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To: engineer who wrote (1930)	9/26/1999 2:27:00 AM
From: gdichaz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

engineer: Optimization is easy from an arm chair for you. But that is because you have the background and experience to do that. In my case, no matter where I sit, "optimization" is not exactly what I am able to do. :-) But a little like calculus it is possible to approach a limit. Getting closer thanks to you. Understand what you are saying with regard to Palm OS. Makes sense to me. See why the Q is using Palm OS. Also see why the Q is working on making it possible to use Symbian EPOC and/or WinCE as alternatives for appropriate situations. Will continue to seek out more information on WAP. Appreciate your help on that. As always, best. Chaz

To: engineer who wrote (1930)	9/26/1999 10:51:00 AM
From: DanD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

Engineer.. Nice thoughts. A full OS is not necessary for a handheld device since it is no more than a dummy terminal for a real computer. The big issue for me is that web developers start to do interfaces that support the shrinking size of these terminals screens. It will be interesting to see what the minimum screen size is accepted by the user community. The actual technology that has to run on these machines is not very intense. (At least at this time)

To: engineer who wrote (1930)	9/26/1999 12:41:00 PM
From: Tom O	Respond to of 13582

Threat to CDMA? I follow the Gilder Tech message board. There have been a couple of posts recently about a new technology that is supposedly a threat to CDMA. I'm not an EE, or even very tech savvy for that matter, so would appreciate some help evaluating this. By the way, I'm a first time poster, and am in awe of the level of knowledge presented on this thread. Thanks. Below is a post on Gilder board via Yahoo: ********************************** by: tybalt (25/M/Verona) 38928 of 39187 CDMA may be going away or at least changing so much that it won't be recognizable. In the IEEE 1999 Emerging Wireless Symposium (4/12-4/13) a professor from Colorado State University presented a paper on a new multicarrier protocol that blows away all of the other multicarrier protocols (by the way, multicarrier blows away CDMA). Only this multicarrier protocol is easier to implement than CDMA. The IEEE Radio and Wireless Conference proceedings (8/1-8/4) included a paper that explains how this multicarrier protocol enables spatial processing without antenna arrays. There is an international patent application published in the WIPO that describes this multicarrier protocol and how it can be used to make a CDMA chip sequence. The difference is that instead of fast serial processing, which limits the implementation of wideband CDMA, the chip sequence is created using a slow parallel type of processing. They are proposing an ultra-wideband CDMA, which can be created using slow processing speeds. They also describe what they call a logical dimension to the frequency spectrum in which they can transmit signals having some kind of destructive interference relation that makes them undetectable to conventional receivers. A U.S. patent on this issued today. I talked to the electrical engineering department at CSU about this, and they said that this communication technology is being developed by a small company who is partnering with one of the big telecom companies (they did not say who) under a big NASA grant. ---------------------------------- Below is a follow-up post on Gilder message board: ------------------------------------ Someone posted earlier that a professor at CSU had developed a new multi-carrier, multiple access algorithm that can be a threat to CDMA. I was able to track it down and read the paper he presented at the IEEE Wireless conference. Without going into details, the key point to be made is that the correlation function of CIMA produces 2(N-1) nulls as opposed to N-1 for CDMA, where N is the number of users. The authors call the first N-1 nulls orthogonal (meaning you can transmit N-1 codes simulataneously without cross interference). The remaining N-1 nulls are pseudo-orthogonal, implying that the null depth is not as deep and/or they are susceptible to a little bit of cross interference. Their performance curves (BER vs. the number of users) didn't go all the way to 2(N-1), maybe N+3 or so, which showed graceful performance degradation. Up to N-1, there was little difference in performance between CDMA and CIMA. Another advantage for CIMA that I saw was that both the receiver and transmitter architecture was deceptively simple. ------------------------------ Anyone make any sense of this? Best, Tom O.

To: engineer who wrote (1930)	9/27/1999 4:17:00 PM
From: cfoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

To this discussion I offer a quote from a recent piece by Clayton Christensen: "there are tremendous opportunities for companies who identify applications for technology to large, less-skilled markets." He also says that existing companies often view new technologies as sustaining, rather than disruptive. So they wait until they "perfect" the new technology and can profitably add it to their existing product line, for their existing customers. Meanwhile new firms use the less than perfect current technology to go after the large, less-skilled market. This seems to describe the success of the Palm "OS" and maybe some of the difficulty MSFT seems to be having in establishing CE. My hope for QCOM is that they direct their efforts to support the disruptors because the more success they have, the more business for QCOM.