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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pierre who wrote (2229)	10/4/2000 7:34:12 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 12245

Pierre, if Ericy had had the wit, they would have bought the CDMA patents [by buying Q!] and done it all themselves. They would NOT have bought the patents and simply put them in a draw. If they did, they would have financially damaged their shareholders to the tune of 100s of $$billions. Okay, maybe they would have done that. That's the price of human stupidity. But when the patents expired, Nokia and others would have figured out that they could make CDMA fly and it would take off. If Ericy had bought the patents from Q! shareholders for a song, that is the fault of the Q! shareholders. If they don't know the value of something they own, it's better that somebody else owns it. I would have been singing Ericy praises [and they would have deserved praise if they had bought instead of wasting time creating FUD - ironical that they now claim CDMA is good]. As you say, Ericy tried to stop CDMA. The monopoly which mattered there is the political state monopoly of European governments which banned CDMA. They were the ones who could exert power to stop CDMA. Ericy had no power without state monopolies. All Ericy could do was whine like a fleet of 747s about how they invented it in 1880 and if it did work, which it wouldn't, they invented it. What did MSFT stop? Jon mentioned Eudora, but I've used that today, so anybody else could too [I've used it with Windows 95, 98 and 2000]. MSFT hasn't stopped encyclopedia.com [I picked that name at random and sure enough, there is a company there which has killed off Encarta]. Let's see, how about spreadsheets? Does MSFT have the only one? How about word processing? Or anything. Here's linux.com which seems okay. Wow, a bunch of operating systems and stuff here: apple.com For an allegedly big-time evil monopolist, holding the world and cyberspace in thrall, MSFT is NOT doing very well. While it's true that Ericy was stupid, it's hard to think they would be so stupid as to buy something if they thought it would work brilliantly, then hide it in a draw. Similar theories about evil Big Oil have been around for decades. I've told the story about when I was doing methanol research for BP Oil for use in cars and we used to mix in 1% de-ionized water to prevent corrosion of aluminium [aluminum]. I visited a petrol station one day to fill the 1 litre petrol [gasoline] tank under the bonnet [hood] which started the motor and ran it until the engine warmed up enough to vapourize [vaporize] methanol. We had a water jacket around the carburetor inlet to help and that had to warm up too. A solenoid valve would then switch the engine to methanol which was in the normal fuel tank. For fun, I asked the attendant, after he filled the 1 litre tank to add a bit of water to the fuel tank from the watering can he had handy, claiming it runs on a tiny amount of water and just needs a bit now and then. He very diffidently tipped it in, and I encouraged him to give it a good dollop, [hoping that the water would mix enough with the methanol that I wouldn't get stuck on the forecourt - water being heavier than methanol so it would sink to the bottom]. I went in to pay for my litre [quart] of petrol and he was saying to the other attendant: "I tell you it runs on bloody water...I put it in myself!!!!" etc.... Anyway, I got going and didn't stop, even down the road. So I imagine that there is another person who thinks that cars can run on water and oil companies just buy and bury such great research. He will surely have told quite a few people. Funnily enough, the Technical Director of the New Zealand Liquid Fuels Trust Board, a government agency whose business it was to find alternative fuels during the last big oil price rises, had a similar sense of humour [humor] and did the same thing. But he conked out down the road and had to get help [probably not from the service station he went to]. I was subsequently looking after R&D for BP Oil International for petrol and diesel. There were some good ideas which were not followed up, but none because they would be a great new product which would stop sales of normal fuels. There are too many good ideas to follow, so the best are picked. Companies try to get an edge over competitors. They don't do that by finding a lode of uranium and burying it. They dig it up, build a nuke and let the competitors eat that! CDMA is much more powerful than a nuclear bomb. This is going to blow up everything wired, analogued, GSMed and TDMAed. Mqurice PS: Pierre, come to think of it, a croc stun-gun feature on a Globalstar phone would be handy for loading the crocodile truck. Another feature to add to the others.