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

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (2259)	10/8/2000 6:24:39 PM
From: Drew Williams	Respond to of 12245

re: Mr. Softy etc. You might want to pick up a book by Neal Stephenson, "In The Beginning Was The Command Line." amazon.com This is a long essay on computers and operating systems in general and how we got to where we are. It is Stephenson's opinion that the lawsuit against Microsoft is silly, because Microsoft got where it is largely by the open architecture of the PC. Lots of companies got to play in the game, and that competition led to all sorts of hardware innovation resulting in much lower PC prices. Apple, on the other hand, by choosing to keep the Macintosh architecture proprietary, had a much more elegant but substantially more expensive system. (Stephenson used Macintoshes until one ate a book he was writing!) Today we also have Linux, which Stephenson now uses, which has ended up running on equipment designed to run Microsoft software. This is because this hardware is relatively inexpensive. Stephenson also uses BE, also running on Wintel hardware, and he likes it very much, even though he can see no rational explanation for anyone having bothered to write it. There is NO business case for its existence. The only explanation he comes up with is that it is French, who, to quote Stephenson, are saying to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, "I f#rt in your general direction, you Anglo-Saxon dogs." (Actually, since I loaned the book to a friend, that quote may not be quite accurate, except for the unexpurgitated version of the beginning of the sentence.) By the way, Stephenson is better known as a science fiction writer. His latest, Cryptonomicom, is terrific. amazon.com He is probably best known for Snow Crash. amazon.com By the way, it seems to me that by licensing CDMA to so many manufacturers and opening QUALCOMM's technology as much as he has, Irwin Jacobs is showing that he has learned the most important Wintel lesson. If there are dozens of companies making phones with QUALCOMM's innards, as opposed to the relative handful making GSM phones, there will be more innovation and lower prices. To misquote the late unlamented Chairman Mao, "Let a thousand CDMA flowers bloom."

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (2259)	10/8/2000 6:26:05 PM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12245

>>I hope you weren't mistaking me for a peasant sheep farmer in the Antipodes. I hope you weren't indulging some foolish collectivist fantasy that individuals are defined by the place they live.<< Maurice, of course I know you're not a sheep farmer. Actually I was referring to an earlier jibe of yours about America restricting sheep imports, the point being that we don't eat sheep anyway and New Zealand's most obvious export market seems to be the Mideast, which likes 'em and has the money to buy 'em. I hear that Australia ships sheep there by the shipload. And yes, my country does dumb things like the wool and mohair subsdiy program to insure a vital strategic stockpile of material for making WWI-style military uniforms. I am not a flag-waving patriot at all. As one who lives on the geographical periphery myself, I greatly appreciate the dawning of the internet and march toward world-wide democracy. My comments were strictly in the vein of trying to get your goat about this anti-trust thing. Microsoft has done many evil things, like holding merger talks with small companies as a pretext for stealing their technology. I have not followed this closely so I don't have the details, but this is the kind of thing that has created so much animosity. In my own father's case he successfully (and legally) met the competition by selling off an unprofitable sector and creating a new higher-margin business to service his industry. That's how anti-trust laws spur competition and innovation. Janet Reno is a hero.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (2259)	10/8/2000 10:00:29 PM
From: S100	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12245

"I hope you weren't mistaking me for a peasant sheep farmer in the Antipodes" Sheep, goat and gaur news. What is a Gaur? members.aol.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Extinct goat in line for cloning By David Pilling, Pharmaceuticals Correspondent Published: October 8 2000 18:12GMT \| Last Updated: October 8 2000 18:17GMT Scientists will later this year attempt the first resurrection of an extinct species when they seek to clone a Spanish mountain goat from the preserved cells of a deceased specimen. In an echo of Jurassic Park, the book and film in which dinosaurs are brought back to life, scientists hope to revive the bucardo, a species declared extinct - albeit only nine months ago. Saving endangered species has been considered a promising application of cloning ever since Dolly, produced from the mammary cell of a dead sheep, was cloned in 1997. Science fiction moved closer to fact last week when Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), a Massachusetts-based biotechnology company, said it had cloned an endangered animal called an Asian gaur. The gaur, named Noah, is due to be born next month. It was cloned from a single skin cell of a dead gaur, an ox-like animal. The cell was injected into a cow egg from which the DNA had been removed. Once it began dividing, it was implanted into a cow on an Iowa farm, making it the first cloned animal to be gestated in the womb of another species. ACT hopes to repeat its success in Spain. Plans are already under way to clone other endangered species. The development has drawn a mixed response from conservationists, some of whom question the value of reviving a species if its natural habitat has been destroyed. news.ft.com