Rain…

Rain and Bad Weather

I woke up in the middle of the night and had the pleasure of listening to the rain before I fell back asleep. The sound of rain is so soothing, and tends to put everything into perspective. It makes the problems of the world go away. One of my favourite CD’s is Pink Floyd’s ‘Delecate Sound Of Thunder’. Well, this is the delicate sound of the rain.

I was in bed, under the blankets just listening before I fell back asleep. This is what I call relaxing. Madonna has her song ‘Rain’ on the subject. So does Belinda Carlisle with her song ‘Summer Rain’. Also Harrigan Logan’s version of ‘Over the Rainbow’. And not forgetting the sorrowful “I think it’s going to rain today” sung by Better Middler on the Beaches Soundtrack. Probably the most beautiful is Enya’s other version of ‘Storms in Africa’, but not the version on the Watermark album. And there are so many other songs. Anyway, basically, rain is too beautiful to be experienced alone in my opinion. Right now though I guess I have to.

A friend of mine had to take a flight south from Sydney last night. Aparently the weather was pretty horrible… So much so that he saw that the flight attendant got a call on the intercom, sat down and tightened her belt. Then my friend tightened his belt, and just then got hit by really survere turbulance. He managed to hit his head on the baggage rack, probably 6″ above his head normally. And his seat belt was really tight. That is what I call turbulance. Basically I am glad I was not on that plane.

GPRS vs. CDMA 1x vs. Unwired

Quick comparisson… Unwired seems to have the lowest latency, followed by CDMA and GPRS. CDMA has the best coverage, followed by GPRS and then Unwired a disimal last. Unwired is the only one that allows connections back to your computer, which is essential for some protocols and P2P programs. Unwired scales the worst of the three, requiring the most towers, followed by GPRS and then CDMA. Unwired transmits more energy than the other two followed by GPRS and CDMA. I beleve that CDMA would work best in a mobile environment followed by GPRS and then unwired definitely last.

Basically CDMA stacks up fairly well, apart from the issue of being behind a NAT gateway. Unwired probably would not be good as a mobile phone since it most likely transmits far more power than the other two. CDMA has the potential to lite on power usage since it uses ‘closed loop power control’ commonly requiring 10-100 times less transmitter power. I suspect that Unwired does not even bother about cell handovers. GPRS does hard cell handovers, whilst CDMA does ‘soft’ handovers all the time.

If none of this makes any sense to you, then I am not surprised. This is the sort of stuff I learned to do in my course at uni, analysing available evidence and working out what it means.

Non-Free Trade Agreement

AustralianIT from The Australian has a Story about how Sony is trying again to ban PS/2 mod chips. The argument last time was that the mod chips remove an artificial barrier allowing australians to buy games from the USA at cheaper prices. Strange that a free trade agreement is being used to reduce the amount of free trade.