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Folks,
Oooh! How true Thomas Friedman's statement below
is:-
"The hidden hand of the market will
never work without a hidden fist.
MacDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F15 warplane. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps".
Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist
Just look at the article which follows
below.
So Iraq will have a US-developed CDMA
system??
This my friends -- is gunboat globalisation -- the
extension of economic, cultural and idelogical globalisation by military
means.
Where are the weapons of mass destruction? In any
case why can't Iraq have nuclear weapons, biological and chemical
weapons when the big imperialist powers attacking it can?
The US' CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) mobile
communications technology lost to Europe' GSM (Global System for Mobile
Communications) technology in open competition worldwide and GSM won
critical mass worldwide so now US imperialist politicians want to enforce CDMA
with the barrel of the gun. So much for free competition.
In fact. The failure of CDMA (or any other US
standard) to gain worldwide acceptance is precisely due to the failure of the
neo-liberal, free-market policy of competition between incompatible
technologies hoping that the "fittest" will survive
and dominate.
On the other hand, this "outdated" French
technology called GSM began as a Europe-wide standard and it was
developed under the direction of a steering group called "Groupe
Speciale Mobile" (GSM), the acronym was later given its
current name and now it's the mobile communications standard in most
countries outside North America and has made inroads into North America as
well and it lets me use my dual-band mobile phone wherever I am in the world
(apart from North America) and have the cost of all calls charged to my home
account in Malaysia.
So a standard won over proprietary technology and
has allowed everyone to enjoy the benefits of mobile communications wherever
they are.
Now I can expect the public relations spin doctors,
syncophantic media and consumers rights NGOs cranking up the propaganda against
GSM, so we technology journalists in this part of the world had better be
careful of what bullshit we read in articles written
by journo-prostitutes in North America -- err and some pro
US-imperialist journo-prostitutes here as well -- like certain
BLOGmeisters.
BTW. The very fact that Microsoft Windows and
Office have respectively become the dominant PC operating system
and office application is primarily due to the same "winner takes all" policy in
the US information technology industry which saw US proprietary mobile phone
technologies lose to the GSM standard.
Microsoft's dominance could come apart if someone,
somewhere could come up with an international standard specification for an
operating system which software developers could comply with -- and that my
friends would enable real competition -- just like you can buy any
standards-compliant lightbulb or mobile phone by any manufacturer and be
confident that they will work.
However, especially the software part of the IT
industry is nortoriously unable to agree on standards, unlike engineers like
those in the IEEE, ISO and ITU who are able to sit down and work out a
standard.
This inability is true even within the open-source
software community which bases itself on standards-based technologies and
protocols but at the same time is so individualistic that they start fighting
about what standards, licensing, or even open source operating systems
(ie-- Linux, BSD, etc) to adopt.
Also thanks to IBM not patenting the design for its
IBM PC, it advertantly or inadvertantly gave the world an open standards PC
architecture which any Tom, Dick, Harry, Ah Chong or Mydin could build a
compliant PC and back then, Microsoft
was there at the right place and right time to benefit from the explosion in PCs
which was about to take place back and is now still laughing all the way to the
bank as a result.
Things would be pretty different if there
were a "GSM" of operating systems but is the ruggedly
individualistic, "do your own thing and pass the joint man" software
industry up to it?
I don't expect they'd tolerate pot smoking at
Redmond.
Regards
Charles
======================================================= http://theregister.co.uk/content/59/29974.html Iraq's mobile network - Qualcomm to follow the
tanks?
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Posted: 27/03/2003 at 11:48 GMT And in a flash, the war on terror started to morph into the war for CDMA. North Korea, watch out - there's a jumping-off point right next door. US wireless company Qualcomm has often been described as the civilian wing of the military-industrial complex, so perhaps the only thing that should surprise us is how speedily its arrival in the wake of the tanks in Iraq occurred. The new Iraq will need (among other things) a
mobile phone network, GSM phone networks are supplied by ungrateful and
despicable Europeans*, so any attempt by the DoD and USAID to install anything
other than a US-designed CDMA system would be, would be... But we'll let the
Congressman tell you all about it later.
Spread-spectrum radio began life as a military
technology; Qualcomm grew fat on Pentagon pork defense contracts in the late
Reagan years as it sought to tame CDMA for civilian use. Which it eventually
did, after many delays, and with some admirable panache. Only CDMA arrived, when
it eventually did arrive - three years after co-founder Dr Jacobs promised - too
late to make an impact on the cellphone industry as it was. The world had
multilaterally decided on an older time-division digital technology several
years previously.
The result is that the world has a single standard,
and enjoys economies of scale and very, very cool gadgets. The USA on the other
hand decided to allow four incompatible standards to battle it out, thus
blocking innovation from overseas, and allowing cellphone carriers to play
atrocious bait and switch games with cellphone subscribers here. Er, that's us.
But back to the Gulf.
Congressman Darrell Issa (R., San Diego) yesterday
issued a rallying cry for the new, reconstructed Iraq to embrace CDMA instead of
GSM. Issa is urging Congress reps to sign a round-robin letter to Donald
Rumsfeld, denouncing GSM ("French" and outdated) and urging the cause of the Q
stuff instead. Qualcomm, we note chipped in $4,500 for Issa's 2002 campaign, but
then so did lots of other outfits. We hope the Iraqis like their Centrinos, too.
Says Issa: "We have learned that planners at the
Department of Defense and USAID are currently envisioning using Federal
appropriations to deploy a European-based wireless technology known as GSM
('Groupe Speciale Mobile'- this standard was developed by the French) for this
new Iraqi cell phone system."
This is fighting talk, as the mere mention of the
word "entree" is enough to send a patriotic USAian into paroxysms of rage, right
now. It's also quite incorrect, and ETSI anoraks will tell you all about Groupe
Speciale Mobile, should you let them. WIth almost a billion users, in over 150
countries, GSM is the world's cellphone standard. But let Mr Issa continue:
"If European [sic] GSM technology is deployed in
Iraq, much of the equipment used to build the cell phone system will be
manufactured in France by Alcatel, in Germany by Siemens, and elsewhere in
western and northern Europe."
He seems a little vague here about "Northern
Europe" and is very coy about naming the Nordic telephony pioneers explicitly:
Sweden and Finland. But he continues, a little shakily:
"Therefore, if our understanding of this situation
is correct, because of ill-considered planning, the U.S. government will soon
hand U.S. taxpayer dollars over to French, German, and other European cell phone
equipment companies to build the new Iraqi cell phone system."
"This is not acceptable" he cries.
Er well, no. American manufacturers such as Lucent
and Motorola are very keen to export GSM technology into foreign markets indeed.
And the European competitors may well be Siemens, but are just as likely to be
LM Ericsson and Nokia, from Sweden and Finland respectively. But they're not
quite on the wrong side. Yet?
Aside from Issa's objections to the possibility of
the French and Germans getting contracts, there is, he says, a security issue at
stake here:
"... we understand that CDMA cell phones include an
integrated global positioning system (GPS) feature that allows the precision
location of callers in times of emergency. [do we detect the teensiest of a
briefing here?] European GSM cell phones do not have integrated GPS. If US
relief workers in Iraq are equipped with CDMA cell phones with GPS, they will be
immediately locatable in case of terrorist attack or kidnapping. Finally,
because US CDMA systems are compliant with the US Communications Assistance for
Law Enforcement Act, this system provides all necessary access for law
enforcement in post-conflict Iraq."
Depending on who's doing the enforcing, of course.
But yes, there do seem to be roaming advantages in the case of US security
people commuting between the US and Iraq. We could observe that the European
networks make a pretty good fist of figuring out where you are without GPS, and
we might mention that there are other points about CDMA GPS. But we won't - not
today, anyway.
Issa's punchline is quite unambiguous:
"If the U.S. government deploys US- developed CDMA
in Iraq, then American companies will manufacture most of the necessary
equipment here in the United States."
Er, wrong again. What bomb-shattered bits of
Mesopotamia that may survive will be as intrigued by Lucent's 4G network as
anything that "Europeans" have to offer. Issa's shaky pitch is founded on a
shaky assumption: that the US national interest relies on one single patent
hoarder, in his home constituency, and not the great wealth that the real
US-based manufacturers could bring home.
You must question, once again, how a patent
licensing company came to identify itself so closely with the national interest.
Qualcomm's key patents were filed in 1989. Under the seventeen-year rule, the
most important of these will expire in three years time.
Patient Mesopotamians may be wise to sit this one
out, but we doubt anybody will ask them. ®
* Some years back The Register picked up the latest
edition of what was then a very fat magazine bloated with lovely, lovely PC
advertising, but which is now sadly slimmed. And boggled we were to read the
amazing diatribe on poison European GSM technology, written by someone who, as
far as we know, remains a senior executive of the rump of the publishing
company. Had he been getting good brief from something beginning with Q?, we
wondered. GSM was nothing like as good as the home-grown technology that was
just around the corner. GSM was dangerous. GSM would stop pacemakers, hospitals
would cease to function, planes would fall out of the sky... Wheelchairs would
run haywire into the paths of uncoming trucks. Excellent stuff, and no, we're
not making it up - he was. But at least you seem to get a more sedate class of
black propaganda these days.
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