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The Telecom Digest for March 21, 2012
Volume 31 : Issue 74 : "text" Format
====== 30 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the
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See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details
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Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 23:16:33 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Free apps eat up your phone battery just sending ads
Message-ID: <p06240897cb8da6d3f6eb@[10.0.1.4]>
Free apps eat up your phone battery just sending ads
by Jacob Aron
18 March 2012
STRUGGLING to make your smartphone battery last the whole day? Paying
for your apps might help. Up to 75 per cent of the energy used by
free versions of Android apps is spent serving up ads or tracking and
uploading user data: running just one app could drain your battery in
around 90 minutes.
Abhinav Pathak, a computer scientist at Purdue University, Indiana,
and colleagues made the discovery after developing software to
analyse apps' energy usage. When they looked at popular apps such as
Angry Birds, Free Chess and NYTimes they found that only 10 to 30 per
cent of the energy was spent powering the app's core function.
...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328566.400-free-apps-eat-up-your-phone-battery-just-sending-ads.html
-or-
http://tinyurl.com/75tgvn3
***** Moderator's Note *****
TANSTAAFL.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:06:34 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: What Hath Bell Labs Wrought? The Future
Message-ID: <p062408a1cb8db099411b@[10.0.1.4]>
THE IDEA FACTORY
Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
By Jon Gertner
>422 pages. The Penguin Press. $29.95
What Hath Bell Labs Wrought? The Future
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
March 19, 2012
In today's world of Apple, Google and Facebook, the name may not ring
any bells for most readers, but for decades - from the 1920s through
the 1980s - Bell Labs, the research and development wing of AT&T, was
the most innovative scientific organization in the world. As Jon
Gertner argues in his riveting new book, "The Idea Factory," it was
where the future was invented.
Indeed, Bell Labs was behind many of the innovations that have come
to define modern life, including the transistor (the building block
of all digital products), the laser, the silicon solar cell and the
computer operating system called Unix (which would serve as the basis
for a host of other computer languages). Bell Labs developed the
first communications satellites, the first cellular telephone systems
and the first fiber-optic cable systems.
The Bell Labs scientist Claude Elwood Shannon effectively founded the
field of information theory, which would revolutionize thinking about
communications; other Bell Labs researchers helped push the
boundaries of physics, chemistry and mathematics, while defining new
industrial processes like quality control.
In "The Idea Factory," Mr. Gertner - an editor at Fast Company
magazine and a writer for The New York Times Magazine - not only
gives us spirited portraits of the scientists behind Bell Labs'
phenomenal success, but he also looks at the reasons that research
organization became such a fount of innovation, laying the groundwork
for the networked world we now live in.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/books/the-idea-factory-by-jon-gertner.html
-or-
http://tinyurl.com/6t2ct22
***** Moderator's Note *****
I'm always wary of lionizing organizations or people that I don't know
personnaly. Bell Labs made mistakes as well as breakthroughs, and it
was always cursed by a gap between its blackboards and its
breadboards. The feeling of the scientists and engineers at the labs
was that manufacturing was Western Electric's business, and since the
labs were actually a subsidiary of WE, there was a potent driver for a
"We just design 'em" culture that limited many of the Labs' projects
to theoretical advances.
The gap between the Labs and the field caused some very severe errors:
most notably, the choice of an 8,000 Hz sample rate for the T-1
carrier system. Although it was Shannon's work that predicted the need
for a sample rate of at least twice the highest frequency to be
reproduced, the T-1 designers didn't do the field trials which would
have revealed that sampling ambiguities at even sub-multiples of the
"chop" rate would make 1,000 Hz test tones unusable. This is the
reason that "Milliwatt" test tones are now slightly offset from 1,000
Hz - but I can only imaging the cost of rework and redesign that
far-reaching error caused.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:38:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: What Hath Bell Labs Wrought? The Future
Message-ID: <8539b80f-e3cd-4c3a-8e72-2e0a4a91cf1d@i2g2000vbv.googlegroups.com>
***** Moderator's Note *****
> The gap between the Labs and the field caused some very severe errors:
> most notably, the choice of an 8,000 Hz sample rate for the T-1
> carrier system. Although it was Shannon's work that predicted the need
> for a sample rate of at least twice the highest frequency to be
> reproduced, the T-1 designers didn't do the field trials which would
> have revealed that sampling ambiguities at even sub-multiples of the
> "chop" rate would make 1,000 Hz test tones unusable. This is the
> reason that "Milliwatt" test tones are now slightly offset from 1,000
> Hz - but I can only imaging the cost of rework and redesign that
> far-reaching error caused.
Could you elaborate on this in layman's terms--particularly the
statement-- "sampling ambiguities at even sub-multiples of the
"chop" rate would make 1,000 Hz test tones unusable"?
It would seem to me that 8,000 Hz sample rate would make sense because
it was double the voice band of 4,000 Hz.
Thanks.
***** Moderator's Note *****
I didn't write that clearly: it's not "even sub-multiples", it's
"rational sub-multiples", i.e., sub-multiples that evenly divide into
8,000 Hz.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:38:25 -0700 (PDT)
From: Joseph Singer <joeofseattle@yahoo.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Public smart phones
Message-ID: <1332286705.62741.YahooMailClassic@web161505.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
It's the cellphone of last resort.
New Yorkers stuck with a battery-drained iPad or BlackBerry will soon
be able to turn to the city's newest "pay phones" -- computer kiosks
that let users buy access to the Web, e-mail and various apps.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/public_smart_phones_BadgbBQ9KB9wSimdMTF3rJ?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=Local
-or-
http://goo.gl/IjAFj
TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom-
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