The holiday spirit
William Shawn, the long-time editor of the New Yorker, used to say that "the process of falling short of perfection is a never-ending one." Wouldn't you know it--this resigned observation applies to us as well.
First example: Last we wrote that the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. As Bob Dressler, VP Technology at Polaris Wireless, was quick to point out, it was the St. Louis Cardinals who actually won the World Series this year. Quite a few of our readers emailed us with this correction, but Dressler is correct on yet another point--"The folks at Sports Illustrated can rest comfortably knowing that you're not another threat to their business." Ouch. Perhaps fond memories of Sweet Lou Whittaker and Alan Trammel had caused this momentary, if egregious, lapse.
Second example: Last week we wrote about the fact that 802.11 was inherently flawed, and that the flaw was causing packet losses in a small but significant number of transmissions. We cited as source a story by Peter Judge in Techworld. It would have been more appropriate to credit Unstrung's Richard Martin, who broke the story a few days earlier. Martin quotes officials at WLAN testing firm VeriWave as saying that the loss was both predictable and unavoidable. Tom Alexander, VeriWave's founder and CTO said that users "will just have to live with it."
Third example: A few weeks ago we wrote in our sister publication, WiMAX Beat, that Mytel was planning to roll out a WiMAX network in Pakistan's north eastern territory. We added that it was a forbidding, mountainous region, populated by proud tribes chafing at the idea of "being answerable to the central government in Karachi." Tariq Mufti of TM Advisory Services wrote to make two important corrections: First, the area in which Mytel was rolling out its WiMAX network was the North Western Frontier Province, not the north eastern territory; second, Pakistan's central government sits in Islamabad, not Karachi (the latter is the country's largest city and its business center). As Bob Dressler would say, the folks at National Geographic can also rest comfortably knowing that we are not a threat to their business.
Happy Thanksgiving to all! -Ben
P.S. Be sure not to miss our upcoming webinar with Intel: "Connecting WiMAX to the World." On November 30th, Intel's Technical Engineer Anil Agrawal will discuss integrating an Access Service Node Gateway (ASN GW) into a mobile WiMAX network in order to reuse previously developed hardware and software, meet key requirements, lower development cost and improve time to market. Join us and register today!