Quotes of the week

Not so long ago, a programmer was someone who programs, but that seems to be the last thing programmers do nowadays. Today, the definition of a programmer is someone who complains unless the problem being solved has already been solved and whose solution can be expressed in a single line of code.

So, you might ask, why all of the new complexity if we get no performance advantage? Because simple approaches don't produce enough new intellectual property to keep the usual suspects in business. If you just take the GSM/GPRS/EDGE specification and change some parameters (like symbol rate and number of timeslots) you can get a very efficient, flexible system, but you won't have a much fodder for IEEE papers. Worse yet, you don't generate a lot of new patents, and with a lot of the patents on 2.xG systems expiring early in this decade, the NEPs needed a new gravy train. This complexity also deters small players from building their own UMTS implementations.