They got rid of the QA team and made the programmers create more unit-tests (this is key).
Of course that's not really true, either...
From the QA team: "Some started working on automation [for testing], and they thought that was great—that they didn't have to do the same thing over and over."
So really all they did was move their good QA folks to different departments, where they are now writing QA tests, but just don't get called QA engineers anymore, so Yahoo can get PR with nonsense stories like this one claiming there's "no more QA".
Yes, they automated QA testing as part of this, though it sounds like they did so in the most backwards and painful way possible, which means they necessarily reduced the size of the QA team in the process. But none of that would be news if they didn't lie about it, would it? I'm sure many other companies (like Amazon) had this model of fully-automated QA tests working for many YEARS before Yahoo thought-up the idea.
focusing on making a really good browser is a great idea.
Except all the effort they've put into Firefox over the past couple years has been making things worse, breaking things, using more resources, copying the worst parts of Chrome, pushing away users and lowering market-share. I'd rather their focus goes elsewhere, until somebody realizes their mistake.
NoScript is a HUGE improvement, in my experience. However, it's also a big pain in the ass to use, so I wouldn't foist it on my wife's computer for instance.
I think you're just doing it wrong... NoScript can easily be configured to allow everything by default. Then you just tell your wife it's a big "toggle" button she can click on when a site does things she doesn't like... (e.g. pop-ups/pop-unders, autoplay, and other annoyances)
Some libraries like libx264 are built for multiple cores especially when used with ffmpeg.
I know them quite well... I've done some minor dev work on them. But with multi-threading, you get diminishing returns and can't fully max-out all the cores, no matter how much you want to, you'll have some idle CPU time on some cores... increasing amounts as you increase the core count.
This is why Firewire and eSATA and Thunderbolt are preferred. All of them have independent chips which handle the work so the CPU doesn't have to do it.
A completely specious argument... The overhead of a USB transfer doesn't drag-down a modern CPU. Take just a few dollars of the money you'd pay for Firewire versions of your gear, and use it to get a slightly higher-end CPU. Now the overhead of USB is covered, you've saved some money, and you're better-off all-around.
Firewire is around because of legacy DV cameras. If Firewire was any good, eSATA wouldn't have ever appeared. But it's still around mostly because it had several years' head-start on USB3. Thunderbolt is only a thing because Apple has a dog in the fight, so they insist on forcing it on their users like Firewire before it, or PPC processors before it, or now with H.264 and blocking Flash and WebM, or a million other examples.
I've said it is a poor choice for realtime work
Except I already said USB isn't good for real-time... But with most use cases USB can easily do faster-than-real-time, which eliminates the issue.
Your example would be to argue that Toyota Camry is fine for all home improvement because they are everywhere.
No, my argument would be that you've so far been unable to name even ONE single case, where your Toyota Camry has been insufficient for the task...
The problem with USB is that it is CPU bound meaning that contention isn't as easy to remove as you think. For most video production work, the CPU is busy with processing the video
On a tech site, I'd think you'd know about multi-core CPUs and such... They're pretty common these days.
the practical rate is around 400MB/s (less than 60% actual efficieny).
That's not a question of efficiency, and theoretical gripes don't matter to anyone. In the real world, it's plenty fast, and you'd be hard pressed to point to an actual scenario where someone tried and found they were unable to use USB.
Why would you need 12V for it to work for laptops?
Because at 5V you need to pull 3X as many amps over the wire to meet the power needs... Probably MORE, with conversion losses.
So, for a laptop that draws 90W (pretty common), at USB's 5V, that's over 20amps. Do you know what a USB cable that can supply 20amps will look like? Here's a hint: Those big long heavy orange $20+ extension cords are only rated for 15amps.
If you are one of these deluded people who thinks we can do everything through wireless then you couldn't be more wrong.
I never said that, and your feigned outrage as you distort what I said isn't helping your argument.
When it comes to phones, yes, we could eliminate data cables. We certainly don't need them often, so it's ridiculous to pretend we need data (rarely used) and power (frequently needed) combined.
Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember every frickin' cell phone vendor shipping their own unique power cable.
Yes I am... and they were ALL combined power + data. If they didn't tack data onto it, they could have used simple barrel connectors. That's how you end up with proprietary connectors... tacking-on new mis-features.
Who gives a shit?
You do, genius. Don't you remember what you JUST SAID?
"USB just needs to settle on a single un-keyed connector that can carry enough power to run a laptop" -sjbe
Single function cables are idiotic, wasteful and unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.
No, in fact we've got decades of history to prove they're the best options, all-around, every time.
Demonstrably not true and completely missing the point.
Nobody has ever demonstrated that, because you're spouting nonsense. Tiny pins can't take a fraction the force of big solid metal barrels. And you're missing the point that broken USB cables, and worse, jacks, are a HUGE and ridiculously common failure mode, resulting in tons of money being wasted, and a great many phones being thrown away for no other reason.
Having to carry a special quasi-unique power cord around everywhere is idiotic design.
Laptop connectors don't have many variations, and they could easily settle on a single one, if just a fraction the government interest that was put on phones to get micro-USB MANDATED, was directed towards other devices like laptops.
Barrel connectors have their uses but powering a laptop, tablet, cellphone or other mobile device should not be one of them. It is wasteful, unnecessary, and provides no meaningful performance benefit.
You're actually describing USB... It has its uses, but it's a clumsy and fragile piece of shit as a power supply. Barrel connectors are nearly the perfect design for just such a task. Hell, the headphone jacks one cell phones tablets and laptos, which nobody ever has trouble with, is proof enough of the durability of such a simple connector design.
For years, firewire buried usb in terms of hard drive transfer speeds. (solid 800mbps vs laggy 480mbps) But it was during this time that PC motherboard manufacturers stubbornly refused to put firewire ports on their boards. Also during this time, it was difficult to impossible to boot a windows computer from an external drive. These factors led to almost a decade of time where the macs were the only computers that commonly used high performing external storage.
Uhh, not really... Even Apple balked at the expense of Firewire-800, and mostly stuck with 400, except in their most expensive products.
When Firewire-800 was introduced, hard drives couldn't even keep-up with Firewire-400 or USB2 speeds. Even the 15,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah drives introduced around 2002 had maximum throughput of 60MB/sec, while their average was lower.
Firewire-800 was 2002... Around 2004, higher-end PCs started getting eSATA connectors that were at worst TWICE AS FAST as Firewire-800. And yes, as above, eSATA was much faster than necessary, too. Most hard drives, particularly external 2.5" ones, weren't seriously bottle-necked by USB2 speeds, which is why USB3 took so long to materialize.
But I thought that USB 2 was inadequate, or rather, that High Speed USB was inadequate, and that they needed Super Speed USB (3) in order to get video transfers enabled over USB
USB2 is just fast enough to about max-out the transfer speed of a Class-6 SD card (i.e. real-time), which is on the high-end and more than fast enough for 1080 video recordings (can usually get away with Class-4).
You'll only need speeds above that for all I-frames/stills in 1080 (e.g. for studio use) or 4K recording... And even then, you could still transfer the data over USB2 if needed, just at less-than real-time.
Power and data can and should go over the same cables.
We no longer need ANY CABLE for data. Your saddling yourself with restrictions to satisfy a long-lost need. And...
Proprietary charging cables are wasteful, annoying, redundant, and unnecessary
It's only where POWER and DATA go over the same cable that we end up with horrible proprietary crap! If phones had power-only cables, they'd have been simple, standard barrel connectors.
Now USB just needs to settle on a single un-keyed connector that can carry enough power to run a laptop
Laptops have had that forever... Their simple barrel connectors can pull 200W+, no trouble at all. And no USB connector will ever be 1/100th as durable as a tough, simple, basic barrel connector.
There's only ONE THING I give USB credit for... It sucked the air out of all the subtle variation of voltages around its range. Instead of devices that needed 3V, some that needed 6V, and others that needed 4.5V, and even with some that wanted 7.5V, now all those devices will have mini-USB plugs (usually not micro-usb), and run on 5V.
Of course if every smartphone charger on the planet switched to 12V, it would have the same effect on laptops, and all other devices that use any voltages anywhere around that range.
It is also unnecessary 99.9% of the time. Nearly all RS232 devices and hosts will work just fine with TTL voltages (+5V/GND).
I wish that were true, but it sure as hell isn't!
Sure, MANY devices accept TTL voltage RS232, but a big number DO NOT. So if you depend on that USB-RS232 adapter, you'll be left standing around, looking like a moron.
Just had to configure a brand new smart PDU a while ago... Absolutely no activity to my company laptop via USB. Bad cable? Incorrect wiring? Defective PDU? Nope... Plugged that cable to a server with an actual RS232 port, and it works flawlessly.
I wish I could find USB-RS232 adapters that actually output the proper voltages...
USB is dirt cheap. You can have a separate bus-per-device if you so desire. That will easily eliminate all contention.
And what you really mean is USB is useless for REAL-TIME work... When USB can do faster-than-realtime for you, the contention and other gripes aren't much of an issue. Firewire is dying out in production video shops, too, though it has been (almost-) replaced by several different alternatives, not (just) USB.
Firewire is long dead, except for a few niches in the industry.
DV cameras were the one and only practical consumer application of firewire, and they've been obsolete and forgotten for many years. Once you eliminate DV tape and switch to solid-state, you eliminate the need for the fixed-bit-rate codec, and can easily transfer faster-than-real-time over USB2.
In fact, you can skip the USB cables, and transfer your videos over WiFi these days, even with sub-$100 camcorders...
Nuclear is an over-centralized, expensive, and dangerous technology based on a limited fuel source.
You want to call Nuclear over-centralized and expensive in the same breath you praise wind? Take a good look at the Pickens Plan:
"New transmission lines, worth $64 billion to $128 billion, would be needed to carry the power from the windmills to the cities. Pickens [...] said the government should begin building transmission lines for wind-generated power in the same way that President Eisenhower did by declaring an emergency to build the interstate highway system in the 1950s and 1960s."
USB replaced PS/2 and IEEE 1284 (Parallel ports), and SCSI-1 (see: Pre-USB scanners, CD Burners, HDDs), and PCMCIA (see WiFi, Flash, Floppies, Zip drives, etc.), and game ports, and TOSLINK, and MIDI ports, and PCI slots (to a significant extent), and ADB, and infrared ports, and...
As for the mountain ranges I bet there are TV repeaters on top of those ridges.
Absolutely not. ATSC doesn't really support single-frequency networks/repeaters.
2edge, 60 miles away, and -117dBm according to TVFool, yet good-enough reception for my purposes (some channels break-up more than others).
50 miles south of the Jacksonville ones.
That sounds entirely doable, even with pine trees. At least Florida doesn't throw mountains in the way. Trying TVFool with a zip of 32134, it says you have very good signal strength, even at that distance.
Ten years ago I got a new extreme range one, didn't help.
Every cheap $20 antenna claims to get extreme-range reception... that doesn't mean they do. What you need is an 8-bay for UHF, like a Winegard 8800, combined with a mast-mounted preamp like the RCA TVPRAMP1R. For VHF stations, an AntennaCraft y10-7-13, connected to that same preamp. Even with the large obstructions, I have no doubt you'll get solid reception.
And yes I want to watch what I want, my sports and The Walking Dead.
You're welcome to do what you want... Just not justifying it by pretending you don't have any (free) alternatives, when it looks like you're got a far better signal than many of us who go the free route.
I meant I'd have to go to 350 ft to get signal that I could actually watch reliably.
That still makes zero sense. How high your antenna tower needs to be is directly correlated with how good your antenna is, (and how many of them you install together). TVFool contains NO INFORMATION on how good antennas are, so it never (directly) tells anyone how tall of a tower they need. So it seems you're making some big assumptions, somewhere, which likely aren't accurate. You were quick to claim you were technically adept, but haven't shown any knowledge of RF, thus far. The quickest way to get at the facts of the matter would be to give a rough location, so your claim could be verified, or useful advice could be give to correct your misunderstanding.
One simple hint: Using TWO antennas is equivalent to doubling the height of your tower. Four antennas doubles it, again. Even taking your unexplained "350ft" antenna tower at face value, a quad antenna setup gets you down under 90ft, which is far more manageable.
It's pretty well documented. Wealthy and educated people get treatment programs, while poor (and let's face it, black) people get jail. It's because what we're really using our drug policy for is to keep the poors in check.
What's even better documented is the fact poor black people get harsher sentences, because poor black people vote for politicians who advocate tougher sentences in their jurisdictions.
It's unfortunate, but it's caused by sociological factors, NOT a grand conspiracy by white people to keep black people down...
TV Fools says I would need a 350 ft tower to get any signal
That makes no sense. Except for the dark side of the moon, there's no place on Earth where you'd have ZERO radio signals. TVFool doesn't have a zero value that it would ever show. It might show stations in RED or GREY as a quick hint that the signal isn't strong, but a good antenna can handle very weak signals in those ranges.
So what is TVFool showing as the dBm of your strongest network station? I've got good (but not perfect) reception with ATSC signals as weak as -120 dBm, with just a single good 4-bay UHF antenna and preamp. And mine are all 2Edge reception...
If you really are on the fringes, it's possible touse two or even FOUR antennas, together, to pull-in even weaker signals without a huge tower.
I watch live events carried only on ESPN. Or a certain few programs only available on cable
There are plenty of people who have become accustomed to the shows they watch on cable, and just refuse to adapt to the near-equivalents available OTA. You're not unique in that aspect, but I'm completely unsympathetic to those who are merely set in their ways. And you really are part of the problem, one of those making it profitable to lock-up content under expensive paid TV service packages.
I have to have the satellite for broadcast channels also because I live in the middle of a pine forest and would need a 100 ft tower to get an antenna over the trees.
OTA TV signals do NOT require line-of-sight. In my case, I've got TWO mountain ranges in my way, but I still get OTA television.
What's your zip code? I looked-up Yosemite, since that was the first (and biggest) "pine forest" which came to mind, and found a good TV antenna 20ft above ground can EASILY receive all the major network stations in the area. Of course you could be in one of the few areas in the country where OTA signals are too far away, but it sounds like you've really never tried, and you've always just assumed the worst.
I see 'streaming video on mobile devices' as another tech bubble that will burst sooner than most people think it will. There is only so much bandwidth available, and people keep demanding more and more of it, and all the while wireless providers like AT&T and Verison are literally gouging people for service,
Except "streaming video on mobile devices" does NOT imply that people are using their cellular data plans at all. The linked article even talks about people using free business/municipal WiFi.
I see it either coming to a point where you can't get more people and more bandwidth because it just doesn't exist, or it getting to the point where people are paying so much money that they start backing away from it
I don't see that happening... Spectrum reuse (smaller towers, lower-power antennas, with much shorter range) will allow the existing available cellular frequencies to be utilized many times more efficiently, blanketing small areas (neighborhoods) with much higher speeds, which don't interfere with the big towers covering large geographic areas.
The up-coming FCC incentive auction will give the cellular companies big new swaths of lower frequencies. Meanwhile micro-cells and pico-cells are decreasing in price and increasing in popularity with cellular carriers, and their operation necessarily involves higher spectrum reuse. LTE-U operates just like WiFi, on the same unlicensed frequencies and with a very small radius of service, and those devices should be available very shortly.
Meanwhile there are people like me (and I don't believe I'm anything like alone in this) who have no smartphone and see no reason to ever get one, because of how much wireless companies gouge for 'data plans'
Early 2015: "overall smartphone penetration up to 77% of mobile phone owners in the U.S. Among recent phone acquirers, 91% chose smartphones as their mobile handset [...] Overall smartphone penetration continues to rise rapidly, increasing 8 percentage points"
While there's some truth to what you say about the two biggest US cellular carriers, it doesn't apply to T-Mobile/Sprint.
T-Mobile now offers unlimited video streaming (Netflix, HBO NOW, Hulu, more) that doesn't apply against your data allowance. And that's besides T-Mobile offering "unlimited" data plans for some time.
Sprint doesn't charge overages at all... they prefer to throttle your data connection down to much slower speeds, rather than disconnect your data, or charge you extra fees. And a Sprint service like Boost with several GBytes of data is just $30/mo, including most taxes/fees.
MVNOs can have even better deals. RingPlus, FreedomPop and others offer free plans that include cellular data. Some MVNOs like Republic will allow activating your smartphone for $10 with unlimited calling/sms, but NO DATA PLAN at all. You are tied to WiFi for internet, but that means no overage charges, ever.
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Of course that's not really true, either...
From the QA team: "Some started working on automation [for testing], and they thought that was great—that they didn't have to do the same thing over and over."
So really all they did was move their good QA folks to different departments, where they are now writing QA tests, but just don't get called QA engineers anymore, so Yahoo can get PR with nonsense stories like this one claiming there's "no more QA".
Yes, they automated QA testing as part of this, though it sounds like they did so in the most backwards and painful way possible, which means they necessarily reduced the size of the QA team in the process. But none of that would be news if they didn't lie about it, would it? I'm sure many other companies (like Amazon) had this model of fully-automated QA tests working for many YEARS before Yahoo thought-up the idea.
Except all the effort they've put into Firefox over the past couple years has been making things worse, breaking things, using more resources, copying the worst parts of Chrome, pushing away users and lowering market-share. I'd rather their focus goes elsewhere, until somebody realizes their mistake.
Sure you will. "Default" is just where you start from. You say whitelisting is too much work, so try it from a blacklisting perspective, instead.
After looking through the movies and TV shows in both lists... I can safely say the world would have been better of had Flash never existed.
I think you're just doing it wrong... NoScript can easily be configured to allow everything by default. Then you just tell your wife it's a big "toggle" button she can click on when a site does things she doesn't like... (e.g. pop-ups/pop-unders, autoplay, and other annoyances)
I know them quite well... I've done some minor dev work on them. But with multi-threading, you get diminishing returns and can't fully max-out all the cores, no matter how much you want to, you'll have some idle CPU time on some cores... increasing amounts as you increase the core count.
A completely specious argument... The overhead of a USB transfer doesn't drag-down a modern CPU. Take just a few dollars of the money you'd pay for Firewire versions of your gear, and use it to get a slightly higher-end CPU. Now the overhead of USB is covered, you've saved some money, and you're better-off all-around.
Firewire is around because of legacy DV cameras. If Firewire was any good, eSATA wouldn't have ever appeared. But it's still around mostly because it had several years' head-start on USB3.
Thunderbolt is only a thing because Apple has a dog in the fight, so they insist on forcing it on their users like Firewire before it, or PPC processors before it, or now with H.264 and blocking Flash and WebM, or a million other examples.
Except I already said USB isn't good for real-time... But with most use cases USB can easily do faster-than-real-time, which eliminates the issue.
No, my argument would be that you've so far been unable to name even ONE single case, where your Toyota Camry has been insufficient for the task...
More than enough data here to refute the anecdotes I was replying to...
I previously had an incompetent Jr employee under me, who happened to have a doctorate...
Meanwhile, the billionaire founders of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook and Dell are college drop-outs.
On a tech site, I'd think you'd know about multi-core CPUs and such... They're pretty common these days.
That's not a question of efficiency, and theoretical gripes don't matter to anyone. In the real world, it's plenty fast, and you'd be hard pressed to point to an actual scenario where someone tried and found they were unable to use USB.
Because at 5V you need to pull 3X as many amps over the wire to meet the power needs... Probably MORE, with conversion losses.
So, for a laptop that draws 90W (pretty common), at USB's 5V, that's over 20amps. Do you know what a USB cable that can supply 20amps will look like? Here's a hint: Those big long heavy orange $20+ extension cords are only rated for 15amps.
I never said that, and your feigned outrage as you distort what I said isn't helping your argument.
When it comes to phones, yes, we could eliminate data cables. We certainly don't need them often, so it's ridiculous to pretend we need data (rarely used) and power (frequently needed) combined.
Yes I am... and they were ALL combined power + data. If they didn't tack data onto it, they could have used simple barrel connectors. That's how you end up with proprietary connectors... tacking-on new mis-features.
You do, genius. Don't you remember what you JUST SAID?
"USB just needs to settle on a single un-keyed connector that can carry enough power to run a laptop" -sjbe
No, in fact we've got decades of history to prove they're the best options, all-around, every time.
Nobody has ever demonstrated that, because you're spouting nonsense. Tiny pins can't take a fraction the force of big solid metal barrels. And you're missing the point that broken USB cables, and worse, jacks, are a HUGE and ridiculously common failure mode, resulting in tons of money being wasted, and a great many phones being thrown away for no other reason.
Laptop connectors don't have many variations, and they could easily settle on a single one, if just a fraction the government interest that was put on phones to get micro-USB MANDATED, was directed towards other devices like laptops.
You're actually describing USB... It has its uses, but it's a clumsy and fragile piece of shit as a power supply. Barrel connectors are nearly the perfect design for just such a task. Hell, the headphone jacks one cell phones tablets and laptos, which nobody ever has trouble with, is proof enough of the durability of such a simple connector design.
Uhh, not really... Even Apple balked at the expense of Firewire-800, and mostly stuck with 400, except in their most expensive products.
When Firewire-800 was introduced, hard drives couldn't even keep-up with Firewire-400 or USB2 speeds. Even the 15,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah drives introduced around 2002 had maximum throughput of 60MB/sec, while their average was lower.
Firewire-800 was 2002... Around 2004, higher-end PCs started getting eSATA connectors that were at worst TWICE AS FAST as Firewire-800. And yes, as above, eSATA was much faster than necessary, too. Most hard drives, particularly external 2.5" ones, weren't seriously bottle-necked by USB2 speeds, which is why USB3 took so long to materialize.
USB2 is just fast enough to about max-out the transfer speed of a Class-6 SD card (i.e. real-time), which is on the high-end and more than fast enough for 1080 video recordings (can usually get away with Class-4).
You'll only need speeds above that for all I-frames/stills in 1080 (e.g. for studio use) or 4K recording... And even then, you could still transfer the data over USB2 if needed, just at less-than real-time.
We no longer need ANY CABLE for data. Your saddling yourself with restrictions to satisfy a long-lost need. And...
It's only where POWER and DATA go over the same cable that we end up with horrible proprietary crap! If phones had power-only cables, they'd have been simple, standard barrel connectors.
Laptops have had that forever... Their simple barrel connectors can pull 200W+, no trouble at all. And no USB connector will ever be 1/100th as durable as a tough, simple, basic barrel connector.
There's only ONE THING I give USB credit for... It sucked the air out of all the subtle variation of voltages around its range. Instead of devices that needed 3V, some that needed 6V, and others that needed 4.5V, and even with some that wanted 7.5V, now all those devices will have mini-USB plugs (usually not micro-usb), and run on 5V.
Of course if every smartphone charger on the planet switched to 12V, it would have the same effect on laptops, and all other devices that use any voltages anywhere around that range.
I wish that were true, but it sure as hell isn't!
Sure, MANY devices accept TTL voltage RS232, but a big number DO NOT. So if you depend on that USB-RS232 adapter, you'll be left standing around, looking like a moron.
Just had to configure a brand new smart PDU a while ago... Absolutely no activity to my company laptop via USB. Bad cable? Incorrect wiring? Defective PDU? Nope... Plugged that cable to a server with an actual RS232 port, and it works flawlessly.
I wish I could find USB-RS232 adapters that actually output the proper voltages...
USB is dirt cheap. You can have a separate bus-per-device if you so desire. That will easily eliminate all contention.
And what you really mean is USB is useless for REAL-TIME work... When USB can do faster-than-realtime for you, the contention and other gripes aren't much of an issue. Firewire is dying out in production video shops, too, though it has been (almost-) replaced by several different alternatives, not (just) USB.
Firewire is long dead, except for a few niches in the industry.
DV cameras were the one and only practical consumer application of firewire, and they've been obsolete and forgotten for many years. Once you eliminate DV tape and switch to solid-state, you eliminate the need for the fixed-bit-rate codec, and can easily transfer faster-than-real-time over USB2.
In fact, you can skip the USB cables, and transfer your videos over WiFi these days, even with sub-$100 camcorders...
You want to call Nuclear over-centralized and expensive in the same breath you praise wind? Take a good look at the Pickens Plan:
"New transmission lines, worth $64 billion to $128 billion, would be needed to carry the power from the windmills to the cities. Pickens [...] said the government should begin building transmission lines for wind-generated power in the same way that President Eisenhower did by declaring an emergency to build the interstate highway system in the 1950s and 1960s."
USB replaced PS/2 and IEEE 1284 (Parallel ports), and SCSI-1 (see: Pre-USB scanners, CD Burners, HDDs), and PCMCIA (see WiFi, Flash, Floppies, Zip drives, etc.), and game ports, and TOSLINK, and MIDI ports, and PCI slots (to a significant extent), and ADB, and infrared ports, and...
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
Absolutely not. ATSC doesn't really support single-frequency networks/repeaters.
2edge, 60 miles away, and -117dBm according to TVFool, yet good-enough reception for my purposes (some channels break-up more than others).
That sounds entirely doable, even with pine trees. At least Florida doesn't throw mountains in the way. Trying TVFool with a zip of 32134, it says you have very good signal strength, even at that distance.
Every cheap $20 antenna claims to get extreme-range reception... that doesn't mean they do. What you need is an 8-bay for UHF, like a Winegard 8800, combined with a mast-mounted preamp like the RCA TVPRAMP1R. For VHF stations, an AntennaCraft y10-7-13, connected to that same preamp. Even with the large obstructions, I have no doubt you'll get solid reception.
You're welcome to do what you want... Just not justifying it by pretending you don't have any (free) alternatives, when it looks like you're got a far better signal than many of us who go the free route.
That still makes zero sense. How high your antenna tower needs to be is directly correlated with how good your antenna is, (and how many of them you install together). TVFool contains NO INFORMATION on how good antennas are, so it never (directly) tells anyone how tall of a tower they need. So it seems you're making some big assumptions, somewhere, which likely aren't accurate. You were quick to claim you were technically adept, but haven't shown any knowledge of RF, thus far. The quickest way to get at the facts of the matter would be to give a rough location, so your claim could be verified, or useful advice could be give to correct your misunderstanding.
One simple hint: Using TWO antennas is equivalent to doubling the height of your tower. Four antennas doubles it, again. Even taking your unexplained "350ft" antenna tower at face value, a quad antenna setup gets you down under 90ft, which is far more manageable.
What's even better documented is the fact poor black people get harsher sentences, because poor black people vote for politicians who advocate tougher sentences in their jurisdictions.
It's unfortunate, but it's caused by sociological factors, NOT a grand conspiracy by white people to keep black people down...
That makes no sense. Except for the dark side of the moon, there's no place on Earth where you'd have ZERO radio signals. TVFool doesn't have a zero value that it would ever show. It might show stations in RED or GREY as a quick hint that the signal isn't strong, but a good antenna can handle very weak signals in those ranges.
So what is TVFool showing as the dBm of your strongest network station? I've got good (but not perfect) reception with ATSC signals as weak as -120 dBm, with just a single good 4-bay UHF antenna and preamp. And mine are all 2Edge reception...
If you really are on the fringes, it's possible touse two or even FOUR antennas, together, to pull-in even weaker signals without a huge tower.
There are plenty of people who have become accustomed to the shows they watch on cable, and just refuse to adapt to the near-equivalents available OTA. You're not unique in that aspect, but I'm completely unsympathetic to those who are merely set in their ways. And you really are part of the problem, one of those making it profitable to lock-up content under expensive paid TV service packages.
OTA TV signals do NOT require line-of-sight. In my case, I've got TWO mountain ranges in my way, but I still get OTA television.
What's your zip code? I looked-up Yosemite, since that was the first (and biggest) "pine forest" which came to mind, and found a good TV antenna 20ft above ground can EASILY receive all the major network stations in the area. Of course you could be in one of the few areas in the country where OTA signals are too far away, but it sounds like you've really never tried, and you've always just assumed the worst.
Except "streaming video on mobile devices" does NOT imply that people are using their cellular data plans at all. The linked article even talks about people using free business/municipal WiFi.
I don't see that happening... Spectrum reuse (smaller towers, lower-power antennas, with much shorter range) will allow the existing available cellular frequencies to be utilized many times more efficiently, blanketing small areas (neighborhoods) with much higher speeds, which don't interfere with the big towers covering large geographic areas.
The up-coming FCC incentive auction will give the cellular companies big new swaths of lower frequencies. Meanwhile micro-cells and pico-cells are decreasing in price and increasing in popularity with cellular carriers, and their operation necessarily involves higher spectrum reuse. LTE-U operates just like WiFi, on the same unlicensed frequencies and with a very small radius of service, and those devices should be available very shortly.
You're not alone, but certainly in a very, very tiny minority. Back in early 2013, the majority of all Americans owned smartphones, and that trend has only increased several percent per year:
Early 2015: "overall smartphone penetration up to 77% of mobile phone owners in the U.S. Among recent phone acquirers, 91% chose smartphones as their mobile handset [...] Overall smartphone penetration continues to rise rapidly, increasing 8 percentage points"
While there's some truth to what you say about the two biggest US cellular carriers, it doesn't apply to T-Mobile/Sprint.
T-Mobile now offers unlimited video streaming (Netflix, HBO NOW, Hulu, more) that doesn't apply against your data allowance. And that's besides T-Mobile offering "unlimited" data plans for some time.
Sprint doesn't charge overages at all... they prefer to throttle your data connection down to much slower speeds, rather than disconnect your data, or charge you extra fees. And a Sprint service like Boost with several GBytes of data is just $30/mo, including most taxes/fees.
MVNOs can have even better deals. RingPlus, FreedomPop and others offer free plans that include cellular data. Some MVNOs like Republic will allow activating your smartphone for $10 with unlimited calling/sms, but NO DATA PLAN at all. You are tied to WiFi for internet, but that means no overage charges, ever.