On GSM/3GSM networks, phone calls are conducted over separate channels to data. And voice always takes priority. You'll never not be able to make a phone call due purely to people using too much data.
Um yes it did? As I said in GP post, restrictions on tethering are done by the CARRIER (hence, needing a 'tethering plan'), not the phone itself. And as I said, carriers have never restricted tethering where I live.
(NB. I do know that tethering wasn't possible on the iPhone on earlier versions of iOS, at least not without jail-breaking. So I should clarify that by "from day 1", I meant, from the day I first got a smartphone, not necessarily that it was always a feature on all phones - but either way, carriers have never had anything to do with it here).
Tethering has worked from day one on most phones? This is to do with restrictions placed on plans by a carrier, not the hardware/software capabilities of the device/operating system.
FWIW I've tethered since the day I first got a smartphone (first on iPhone, then on an Android). But no carrier in the country I live in has ever restricted tethering AFAIK (why should they - I'm paying for the data either way, why do they care how I use it?) It's always seemed a bit mystifying to me why carriers in America seem to have a 'thing' about tethering as if something makes it different than any other form of data use.
My home DSL connection (which has been on native IPv6 for 2+ years now) assigns a static/56 prefix to each customer. Not saying that all ISPs will do it that way, I don't see any reason why they WOULDN'T do this.
Yep. Been on native IPv6 for 2 years now and I have not ONCE needed to memorise, copy down or type/enter a IPv6 address for any reason. This is a non-issue.
Er this is completely standard. I've been on native IPv6 for two years now, on my standard residential $29.95/month DSL plan, and also have a block way bigger than the entire IPv4 internet. Though mine's only a/56 rather than a/48 (oh noes, only 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 globally-addressable IPs for my home LAN??)
Those 500 EUR notes were problematic in the UK even well before they got 'banned'. I remember getting some from a currency exchange place before my trip to the UK in 2005, and upon arrival, I had a HELL of a time trying to find any store that would accept/make change for them! Damn things took a very long time to get rid of...
As an Aussie myself I should point out though that a good amount of this can also be explained by the current strength of the Australian Dollar (or more accurately, the massive devaluation of the USD over the last few years). Adjusted for PPP (which gets rid of currency effects), the US still has us beat on GDP/capita (and most likely always will, since they have the vast majority of the world's super-rich individuals and companies). AU still does pretty well though!
While it's nice that you get three months off a year, that is not the reality for the bulk of Americans.
In my country we have a legal minimum of 5 weeks off per year, plus public holidays. That is the legal minimum for any job - full time, part time, casual or otherwise. Everyone gets this amount, but no-one really gets MORE than this amount. The vast majority of the Americans I meet (and I spend a fair bit of time in the US for work and family reasons) express jealousy at this arrangement. They tell me they only get a week per year, or that they'd need to work at their job for [some inordinately long period of time] before they earned that amount of time off etc.
I do observe a common trend in most "US vs. other country" comparisons, whether it be holidays, access to education, overall wealth, wages, or any number of other quality-of-life factors. At the high end, the US has it better than anyone - huge wealth, lots of holidays etc. But it's counter-balanced by comparatively crappy figures for the low-end and middle-end of the spectrum. Whereas in other countries there's a bit less at the high end sure, but there's a guaranteed lower limit on things that is still pretty decent.
Which is the better arrangement is of course a matter of ideology. But you always have to be careful making black and white comparisons between the US and other places I find, because the US is just so different from person to person, industry to industry, area to area. Other places are far more 'homogeneous' and regulated when it comes to most things and so are easier to make generalisations about.
This is true of virtually all OECD countries. There is net migration from developing countries, to the developed world. This is not new, nor exclusive to the US.
I have one issue with the above figures - the HDI and GDP/capital ranks quoted are based on the mean, not the median. Basically you have the lion's share of the world's ultra-rich, which makes things look better than they are.
Check out the inequality-adjusted HDI figures for a better idea of how the "typical" person's life compares between various countries. The US rank slips way, way down. Whereas some countries don't move much (e.g. Germany, moving from 9th to 7th) or at all (e.g. Australia, 2nd in both overall ~and~ inequality-adjusted HDI). This suggests that in those countries, the average Joe (or should that be the 'median' Joe?) has a better life than in America. It also suggests that in those countries there are few very poor, few very rich, and a large and affluent middle class; whereas the US has a relatively smaller middle class, but a lot of very poor, and a decent amount of mega-rich.
Not flaming your whole post because I do agree with much of it - the best US universities (Harvard, MIT, Stanford etc.) in particular are well admired around the world and really only have a few peers from elsewhere (e.g. Oxford and Cambridge). I also believe that American society is better geared for producing innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. But it's a very polarised country in terms of income distribution, quality of life etc...something that is not obvious when you use figures based on averages rather than medians.
Yeah the iPhone does enjoy good resale value. I've been through several iterations of them now and each time made sure they were in a case + screen protector from day 1. Typically a new iPhone is $900ish (outright price, not on contract), and I can sell it again after a year for $600ish, or after two years for $300-400ish. That's not bad really for a piece of consumer electronics (most of which depreciate at ridiculous rates).
Ah, thanks. My Google-fu is lacking it appears. Actually that's one issue with the way that search engines geolocate you and present 'relevant' results these days - it makes looking for locations named the same as some local location difficult!
Glenelg is a suburb (and rather nice beach) in Adelaide, South Australia. As far as my Google-fu can determine, it is the only location named as such on earth.
There's also a few other names being used by NASA to refer to nearby points of interest that seem to have Australian origin. My only guess is that it has something to do with the fact that the overall area in which they landed, Gale Crater, is named after an Australian astronomer?
In terms of population, around 1/3rd of the world drives on the left (side of the road, i.e. right-hand drive), and 2/3rds on the right (side of the road, i.e. left-hand drive)
India alone, with well over a billion people, drives on the left. Add to that Japan, much of SE Asia, Australia and (as you mention) NZ. And no doubt some other ones I'm not aware of. It's by no means just one or two holdouts (where as the metric vs. imperial situation is really just the US and a couple of non-factor countries, versus everyone else)
The other thing is that left-hand or right-hand drive are really just two equally good alternatives. They are the same thing, just mirrored, and neither is inherently superior. Whereas comparing the two systems of measurement, they are clearly quite different and there are points of superiority/inferiority that can be argued.
My ISP's done all the above (been using native IPv6 for >2 years), and you're right... done properly it's transparent to the end user and everything just works as it always has. It was done as an opt-in trial for the first year or so (you just changed your PPP login details from user@isp.net to user@ipv6.isp.net). Then after ironing out any issues, they just turned it on for all new customers by default. The sky hasn't fallen in.
In fact I forget all about IPv6 most of the time, only to be occasionally reminded when I ping/tracert stuff:
C:\>ping www.google.com
Pinging www.google.com [2404:6800:4006:801::1012] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=11ms Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=11ms Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=10ms Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=10ms
Ping statistics for 2404:6800:4006:801::1012:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 10ms, Maximum = 11ms, Average = 10ms
But yeah, my ISP is in the minority and like you I wonder - why is this the case?
Well you're right of course - when they truly run out of IPv4, those that get connected after that date will only be able to 'see' the IPv6 portions of the internet. Which is why it's important that we get at least ~most~ of the net running IPv6 before that happens. Currently let's face it, most stuff is still IPv4 only (although the major sites - Google, Facebook, anything served from Akamai etc. are all nicely dual stacked now, and I'm noticing it increasing rapidly... my router reports approx 15% of my total traffic is now native IPv6; a year ago it was ~1%)
And yeah I know what you mean about legacy code in companies...that's a big issue that everyone will have to deal with. But I was more referring to first getting ISPs and residential/home users up and running on IPv6 - they are much easier since all modern OSes, browsers, phones etc. support it. And increasing consumer/residential connections is the main reason for IPv4 exhaustion (rapid uptake of connections in Asia particularly), so if we can deal with that side of it, it leaves companies that need to remain dual-stacked for legacy reasons with that much more time to deal with the situation.
Yeah I used to keep my iPhone on 2G (EDGE/GPRS) most of the time - it did wonders for battery life and was still OK for getting your emails and stuff. Soon as you wanted to do something a bit more intensive like check Google Maps though, you'd need to flick 3G back on.
It's carrier-specific, but only on the 4S. AT&T iPhone 4S won't have the option. Every other iPhone model will.
And a 4S on any network other than AT&T generally will too (my 4S on a network here in Australia has the option, but I travel regularly to the US and soon as I put my AT&T SIM back in it, the option vanishes).
Yeah agreed. I've been on native IPv6 (dual stack, obviously) for, hmm, approaching two years now (I'm in the APNIC area so they ran out of IPv4 a while ago) and honestly I'm only reminded of the fact when someone brings IPv6 up in an article or something. The changeover was easy from the user's perspective - it just works. Indeed I suspect many users of my ISP don't even know they are on IPv6.
The resistance and heel-dragging on the changeover in many places/companies is a bit mystifying to me. It's not really that hard.
Bumped start time UP to 9am? Wow, how early do US schools usually start then? 9am was standard start time for both primary (elementary) and high schools here in Australia when I was growing up (the 80s and 90s) and still is as far as I know. I couldn't really imagine having to start much earlier than that - as you say, kids aren't made to get up early.
Mind you we only get 5-6 weeks off for summer. Same total weeks off per year as the US though, as we have a 2 week Easter break, 3 week winter break, and 2 weeks spring break in there too.
Primary school (years 1-6): 9am-3pm High school (years 7-12): 9am-3:25pm
Having said that, during my latter years in high school I was actually AT school from 7:45am-5pm most days, because I had music lessons/orchestra/etc. before classes started, and sports afterwards. The music was my choice, but the school made after-school sport (2-3 days a week) compulsory at least up to year 10.
Don't get me wrong - I live in Australia where kids have, overall, a similar number of weeks per year spent in school. The difference is that our school year is divided up into 4 terms each with a 2-3 week break between them. So we get (varies a little depending on which State you're in, but roughly speaking):
- A 2 week break at Easter; - A 3 week break in winter (July) - Another 2 or sometimes 3 weeks off in spring (around late Sept/early Oct usually) - And then the 'summer' break (referred to generally as the Christmas break) which is the longest at about 6 weeks (typically from mid/late-December until the first week of February)
So our summer break is the longest but still considerably shorter than the US summer break. We just have more (and longer) smaller breaks throughout the year.
Sigh. I used a random country to use as an example. (Well not entirely random: one that produces enough TV/movies to matter. The example wouldn't have worked well if I picked Lesotho or something!)
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On GSM/3GSM networks, phone calls are conducted over separate channels to data. And voice always takes priority. You'll never not be able to make a phone call due purely to people using too much data.
Um yes it did? As I said in GP post, restrictions on tethering are done by the CARRIER (hence, needing a 'tethering plan'), not the phone itself. And as I said, carriers have never restricted tethering where I live.
(NB. I do know that tethering wasn't possible on the iPhone on earlier versions of iOS, at least not without jail-breaking. So I should clarify that by "from day 1", I meant, from the day I first got a smartphone, not necessarily that it was always a feature on all phones - but either way, carriers have never had anything to do with it here).
Tethering has worked from day one on most phones? This is to do with restrictions placed on plans by a carrier, not the hardware/software capabilities of the device/operating system.
FWIW I've tethered since the day I first got a smartphone (first on iPhone, then on an Android). But no carrier in the country I live in has ever restricted tethering AFAIK (why should they - I'm paying for the data either way, why do they care how I use it?) It's always seemed a bit mystifying to me why carriers in America seem to have a 'thing' about tethering as if something makes it different than any other form of data use.
My home DSL connection (which has been on native IPv6 for 2+ years now) assigns a static /56 prefix to each customer. Not saying that all ISPs will do it that way, I don't see any reason why they WOULDN'T do this.
Yep. Been on native IPv6 for 2 years now and I have not ONCE needed to memorise, copy down or type/enter a IPv6 address for any reason. This is a non-issue.
Er this is completely standard. I've been on native IPv6 for two years now, on my standard residential $29.95/month DSL plan, and also have a block way bigger than the entire IPv4 internet. Though mine's only a /56 rather than a /48 (oh noes, only 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 globally-addressable IPs for my home LAN??)
That's the whole beauty of IPv6 :)
Those 500 EUR notes were problematic in the UK even well before they got 'banned'. I remember getting some from a currency exchange place before my trip to the UK in 2005, and upon arrival, I had a HELL of a time trying to find any store that would accept/make change for them! Damn things took a very long time to get rid of...
As an Aussie myself I should point out though that a good amount of this can also be explained by the current strength of the Australian Dollar (or more accurately, the massive devaluation of the USD over the last few years). Adjusted for PPP (which gets rid of currency effects), the US still has us beat on GDP/capita (and most likely always will, since they have the vast majority of the world's super-rich individuals and companies). AU still does pretty well though!
While it's nice that you get three months off a year, that is not the reality for the bulk of Americans.
In my country we have a legal minimum of 5 weeks off per year, plus public holidays. That is the legal minimum for any job - full time, part time, casual or otherwise. Everyone gets this amount, but no-one really gets MORE than this amount. The vast majority of the Americans I meet (and I spend a fair bit of time in the US for work and family reasons) express jealousy at this arrangement. They tell me they only get a week per year, or that they'd need to work at their job for [some inordinately long period of time] before they earned that amount of time off etc.
I do observe a common trend in most "US vs. other country" comparisons, whether it be holidays, access to education, overall wealth, wages, or any number of other quality-of-life factors. At the high end, the US has it better than anyone - huge wealth, lots of holidays etc. But it's counter-balanced by comparatively crappy figures for the low-end and middle-end of the spectrum. Whereas in other countries there's a bit less at the high end sure, but there's a guaranteed lower limit on things that is still pretty decent.
Which is the better arrangement is of course a matter of ideology. But you always have to be careful making black and white comparisons between the US and other places I find, because the US is just so different from person to person, industry to industry, area to area. Other places are far more 'homogeneous' and regulated when it comes to most things and so are easier to make generalisations about.
This is true of virtually all OECD countries. There is net migration from developing countries, to the developed world. This is not new, nor exclusive to the US.
I have one issue with the above figures - the HDI and GDP/capital ranks quoted are based on the mean, not the median. Basically you have the lion's share of the world's ultra-rich, which makes things look better than they are.
Check out the inequality-adjusted HDI figures for a better idea of how the "typical" person's life compares between various countries. The US rank slips way, way down. Whereas some countries don't move much (e.g. Germany, moving from 9th to 7th) or at all (e.g. Australia, 2nd in both overall ~and~ inequality-adjusted HDI). This suggests that in those countries, the average Joe (or should that be the 'median' Joe?) has a better life than in America. It also suggests that in those countries there are few very poor, few very rich, and a large and affluent middle class; whereas the US has a relatively smaller middle class, but a lot of very poor, and a decent amount of mega-rich.
Not flaming your whole post because I do agree with much of it - the best US universities (Harvard, MIT, Stanford etc.) in particular are well admired around the world and really only have a few peers from elsewhere (e.g. Oxford and Cambridge). I also believe that American society is better geared for producing innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. But it's a very polarised country in terms of income distribution, quality of life etc...something that is not obvious when you use figures based on averages rather than medians.
Yeah the iPhone does enjoy good resale value. I've been through several iterations of them now and each time made sure they were in a case + screen protector from day 1. Typically a new iPhone is $900ish (outright price, not on contract), and I can sell it again after a year for $600ish, or after two years for $300-400ish. That's not bad really for a piece of consumer electronics (most of which depreciate at ridiculous rates).
Ah, thanks. My Google-fu is lacking it appears. Actually that's one issue with the way that search engines geolocate you and present 'relevant' results these days - it makes looking for locations named the same as some local location difficult!
What's with all the Australian place names being used?
The landing site was adjacent to a point they are calling Goulburn (a town in south-eastern New South Wales).
Glenelg is a suburb (and rather nice beach) in Adelaide, South Australia. As far as my Google-fu can determine, it is the only location named as such on earth.
There's also a few other names being used by NASA to refer to nearby points of interest that seem to have Australian origin. My only guess is that it has something to do with the fact that the overall area in which they landed, Gale Crater, is named after an Australian astronomer?
In terms of population, around 1/3rd of the world drives on the left (side of the road, i.e. right-hand drive), and 2/3rds on the right (side of the road, i.e. left-hand drive)
India alone, with well over a billion people, drives on the left. Add to that Japan, much of SE Asia, Australia and (as you mention) NZ. And no doubt some other ones I'm not aware of. It's by no means just one or two holdouts (where as the metric vs. imperial situation is really just the US and a couple of non-factor countries, versus everyone else)
The other thing is that left-hand or right-hand drive are really just two equally good alternatives. They are the same thing, just mirrored, and neither is inherently superior. Whereas comparing the two systems of measurement, they are clearly quite different and there are points of superiority/inferiority that can be argued.
My ISP's done all the above (been using native IPv6 for >2 years), and you're right ... done properly it's transparent to the end user and everything just works as it always has. It was done as an opt-in trial for the first year or so (you just changed your PPP login details from user@isp.net to user@ipv6.isp.net). Then after ironing out any issues, they just turned it on for all new customers by default. The sky hasn't fallen in.
In fact I forget all about IPv6 most of the time, only to be occasionally reminded when I ping/tracert stuff:
C:\>ping www.google.com
Pinging www.google.com [2404:6800:4006:801::1012] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=11ms
Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=11ms
Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=10ms
Reply from 2404:6800:4006:801::1012: time=10ms
Ping statistics for 2404:6800:4006:801::1012:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 10ms, Maximum = 11ms, Average = 10ms
But yeah, my ISP is in the minority and like you I wonder - why is this the case?
Well you're right of course - when they truly run out of IPv4, those that get connected after that date will only be able to 'see' the IPv6 portions of the internet. Which is why it's important that we get at least ~most~ of the net running IPv6 before that happens. Currently let's face it, most stuff is still IPv4 only (although the major sites - Google, Facebook, anything served from Akamai etc. are all nicely dual stacked now, and I'm noticing it increasing rapidly ... my router reports approx 15% of my total traffic is now native IPv6; a year ago it was ~1%)
And yeah I know what you mean about legacy code in companies...that's a big issue that everyone will have to deal with. But I was more referring to first getting ISPs and residential/home users up and running on IPv6 - they are much easier since all modern OSes, browsers, phones etc. support it. And increasing consumer/residential connections is the main reason for IPv4 exhaustion (rapid uptake of connections in Asia particularly), so if we can deal with that side of it, it leaves companies that need to remain dual-stacked for legacy reasons with that much more time to deal with the situation.
The weight I'm not too fussed about, but any reduction in thickness is awesome for anyone that keeps their phone in their pants pocket. :)
Yeah I used to keep my iPhone on 2G (EDGE/GPRS) most of the time - it did wonders for battery life and was still OK for getting your emails and stuff. Soon as you wanted to do something a bit more intensive like check Google Maps though, you'd need to flick 3G back on.
It's carrier-specific, but only on the 4S. AT&T iPhone 4S won't have the option. Every other iPhone model will.
And a 4S on any network other than AT&T generally will too (my 4S on a network here in Australia has the option, but I travel regularly to the US and soon as I put my AT&T SIM back in it, the option vanishes).
Yeah agreed. I've been on native IPv6 (dual stack, obviously) for, hmm, approaching two years now (I'm in the APNIC area so they ran out of IPv4 a while ago) and honestly I'm only reminded of the fact when someone brings IPv6 up in an article or something. The changeover was easy from the user's perspective - it just works. Indeed I suspect many users of my ISP don't even know they are on IPv6.
The resistance and heel-dragging on the changeover in many places/companies is a bit mystifying to me. It's not really that hard.
Bumped start time UP to 9am? Wow, how early do US schools usually start then? 9am was standard start time for both primary (elementary) and high schools here in Australia when I was growing up (the 80s and 90s) and still is as far as I know. I couldn't really imagine having to start much earlier than that - as you say, kids aren't made to get up early.
Mind you we only get 5-6 weeks off for summer. Same total weeks off per year as the US though, as we have a 2 week Easter break, 3 week winter break, and 2 weeks spring break in there too.
School schedule for me (Australia, 1990s) was:
Primary school (years 1-6): 9am-3pm
High school (years 7-12): 9am-3:25pm
Having said that, during my latter years in high school I was actually AT school from 7:45am-5pm most days, because I had music lessons/orchestra/etc. before classes started, and sports afterwards. The music was my choice, but the school made after-school sport (2-3 days a week) compulsory at least up to year 10.
Yeah the US summer breaks are incredibly long.
Don't get me wrong - I live in Australia where kids have, overall, a similar number of weeks per year spent in school. The difference is that our school year is divided up into 4 terms each with a 2-3 week break between them. So we get (varies a little depending on which State you're in, but roughly speaking):
- A 2 week break at Easter;
- A 3 week break in winter (July)
- Another 2 or sometimes 3 weeks off in spring (around late Sept/early Oct usually)
- And then the 'summer' break (referred to generally as the Christmas break) which is the longest at about 6 weeks (typically from mid/late-December until the first week of February)
So our summer break is the longest but still considerably shorter than the US summer break. We just have more (and longer) smaller breaks throughout the year.
Sigh. I used a random country to use as an example. (Well not entirely random: one that produces enough TV/movies to matter. The example wouldn't have worked well if I picked Lesotho or something!)