"Hrm. Well there, this SD card looks blank. Format."
And it's tossed in the trash because it was broken.
What you need is something that streams to off site.
I thought he was clear on the problem that encryption solves: the level of overreach law enforcement....assured that the data was secure from prying eyes
He wasn't looking for a solution to prevent him from throwing away an SD card that he recorded his encrypted steam to - how is that even a problem? I have a flash drive right here with gigabytes of encrypted data and I haven't thrown it away because it contains gigabytes of encrypted data.
Has any telco stated (or even implied) that txt messages are deleted from their system upon delivery? Since they have to store messages for some period of time to queue them for delivery and pass them around their network, I wouldn't be surprised if they end up on backup tapes and stored for quite some time.
Yep, I've been increasingly considering taking what money and skills I have and trying to immigrate to a more sane country. Then I think it's an extreme solution, then the next bit of U.S. insanity takes hold, and I'm considering it again.
Maybe it would be easier to just encrypt your communications - modern smartphones are more than capable of encrypting txts, emails and voice communications.
> And, at the end of the payback term, if you stay with T-Mobile, you save $20/month since the phone's paid off, but with VErizon you keep paying the same amount.
Except, at the end of 2 years, you want a new phone so you start over with paying the full price.
Lots of people keep their phone until it dies, not everyone needs the latest and greatest.
My Galaxy Nexus is about 18 months old and the only reason I'd replace it after my contract term is up is to move away from Verizon to a cheaper carrier - it does everything I need. The only reason I replaced my 2 year old original Droid was because the screen started flashing when I slid the keyboard out. Since the Galaxy Nexus has no moving parts (well, except a couple buttons) and has a replaceable battery, I expect it to last a lot longer.
I think the down payment option is a good deal. However not everybody agrees, and I think the reason why is kind of stupid.
Techcrunch basically attacks t-mobile over this one because if you want to change carriers, you're still stuck with a $600 (or whatever) phone, as opposed to a $350 early termination fee.
I'm wondering if they have a bone to pick with t-mobile, because a few hours ago slashdot posted an article from them about how t-mobile UK are scamming customers with premium SMS.
The only possible way I could see the light in this statement would be if you could bring that phone to any of the other major carriers. Sadly, as far as major carriers, your only other option is AT&T. Though you can get some pretty good deals with the MVNO's, their coverage isn't as good. Personally I'd prefer to just own the phone than be in a contract.
Galaxy SIII on Verizon $199 + $350 ETF reduced by $10/month Galaxy SIII on T-Mobile: $549 or $69 + $20/month for 24 months = $549
If you break your Verizon contract in the first month, your phone cost is $199 + $350 for the phone, or $549 If you break you T-Mobile contract in the first month, your phone cost is $69 + 20*24 = $549
If you break your Verizon contract after 6 months, you owe $350 - ($10*6) = $290 to break your contract If you break your T-mobile contract after 6 months, you owe 18 * $20 = $360 to break your contract
If you break your Verizon contract after 12 months, you owe $350 - ($10*12) = $230 to break your contract If you break your T-mobile contract after 12 months, you own 12 * $12 = $240 to break your contract
However, in the last 2 cases, you saved $130 on the price of the phone so you still break even or come out ahead.
And, at the end of the payback term, if you stay with T-Mobile, you save $20/month since the phone's paid off, but with VErizon you keep paying the same amount.
There is no evidence that T-Mobile has even gone to the table to negotiate with a lot of phone manufacturers over new phones. There have even been cases where small regional carriers operating on T-Mobile frequencies have picked up phones that T-Mobile has never carried (the last Blackberry Pearl, the 9100, was an example), so it clearly was not a case of the phone not existing or being made for T-Mobile frequencies. R
Negotiate? With what? T-Mobile is a small carrier, they can't promise millions of phones to every manufacturer, nor can they afford huge co-marketing budgets.
Blame regulators - if they wanted to enforce any sort of free market, they'd require that all phones have dual-mode GSM/CDMA radios that cover all carrier frequencies -- that would let consumers hop between carriers without spending $500 on a new phone.
That would increase the cost by quite a bit. We have two major GSM carriers in the US who use different frequencies, and two CDMA carriers who also use different frequencies. Hence a phone to hop between all four carriers would need to be able to communicate on four different sets of frequencies, and that isn't even including the various data frequencies.
The iPhone 4S is a dual GSM/CDMA phone. Parts breakdowns put the cost of the wireless chip at around $25.
I don't think car manufacturers would get away with releasing a car that requires Exxon gas (which is 50% more expensive than other smaller brands) for the first 2 years, so why do the cellular carriers get away with it?
I don't know where on earth you buy your gas, but where I live nobody would stay in business charging that much more than their neighbors. If a gas station charged five percent more - with gas at $3.50 and up for regular where I live - they would look like a hollywood ghost town. With 50% difference they might as well not even bother taking delivery.
That said, motor fuel is not a particularly good analogy for cell phones and cellular networks, even if you were to call GSM "gas" and CDMA "diesel". There is more in common between the engine types than there is between the phone types, amongst other things.
So you got that I was making an analogy, but then you thought I was literally claiming that Exxon gas is 50% more expensive than other brands? In this analogy I was implying that some cell phone carriers cost 50% more than their competition and you're pretty much stuck with them unless you want to buy a new phone.
They're by far the least evil of the major carriers in the US.
Only for certain definitions of "evil". I've been with them for 7+ years and every year the service gets a little worse, the plan gets a little more expensive, and they offer fewer new phones that I actually want to purchase. Sure, their customer service is cheery and all, but they rarely actually accomplish anything.
Don't blame T*Mobile for a lack of phones - they can't force manufacturers to support their frequencies (though AT&T GSM phones will work just fine on T*Mobile as long as you don't care about 3G or 4G data - I used an Android phone on T-Mobile that only worked with 2G and it was surprisingly usable despite the slow data speeds).
Blame regulators - if they wanted to enforce any sort of free market, they'd require that all phones have dual-mode GSM/CDMA radios that cover all carrier frequencies -- that would let consumers hop between carriers without spending $500 on a new phone. Dual-mode phones may cost $10 - $20 more than single mode phones but would give consumers a lot more choice and flexibility.
I don't think car manufacturers would get away with releasing a car that requires Exxon gas (which is 50% more expensive than other smaller brands) for the first 2 years, so why do the cellular carriers get away with it?
I know I can plug my phone into any microUSB charger I can find and it will charge.
So can I (using an iPhone or an iPad) plug into any USB charger.
What you are saying is actually not true, in that if you plug into a standard USB port and have too many things going on with the device (like tethering or running a game or using a navigation app) the device may well still be losing power.
The problem, if there is one, is people claiming that the iPhone is any more proprietary than any other kind of device that charges over USB.
The iPhone is the only modern smartphone not lying to consumer by pretending to be something it's not really (a standard USB device).
So you agree that having a standard connector that supports a special high-speed charge mode is not absurd after all as long as it defaults to something that anyone can use as long as they have a compatible cable that can plug in to it? Any random USB port may not be able to do fast charging (and may not be able to keep up with a busy device's power demands), but when you're on the go and have to charge up, you can count on any USB port being compatible with your device. When you're at home or the office you can enjoy fast charging on your device's own USB charger, but when your coworker needs to charge his phone to make a call, you can lend him the same charger.
The different between Apple's proprietary cable and a device that uses a generic Micro-USB cable is that I can buy a generic MicroUSB cable for 99 cents and have many of them - I have at least 5 - 1 in each of the cars, 1 one home, 1 at work, one in my backpack with an AC USB adapter. It only cost $5 for me to have all of those cables, but I would have paid $100 for the Apple equivalents (or around $60 for certified third party equivalents), so instead of having multiple cables, I'd probably have only one or two and carry it around with me.
I'm on Verizon and I have had a few sessions of 100MB+ downloads running at top speed all the way. Granted, I am not in a spot with a 10 Mbit+ signal very often but when I am, it is blazing. Of course take this with a grain of salt; Verizon is both creative and clandestine when it comes to service shaping, so they could very well use that tactic in certain congested areas.
Interesting, I'm on Verizon too, but I'm in a pretty busy urban area, so maybe the cell tower is over subscribed enough to make them throttle my big downloads.
This is exactly why I think it's so absurd that people complain about "custom" connectors (never mind USB itself has about five!), when in order to charge devices in a reasonable time over an ancient standard, we instead live in a world of custom chargers that just happen to PRETEND to use the same connector type when they really behave differently depending of what is plugged into them.
As long as they all default to a least-common-denominator "safe mode" that's compatible with whatever happens to be be plugged in, even if it's just at the standard 500mA rate, then what's the problem?
I know I can plug my phone into any microUSB charger I can find and it will charge.
Maybe this is the right place to ask this question:
Is there any way to force Chrome on my Galaxy Nexus to either fully cache the current page so it can display it instantly upon browser startup, or to not reload it when I start the browser and show me a blank screen?
It's annoying to start up the browser when I last was viewing a large, complicated page, and then I have to wait while the browser tries to reload and display that page, even though I want to go to a new page. Even if I hit the stop button, I have to wait for the browser to finish up what it's doing before it will stop.
It's not that I'm memory constrained, even if I reboot the phone to get most apps out of memory, open the browser and go to a page, go back to the home screen, then back to the browser, the browser downloads and redisplays the current page.
You have 50 megabit wired service? That's good, but most people don't have anywhere near that for their home/office, but can get it through 4G. That's what I was suggesting, since to save any time you basically need to saturate the google server sending you the app but not saturate the internet uplink, which is pretty damn hard to do.
Do you really get 50 mbit sustained through 4G? My downloads always start fast, then quickly drop down to a much slower speed - I've always assumed that my carrier is throttling me on big downloads... i.e. small 1MB things like web pages load fast, sustained downloads are throttled. Do people really get fast 4G speeds for tens or hundreds of megabytes?
What "context" are you talking about? There's absolutely no mention of Android in TFS, and in fact he says, "I don't care what phone platform."
The context comes from knowing that he's talking about a programmable phone platform that has a touch screen, camera, etc - customizable enough to allow a driver for a USB I/O board to be loaded. There aren't many phone platforms that meet those criteria, and an feature phone is not one of them.
Only a nitpicking pedant would say "Hey, wait a second, he said "Cell Phones", but the Nokia 1100 has no camera, a monochrome non-touch screen display, and no known SDK to allow custom apps to be developed for it, so that proves that any old cell phone is not what he's looking for, so obviously he doesn't know what he's talking about!"
I don't see what the point of this claim about the "most outdated cellphone" was. Even among new phones, there are models without touchscreens or wifi, and if you start considering outdated technology at all then your claim becomes even more inaccurate.
Using my keen powers of recognizing context, I've deduced that he meant "Android smartphones", he wasn't talking about a basic feature phone that doesn't run android and doens't have a screen, touch screen, Wifi, 3g/4g camera(s), etc.
Your cell phone does not have an interface bus that you can use to control devices.
Yeah, that's why he said that when he wrote his question:
The only thing that is missing are the digital/analog in/out pins. So why not flip it around and make a USB or bluetooth peripheral board with just the pins?
And others have pointed out some solutions that do just that.
But they tend to cost about as much (or more) than just buying a Pi in the first place.But if you want the built-in camera and display like a cell phone, then going with an old cell phone + a USB I/O board might be more cost effective than procuring a quality touch-screen display and camera for the Pi.
vSphere 5 Enterprise with Ops Manager is $4300/CPU. He has 14 servers, if each is dual-processor, then he'd pay $60K pruchase price plus $14K/year maintenance. Assuming that servers + storage cost him $15K + $500/year per server for hardware support, then his total initial cost is $270K + $21K/year for maintenance, or $284/initial + $22/year maintenance for each virtual server. How are you going to beat $280/server with physical servers? The datacenter network switch ports alone for a physical server may cost you more than $280.
Or are you claiming that 14 physical servers can't support 950 virtual servers? 67:1 is a fairly high consolidation ratio, but not unreasonable if they are typical lightly used office servers - 384GB of RAM and 16 cores of CPU in each physical server could easily support that load.
All that ranting, and all you needed to do was ask.
That's the hypervisor only, not any of the features that make VMware attractive to the Enterprise. That's kind of like someone complaining that Cisco hardware is expensive, and you offer a free supervisor engine that won't really do anything until you surround it with a $40,000 switch chassis.
By default, HFS on OSX is case-insensitive (but is case preserving). So cal, Cal, and cAL all refer to the same program. It's not a bug.
It's not a bug, but it's a shitty choice made for dumb users. Utterly unacceptable for the UNIX environment. But then, OS X isn't UNIX for Apple users, it's a free OS Apple could nab and slap on a terrible GUI on the cheap.
It's also the only Unix operating system widely embraced by users. So maybe it wasn't a bad choice after all. I can certainly understand why users wouldn't want to have to distinguish between mydocument, Mydocument, MyDocument and MYDOCUMENT.
Even as a long time linux/unix user, I never found a use for distinguishing files by case alone. Is there a legitimate use-case for that?
... off topic with regard to this book review, but maybe the right person will read this, so here goes. When using Terminal with caps lock accidentally on, I discovered that in Mac OS X (10.6 and 10.7 at least), 'CAL' will give you sideways output as opposed to 'cal':
Does the same thing on Ubuntu 12.10:
$ ln -s/usr/bin/cal/tmp/CAL $/tmp/CAL
March 2013 Su 3 10 17 24 31 Mo 4 11 18 25 Tu 5 12 19 26 We 6 13 20 27 Th 7 14 21 28 Fr 1 8 15 22 29 Sa 2 9 16 23 30
Which is the same as running "ncal".
Looks like/usr/bin/cal is a symlink to/usr/bin/ncal, so the cal/ncal program must look to see if it's been invoked as "cal" and if not, then it treats it as ncal.
$ ls -l/usr/bin/cal lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Jan 19 00:52/usr/bin/cal -> ncal
I don't know anything about that particular video but I've heard stories of others who claimed personal experience with cellphones causing issues (which I also cannot verify)
And out of the 10 million annual flights and 800 million passengers that fly each year, I'm sure you can find 2 passengers that claim to have seen the flying unicorns that keep the planes in the air. A few observations of something doesn't make it true.
Interference from passenger devices is tested millions of times/year as people inadvertantly (or puposely) leave their devices turned on, or the devices power one themselves when something pushes against the power switch. If there were really a problem, there would be more than a handful of reports of interference.
It's not about devices that are broadcasting under normal conditions, or intended conditions. It's about malfunctioning devices. The last thing we need on the news is a blackbox recording of the pilots trying to communicate with the tower about a situation in which another plane is approaching and to take immediate actions to avoid a collision only to be drowned out by static, squeals,
If that were really the case, then why don't airlines require that the batteries be removed from devices and surrendered to the flight attendant or that the devices be placed into an RF shielded container?
Everything on a plane is heavily regulated with strict testing and installation regulations - if a passenger cell phone could really disrupt the flight, do you really think the FAA would leave it up to the customer to remember to turn it off?
On any given flight there are likely dozens of phones and other devices that have powered themselves on in carryon or checked bags - my phone doesn't have a removable battery and has an easily pressed power button, so most of the time I find that it's powered itself on at some point during the flight.
Not that I think any of these things should be mandated. If the power is out for any length of time the store will compensate. People are going to want to make money and sell things, believe it or no
The problem is... people don't generally stock up food in modern times, so if the store shuts down unexpectedly, people may starve to death, or there may be chaos on the streets, because 20% of people ran out of this week's supply and can't buy food they need to survive.
You seem to be under the impression that grocery stores stock vast amounts of food -- they don't. If those daily delivery trucks stop coming, most stores will start running out of food in less than a day. Google Maps shows about 80 grocery stores in my town of 800,000 (this includes many small corner markets as well as big Safeways and Luckys), so there are about 1000 residents per store. Imagine 1000 hungry people walking down an isle in your store and guess how long it will last. Stores regularly run out of staples just when bad weather is announced, and that's when they can still get delivery trucks in.
The people that would riot in the streets if they can't buy a cheeseburger are the same people that don't have hundreds of dollars in cash stashed at home just in case a disaster knocks the power offline for a week. Many of them work hourly jobs and will have no income during that time and literally live paycheck to paycheck.
Food is not the most important thing to have in a disaster - most people will have at least a couple days of non-perishable foods on their shelves and refrigerators (which will still be cold for up to 24 hours) at home... they may not have any way to cook it, but they'd have the same problem with grocery store food. People can go for days without food without any ill effects, most people are even fine after going weeks with no food, but people will start dying quickly if they have no source of fresh water for drinking and sanitation - imagine 1000 residents of an apartment building using the street out front as a toilet when the water in their building stops working.
So what you're proposing solves the least important part of a disaster response but drives up food prices for everyone.
Stores provide convenient shopping, but without regulation to the contrary, they have no reason to prepare for extreme contingencies such as long-term power outages -- its cheaper to not be prepared for them; having employees available and trained to work without electricity is more expensive.
It makes sense that requirement that stores meet certain standards of preparedness should be part of a locality's disaster planning.
What good is a store's disaster planning if they can't get supplies trucked in? Any community that relies on stock on-hand in a disaster is a community that will have a 1 day disaster plan (and if the disaster lasts one day, it's not much of a disaster).
A certain standard of reliability: they're not just going to temporarily close up shop, whenever disruption of infrastructure makes it inconvenient to due business; even if they will operate under reduced profit, or have to mark up items to a higher price to properly cover their additional costs,
It's illegal to mark up prices during an emergency.
or to adjust to the new equilibrium between supply and demand during the emergency, it's better than closing up shop, and they should be required to stay open, unless there is an evacuation,
So when there are 500 people lined up outside and enough food/supplies inside for 100 of them, how do you expect the 5 employees inside to "adjust to this new equilibrium"? Do you expect the store employees to enforce rationing? I'm sure you've seen the Christmas mobs that literally trample other customers to get the latest Christmas present - do you think people will form an orderly line at the door and listen to the sales clerk when he says "O
Slashdot Mirror
"Hrm. Well there, this SD card looks blank. Format."
And it's tossed in the trash because it was broken.
What you need is something that streams to off site.
I thought he was clear on the problem that encryption solves: the level of overreach law enforcement ....assured that the data was secure from prying eyes
He wasn't looking for a solution to prevent him from throwing away an SD card that he recorded his encrypted steam to - how is that even a problem? I have a flash drive right here with gigabytes of encrypted data and I haven't thrown it away because it contains gigabytes of encrypted data.
Has any telco stated (or even implied) that txt messages are deleted from their system upon delivery? Since they have to store messages for some period of time to queue them for delivery and pass them around their network, I wouldn't be surprised if they end up on backup tapes and stored for quite some time.
Yep, I've been increasingly considering taking what money and skills I have and trying to immigrate to a more sane country. Then I think it's an extreme solution, then the next bit of U.S. insanity takes hold, and I'm considering it again.
Maybe it would be easier to just encrypt your communications - modern smartphones are more than capable of encrypting txts, emails and voice communications.
> And, at the end of the payback term, if you stay with T-Mobile, you save $20/month since the phone's paid off, but with VErizon you keep paying the same amount.
Except, at the end of 2 years, you want a new phone so you start over with paying the full price.
Lots of people keep their phone until it dies, not everyone needs the latest and greatest.
My Galaxy Nexus is about 18 months old and the only reason I'd replace it after my contract term is up is to move away from Verizon to a cheaper carrier - it does everything I need. The only reason I replaced my 2 year old original Droid was because the screen started flashing when I slid the keyboard out. Since the Galaxy Nexus has no moving parts (well, except a couple buttons) and has a replaceable battery, I expect it to last a lot longer.
I think the down payment option is a good deal. However not everybody agrees, and I think the reason why is kind of stupid.
Techcrunch basically attacks t-mobile over this one because if you want to change carriers, you're still stuck with a $600 (or whatever) phone, as opposed to a $350 early termination fee.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/26/t-mobiles-uncarrier-pricing-isnt-so-different-from-the-contract-devil-you-already-know/
I'm wondering if they have a bone to pick with t-mobile, because a few hours ago slashdot posted an article from them about how t-mobile UK are scamming customers with premium SMS.
The only possible way I could see the light in this statement would be if you could bring that phone to any of the other major carriers. Sadly, as far as major carriers, your only other option is AT&T. Though you can get some pretty good deals with the MVNO's, their coverage isn't as good. Personally I'd prefer to just own the phone than be in a contract.
Galaxy SIII on Verizon $199 + $350 ETF reduced by $10/month
Galaxy SIII on T-Mobile: $549 or $69 + $20/month for 24 months = $549
If you break your Verizon contract in the first month, your phone cost is $199 + $350 for the phone, or $549
If you break you T-Mobile contract in the first month, your phone cost is $69 + 20*24 = $549
If you break your Verizon contract after 6 months, you owe $350 - ($10*6) = $290 to break your contract
If you break your T-mobile contract after 6 months, you owe 18 * $20 = $360 to break your contract
If you break your Verizon contract after 12 months, you owe $350 - ($10*12) = $230 to break your contract
If you break your T-mobile contract after 12 months, you own 12 * $12 = $240 to break your contract
However, in the last 2 cases, you saved $130 on the price of the phone so you still break even or come out ahead.
And, at the end of the payback term, if you stay with T-Mobile, you save $20/month since the phone's paid off, but with VErizon you keep paying the same amount.
There is no evidence that T-Mobile has even gone to the table to negotiate with a lot of phone manufacturers over new phones. There have even been cases where small regional carriers operating on T-Mobile frequencies have picked up phones that T-Mobile has never carried (the last Blackberry Pearl, the 9100, was an example), so it clearly was not a case of the phone not existing or being made for T-Mobile frequencies.
R
Negotiate? With what? T-Mobile is a small carrier, they can't promise millions of phones to every manufacturer, nor can they afford huge co-marketing budgets.
Blame regulators - if they wanted to enforce any sort of free market, they'd require that all phones have dual-mode GSM/CDMA radios that cover all carrier frequencies -- that would let consumers hop between carriers without spending $500 on a new phone.
That would increase the cost by quite a bit. We have two major GSM carriers in the US who use different frequencies, and two CDMA carriers who also use different frequencies. Hence a phone to hop between all four carriers would need to be able to communicate on four different sets of frequencies, and that isn't even including the various data frequencies.
The iPhone 4S is a dual GSM/CDMA phone. Parts breakdowns put the cost of the wireless chip at around $25.
I don't think car manufacturers would get away with releasing a car that requires Exxon gas (which is 50% more expensive than other smaller brands) for the first 2 years, so why do the cellular carriers get away with it?
I don't know where on earth you buy your gas, but where I live nobody would stay in business charging that much more than their neighbors. If a gas station charged five percent more - with gas at $3.50 and up for regular where I live - they would look like a hollywood ghost town. With 50% difference they might as well not even bother taking delivery.
That said, motor fuel is not a particularly good analogy for cell phones and cellular networks, even if you were to call GSM "gas" and CDMA "diesel". There is more in common between the engine types than there is between the phone types, amongst other things.
So you got that I was making an analogy, but then you thought I was literally claiming that Exxon gas is 50% more expensive than other brands? In this analogy I was implying that some cell phone carriers cost 50% more than their competition and you're pretty much stuck with them unless you want to buy a new phone.
Can I send a cheek-swab to the US Copyright office and copyright my own genes?
They're by far the least evil of the major carriers in the US.
Only for certain definitions of "evil". I've been with them for 7+ years and every year the service gets a little worse, the plan gets a little more expensive, and they offer fewer new phones that I actually want to purchase. Sure, their customer service is cheery and all, but they rarely actually accomplish anything.
Don't blame T*Mobile for a lack of phones - they can't force manufacturers to support their frequencies (though AT&T GSM phones will work just fine on T*Mobile as long as you don't care about 3G or 4G data - I used an Android phone on T-Mobile that only worked with 2G and it was surprisingly usable despite the slow data speeds).
Blame regulators - if they wanted to enforce any sort of free market, they'd require that all phones have dual-mode GSM/CDMA radios that cover all carrier frequencies -- that would let consumers hop between carriers without spending $500 on a new phone. Dual-mode phones may cost $10 - $20 more than single mode phones but would give consumers a lot more choice and flexibility.
I don't think car manufacturers would get away with releasing a car that requires Exxon gas (which is 50% more expensive than other smaller brands) for the first 2 years, so why do the cellular carriers get away with it?
I know I can plug my phone into any microUSB charger I can find and it will charge.
So can I (using an iPhone or an iPad) plug into any USB charger.
What you are saying is actually not true, in that if you plug into a standard USB port and have too many things going on with the device (like tethering or running a game or using a navigation app) the device may well still be losing power.
The problem, if there is one, is people claiming that the iPhone is any more proprietary than any other kind of device that charges over USB.
The iPhone is the only modern smartphone not lying to consumer by pretending to be something it's not really (a standard USB device).
So you agree that having a standard connector that supports a special high-speed charge mode is not absurd after all as long as it defaults to something that anyone can use as long as they have a compatible cable that can plug in to it? Any random USB port may not be able to do fast charging (and may not be able to keep up with a busy device's power demands), but when you're on the go and have to charge up, you can count on any USB port being compatible with your device. When you're at home or the office you can enjoy fast charging on your device's own USB charger, but when your coworker needs to charge his phone to make a call, you can lend him the same charger.
The different between Apple's proprietary cable and a device that uses a generic Micro-USB cable is that I can buy a generic MicroUSB cable for 99 cents and have many of them - I have at least 5 - 1 in each of the cars, 1 one home, 1 at work, one in my backpack with an AC USB adapter. It only cost $5 for me to have all of those cables, but I would have paid $100 for the Apple equivalents (or around $60 for certified third party equivalents), so instead of having multiple cables, I'd probably have only one or two and carry it around with me.
I'm on Verizon and I have had a few sessions of 100MB+ downloads running at top speed all the way. Granted, I am not in a spot with a 10 Mbit+ signal very often but when I am, it is blazing. Of course take this with a grain of salt; Verizon is both creative and clandestine when it comes to service shaping, so they could very well use that tactic in certain congested areas.
Interesting, I'm on Verizon too, but I'm in a pretty busy urban area, so maybe the cell tower is over subscribed enough to make them throttle my big downloads.
This is exactly why I think it's so absurd that people complain about "custom" connectors (never mind USB itself has about five!), when in order to charge devices in a reasonable time over an ancient standard, we instead live in a world of custom chargers that just happen to PRETEND to use the same connector type when they really behave differently depending of what is plugged into them.
As long as they all default to a least-common-denominator "safe mode" that's compatible with whatever happens to be be plugged in, even if it's just at the standard 500mA rate, then what's the problem?
I know I can plug my phone into any microUSB charger I can find and it will charge.
Maybe this is the right place to ask this question:
Is there any way to force Chrome on my Galaxy Nexus to either fully cache the current page so it can display it instantly upon browser startup, or to not reload it when I start the browser and show me a blank screen?
It's annoying to start up the browser when I last was viewing a large, complicated page, and then I have to wait while the browser tries to reload and display that page, even though I want to go to a new page. Even if I hit the stop button, I have to wait for the browser to finish up what it's doing before it will stop.
It's not that I'm memory constrained, even if I reboot the phone to get most apps out of memory, open the browser and go to a page, go back to the home screen, then back to the browser, the browser downloads and redisplays the current page.
You have 50 megabit wired service? That's good, but most people don't have anywhere near that for their home/office, but can get it through 4G. That's what I was suggesting, since to save any time you basically need to saturate the google server sending you the app but not saturate the internet uplink, which is pretty damn hard to do.
Do you really get 50 mbit sustained through 4G? My downloads always start fast, then quickly drop down to a much slower speed - I've always assumed that my carrier is throttling me on big downloads... i.e. small 1MB things like web pages load fast, sustained downloads are throttled. Do people really get fast 4G speeds for tens or hundreds of megabytes?
What "context" are you talking about? There's absolutely no mention of Android in TFS, and in fact he says, "I don't care what phone platform."
The context comes from knowing that he's talking about a programmable phone platform that has a touch screen, camera, etc - customizable enough to allow a driver for a USB I/O board to be loaded. There aren't many phone platforms that meet those criteria, and an feature phone is not one of them.
Only a nitpicking pedant would say "Hey, wait a second, he said "Cell Phones", but the Nokia 1100 has no camera, a monochrome non-touch screen display, and no known SDK to allow custom apps to be developed for it, so that proves that any old cell phone is not what he's looking for, so obviously he doesn't know what he's talking about!"
I don't see what the point of this claim about the "most outdated cellphone" was. Even among new phones, there are models without touchscreens or wifi, and if you start considering outdated technology at all then your claim becomes even more inaccurate.
Using my keen powers of recognizing context, I've deduced that he meant "Android smartphones", he wasn't talking about a basic feature phone that doesn't run android and doens't have a screen, touch screen, Wifi, 3g/4g camera(s), etc.
Your cell phone does not have an interface bus that you can use to control devices.
Yeah, that's why he said that when he wrote his question:
The only thing that is missing are the digital/analog in/out pins. So why not flip it around and make a USB or bluetooth peripheral board with just the pins?
And others have pointed out some solutions that do just that.
But they tend to cost about as much (or more) than just buying a Pi in the first place.But if you want the built-in camera and display like a cell phone, then going with an old cell phone + a USB I/O board might be more cost effective than procuring a quality touch-screen display and camera for the Pi.
*cough*bullshit*cough*
*cough*bullshit*cough*
What are you calling bullshit on? The value?
vSphere 5 Enterprise with Ops Manager is $4300/CPU. He has 14 servers, if each is dual-processor, then he'd pay $60K pruchase price plus $14K/year maintenance. Assuming that servers + storage cost him $15K + $500/year per server for hardware support, then his total initial cost is $270K + $21K/year for maintenance, or $284/initial + $22/year maintenance for each virtual server. How are you going to beat $280/server with physical servers? The datacenter network switch ports alone for a physical server may cost you more than $280.
Or are you claiming that 14 physical servers can't support 950 virtual servers? 67:1 is a fairly high consolidation ratio, but not unreasonable if they are typical lightly used office servers - 384GB of RAM and 16 cores of CPU in each physical server could easily support that load.
Oh, you want it free?
OK, here you go: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html
All that ranting, and all you needed to do was ask.
That's the hypervisor only, not any of the features that make VMware attractive to the Enterprise. That's kind of like someone complaining that Cisco hardware is expensive, and you offer a free supervisor engine that won't really do anything until you surround it with a $40,000 switch chassis.
By default, HFS on OSX is case-insensitive (but is case preserving). So cal, Cal, and cAL all refer to the same program. It's not a bug.
It's not a bug, but it's a shitty choice made for dumb users. Utterly unacceptable for the UNIX environment. But then, OS X isn't UNIX for Apple users, it's a free OS Apple could nab and slap on a terrible GUI on the cheap.
It's also the only Unix operating system widely embraced by users. So maybe it wasn't a bad choice after all. I can certainly understand why users wouldn't want to have to distinguish between mydocument, Mydocument, MyDocument and MYDOCUMENT.
Even as a long time linux/unix user, I never found a use for distinguishing files by case alone. Is there a legitimate use-case for that?
Sounds like your CAL somehow redirects in some cases to ncal - probably a bug in the filesystem.
It's so hard to tell if someone is trolling by making a backhanded swipe at a "feature" of OSX, or if they really mean what they say.
By default, HFS on OSX is case-insensitive (but is case preserving). So cal, Cal, and cAL all refer to the same program. It's not a bug.
... off topic with regard to this book review, but maybe the right person will read this, so here goes. When using Terminal with caps lock accidentally on, I discovered that in Mac OS X (10.6 and 10.7 at least), 'CAL' will give you sideways output as opposed to 'cal':
Does the same thing on Ubuntu 12.10:
$ ln -s
$
March 2013
Su 3 10 17 24 31
Mo 4 11 18 25
Tu 5 12 19 26
We 6 13 20 27
Th 7 14 21 28
Fr 1 8 15 22 29
Sa 2 9 16 23 30
Which is the same as running "ncal".
Looks like /usr/bin/cal is a symlink to /usr/bin/ncal, so the cal/ncal program must look to see if it's been invoked as "cal" and if not, then it treats it as ncal.
$ ls -l
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Jan 19 00:52
I don't know anything about that particular video but I've heard stories of others who claimed personal experience with cellphones causing issues (which I also cannot verify)
And out of the 10 million annual flights and 800 million passengers that fly each year, I'm sure you can find 2 passengers that claim to have seen the flying unicorns that keep the planes in the air. A few observations of something doesn't make it true.
Interference from passenger devices is tested millions of times/year as people inadvertantly (or puposely) leave their devices turned on, or the devices power one themselves when something pushes against the power switch. If there were really a problem, there would be more than a handful of reports of interference.
It's not about devices that are broadcasting under normal conditions, or intended conditions. It's about malfunctioning devices. The last thing we need on the news is a blackbox recording of the pilots trying to communicate with the tower about a situation in which another plane is approaching and to take immediate actions to avoid a collision only to be drowned out by static, squeals,
If that were really the case, then why don't airlines require that the batteries be removed from devices and surrendered to the flight attendant or that the devices be placed into an RF shielded container?
Everything on a plane is heavily regulated with strict testing and installation regulations - if a passenger cell phone could really disrupt the flight, do you really think the FAA would leave it up to the customer to remember to turn it off?
On any given flight there are likely dozens of phones and other devices that have powered themselves on in carryon or checked bags - my phone doesn't have a removable battery and has an easily pressed power button, so most of the time I find that it's powered itself on at some point during the flight.
Why dont they make my friend turn off her hearing aids then?
If the goal is to keep people alert, shouldn't they require that anyone with hearing aids wear them and turn them *on*?
Not that I think any of these things should be mandated. If the power is out for any length of time the store will compensate. People are going to want to make money and sell things, believe it or no
The problem is... people don't generally stock up food in modern times, so if the store shuts down unexpectedly, people may starve to death, or there may be chaos on the streets, because 20% of people ran out of this week's supply and can't buy food they need to survive.
You seem to be under the impression that grocery stores stock vast amounts of food -- they don't. If those daily delivery trucks stop coming, most stores will start running out of food in less than a day. Google Maps shows about 80 grocery stores in my town of 800,000 (this includes many small corner markets as well as big Safeways and Luckys), so there are about 1000 residents per store. Imagine 1000 hungry people walking down an isle in your store and guess how long it will last. Stores regularly run out of staples just when bad weather is announced, and that's when they can still get delivery trucks in.
The people that would riot in the streets if they can't buy a cheeseburger are the same people that don't have hundreds of dollars in cash stashed at home just in case a disaster knocks the power offline for a week. Many of them work hourly jobs and will have no income during that time and literally live paycheck to paycheck.
Food is not the most important thing to have in a disaster - most people will have at least a couple days of non-perishable foods on their shelves and refrigerators (which will still be cold for up to 24 hours) at home... they may not have any way to cook it, but they'd have the same problem with grocery store food. People can go for days without food without any ill effects, most people are even fine after going weeks with no food, but people will start dying quickly if they have no source of fresh water for drinking and sanitation - imagine 1000 residents of an apartment building using the street out front as a toilet when the water in their building stops working.
So what you're proposing solves the least important part of a disaster response but drives up food prices for everyone.
Stores provide convenient shopping, but without regulation to the contrary, they have no reason to prepare for extreme contingencies such as long-term power outages -- its cheaper to not be prepared for them; having employees available and trained to work without electricity is more expensive.
It makes sense that requirement that stores meet certain standards of preparedness should be part of a locality's disaster planning.
What good is a store's disaster planning if they can't get supplies trucked in? Any community that relies on stock on-hand in a disaster is a community that will have a 1 day disaster plan (and if the disaster lasts one day, it's not much of a disaster).
A certain standard of reliability: they're not just going to temporarily close up shop, whenever disruption of infrastructure makes it inconvenient to due business; even if they will operate under reduced profit, or have to mark up items to a higher price to properly cover their additional costs,
It's illegal to mark up prices during an emergency.
or to adjust to the new equilibrium between supply and demand during the emergency, it's better than closing up shop, and they should be required to stay open, unless there is an evacuation,
So when there are 500 people lined up outside and enough food/supplies inside for 100 of them, how do you expect the 5 employees inside to "adjust to this new equilibrium"? Do you expect the store employees to enforce rationing? I'm sure you've seen the Christmas mobs that literally trample other customers to get the latest Christmas present - do you think people will form an orderly line at the door and listen to the sales clerk when he says "O