What the EU seems to be objecting to is not the inclusion of Google apps but the inability to remove them. Google could adopt an intermediate position that both sides might consider acceptable: continue to require that the apps be included by device makers, but stop packaging them as part of the system build so the user could uninstall them if desired. Users could be allowed to uninstall Chrome, Maps, Gmail, Camera, Contacts, and so forth; few would do that so the loss to Google would be minimal. Google Play Services is the notable exception; Google might need to block that from being uninstalled because removing it would break a lot of other apps, including apps that do not come from Google. (Some of the APIs that many apps depend on actually come from Google Play Services rather than from the core of Android.)
Hulu has an inside track on network TV programs because it's owned by some of them. How high they set the fees doesn't matter; the networks are just moving money from one pocket to another.
XP is a 32 bit version of Windows. There is a 64 bit version of XP, but because of poor compatibility and driver support very few people run it. Your 16 bit programs will run just fine on XP.
It is impossible to do an apples to Apples comparison between Edge and Safari because they don't run on the same OS. These benchmarks chose to concentrate on the OS with the larger market share.
You seem to be discussing mobile devices. iOS is a special case; all competing browsers are guaranteed to be inferior to Safari because Apple requires that they use the HTML and Javascript services provided by iOS, which are basically an out of date version of Safari. The choice on iOS is easy because Apple has rigged the game.
The benchmarks cited here are on systems where all the browsers they tested run natively - that means Windows. Safari for Windows was discontinued ages ago so it's out of the picture. It would be interesting to see how Chrome and Firefox compare with Safari on a Mac, a platform where all three get to run their own code, but then Edge would be left out because it's Windows-only. A comparison of Chrome and Firefox on Android and Linux would also be nice to see. (Neither Edge nor Safari is available there so it would be a two horse race.)
There is also no meaningful way to replace the web browser. Sure, you can install Chrome or Firefox... but they are bastard versions that use Apple's HTML rendering and Javascript engines. They are really just a reskinning of an old version of Safari - not even the current version, since the services that come with the OS are usually behind. Apple has rigged the game by guaranteeing that any alternative browser will be inferior to their own in the most important ways.
S mode in Windows 10 has a similar restriction that forces developers to use components of Edge. But there aren't enough people using S mode to matter. Chromebooks don't have any way to install an alternative browser at all, aside from using the subsystems for running Android apps or Linux applications.
Except in China. Phones with no Google Play access are common there because most Google services are blocked from most of the population by the Great Firewall, making a non-Google phone a viable product. The Chinese phones made for export have Google services but there are many domestic-only models that do not.
Owning a luxury car is a more clear indicator of wealth. (Though not foolproof; some are bought used at more reasonable prices, given to non-rich people by wealthier family members, or inherited.) But a relatively small number of people own luxury cars; many rich people do not own one.
Smartphone ownership, in contrast, is becoming nearly universal. But the TYPE of smartphone that people own correlates with wealth. That makes it a more useful metric in some ways than the Ferrari, because there are fewer rich people who don't own a smartphone at all.
Facebook was already worth a lot before it made any profit at all. Ditto Google, Amazon, and many other tech companies. The stock value of a company is based not only on current performance but on future potential.
Tesla inventors are betting that the company will successfully become a high volume car maker, and become one of the major brands in our electric car future. To a lesser extent they're also betting on Tesla's other product lines like solar roofs and the Powerwall. If they are right they stand to make a lot of money. If they're wrong and Tesla fails, they could lose most or all of their investment.
Buying Facebook stock is not without risk. Previous social media have succeeded for a while and faded away. (How is that investment in MySpace looking right now?) Or the company could sink due to a scandal. Facebook also has the problem that younger people are not engaging with it in the same numbers as in the past. (So far it's not hurting Facebook all that much because they're using Instagram instead, which is another Facebook property, but who knows what the social medium of choice of the next round of teens will be?) That leaves Facebook with an older user base that is less desirable to advertisers.
I never cared for either the Model M or the original IBM PC keyboard (similar feel, different layout). Too stiff and too loud for my taste. But if they work for you, use them; there is no reason to retire a piece of technology that works just because it's old.
Signed integer vs fixed point is a minor implementation detail that is already dealt with when you put Red Book data into a computer file, or vice versa.
The most common form of PCM audio data on computers is the WAV file format invented by Microsoft. The primary alternative is Apple's AIFF, which can actually contain audio data in a number of formats but most often contains uncompressed PCM audio. If you feed a WAV or AIFF file into FLAC and then decompress the resulting FLAC file, you get a WAV or AIFF file that contains bit-for-bit identical PCM audio data. (In many cases the files will not be bit-for-bit identical because they will contain different metadata; unlike ZIP files, that's not one of the design goals of FLAC. So don't panic because the files fail that test.)
Similarly, if you rip a CD to produce WAV files (and do it with a ripping program that avoids data errors) and then use the resulting files to create a new CD, the new one will have identical PCM audio data. That also meets the definition of a lossless process.
Exactly right. The streaming version is usually made by taking the same digital data that you would hear on the CD, and encoding it with their choice of codec without any additional processing. Spotify uses Vorbis, Apple Music uses AAC, and most others use MP3. The handful of services offering lossless streaming compress it with FLAC. (And there is now one audiophile service that offers streamed DSD audio.) In the early days of streaming it was done by the streaming company buying a CD and ripping it; now it's more likely that they receive the files directly from the record company.
Since the streaming company is working with the same data, whatever excessive loudness processing the record company chooses to do is on both the CD and the streamed version. Except for compression artifacts from the lossy encoding, what you hear on Spotify or Apple or Amazon or Google or whatever is exactly what you would hear on the CD.
The FM broadcast band uses an analog modulation technique. But that doesn't mean that digital technology can't be used to receive it. Or transmit it, for that matter. The current state of the art involves both, though much of the installed base has not caught up.
The point I was making is that the definition of "unused" isn't as simple as all that. How densely you can pack signals into radio spectrum is highly dependent on the kinds of receivers that people are using. We could significantly increase the number of FM broadcast stations that would be allowed on the air if we could magically replace the entire installed base with 2018 DSP-based radios. That's not likely to happen because it would make a huge number of radios that people already own obsolete, but it is true in terms of technology.
The truth is that the public interest would be better served by taking some of the existing high power stations off the air to facilitate the existence of more community radio. But whose multimillion dollar radio licenses are you going to take away?
Alternately, you could force people to give up all their cheap old radios and buy better new ones that would allow more stations to be packed in. But how does that help the dollar store shoppers who would be unable to afford the new radios?
Capitalism has led to sub-optimal use of a scarce public resource. So what is new?
Pirate stations are mostly found in densely populated areas (in other words, cities) for two reasons. First, that's where enough listeners are available in a small area to support them. Second, legal low power licenses are available in most rural areas, eliminating the need to be a pirate.
There were plenty of pirate operations on the air here in Boston before the recent FCC actions. Right now there isn't much because the area remains under high scrutiny, but new ones will surely return once the FCC's attention turns elsewhere.
It's slightly more complicated. In some cases those frequencies ARE unused for somebody with a state of the art radio receiver, but not for a listener with the kind of radio that most people own. State of the art in this case means DSP filtering and reception; analog technologies need not apply.
There is some truth here. Current DSP receiver technology has MUCH more rejection of nearby signals than analog receivers had, even the storied RIMO filters in some fabulously expensive McIntosh tuners. If everybody were using DSP receivers, alternate channels could be used without restriction and even adjacent channels could be used under some circumstances. In less technical terms, that would allow us to double the number of FM broadcast stations.
But it would require replacing all the older radios because they would now receive unacceptable amounts of interference when the users tried to listen to existing stations. Aside from the fact that people would oppose the idea because of the expense of buying new radios, it would compromise the response to natural disasters for two reasons: there would be fewer radios out in the world that could receive signals during the disaster, and the new DSP radios might consume more power than the cheap old ones they replace and therefore reduce battery life. That could be mitigated by requiring some stations to leave the air during a disaster, allowing reception of the remaining ones with older radios.
Digital broadcast television now packs in channels much more densely than analog television did, and that's even before counting the existence of subchannels. But it's not because there is anything magic about digital. It's because the adoption of a new standard made all the lousy old receivers obsolete, meaning that the entire base of viewers is now using tuners with DSP filtering.
Switching to digital radio broadcasting would be a completely different path with its own pros and cons. On the plus side it's another way to increase the capacity of the band, as each existing channel could carry a number of digital subchannels. (How many depends on what level of audio quality we're willing to accept.) And it would make all the old poorly designed equipment obsolete, allowing denser packing of the band. On the other hand, it would eliminate all existing pirate operations and legal low power stations and make them much more scarce for a while, because the digital transmission equipment is currently not inexpensive - good for the big broadcasters, bad for community broadcasters. A wholesale switch to digital broadcasting would seriously impact the usefulness of FM radio for disaster response because there would be no existing base of compatible receivers, and the new digital receivers would be costly at the start.
The problem is that they are not entirely unused. They are close enough to licensed broadcasts to cause interference for some listeners. To some degree the situation can be resolved by improving the receivers - DSP filtering can handle closer station spacing than traditional designs - but that would mean that the installed base would be obsolete.
On the other hand, there are community needs that are not being addressed by the current system. Entire populations are not being reached by existing legal radio stations because they are not sufficiently lucrative to justify the use of an expensive commercial radio license, and the FCC rules make the availability of low power radio licenses for community broadcasting very limited, especially in the densely populated areas that need them most.
The solution that would provide the greatest public benefit would require existing broadcasters to give up some of their signal coverage to facilitate an expansion of community broadcasting. But that's unlikely to happen, because commercial broadcasters paid millions of dollars for their licenses and are not going to allow an action that would cost them listeners. It would also require some of all of them to cease transmissions in the HD Radio format, which works by expanding the signal into adjacent channels to broadcast its digital sidebands. (HD Radio has the potential benefit of allowing a wider variety of content on FM radio, but in the real world the benefit is very limited because of low adoption of the format.)
Visa and Mastercard are separate companies. But they're separate in the same way that Tweedledee and Tweedledum are separate people. They move in lockstep.
The readers for these cards will either be built into computers or connect by USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) or Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps). That should allow the speed of the new cards to be used effectively.
If it's possible to make 400GB and 512GB microSD cards, it should be possible to make full size SD cards that are significantly larger. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason they don't exist (SanDisk demoed a 1GB SD card but hasn't put it into production) is that the current cards are too slow for most of the use cases that would actually need more capacity and be willing to pay for it, like professional videographers. If that's true we will see 1GB and perhaps even 2GB SD cards shortly after this standard is adopted, just in time to go into the new cameras that use it.
Measly 4K video? 8K cameras and displays already exist. So far they all have to record to external recorders because SD cards aren't big or fast enough, but this standard will make it possible once the technology to make those larger cards is ready
I admire Elon Musk. But I also admire Linus Torvalds for his huge contribution to the world of software. And Richard Stallman, for coming up with the key concept of free software that makes it all possible.
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What the EU seems to be objecting to is not the inclusion of Google apps but the inability to remove them. Google could adopt an intermediate position that both sides might consider acceptable: continue to require that the apps be included by device makers, but stop packaging them as part of the system build so the user could uninstall them if desired. Users could be allowed to uninstall Chrome, Maps, Gmail, Camera, Contacts, and so forth; few would do that so the loss to Google would be minimal. Google Play Services is the notable exception; Google might need to block that from being uninstalled because removing it would break a lot of other apps, including apps that do not come from Google. (Some of the APIs that many apps depend on actually come from Google Play Services rather than from the core of Android.)
Hulu has an inside track on network TV programs because it's owned by some of them. How high they set the fees doesn't matter; the networks are just moving money from one pocket to another.
The Jesus channel doesn't have programming. It's a commercial 24/7.
It says something about how bad the state of the art in electronic design is in most of the car industry.
XP is a 32 bit version of Windows. There is a 64 bit version of XP, but because of poor compatibility and driver support very few people run it. Your 16 bit programs will run just fine on XP.
It is impossible to do an apples to Apples comparison between Edge and Safari because they don't run on the same OS. These benchmarks chose to concentrate on the OS with the larger market share.
You seem to be discussing mobile devices. iOS is a special case; all competing browsers are guaranteed to be inferior to Safari because Apple requires that they use the HTML and Javascript services provided by iOS, which are basically an out of date version of Safari. The choice on iOS is easy because Apple has rigged the game.
The benchmarks cited here are on systems where all the browsers they tested run natively - that means Windows. Safari for Windows was discontinued ages ago so it's out of the picture. It would be interesting to see how Chrome and Firefox compare with Safari on a Mac, a platform where all three get to run their own code, but then Edge would be left out because it's Windows-only. A comparison of Chrome and Firefox on Android and Linux would also be nice to see. (Neither Edge nor Safari is available there so it would be a two horse race.)
There is also no meaningful way to replace the web browser. Sure, you can install Chrome or Firefox... but they are bastard versions that use Apple's HTML rendering and Javascript engines. They are really just a reskinning of an old version of Safari - not even the current version, since the services that come with the OS are usually behind. Apple has rigged the game by guaranteeing that any alternative browser will be inferior to their own in the most important ways.
S mode in Windows 10 has a similar restriction that forces developers to use components of Edge. But there aren't enough people using S mode to matter. Chromebooks don't have any way to install an alternative browser at all, aside from using the subsystems for running Android apps or Linux applications.
Except in China. Phones with no Google Play access are common there because most Google services are blocked from most of the population by the Great Firewall, making a non-Google phone a viable product. The Chinese phones made for export have Google services but there are many domestic-only models that do not.
Owning a luxury car is a more clear indicator of wealth. (Though not foolproof; some are bought used at more reasonable prices, given to non-rich people by wealthier family members, or inherited.) But a relatively small number of people own luxury cars; many rich people do not own one.
Smartphone ownership, in contrast, is becoming nearly universal. But the TYPE of smartphone that people own correlates with wealth. That makes it a more useful metric in some ways than the Ferrari, because there are fewer rich people who don't own a smartphone at all.
Facebook was already worth a lot before it made any profit at all. Ditto Google, Amazon, and many other tech companies. The stock value of a company is based not only on current performance but on future potential.
Tesla inventors are betting that the company will successfully become a high volume car maker, and become one of the major brands in our electric car future. To a lesser extent they're also betting on Tesla's other product lines like solar roofs and the Powerwall. If they are right they stand to make a lot of money. If they're wrong and Tesla fails, they could lose most or all of their investment.
Buying Facebook stock is not without risk. Previous social media have succeeded for a while and faded away. (How is that investment in MySpace looking right now?) Or the company could sink due to a scandal. Facebook also has the problem that younger people are not engaging with it in the same numbers as in the past. (So far it's not hurting Facebook all that much because they're using Instagram instead, which is another Facebook property, but who knows what the social medium of choice of the next round of teens will be?) That leaves Facebook with an older user base that is less desirable to advertisers.
I never cared for either the Model M or the original IBM PC keyboard (similar feel, different layout). Too stiff and too loud for my taste. But if they work for you, use them; there is no reason to retire a piece of technology that works just because it's old.
Signed integer vs fixed point is a minor implementation detail that is already dealt with when you put Red Book data into a computer file, or vice versa.
The most common form of PCM audio data on computers is the WAV file format invented by Microsoft. The primary alternative is Apple's AIFF, which can actually contain audio data in a number of formats but most often contains uncompressed PCM audio. If you feed a WAV or AIFF file into FLAC and then decompress the resulting FLAC file, you get a WAV or AIFF file that contains bit-for-bit identical PCM audio data. (In many cases the files will not be bit-for-bit identical because they will contain different metadata; unlike ZIP files, that's not one of the design goals of FLAC. So don't panic because the files fail that test.)
Similarly, if you rip a CD to produce WAV files (and do it with a ripping program that avoids data errors) and then use the resulting files to create a new CD, the new one will have identical PCM audio data. That also meets the definition of a lossless process.
Exactly right. The streaming version is usually made by taking the same digital data that you would hear on the CD, and encoding it with their choice of codec without any additional processing. Spotify uses Vorbis, Apple Music uses AAC, and most others use MP3. The handful of services offering lossless streaming compress it with FLAC. (And there is now one audiophile service that offers streamed DSD audio.) In the early days of streaming it was done by the streaming company buying a CD and ripping it; now it's more likely that they receive the files directly from the record company.
Since the streaming company is working with the same data, whatever excessive loudness processing the record company chooses to do is on both the CD and the streamed version. Except for compression artifacts from the lossy encoding, what you hear on Spotify or Apple or Amazon or Google or whatever is exactly what you would hear on the CD.
The FM broadcast band uses an analog modulation technique. But that doesn't mean that digital technology can't be used to receive it. Or transmit it, for that matter. The current state of the art involves both, though much of the installed base has not caught up.
The point I was making is that the definition of "unused" isn't as simple as all that. How densely you can pack signals into radio spectrum is highly dependent on the kinds of receivers that people are using. We could significantly increase the number of FM broadcast stations that would be allowed on the air if we could magically replace the entire installed base with 2018 DSP-based radios. That's not likely to happen because it would make a huge number of radios that people already own obsolete, but it is true in terms of technology.
The truth is that the public interest would be better served by taking some of the existing high power stations off the air to facilitate the existence of more community radio. But whose multimillion dollar radio licenses are you going to take away?
Alternately, you could force people to give up all their cheap old radios and buy better new ones that would allow more stations to be packed in. But how does that help the dollar store shoppers who would be unable to afford the new radios?
Capitalism has led to sub-optimal use of a scarce public resource. So what is new?
Pirate stations are mostly found in densely populated areas (in other words, cities) for two reasons. First, that's where enough listeners are available in a small area to support them. Second, legal low power licenses are available in most rural areas, eliminating the need to be a pirate.
There were plenty of pirate operations on the air here in Boston before the recent FCC actions. Right now there isn't much because the area remains under high scrutiny, but new ones will surely return once the FCC's attention turns elsewhere.
It's slightly more complicated. In some cases those frequencies ARE unused for somebody with a state of the art radio receiver, but not for a listener with the kind of radio that most people own. State of the art in this case means DSP filtering and reception; analog technologies need not apply.
There is some truth here. Current DSP receiver technology has MUCH more rejection of nearby signals than analog receivers had, even the storied RIMO filters in some fabulously expensive McIntosh tuners. If everybody were using DSP receivers, alternate channels could be used without restriction and even adjacent channels could be used under some circumstances. In less technical terms, that would allow us to double the number of FM broadcast stations.
But it would require replacing all the older radios because they would now receive unacceptable amounts of interference when the users tried to listen to existing stations. Aside from the fact that people would oppose the idea because of the expense of buying new radios, it would compromise the response to natural disasters for two reasons: there would be fewer radios out in the world that could receive signals during the disaster, and the new DSP radios might consume more power than the cheap old ones they replace and therefore reduce battery life. That could be mitigated by requiring some stations to leave the air during a disaster, allowing reception of the remaining ones with older radios.
Digital broadcast television now packs in channels much more densely than analog television did, and that's even before counting the existence of subchannels. But it's not because there is anything magic about digital. It's because the adoption of a new standard made all the lousy old receivers obsolete, meaning that the entire base of viewers is now using tuners with DSP filtering.
Switching to digital radio broadcasting would be a completely different path with its own pros and cons. On the plus side it's another way to increase the capacity of the band, as each existing channel could carry a number of digital subchannels. (How many depends on what level of audio quality we're willing to accept.) And it would make all the old poorly designed equipment obsolete, allowing denser packing of the band. On the other hand, it would eliminate all existing pirate operations and legal low power stations and make them much more scarce for a while, because the digital transmission equipment is currently not inexpensive - good for the big broadcasters, bad for community broadcasters. A wholesale switch to digital broadcasting would seriously impact the usefulness of FM radio for disaster response because there would be no existing base of compatible receivers, and the new digital receivers would be costly at the start.
The problem is that they are not entirely unused. They are close enough to licensed broadcasts to cause interference for some listeners. To some degree the situation can be resolved by improving the receivers - DSP filtering can handle closer station spacing than traditional designs - but that would mean that the installed base would be obsolete.
On the other hand, there are community needs that are not being addressed by the current system. Entire populations are not being reached by existing legal radio stations because they are not sufficiently lucrative to justify the use of an expensive commercial radio license, and the FCC rules make the availability of low power radio licenses for community broadcasting very limited, especially in the densely populated areas that need them most.
The solution that would provide the greatest public benefit would require existing broadcasters to give up some of their signal coverage to facilitate an expansion of community broadcasting. But that's unlikely to happen, because commercial broadcasters paid millions of dollars for their licenses and are not going to allow an action that would cost them listeners. It would also require some of all of them to cease transmissions in the HD Radio format, which works by expanding the signal into adjacent channels to broadcast its digital sidebands. (HD Radio has the potential benefit of allowing a wider variety of content on FM radio, but in the real world the benefit is very limited because of low adoption of the format.)
Visa and Mastercard are separate companies. But they're separate in the same way that Tweedledee and Tweedledum are separate people. They move in lockstep.
The readers for these cards will either be built into computers or connect by USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) or Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps). That should allow the speed of the new cards to be used effectively.
If it's possible to make 400GB and 512GB microSD cards, it should be possible to make full size SD cards that are significantly larger. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason they don't exist (SanDisk demoed a 1GB SD card but hasn't put it into production) is that the current cards are too slow for most of the use cases that would actually need more capacity and be willing to pay for it, like professional videographers. If that's true we will see 1GB and perhaps even 2GB SD cards shortly after this standard is adopted, just in time to go into the new cameras that use it.
Measly 4K video? 8K cameras and displays already exist. So far they all have to record to external recorders because SD cards aren't big or fast enough, but this standard will make it possible once the technology to make those larger cards is ready
I admire Elon Musk. But I also admire Linus Torvalds for his huge contribution to the world of software. And Richard Stallman, for coming up with the key concept of free software that makes it all possible.