Everyone. Just because we're not all downloading torrents on our phones doesn't mean a faster internet connection doesn't do wonders for page load times or app responsiveness, not to mention side benefits like reduced battery life due to less active RF time.
...Does anyone actually buy phones based on their max LTE download speed? Most of us have quotas and are trying as hard as possible not to burn through them.
Yes. Quotas are irrelevant. Pretty much everything we do on our phones accesses data in small chunks. This data access happening faster is good for not only phone responsiveness but also improved battery life since your wireless components aren't active as long.
Admittedly this is a small incremental change.
That said outside of the USA where banning the use of tethering isn't actually a thing, the max LTE speeds can be relevant for some.
because really they have nothing compelling to say against the iPhone X.
It's always interesting when something doesn't fit your world view it suddenly becomes "nothing compelling". But talk something truly irrelevant like CPU speed and I'm sure you would start to salivate along with the rest of the fanbois.
because the carriers are the limit
Yeah those damn common carries that only serve Apple and not Samsung.
Also, nobody downloads huge files on their phone because why would you?
No one. On the other hand my phone's battery life is longer on account of not running a high-powered wireless receiver for as long as you do, when we both use the same amount of data.
If the cellular is fast enough to stream video and load web pages instantly, the rest is just academic.
That is completely wrong. It's like saying the only spec that matters on a HDD is continuous unfragmented read performance. The benefits of a faster connection on your phone run very deep from overal responsiveness, to less active time, to less impact from background tasks, or and you can download files faster too. No one downloads huge files? I just got pushed some 280MB. The only notice I got about it is "Google Play has installed updates".
Mind you I also tether my laptop when I'm working, so having a 33% faster internet connection helps a lot there (or it would if I had the phone in question).
The article spells out the actual cause of the issue: hardware encryption.
The use of hardware encprytion does not preclude the ability to impliment a software recovery solution. Secure enclave, TPM, whatever hardware you want to use ultimately the user should have the ability to backup the key used. Normalising shitty implimentations from Apple and Android does not make it good.
If the professionals are so mighty then they probably work around it.:-)
Jokes aside, you are making a lot of assumptions about said professionals. On the one side my laptop's TPM based encrytion has a recovery key should I need to extract the HDD from the case using a hacksaw. But on the other hand data loss in the age of the cloud? Seconds after I hit the save button my stuff is backed up. The kind of professional work I do permits this. I wouldn't attempt to recover the data on my drive if my computer fails.
There are of course professionals whose work doesn't permit this, the airplane coder who never has internet, the photographer / video producer who can't cloud backup a 200GB file every time he makes a change, etc. But for a large number of "professionals" the idea of losing data since last backup is a thing of the past.
I still backup by the way, but put a bullet through my PC right now and I won't need that backup. All I'll lose is this typed message. If on the other hand my cloud provider* fails then that backup may be more important and I may lose up to one weeks worth of work.
Except it doesn't need to be implemented in that way. While hardware is tied to the TPM for all normal purposes recovery keys offer a solution should that additional hardware fail. As a person never normally needs access to the key in question they also don't need to remember it or carry it with them.
TPM and secure enclave is just a storage mechanism. There's no reason that can't be backed up on a piece of paper and stuck in a safety deposit box somewhere. Or if you're Microsoft, convince your users to upload the key to the cloud and tie it to their Windows account presumably so the NSA can see what porn you like.
Why is it one or the other? The purpose of th enclave is the same as TPM, provide a means to take a really long and secure passphrase with you on the road. There's no reason why you can't back it up anyway.
Take bit-locker for instance. Data is stored in the TPM to access the drive. Howerver if the drive is ultimately separated from the PC I can use a 48 digit recovery key to access that data. Since the use of the actual key to get past the encryption is rare that key doesn't need to physically be with me at any time and can at home, or in a safety deposit box, or with a trusted 3rd party, or if you really hate yourself back it up on the cloud and tie it to your MS account.
Diffraction limit is only related to image sharpness. There's a lot more to having more megapixels than sharpness when you start exploring the oportunities of signal processing.
Why do you know that? Higher pixel counts do wonders for the ability to process data. Control of the individual pixels even more so. HDR, noise reduction, better colour reproduction through different and very lossy interpolation across the beyer sensor, software based vibration reduction all benefit from higher pixel counts.
But ultimately the answer is a: not really. You can cram as many pixels as you want into your sensor. That 3mm tiny camera lens will limit your sharpness and your practical ability to digitally zoom.
Wish someone will make a CCD with a dynamic range 3 orders of mag better than the crappy ones we have.
What for? As it stands currently the biggest problem with have with the images our existing CCDs are recording is processing them in a way to display that detail. We already have the ability to shoot into the sun while seeing into the shadows. What will even more dynamic range show? That glass is imperfect and flaring limits our ability to see?
The number of megapixels is only very lightly related to the amount of light that comes in. You're still getting the same light hitting the sensor, and with modern sensor designs very little is wasted on gaps between photosensitive areas... unlike say 15 years ago. You want to take a half-way decent night shot? Cram as many megapixels as you want in. The noise profile is random across pixels so noise reduction algorithms work true wonders when you have a very fine grain to remove, especially when that noisy grain is finer than the details that were captured.
Why not just use the quad bayer array with fewer pixels and give mobile phones an actual low light capability for once.
Or better still, why not up to 48Mpxl and then us signal processing to eliminate the randomly distributed noise across the pixels to give mobile phones an actual low light capability... while also providing the ability to give other useful features like better HDR.
You missed addressing the GP's point directly too: It's also good for noise since noise is distributed randomly across pixels. Sure the signal to noise ratio on individual pixels is better for a larger pixel, but for smaller ones the noise reduction algorithms work in a far more visually pleasing way.
Is the idea that they're losing NES/SNES classic sales because people are getting the ROMs instead? That's the same kind of argument the MPAA/RIAA uses that never seems to work out in the real world.
I'd be cautious comparing these. The NES/SNES classic sales are a hardware device with a shitton of ROMs, made available again. The arguement for the MPAA/RIAA compares small segemented short term entertainment along side of services that make them freely available. Not having access to a song may not translate to a sale to the MPAA because I may just stream it from Spotify, or play it on Youtube whenever I want to, not to mention it may be on the radio right now.
The same can not be said for the NES/SNES which has a sole legitimate source.
Don't be daft. The entire world is full of requirements for special tools for specific devices, always has been. The extent to you needing tools is dependent only on the fault you had and the device you're fixing. That's not a waste, it's a sign that we are constantly bringing engineering to new heights.
Not just in England, I doubt Germany is any different
Don't apply local government issues universally especially between very different countries, and especially about something as complex as waste management. Each country does this very differently, LOCALITIES do it very differently.
For instance right here where I am sitting right now in Germany almost nothing ends up in landfil and while we're encouraged to keep separating our streams because the back end economics can change in an instance, right now paper, plastic and general waste is being combined to feed the local central heating plants which don't have enough garbage to process. Drive 300km south and there's a world class recycling centre providing raw materials to various industries which relies heavily on separated waste streams.
The economics can change in an instant too. A country suddenly stops importing, or a state suddenly changes the standards on contamination... It's not a waste of time doing the front end work when the back end is variable just because right now the back end isn't working.
Also... losing money? The only place in the western world where waste management is a profit centre is Sweden. You don't need to make money on this, it's a core utility.
And you can heat the lens if you are really hopped up about this "problem."
No that's just it. The problems are easily solvable, but really that doesn't change those people arguging against it. It's not just LED traffic lights either. There are countless cases where a change produces a huge net benefit while the detractors will find one very specific very rare example where something won't work and then use that as a case against the entire project.
We see that constantly right here on Slashdot too.
Go through the security at Schiphol Airport and you're asked to leave everything in your bag in the right 6 lanes. Has been like that since the start of the year and they aren't 3D CT scanning anything, they just have a better X-ray machine with finer contrast adjustment.
How about ACTUALLY air-gapping the control network.
I have a better idea. Pratice good security rather than proposing something that ultimately gives you a false sense of security. As TFS points out these hackers breached supplier's machines and networks. That now gives them the ability to drop in a payload that will happily breach the air-gap next time someone makes a service call.
The upside about air-gapping is how effective it is, the downside is that it's like a warm blanket making you feel cosy without actually fixing the core problem that your house's central heating system is broken. Companies need to practice layered security at every level. That network layout that isn't airgapped is part of security. That USB stick that vendor plugs in is part of security. That code review you aren't doing because of your over-reliance on vendors and lack of knowledge is part of security. That receptionist who buzzed him in is part of security.
Air-gaps do nothing when vendor systems are breached because at the first sign of a problem you will kindly ask that vendor to come over to your side of the gap.
I didn't say the queue was mythical. I said the "long queue" was mythical. It is actually incredibly short working blocks at a time. This is also precisely why writes take longer than reads as seen by the OS. It's a very short queue that is cleared within milliseconds. You're write about the size, but dead wrong about the time. But no need to take my word for it, just look at the hardware since the flash memory based devices that are resistant to dataloss on unexpected loss of power have... a capacitor, and one that provides milliseconds of power.
Nope. You are still operating at the wrong layer. Like I said, you're not even aware of what you don't know.
Nope, I'm operating on the only layer that is relevant. You're right though, you're not even aware of what you don't know and you don't appear to know how irrelevant to this discussion that lower layer is given you don't understand the timings involved.
What's the best way forward, do we read the flash sector, erase it, and then re-write it?
You are technically right. What you fail to realise is this operation completes in milliseconds with a queue that is only a few k deep on a device that transfers data at many MB/s.
Objection: Speculation.
There's nothing speculative about seeing the changes in hardware and software governing removable devices over many years. Not just for flash but also quick disconnect.
Sorry buddy, you're an idiot and you're too dim-witted to see it.
And to the crux of it. You provide no understanding and nothing but useless insults. I on the other hand have poured over the details of these controllers in detail because unlike you ivory tower dimwits who think you understand what goes on in low level my job actually involves interfacing with devices without your fancy higher level protections. Come back when you've had to directly read and write to a flash memory controller while adding interrupts to delay your code to prevent precisely the scenario you speculate the person you're talking to knows nothing about.
I know that hurts, but suck it the fuck up and move on.
You're free to move on whenever you're ready to admit what a wrong arsehole you are boy. In the mean time I'm going to be sitting here aruging against you against the spread of your ignorance until Slashdot archives this story.
whether it helps environment or not, whatever increases the government's power over the subjects is a good thing, is not it?
Wrong issue. Emphasising good behaviour in the most difficult to manage part of the lifecycle should not stop just because a latter part of the lifecycle breaks down.
What do you suggest: Government not issue fines, tell everyone right now that they don't need to recycle as much, then they fix their problem and you get to spend your tax dollars on a campaign trying to convince people who were told they don't need to recycle to start recycling again.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, who cares when data plans are capped
Everyone. Just because we're not all downloading torrents on our phones doesn't mean a faster internet connection doesn't do wonders for page load times or app responsiveness, not to mention side benefits like reduced battery life due to less active RF time.
...Does anyone actually buy phones based on their max LTE download speed? Most of us have quotas and are trying as hard as possible not to burn through them.
Yes. Quotas are irrelevant. Pretty much everything we do on our phones accesses data in small chunks. This data access happening faster is good for not only phone responsiveness but also improved battery life since your wireless components aren't active as long.
Admittedly this is a small incremental change.
That said outside of the USA where banning the use of tethering isn't actually a thing, the max LTE speeds can be relevant for some.
because really they have nothing compelling to say against the iPhone X.
It's always interesting when something doesn't fit your world view it suddenly becomes "nothing compelling". But talk something truly irrelevant like CPU speed and I'm sure you would start to salivate along with the rest of the fanbois.
because the carriers are the limit
Yeah those damn common carries that only serve Apple and not Samsung.
Also, nobody downloads huge files on their phone because why would you?
No one. On the other hand my phone's battery life is longer on account of not running a high-powered wireless receiver for as long as you do, when we both use the same amount of data.
If the cellular is fast enough to stream video and load web pages instantly, the rest is just academic.
That is completely wrong. It's like saying the only spec that matters on a HDD is continuous unfragmented read performance. The benefits of a faster connection on your phone run very deep from overal responsiveness, to less active time, to less impact from background tasks, or and you can download files faster too. No one downloads huge files? I just got pushed some 280MB. The only notice I got about it is "Google Play has installed updates".
Mind you I also tether my laptop when I'm working, so having a 33% faster internet connection helps a lot there (or it would if I had the phone in question).
Why are you carrying an internal HDD with you and why is your laptop empty? What are you hiding? Please step into this room.
Safe =/= private.
"Cloud" = someone else's computer. Bugger the "Cloud" and the marketing droids who push it.
No, just the common implimentation is. Get yourself your OwnCloud, or Seafile or whatever you want to call it.
There's no reason the conceptual benefits of the cloud can't be entirely within your control.
The article spells out the actual cause of the issue: hardware encryption.
The use of hardware encprytion does not preclude the ability to impliment a software recovery solution. Secure enclave, TPM, whatever hardware you want to use ultimately the user should have the ability to backup the key used. Normalising shitty implimentations from Apple and Android does not make it good.
No professional in his or her right might
If the professionals are so mighty then they probably work around it. :-)
Jokes aside, you are making a lot of assumptions about said professionals. On the one side my laptop's TPM based encrytion has a recovery key should I need to extract the HDD from the case using a hacksaw. But on the other hand data loss in the age of the cloud? Seconds after I hit the save button my stuff is backed up. The kind of professional work I do permits this. I wouldn't attempt to recover the data on my drive if my computer fails.
There are of course professionals whose work doesn't permit this, the airplane coder who never has internet, the photographer / video producer who can't cloud backup a 200GB file every time he makes a change, etc. But for a large number of "professionals" the idea of losing data since last backup is a thing of the past.
I still backup by the way, but put a bullet through my PC right now and I won't need that backup. All I'll lose is this typed message. If on the other hand my cloud provider* fails then that backup may be more important and I may lose up to one weeks worth of work.
*Not a 3rd party :)
Except it doesn't need to be implemented in that way. While hardware is tied to the TPM for all normal purposes recovery keys offer a solution should that additional hardware fail. As a person never normally needs access to the key in question they also don't need to remember it or carry it with them.
TPM and secure enclave is just a storage mechanism. There's no reason that can't be backed up on a piece of paper and stuck in a safety deposit box somewhere. Or if you're Microsoft, convince your users to upload the key to the cloud and tie it to their Windows account presumably so the NSA can see what porn you like.
Why is it one or the other? The purpose of th enclave is the same as TPM, provide a means to take a really long and secure passphrase with you on the road. There's no reason why you can't back it up anyway.
Take bit-locker for instance. Data is stored in the TPM to access the drive. Howerver if the drive is ultimately separated from the PC I can use a 48 digit recovery key to access that data. Since the use of the actual key to get past the encryption is rare that key doesn't need to physically be with me at any time and can at home, or in a safety deposit box, or with a trusted 3rd party, or if you really hate yourself back it up on the cloud and tie it to your MS account.
Diffraction limit is only related to image sharpness. There's a lot more to having more megapixels than sharpness when you start exploring the oportunities of signal processing.
While I know this high pixel count is worthless
Why do you know that? Higher pixel counts do wonders for the ability to process data. Control of the individual pixels even more so. HDR, noise reduction, better colour reproduction through different and very lossy interpolation across the beyer sensor, software based vibration reduction all benefit from higher pixel counts.
But ultimately the answer is a: not really. You can cram as many pixels as you want into your sensor. That 3mm tiny camera lens will limit your sharpness and your practical ability to digitally zoom.
Wish someone will make a CCD with a dynamic range 3 orders of mag better than the crappy ones we have.
What for? As it stands currently the biggest problem with have with the images our existing CCDs are recording is processing them in a way to display that detail. We already have the ability to shoot into the sun while seeing into the shadows. What will even more dynamic range show? That glass is imperfect and flaring limits our ability to see?
The number of megapixels is only very lightly related to the amount of light that comes in. You're still getting the same light hitting the sensor, and with modern sensor designs very little is wasted on gaps between photosensitive areas ... unlike say 15 years ago. You want to take a half-way decent night shot? Cram as many megapixels as you want in. The noise profile is random across pixels so noise reduction algorithms work true wonders when you have a very fine grain to remove, especially when that noisy grain is finer than the details that were captured.
Why not just use the quad bayer array with fewer pixels and give mobile phones an actual low light capability for once.
Or better still, why not up to 48Mpxl and then us signal processing to eliminate the randomly distributed noise across the pixels to give mobile phones an actual low light capability ... while also providing the ability to give other useful features like better HDR.
You missed addressing the GP's point directly too: It's also good for noise since noise is distributed randomly across pixels. Sure the signal to noise ratio on individual pixels is better for a larger pixel, but for smaller ones the noise reduction algorithms work in a far more visually pleasing way.
Is the idea that they're losing NES/SNES classic sales because people are getting the ROMs instead? That's the same kind of argument the MPAA/RIAA uses that never seems to work out in the real world.
I'd be cautious comparing these. The NES/SNES classic sales are a hardware device with a shitton of ROMs, made available again. The arguement for the MPAA/RIAA compares small segemented short term entertainment along side of services that make them freely available. Not having access to a song may not translate to a sale to the MPAA because I may just stream it from Spotify, or play it on Youtube whenever I want to, not to mention it may be on the radio right now.
The same can not be said for the NES/SNES which has a sole legitimate source.
what a waste.
Don't be daft. The entire world is full of requirements for special tools for specific devices, always has been. The extent to you needing tools is dependent only on the fault you had and the device you're fixing. That's not a waste, it's a sign that we are constantly bringing engineering to new heights.
And how much of those ships full of recycling had items that were blown into the ocean?
Wow, people really do latch on to the insigificant.
Not just in England, I doubt Germany is any different
Don't apply local government issues universally especially between very different countries, and especially about something as complex as waste management. Each country does this very differently, LOCALITIES do it very differently.
For instance right here where I am sitting right now in Germany almost nothing ends up in landfil and while we're encouraged to keep separating our streams because the back end economics can change in an instance, right now paper, plastic and general waste is being combined to feed the local central heating plants which don't have enough garbage to process. Drive 300km south and there's a world class recycling centre providing raw materials to various industries which relies heavily on separated waste streams.
The economics can change in an instant too. A country suddenly stops importing, or a state suddenly changes the standards on contamination... It's not a waste of time doing the front end work when the back end is variable just because right now the back end isn't working.
Also ... losing money? The only place in the western world where waste management is a profit centre is Sweden. You don't need to make money on this, it's a core utility.
And you can heat the lens if you are really hopped up about this "problem."
No that's just it. The problems are easily solvable, but really that doesn't change those people arguging against it. It's not just LED traffic lights either. There are countless cases where a change produces a huge net benefit while the detractors will find one very specific very rare example where something won't work and then use that as a case against the entire project.
We see that constantly right here on Slashdot too.
Go through the security at Schiphol Airport and you're asked to leave everything in your bag in the right 6 lanes. Has been like that since the start of the year and they aren't 3D CT scanning anything, they just have a better X-ray machine with finer contrast adjustment.
How about ACTUALLY air-gapping the control network.
I have a better idea. Pratice good security rather than proposing something that ultimately gives you a false sense of security. As TFS points out these hackers breached supplier's machines and networks. That now gives them the ability to drop in a payload that will happily breach the air-gap next time someone makes a service call.
The upside about air-gapping is how effective it is, the downside is that it's like a warm blanket making you feel cosy without actually fixing the core problem that your house's central heating system is broken. Companies need to practice layered security at every level. That network layout that isn't airgapped is part of security. That USB stick that vendor plugs in is part of security. That code review you aren't doing because of your over-reliance on vendors and lack of knowledge is part of security. That receptionist who buzzed him in is part of security.
Air-gaps do nothing when vendor systems are breached because at the first sign of a problem you will kindly ask that vendor to come over to your side of the gap.
tracability with a warrant
I thought you just asked me to side with the indian government, are you talking about a different one now?
It isn't some mythical idle queue.
I didn't say the queue was mythical. I said the "long queue" was mythical. It is actually incredibly short working blocks at a time. This is also precisely why writes take longer than reads as seen by the OS. It's a very short queue that is cleared within milliseconds. You're write about the size, but dead wrong about the time. But no need to take my word for it, just look at the hardware since the flash memory based devices that are resistant to dataloss on unexpected loss of power have ... a capacitor, and one that provides milliseconds of power.
Nope. You are still operating at the wrong layer. Like I said, you're not even aware of what you don't know.
Nope, I'm operating on the only layer that is relevant. You're right though, you're not even aware of what you don't know and you don't appear to know how irrelevant to this discussion that lower layer is given you don't understand the timings involved.
What's the best way forward, do we read the flash sector, erase it, and then re-write it?
You are technically right. What you fail to realise is this operation completes in milliseconds with a queue that is only a few k deep on a device that transfers data at many MB/s.
Objection: Speculation.
There's nothing speculative about seeing the changes in hardware and software governing removable devices over many years. Not just for flash but also quick disconnect.
Sorry buddy, you're an idiot and you're too dim-witted to see it.
And to the crux of it. You provide no understanding and nothing but useless insults. I on the other hand have poured over the details of these controllers in detail because unlike you ivory tower dimwits who think you understand what goes on in low level my job actually involves interfacing with devices without your fancy higher level protections. Come back when you've had to directly read and write to a flash memory controller while adding interrupts to delay your code to prevent precisely the scenario you speculate the person you're talking to knows nothing about.
I know that hurts, but suck it the fuck up and move on.
You're free to move on whenever you're ready to admit what a wrong arsehole you are boy. In the mean time I'm going to be sitting here aruging against you against the spread of your ignorance until Slashdot archives this story.
whether it helps environment or not, whatever increases the government's power over the subjects is a good thing, is not it?
Wrong issue. Emphasising good behaviour in the most difficult to manage part of the lifecycle should not stop just because a latter part of the lifecycle breaks down.
What do you suggest: Government not issue fines, tell everyone right now that they don't need to recycle as much, then they fix their problem and you get to spend your tax dollars on a campaign trying to convince people who were told they don't need to recycle to start recycling again.