My U-Verse connection could handle four streams just fine, but only one HD. It was provisioned that way because I have a very long loop to the VRAD, which sync at most at about 19,200kbps. 19,200kbps isn't enough for four HD streams along with 6Mbps of Internet.
Others with better/more recent/shorter cabling have higher speeds. A friend of mine, not too far from my own house, has no problem doing 4 HD streams at once. As far as I can tell, having 4 HD streams is more the rule than the exception, these days, but it's all dependent on the amount of last-mile bandwidth you have available.
The 360 thing is an interesting development, and makes good sense in an IPTV environment.
(Disclaimer: I no longer have U-Verse TV because personal things made it difficult to rationalize paying for TV, but would pick it up again in an instant if those personal things improved.)
Tell Me still offers similar free services, including (AFAICT) the basic directory lookups and dialing that GOOG-411 offered.
1-800-555-TELL
That said, I used to use GOOG-411 quite a lot before I got a Droid, but even now I still occasionally refer to it because it is both easy and hands-free.
Modern American cars work just like modern European cars: A 1995 Pontiac has the same hood (bonnet?) opening procedure as a 1995 BMW. Pull a lever/handle inside, hood pops up a bit, and then go outside and fool around trying to find the rest of the mechanism, move another lever, and it's open.
I don't know when this development occurred, as my 1979 Pontiac has a much different procedure: Go to front of car, reach underneath the bumper, pull handle, hood pops up a bit, and pull again to fully release. It works fine, but is not in any way secure...
No, and a flier stuck in the front door isn't the same thing, either. But that doesn't matter.
The reference I made to the iPhone 4 was only to remind folks here, in this context that is Slashdot, about the fact that one's responsibilities regarding lost and found property have already been fully argued and debated ad nausea.
The finder of a thing usually seems to have to make a reasonable attempt at finding the owner of an item (and "reasonable" varies quite a lot from place to place), and if it is unclaimed after 30 days, then they are entitled to keep it.
Generally speaking, YMMV, IANAL, so on, so forth.
But since the FBI asked for their widget back within 30 days, I guess that it's theirs to recover.
(Whether or not I think this is morally right is a different discussion entirely. Personally, I'd like to think that if I find a tracking widget on my car, that it's henceforth mine. However...)
I don't think it's generally needed, at all. A line break might be desirous any- where in a text; are authors supposed to figure out approx- imately where they might be needed? Or should they simp-ly soft-hyphen-ate every-fuck-ing-thing so that it is actu-ally use-ful?
A browser-side diction-ary might be more bet-ter in most cases.
Then there's the issue of viewing angles -- most LCDs have a wide horizontal viewing range, but a narrow vertical viewing angle range. Rotating the monitor flips that. (It's not as big of a deal as you'd think, in that I sit in generally the same place, but it makes it harder to read stuff there if someone is sitting next to me.)
I think you nailed a big part of the problem, and don't even realize it.
Sure, your head might generally be in the same place, but the viewing angles on common TN panels can be so horrible that each eye sees something very different when rotated.
I used to have a cheap Motorola flip phone which had this problem: Things looked all crazy just holding the phone in my hand in its default portrait mode, but fit together just fine with it rotated sideways; clearly, they'd simply bought whatever LCD screens were available without any regard as to their intended orientation. (Amusingly, the phone was useless in sideways orientation...)
I have a rotatable 20" 1600x1200 IPS display which does work fine (and aces the below test) when rotated vertical, but I had Cleartype turned off the last time I tried that. (I'd be willing to see how it behaves with Cleartype enabled under Windows 7, if you ask.)
The 24" 1920x1080 TN display that sits on the desk beside it, though, is extremely bothersome to view when rotated 90 degrees.
To demonstrate what I'm talking about, I direct you to these LCD monitor test images, specifically this set. Give it a spin on both screens, and give your head a 90 degree twist to see the differences.
Your history is clouded by the fact that the you-name-its you speak of were a primary distribution mediums by the MPIAA.
BitTorrent, or Usenet, or HTTP, or anything on the Intarwebs, on the other hand, never were.
It makes sense, from their perspective, to try to kill cassette. Or 1/4" reel-to-reel. Or CD-R. Or DVD-R. Or recordable Blu-Ray.
And if vinyl cutters had ever become common and cheap, you'd have bet they'd have protested them, too.
Why? All of these things were initially invented by them, for them.
But this new(ish) Intarweb tech? They still don't know how to use it. Even though it's decades-old, it wasn't invented for them, so they never bothered to get a firm grasp of it.
And so, your analogy falls apart, and I fail to see the connection between "The Man" and "download," let alone any significant number of instances of "The Man" actively trying to prevent random "downloads." I see nothing, in fact, but a couple of decades (I'm young) of me merrily downloading legitimate things from Usenet, FTP, random Web sites, and most recently torrents, without any attempts of intervention by the MPAA or RIAA.
In conclusion: Your conspiracy theories cloud the war while aiding the enemy, and I wish that you'd stop. Thanks!
Let me preface this by saying that I'm 31 years old. I have been involved with computers since I was born. My first gaming system was an Atari 2600, and my first computer was a TRS-80 Model I with a Radio Shack cassette recorder, though friends variously had a TI99/4A, Atari 800, C64, or Apple ][. I've never attended college, finding formal education to be far too boring. I am not a Luddite.
And frankly, I don't know how any of that matters.
Moving right along:
I initially failed to see the hype surround cell phones, myself. I used to watch my boss fiddle with his old PalmOS Kyocera phone and think, "Gee, I can do all of that with the Handspring Visor that I have in my pocket, and the batteries last for a month!"
I used to swear, up and down, that if my boss didn't want me to have a cell phone badly enough to pay for it, that I wouldn't have one at all.
I used that Visor for a long, long time, with it rattling around in my pants pocket with a couple of pocket knives and a work-provided cell phone, protected only by its own built-in case. I miss its durability and battery life. (It still works and looks fine, even though it was a refurb even when I bought it around 2002.)
Then, I got an iPod Touch. I didn't particularly want one, but it was a free rebate item on a fancy Netgear switch that we'd bought a couple of at work, and I ended up with it.
And, lo, the iPod was useful! I found myself looking at all manner of things wherever there was Wifi, and having a hell of a good time doing it. So much easier, it was, than using my laptop to do the same thing. And instead of calling back to someone at the shop when I needed a pinout for some obscure device that I found myself working on, I could just fucking Google it myself.
So when the Droid came out, I decided I'd jump in, because it'd let me do the same things in a far more open fashion, almost anywhere. Doing so was a big deal for me: Because I work for a Verizon retailer, and I didn't want to carry two phones, I had to buy the thing at cash value ($529, IIRC) if I still wanted the company to float the voice plan. And pay the $30 monthly fee for data coverage.
And you know what? I use it all the time. I've got manuals stored on it, Google at the ready, and damn near every manner of data available to me that I'd have with a desktop PC, but without lugging a desktop.
Typically, it's way, way faster than dialup. I've seen downloads come in at a measured 180 kilobytes per second. Things slow down in areas that are either very dense or very sparse, but that's OK -- I'm not ever without bandwidth.
And in terms of overall utility: I'm way more productive (read: less frustrated) at work, because when I'm out and about doing my technical things, I can find the data I need. Whether configuring a decade-old quad video switcher, or finding the relative headings of local TV stations to aid in aiming a TV antenna (and a compass!), or digging up a manual on some newfangled dispatch communications console, I've got what I need accessible wherever I'm at. One day, I needed an accurate frequency counter: I downloaded one, and it worked great, eliminating hours of work. One day, I needed a flashlight, so I downloaded one of those. Another day, I needed to calculate the voltage drop on a 2,800 foot run of 8 AWG copper, so I Googled a Javascript calculator for that. And then, I needed a bubble level. Or a free Wifi channel to set up a new AP. Et cetera, and so on, and so forth.
It does this stuff.
I haven't regretted paying for this thing for a second, even though the $30 data plan is a lot more than my wife pays to my mom-in-law for her own phone (much like your own wife) and the initial cost was way more than I felt I wanted to spend on such a thing.
If you can't find the utility in a gee-whiz cell phone, you're either not trying hard enough, too tied down to a desk to care, or stuck thinking about the thing as a telephone/ball-and-chain instead of all that is Teh Intarwebs.
However, I'd also like to point out that lots of apps do the same thing. Reboot your Android phone and then leave it on for a day or so, doing minimal stuff like texting and web browsing and phone calls.
Fire up something like Advanced Task Killer (or the less-useful and harder-to-access bits of the setup menu) and I think you'll be surprised at just how much shit is running.
And after you kill it all off, some of it creeps right back.
Doesn't matter, in my experience -- it's just how it is.
I grew up in a house built before 1903 (which was the earliest date we ever found). Originally, it must have distributed gas or wood stoves, and been converted to central heat sometime later (one of the original brick chimneys was repurposed as plenum).
For most of my childhood, we had a giant gravity coal furnace which had been converted to natural gas, along with a weak (and optional) circulation fan. It mostly resembled a huge, upside-down octopus: A giant round thing, covered in asbestos, with 6 or 8" ducts running off in all directions.
When there was a huge blizzard that left folks without power for a week or two, that old codger was a real treat: Even though the thermostat needed power, the gas valve permitted the burner to be turned on and off manually. And since the ductwork was still set up for a gravity feed, it worked just fine without the fan.
However, that was later replaced by a much more modern natural gas furnace of reasonable efficiency for the time (85%, IIRC). It had a proper fan that circulate air circulate air with some force. This eliminated cold spots in the house, as well as the use of various kerosene and electric space heaters, even though almost all of the ductwork remained exactly the same (all of the easily-accessed asbestos-wrapped ducts were replaced at this time, but everything else stayed).
I remember this transition very well: It was nice being warm at night in the winter, for a change, without the drone of a space heater or the worry and bother about kerosene.
And while it certainly didn't do a damned thing during a blackout, the money saved during the heating season would easily have easily have bought a small generator with which to power it...or in more modern times, an inverter. Or a solar panel and some batteries. Or...
Problem A: Not a problem, as long as there is also HTTP, FTP, SFTP, SCP, rsync, etc.
Problem B: Is resisted quite well by BT's hash checking.
Problem C: WTF are you going on about? Is there an Internet Czar somewhere who keeps track of the number of bad packets that I send?
Problem D: I don't think anyone, really, wants to make BT mandatory for anything. But if it -is- mandatory for a given system, then sane upload/download ratios will be easy: 1:1, minus whatever it is that the willing and permanent seeds (read: existing public repositories) deliver. This only increases one's bandwidth usage by a maximum factor of 2, which (in the case of, say, updating a Linux distro) isn't so bad.
What's a fair market wage? And how can the market set a fair wage if no one is allowed to pay one penny under whatever that wage is? Markets require a range of prices offered to settle on a price that is fair. This suggestion makes no sense.
I worked on a prevailing wage job awhile back. My (already ample and fair) hourly wage nearly doubled for the duration of that job.
Which, of course, is a sham. In my case, it was a welcome sham: I sure did enjoy the extra money. But I'm too much of an altruist to say that it was anything other than a sham. (I'm also enough of a realist to see that if I refused to do that job, someone else would've had to do it instead at the same absurd rate.)
What's more: On an almost-weekly basis, the wage would change. Thick stacks of paper were distributed on a regular basis to every contractor on this job just to disseminate the new prevailing wages, which involved even more paper once the changes were assimilated internally by the company that I work for.
I had a sense, at the time, that the whole thing had its roots in a successfully-executed anticompetitive scheme concocted by organized labor unions. And, frankly, it made me feel sad to be forced into a game defined by their rules and, by extension, support them.
But for small files it's really, really bad. Many linux patches involve downloading hundreds of small files, not one big one.
So download those "hundreds of small files" in parallel, instead of one at a time. Problem solved.
Or: Extend BT to optimize downloading lots of small torrents, perhaps as a set. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see where BT is inefficient or slow with small files, nor should it take one to improve its performance in doing so dramatically. I agree that it's really, really bad at doing this stuff right now, but downloading lots of small files was probably never even on the radar screen of anyone before, so improving the protocol in these ways should be glaringly simple for those with sufficient skill.
Or, simpler: If it's a tiny file, use HTTP. If it's bigger than tiny, use BT.
Or, slightly more complex: Do what Blizzard does for WoW updates, and use both.
Even ignoring tiny files, there is the issue of bandwidth limited users, the significantly higher routing requirements of bittorrent (many home routers flake out when you get 50+ TCP connections going through them), users with heavily asymmetrical connections (5Mbit down/256kbit up), and the more complicated configuration required to get a good bittorrent connection.
I haven't seen a TCP connection limit problem on a consumer router in a long, long time. Even my freebie 2wire router from AT&T does just fine with lots (thousands) of connections. I'm not saying that it's never a problem, just that I myself haven't seen any issues like that in quite some time.
I mean: We've come a long way from the dark ages of the once-ubiquitous Linksys BEFSR41.
Asymmetric bandwidth is a problem, but could be sorted neatly enough by a clever BT application (by monitoring latency, and adjusting appropriately). Various clients do some of this already. And, at least in my corner of the woods, I see bandwidth becoming more symmetrical: I currently have a 12/1.5Mbps VDSL connection, which costs about the same as my 7Mbps/384kbps DOCSIS connection did just a couple of years ago.
Complicated configurations aren't a big deal. If, in some hypothetical future world, the now-common HTTP/FTP repositories were seeding everything, and every peer has either zero or misconfigured port forwarding, then the worst case is they'd simply download from the same hosts that they do right now.
Which is to say that it'd be the same, more or less, even if we ignore the aggregation aspects of downloading from all or most repositories in parallel instead of from one (which may or may not actually be fast).
In a more likely case where a good percentage of peers have properly-configured port forwarding (or UPNP) then things simply improve for all involved compared to what we have today.
But if the repositories were themselves seeding, then it'd work just fine: Worst case is that it's still at least as fast as HTTP or FTP from the same repository (plus or minus some BT overhead), all else being the same.
Best case is that there's several repositories all seeding the same basic set of random apps, plus a bunch of users who have already downloaded the random app, and things turn both faster and cheaper than they otherwise would have been.
The hash checks performed by BT will do well to prevent errors and/or poisoned apps, as well.
I've done that a few times myself, as well: Pirate something, find that it is absolutely worth whatever the author/company wants for it, and immediately buy a copy. And I've done the opposite: Pirate something, find that it's a worthless lot of garbage, and delete it.
Amusingly, Android apps bought through the official Google channel offer a 24-hour refund period.
Buy it, try it, and if you don't like it, send it back. It only works once per app, but it should give a user plenty of time to try most sorts of apps without having to risk anything or pirate them.
Perhaps if this fact were more widely publicized, there wouldn't be so much experimental piracy of Android devices.
(Ironically, the free 24-hour trial is also likely to be a key avenue for enabling piracy: Buy it, install a whole paid copy of the software, back it up, uninstall and get refunded...and then reinstall it from backup in a more clandestine method.)
I mean from TFA and the company's website why would the app need network access?
It shouldn't. It sounds like a very simple app.
Android apps do need to ask the user for permission to do specific things (read/write SD card, access network, handle SMS, twiddle address book, etc), but unfortunately the choice presented to the user is monolithic: You can either allow everything that the app asks for, or not install the app. One can't say "Oh, sure, it's fine for this photo-editing software to access my pictures, but never OK for it to be on the network," even though that might be a very reasonable set of tradeoffs.
I'm all for an Android firewall, myself, with application-level granularity (like, say, Zonealarm on Windows, except actually functional). AFAICT, such a thing doesn't exist.
Aren't Android app updates managed by the Android store?
Generally speaking, if that's where they were installed from, then that's where the updates will come from. However, Android also allows a user to use any other source of packages, which might also include a web site.
I see no particular reason (moral or technical) why an app should/could not handle its own updates, like Firefox does on many platforms, but I haven't seen it in practice yet.
Some things shoved against an outside wall, which sat closely to the floor in a relatively isolated area, were also at or below 0 (such as the washer).
The basement was at or below 0, in order for the pipes to have frozen.
The air in the house was a few degrees warmer than that. A glass of water on the counter would not have frozen, for instance.
More to the point: I bought an upscaling DVD player 5 or 6 years ago which supported HDCP over HDMI at 1080i.
Even then, it was less than $50.
Frankly, I'm really not surprised that cheap, dedicated silicon can do a faster job of [insert random job] than a general-purpose CPU. But I guess it must be a new concept for some folks.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends.
My U-Verse connection could handle four streams just fine, but only one HD. It was provisioned that way because I have a very long loop to the VRAD, which sync at most at about 19,200kbps. 19,200kbps isn't enough for four HD streams along with 6Mbps of Internet.
Others with better/more recent/shorter cabling have higher speeds. A friend of mine, not too far from my own house, has no problem doing 4 HD streams at once. As far as I can tell, having 4 HD streams is more the rule than the exception, these days, but it's all dependent on the amount of last-mile bandwidth you have available.
The 360 thing is an interesting development, and makes good sense in an IPTV environment.
(Disclaimer: I no longer have U-Verse TV because personal things made it difficult to rationalize paying for TV, but would pick it up again in an instant if those personal things improved.)
Tell Me still offers similar free services, including (AFAICT) the basic directory lookups and dialing that GOOG-411 offered.
1-800-555-TELL
That said, I used to use GOOG-411 quite a lot before I got a Droid, but even now I still occasionally refer to it because it is both easy and hands-free.
'Twill be missed.
Modern American cars work just like modern European cars: A 1995 Pontiac has the same hood (bonnet?) opening procedure as a 1995 BMW. Pull a lever/handle inside, hood pops up a bit, and then go outside and fool around trying to find the rest of the mechanism, move another lever, and it's open.
I don't know when this development occurred, as my 1979 Pontiac has a much different procedure: Go to front of car, reach underneath the bumper, pull handle, hood pops up a bit, and pull again to fully release. It works fine, but is not in any way secure...
99.9% of us are boring.
Which means that 0.1% of us aren't boring, right?
Hah.
About 0.756% of of the US is already imprisoned.
Given that, it certainly seems reasonable to me that more than 0.1% of the non-imprisoned population is interesting in some judicial sense.
No, and a flier stuck in the front door isn't the same thing, either. But that doesn't matter.
The reference I made to the iPhone 4 was only to remind folks here, in this context that is Slashdot, about the fact that one's responsibilities regarding lost and found property have already been fully argued and debated ad nausea.
It was not an attempt to draw an analogy.
In hidden GPS devices, Soviet Russia tracks you!
Recall the recent "found" iPhone 4 debacle:
The finder of a thing usually seems to have to make a reasonable attempt at finding the owner of an item (and "reasonable" varies quite a lot from place to place), and if it is unclaimed after 30 days, then they are entitled to keep it.
Generally speaking, YMMV, IANAL, so on, so forth.
But since the FBI asked for their widget back within 30 days, I guess that it's theirs to recover.
(Whether or not I think this is morally right is a different discussion entirely. Personally, I'd like to think that if I find a tracking widget on my car, that it's henceforth mine. However...)
I don't think it's generally needed, at all. A line break might be desirous any-
where in a text; are authors supposed to figure out approx-
imately where they might be needed? Or should they simp-ly soft-hyphen-ate every-fuck-ing-thing so that it is actu-ally use-ful?
A browser-side diction-ary might be more bet-ter in most cases.
Then there's the issue of viewing angles -- most LCDs have a wide horizontal viewing range, but a narrow vertical viewing angle range. Rotating the monitor flips that. (It's not as big of a deal as you'd think, in that I sit in generally the same place, but it makes it harder to read stuff there if someone is sitting next to me.)
I think you nailed a big part of the problem, and don't even realize it.
Sure, your head might generally be in the same place, but the viewing angles on common TN panels can be so horrible that each eye sees something very different when rotated.
I used to have a cheap Motorola flip phone which had this problem: Things looked all crazy just holding the phone in my hand in its default portrait mode, but fit together just fine with it rotated sideways; clearly, they'd simply bought whatever LCD screens were available without any regard as to their intended orientation. (Amusingly, the phone was useless in sideways orientation...)
I have a rotatable 20" 1600x1200 IPS display which does work fine (and aces the below test) when rotated vertical, but I had Cleartype turned off the last time I tried that. (I'd be willing to see how it behaves with Cleartype enabled under Windows 7, if you ask.)
The 24" 1920x1080 TN display that sits on the desk beside it, though, is extremely bothersome to view when rotated 90 degrees.
To demonstrate what I'm talking about, I direct you to these LCD monitor test images, specifically this set. Give it a spin on both screens, and give your head a 90 degree twist to see the differences.
I had a problem like that in the first house that I bought.
I learned how to adjust the anticipator in the thermostat, and things were instantly better.
YMMV.
Naah.
Your history is clouded by the fact that the you-name-its you speak of were a primary distribution mediums by the MPIAA.
BitTorrent, or Usenet, or HTTP, or anything on the Intarwebs, on the other hand, never were.
It makes sense, from their perspective, to try to kill cassette. Or 1/4" reel-to-reel. Or CD-R. Or DVD-R. Or recordable Blu-Ray.
And if vinyl cutters had ever become common and cheap, you'd have bet they'd have protested them, too.
Why? All of these things were initially invented by them, for them.
But this new(ish) Intarweb tech? They still don't know how to use it. Even though it's decades-old, it wasn't invented for them, so they never bothered to get a firm grasp of it.
And so, your analogy falls apart, and I fail to see the connection between "The Man" and "download," let alone any significant number of instances of "The Man" actively trying to prevent random "downloads." I see nothing, in fact, but a couple of decades (I'm young) of me merrily downloading legitimate things from Usenet, FTP, random Web sites, and most recently torrents, without any attempts of intervention by the MPAA or RIAA.
In conclusion: Your conspiracy theories cloud the war while aiding the enemy, and I wish that you'd stop. Thanks!
*shrug*
Let me preface this by saying that I'm 31 years old. I have been involved with computers since I was born. My first gaming system was an Atari 2600, and my first computer was a TRS-80 Model I with a Radio Shack cassette recorder, though friends variously had a TI99/4A, Atari 800, C64, or Apple ][. I've never attended college, finding formal education to be far too boring. I am not a Luddite.
And frankly, I don't know how any of that matters.
Moving right along:
I initially failed to see the hype surround cell phones, myself. I used to watch my boss fiddle with his old PalmOS Kyocera phone and think, "Gee, I can do all of that with the Handspring Visor that I have in my pocket, and the batteries last for a month!"
I used to swear, up and down, that if my boss didn't want me to have a cell phone badly enough to pay for it, that I wouldn't have one at all.
I used that Visor for a long, long time, with it rattling around in my pants pocket with a couple of pocket knives and a work-provided cell phone, protected only by its own built-in case. I miss its durability and battery life. (It still works and looks fine, even though it was a refurb even when I bought it around 2002.)
Then, I got an iPod Touch. I didn't particularly want one, but it was a free rebate item on a fancy Netgear switch that we'd bought a couple of at work, and I ended up with it.
And, lo, the iPod was useful! I found myself looking at all manner of things wherever there was Wifi, and having a hell of a good time doing it. So much easier, it was, than using my laptop to do the same thing. And instead of calling back to someone at the shop when I needed a pinout for some obscure device that I found myself working on, I could just fucking Google it myself.
So when the Droid came out, I decided I'd jump in, because it'd let me do the same things in a far more open fashion, almost anywhere. Doing so was a big deal for me: Because I work for a Verizon retailer, and I didn't want to carry two phones, I had to buy the thing at cash value ($529, IIRC) if I still wanted the company to float the voice plan. And pay the $30 monthly fee for data coverage.
And you know what? I use it all the time. I've got manuals stored on it, Google at the ready, and damn near every manner of data available to me that I'd have with a desktop PC, but without lugging a desktop.
Typically, it's way, way faster than dialup. I've seen downloads come in at a measured 180 kilobytes per second. Things slow down in areas that are either very dense or very sparse, but that's OK -- I'm not ever without bandwidth.
And in terms of overall utility: I'm way more productive (read: less frustrated) at work, because when I'm out and about doing my technical things, I can find the data I need. Whether configuring a decade-old quad video switcher, or finding the relative headings of local TV stations to aid in aiming a TV antenna (and a compass!), or digging up a manual on some newfangled dispatch communications console, I've got what I need accessible wherever I'm at. One day, I needed an accurate frequency counter: I downloaded one, and it worked great, eliminating hours of work. One day, I needed a flashlight, so I downloaded one of those. Another day, I needed to calculate the voltage drop on a 2,800 foot run of 8 AWG copper, so I Googled a Javascript calculator for that. And then, I needed a bubble level. Or a free Wifi channel to set up a new AP. Et cetera, and so on, and so forth.
It does this stuff.
I haven't regretted paying for this thing for a second, even though the $30 data plan is a lot more than my wife pays to my mom-in-law for her own phone (much like your own wife) and the initial cost was way more than I felt I wanted to spend on such a thing.
If you can't find the utility in a gee-whiz cell phone, you're either not trying hard enough, too tied down to a desk to care, or stuck thinking about the thing as a telephone/ball-and-chain instead of all that is Teh Intarwebs.
I agree.
However, I'd also like to point out that lots of apps do the same thing. Reboot your Android phone and then leave it on for a day or so, doing minimal stuff like texting and web browsing and phone calls.
Fire up something like Advanced Task Killer (or the less-useful and harder-to-access bits of the setup menu) and I think you'll be surprised at just how much shit is running.
And after you kill it all off, some of it creeps right back.
Doesn't matter, in my experience -- it's just how it is.
I disagree.
I grew up in a house built before 1903 (which was the earliest date we ever found). Originally, it must have distributed gas or wood stoves, and been converted to central heat sometime later (one of the original brick chimneys was repurposed as plenum).
For most of my childhood, we had a giant gravity coal furnace which had been converted to natural gas, along with a weak (and optional) circulation fan. It mostly resembled a huge, upside-down octopus: A giant round thing, covered in asbestos, with 6 or 8" ducts running off in all directions.
When there was a huge blizzard that left folks without power for a week or two, that old codger was a real treat: Even though the thermostat needed power, the gas valve permitted the burner to be turned on and off manually. And since the ductwork was still set up for a gravity feed, it worked just fine without the fan.
However, that was later replaced by a much more modern natural gas furnace of reasonable efficiency for the time (85%, IIRC). It had a proper fan that circulate air circulate air with some force. This eliminated cold spots in the house, as well as the use of various kerosene and electric space heaters, even though almost all of the ductwork remained exactly the same (all of the easily-accessed asbestos-wrapped ducts were replaced at this time, but everything else stayed).
I remember this transition very well: It was nice being warm at night in the winter, for a change, without the drone of a space heater or the worry and bother about kerosene.
And while it certainly didn't do a damned thing during a blackout, the money saved during the heating season would easily have easily have bought a small generator with which to power it...or in more modern times, an inverter. Or a solar panel and some batteries. Or...
Sometimes, the old days are gone for a reason.
You don't seem to know anything about English.
Go back and read everything that I wrote. I think that you'll find that we don't disagree on anything of any significance.
Problem A: Not a problem, as long as there is also HTTP, FTP, SFTP, SCP, rsync, etc.
Problem B: Is resisted quite well by BT's hash checking.
Problem C: WTF are you going on about? Is there an Internet Czar somewhere who keeps track of the number of bad packets that I send?
Problem D: I don't think anyone, really, wants to make BT mandatory for anything. But if it -is- mandatory for a given system, then sane upload/download ratios will be easy: 1:1, minus whatever it is that the willing and permanent seeds (read: existing public repositories) deliver. This only increases one's bandwidth usage by a maximum factor of 2, which (in the case of, say, updating a Linux distro) isn't so bad.
Thank for (what appear to be) some facts.
I think that they all fit neatly into my "things happen" step, but I'm too tired to rewrite my original post to include them.
Plus, nobody's ever going to read this anyway. And if they do, then they'll be able to figure it out based on context.
Which is good enough for me.
What's a fair market wage? And how can the market set a fair wage if no one is allowed to pay one penny under whatever that wage is? Markets require a range of prices offered to settle on a price that is fair. This suggestion makes no sense.
Heh. I agree completely.
Howver, it's pretty well defined: Prevailing Wage.
I worked on a prevailing wage job awhile back. My (already ample and fair) hourly wage nearly doubled for the duration of that job.
Which, of course, is a sham. In my case, it was a welcome sham: I sure did enjoy the extra money. But I'm too much of an altruist to say that it was anything other than a sham. (I'm also enough of a realist to see that if I refused to do that job, someone else would've had to do it instead at the same absurd rate.)
What's more: On an almost-weekly basis, the wage would change. Thick stacks of paper were distributed on a regular basis to every contractor on this job just to disseminate the new prevailing wages, which involved even more paper once the changes were assimilated internally by the company that I work for.
I had a sense, at the time, that the whole thing had its roots in a successfully-executed anticompetitive scheme concocted by organized labor unions. And, frankly, it made me feel sad to be forced into a game defined by their rules and, by extension, support them.
But for small files it's really, really bad. Many linux patches involve downloading hundreds of small files, not one big one.
So download those "hundreds of small files" in parallel, instead of one at a time. Problem solved.
Or: Extend BT to optimize downloading lots of small torrents, perhaps as a set. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see where BT is inefficient or slow with small files, nor should it take one to improve its performance in doing so dramatically. I agree that it's really, really bad at doing this stuff right now, but downloading lots of small files was probably never even on the radar screen of anyone before, so improving the protocol in these ways should be glaringly simple for those with sufficient skill.
Or, simpler: If it's a tiny file, use HTTP. If it's bigger than tiny, use BT.
Or, slightly more complex: Do what Blizzard does for WoW updates, and use both.
Even ignoring tiny files, there is the issue of bandwidth limited users, the significantly higher routing requirements of bittorrent (many home routers flake out when you get 50+ TCP connections going through them), users with heavily asymmetrical connections (5Mbit down/256kbit up), and the more complicated configuration required to get a good bittorrent connection.
I haven't seen a TCP connection limit problem on a consumer router in a long, long time. Even my freebie 2wire router from AT&T does just fine with lots (thousands) of connections. I'm not saying that it's never a problem, just that I myself haven't seen any issues like that in quite some time.
I mean: We've come a long way from the dark ages of the once-ubiquitous Linksys BEFSR41.
Asymmetric bandwidth is a problem, but could be sorted neatly enough by a clever BT application (by monitoring latency, and adjusting appropriately). Various clients do some of this already. And, at least in my corner of the woods, I see bandwidth becoming more symmetrical: I currently have a 12/1.5Mbps VDSL connection, which costs about the same as my 7Mbps/384kbps DOCSIS connection did just a couple of years ago.
Complicated configurations aren't a big deal. If, in some hypothetical future world, the now-common HTTP/FTP repositories were seeding everything, and every peer has either zero or misconfigured port forwarding, then the worst case is they'd simply download from the same hosts that they do right now.
Which is to say that it'd be the same, more or less, even if we ignore the aggregation aspects of downloading from all or most repositories in parallel instead of from one (which may or may not actually be fast).
In a more likely case where a good percentage of peers have properly-configured port forwarding (or UPNP) then things simply improve for all involved compared to what we have today.
But if the repositories were themselves seeding, then it'd work just fine: Worst case is that it's still at least as fast as HTTP or FTP from the same repository (plus or minus some BT overhead), all else being the same.
Best case is that there's several repositories all seeding the same basic set of random apps, plus a bunch of users who have already downloaded the random app, and things turn both faster and cheaper than they otherwise would have been.
The hash checks performed by BT will do well to prevent errors and/or poisoned apps, as well.
Sounds like a win to me.
I realize that it's late in the day, but if someone would please help mod the parent +5 Reasonable, I'd be very appreciative.
I've done that a few times myself, as well: Pirate something, find that it is absolutely worth whatever the author/company wants for it, and immediately buy a copy. And I've done the opposite: Pirate something, find that it's a worthless lot of garbage, and delete it.
Amusingly, Android apps bought through the official Google channel offer a 24-hour refund period.
Buy it, try it, and if you don't like it, send it back. It only works once per app, but it should give a user plenty of time to try most sorts of apps without having to risk anything or pirate them.
Perhaps if this fact were more widely publicized, there wouldn't be so much experimental piracy of Android devices.
(Ironically, the free 24-hour trial is also likely to be a key avenue for enabling piracy: Buy it, install a whole paid copy of the software, back it up, uninstall and get refunded...and then reinstall it from backup in a more clandestine method.)
It shouldn't. It sounds like a very simple app.
Android apps do need to ask the user for permission to do specific things (read/write SD card, access network, handle SMS, twiddle address book, etc), but unfortunately the choice presented to the user is monolithic: You can either allow everything that the app asks for, or not install the app. One can't say "Oh, sure, it's fine for this photo-editing software to access my pictures, but never OK for it to be on the network," even though that might be a very reasonable set of tradeoffs.
I'm all for an Android firewall, myself, with application-level granularity (like, say, Zonealarm on Windows, except actually functional). AFAICT, such a thing doesn't exist.
Generally speaking, if that's where they were installed from, then that's where the updates will come from. However, Android also allows a user to use any other source of packages, which might also include a web site.
I see no particular reason (moral or technical) why an app should/could not handle its own updates, like Firefox does on many platforms, but I haven't seen it in practice yet.
No. By definition, the floor was at or below 0.
Some things shoved against an outside wall, which sat closely to the floor in a relatively isolated area, were also at or below 0 (such as the washer).
The basement was at or below 0, in order for the pipes to have frozen.
The air in the house was a few degrees warmer than that. A glass of water on the counter would not have frozen, for instance.
More to the point: I bought an upscaling DVD player 5 or 6 years ago which supported HDCP over HDMI at 1080i.
Even then, it was less than $50.
Frankly, I'm really not surprised that cheap, dedicated silicon can do a faster job of [insert random job] than a general-purpose CPU. But I guess it must be a new concept for some folks.
*yawn*