But the original question is interesting. Local radio is invaluable in a disaster. The power budget and infrastructure (transmitter towers) for FM radio are much more available. The service area of a single FM radio tower could cover hundreds if not thousands of cell towers. Cell towers also depend on digital backbone and data connections (routers) that also need uninterruptible power.
But the thing about the cellular network is that it's incredibly resilient. Some years ago we had a major earthquake here that wiped out significant chunks of a city and the surrounding area. No power, no water, nothing. The cellular network partially functioned (on banks of lead-acid batteries at many cell sites) until crews got generators in as a priority (which included, among other things, competing cellphone providers servicing and powering each others' gear), and cellphones themselves were battery powered and kept going while (mostly) mains-powered radio receivers went silent. So the cellular network, while overloaded due to the scale of the disaster, continued to provide service. For the subset of radio stations that were still operating, very few people were able to listen.
But not a matter of 'just turn it on' and everything magically works.
Good technical summary, but there's another point you missed: Why would I want to use my retina-display facial-recognition streaming-video touch-sensitive camera phone as a freakin' 1930s-vintage wireless set? My phone (Chinese-made) has the FM radio componentry in it, but the only thing I've ever done with it is remove the icon for it to stop it cluttering up the desktop.
Asking the Betteridge's-Law-confirming "Does Lack of FM Support On Phones Increase Your Chances of Dying In a Disaster?" is equivalent to asking "Does Lack of a Wagon Singletree (for horse-hitching) on a Car Increase Your Chances of Dying In a Disaster?". For both cases there's probably some form of specially-constructed disaster you can come up with for which the answer is yes, but in practice, the answer is no.
Had a year's worth of Sirius satellite radio with a new vehicle. Couldn't stand to listen to it. the sound quality was awful, just like you describe. Even talk stations were tinny and clipped and grating on the ears.
Well you have no-one to blame but yourself for that, if you'd remembered to tape on your Brilliant Pebbles with Teflon Tape, plug in your Tice Clock, and outline the speaker in Green Pen, then you'd have noticed the difference immediately, with strong bass in impact and quantity, clear mids, nice extension and clarity in the trebles, and one of the best soundstages in the market, the physical properties of width and depth producing a sense of great size and space when listening (except that final bit where the third cellist from the left paused to scratch their elbow, which upset the recorded acoustic imaging a bit).
These are well-established, well-tested, well-designed protocols with no suspect commercial interests involved. QUIC solves nothing that hasn't already been solved.
Yeah, but it's from Google, and whatever Google wants, Google gets. They've already done this with SPDY, rammed through the IETF with unseemly haste as "HTTP 2.0", with any objections either ignored or declared out of scope. I don't see how QUIC will be any different, the IETF will rename it to give the impression they had some input into the process, but that'll be all.
You bastard! You complete, utter bastard! Just out of curiosity I tried Bing maps and... it's everything Google maps isn't. I now actually like a Microsoft product.
I didn't even know that the old one was still available, so I've been forced to use the new one. And despite all of the usage, I still hate it. Do they not focus test these sort of things?
Of course they did, on the same people that Slashspot tested Beta on.
I have a permanent redirect for Google maps, just go to Google Maps Classic. Of course now that they're discontinuing it, the utility of the redirect will be limited (sigh). Now it'll be a toss-up between which sucks less, new Google Maps or Apple Maps.
(ObAppleMaps joke: A man using Apple Maps walks into a bar. Or a church. Or a cinema. He's not quite sure.
If he can argue his way out of the charges, he might be a masterdebater, though.
And that's what's really going on here, he was ducking into the lav to toss one off but since masterdebation is still illegal in Dubai he had to come up with this ludicrous red herring involving an iPhone and toilet paper. Suspiciously soggy toilet paper...
I know that sounds like cynical marketroidism, but sometimes you do need to do that to wean people off some hideously ancient version they're still running on an old 386 under Netware 3.1 bricked into a wall next to the second floor men's toilet. "Last 3 major versions" sounds like a pretty generous strategy, we do "last n minor versions", where n is usually spread over 2-3 years. In other words unless you have a long-term support contract, if you come to us with a problem in a product written in the heyday of Windows XP, you're told to upgrade.
It is no surprise that LG decided to ship a half baked solution for their new flagship displays.
It's kind of a surprise they shipped it at all. I didn't know what this thing did without a bit of googling, it appears that it's custom software that allows you to display multiple windows at once on your desktop, like, um, what's that Microsoft OS called that does that too? Not Microsoft Window (aka Windows 8), but the one where you can have multiple windows tiled across your desktop.
As what I'd consider a 'power user', one of the first things I do is turn that obnoxious thing off.
And I appreciate that, I really do, although I wish you had less crap on your machine, it's slowing down the warez site I'm running on it. Some of the other guys have been complaining as well.
Oh, and could you at least write or call your mother once a week or so, I'm getting sick of seeing her nagging in your inbox.
We paid 90 million for something we sold back to the builders for 300k. What the hell man?
Probably out of embarrassment. It may be called the Airlander but Flying Buttcrack
would be a better name. If that thing was flesh-coloured instead of white it'd be on porn sites.
Re:Why doesn't Moz acknowledge the market share is
on
Firefox 37 Released
·
· Score: 2
Because the Firefox devs think their browser should pander to the tablet-interface loving users, with advanced features hidden and the GUI dumbed down - while a large part of their user base specifically wants an "advanced" browser with lots of addons which does NOT look like Chrome.
I was rather shocked when I first ran Firefox on Android, I was expecting,well, Firefox, but what I got was some massively dumbed-down piece of junk that was worse than a range of no-name Android-only browsers from vendors I'd never heard of before. I eventually went with one of them, and at one point submitted a bug report. Within a few hours I had a reply, and a fix. It was everything Firefox should be, but isn't.
I've been a Firefox user since Phoenix 0.3, but none of my mobile devices runs it, and desktop is only hanging on because of all the plugins (of which, admittedly, about half are installed just to undo all the crap they've done to the browser in the last few years).
Still, at least they're hard at work on Firefox OS, which is what the market has been crying out for.
Honestly, the most noticeable change was that the font changed on the tabs and URL bar.
Oh gawd, this obviously means that Firefox will have to make the same change in their Chrome-clone browser. I dread it every time Google makes a change because I know it'll be in the next release of Chromefox...
It does seem pretty straightforward, I mean, they're Italian, a few guys carrying violin cases turn up, badabing, badabang (mostly badabang), problem solved.
Okay, research paid for with my tax dollars. Where can I download it?
You can't. The title should have read "MIT Publishes Paper Discussing Alleged Integer Overflow Debugger That You'll Never Be Able to Get Your Hands On".
(Incidentally, this isn't the first paper on a tool like this. None of the tools have ever been released for general use, although you can occasionally find buggy, research-prototype level code somewhere. I played with one a year or two ago, after several hours of rewriting their code to try and get it working on something other than the one specific configuration of some old Linux distro they tried it with I gave up).
The flaws in RC4 have been known about for a long time but were thought irrelevant in the scheme of SSL/TLS to the point where RC4 was the preferred cipher suit only a few years ago as it was one of the few that were able to mitigate the BEAST attack. So the GP's comment that there's no surprise since RC4 has been known to be weak for a decade isn't quite the full story.
At least part of the fault lies in the TLS standard and standards process itself. While TLS includes extensive processes for adding new mechanisms of all types to the protocol (and dear God has there been a mountain of crap shovelled in there over the years), there's no procedure whatsoever for taking things out (apart from the very ad-hoc "ZOMG THE SKY IS FALLING TELL EVERYONE NOT TO USE THIS ANY MORE" approach). So the single biggest step towards fixing these problems (there's many of them) is to build in some way of removing these ancient, flaw-riddled mechanisms.
I think that the reason is DoD. A really good telescope could as well be turned towards Earth
You'd think that after President Clark did that with the planetary defense grid, any new deployments would have safety interlocks to prevent it from happening again.
I'd be happy to recommend NameCheap for.com and.com.au domains as well. But I have a question about domain name registration myself: I'll soon have to register some.cn domains, does anyone know a good registrar for.cn domain names with IDNA support?
Check your spam folder for many messages from providers who'd be more than happy to register a.cn for you. They'll also sell you bulletproof hosting if you need it.
So the last sentence in the summary should have read "We've heard time and time again how insecure passwords are, and Microsoft is aiming to replace them with a password-equivalent where you can never change your password when it's compromised, you leave copies of it on everything you touch (or look at), and which can be defeated with a bit of gelatin or a printout of a photo".
While I don't agree with the OP, it does seem to be gratuitous bashing of Cruz. AFAIK what he's pointing out is that NASA was chartered to explore space (the NOAA, not NASA, was chartered to do climate research), and yet in my entire lifetime, apart from the 1970s-era Space Shuttle, the only thing of note they've managed to do in this area is launch a few remote/robot probes. Holy fsck, this is an organisation with an $18 billion/year budget that's done basically nothing to further getting mankind into space since the Apollo program ended over forty years ago. They've been busy dicking around with various expensive toys for the last several decades, cancelling one pie-in-the-sky project after another, and presumably will be relying on some of their huge budget to eventually rent room on Russian, or Chinese, or Indian, or whoever else gets there, missions to the moon or Mars.
Looked at another way, if some pro-science senator came along and told them to get their s**t together, would there be such an outcry?
Slashdot Mirror
Bing Maps is like what you'd get if you updated the old version of Google Maps, but made it better instead of worse.
That pretty much sums it up in one line (I can't moderate a discussion that I'm part of or you'd get a +1 Insightful).
Google "Poe's Law".
But the original question is interesting. Local radio is invaluable in a disaster. The power budget and infrastructure (transmitter towers) for FM radio are much more available. The service area of a single FM radio tower could cover hundreds if not thousands of cell towers. Cell towers also depend on digital backbone and data connections (routers) that also need uninterruptible power.
But the thing about the cellular network is that it's incredibly resilient. Some years ago we had a major earthquake here that wiped out significant chunks of a city and the surrounding area. No power, no water, nothing. The cellular network partially functioned (on banks of lead-acid batteries at many cell sites) until crews got generators in as a priority (which included, among other things, competing cellphone providers servicing and powering each others' gear), and cellphones themselves were battery powered and kept going while (mostly) mains-powered radio receivers went silent. So the cellular network, while overloaded due to the scale of the disaster, continued to provide service. For the subset of radio stations that were still operating, very few people were able to listen.
But not a matter of 'just turn it on' and everything magically works.
Good technical summary, but there's another point you missed: Why would I want to use my retina-display facial-recognition streaming-video touch-sensitive camera phone as a freakin' 1930s-vintage wireless set? My phone (Chinese-made) has the FM radio componentry in it, but the only thing I've ever done with it is remove the icon for it to stop it cluttering up the desktop.
Asking the Betteridge's-Law-confirming "Does Lack of FM Support On Phones Increase Your Chances of Dying In a Disaster?" is equivalent to asking "Does Lack of a Wagon Singletree (for horse-hitching) on a Car Increase Your Chances of Dying In a Disaster?". For both cases there's probably some form of specially-constructed disaster you can come up with for which the answer is yes, but in practice, the answer is no.
Had a year's worth of Sirius satellite radio with a new vehicle. Couldn't stand to listen to it. the sound quality was awful, just like you describe. Even talk stations were tinny and clipped and grating on the ears.
Well you have no-one to blame but yourself for that, if you'd remembered to tape on your Brilliant Pebbles with Teflon Tape, plug in your Tice Clock, and outline the speaker in Green Pen, then you'd have noticed the difference immediately, with strong bass in impact and quantity, clear mids, nice extension and clarity in the trebles, and one of the best soundstages in the market, the physical properties of width and depth producing a sense of great size and space when listening (except that final bit where the third cellist from the left paused to scratch their elbow, which upset the recorded acoustic imaging a bit).
These are well-established, well-tested, well-designed protocols with no suspect commercial interests involved. QUIC solves nothing that hasn't already been solved.
Yeah, but it's from Google, and whatever Google wants, Google gets. They've already done this with SPDY, rammed through the IETF with unseemly haste as "HTTP 2.0", with any objections either ignored or declared out of scope. I don't see how QUIC will be any different, the IETF will rename it to give the impression they had some input into the process, but that'll be all.
I started using bing.com for maps
You bastard! You complete, utter bastard! Just out of curiosity I tried Bing maps and... it's everything Google maps isn't. I now actually like a Microsoft product.
Some day, I'll get you for this.
I didn't even know that the old one was still available, so I've been forced to use the new one. And despite all of the usage, I still hate it. Do they not focus test these sort of things?
Of course they did, on the same people that Slashspot tested Beta on.
I have a permanent redirect for Google maps, just go to Google Maps Classic. Of course now that they're discontinuing it, the utility of the redirect will be limited (sigh). Now it'll be a toss-up between which sucks less, new Google Maps or Apple Maps.
(ObAppleMaps joke: A man using Apple Maps walks into a bar. Or a church. Or a cinema. He's not quite sure.
I'm a hard working tech worker in New Zealand, supporting a family of 4 and own my own home.
A sheep pen, a ewe,and three lambs with suspiciously human-looking features doesn't count there mate.
Well, except perhaps in Australia.
If he can argue his way out of the charges, he might be a masterdebater, though.
And that's what's really going on here, he was ducking into the lav to toss one off but since masterdebation is still illegal in Dubai he had to come up with this ludicrous red herring involving an iPhone and toilet paper. Suspiciously soggy toilet paper...
I know that sounds like cynical marketroidism, but sometimes you do need to do that to wean people off some hideously ancient version they're still running on an old 386 under Netware 3.1 bricked into a wall next to the second floor men's toilet. "Last 3 major versions" sounds like a pretty generous strategy, we do "last n minor versions", where n is usually spread over 2-3 years. In other words unless you have a long-term support contract, if you come to us with a problem in a product written in the heyday of Windows XP, you're told to upgrade.
It is no surprise that LG decided to ship a half baked solution for their new flagship displays.
It's kind of a surprise they shipped it at all. I didn't know what this thing did without a bit of googling, it appears that it's custom software that allows you to display multiple windows at once on your desktop, like, um, what's that Microsoft OS called that does that too? Not Microsoft Window (aka Windows 8), but the one where you can have multiple windows tiled across your desktop.
Oh yeah, Windows 1.0, that was it.
As what I'd consider a 'power user', one of the first things I do is turn that obnoxious thing off.
And I appreciate that, I really do, although I wish you had less crap on your machine, it's slowing down the warez site I'm running on it. Some of the other guys have been complaining as well.
Oh, and could you at least write or call your mother once a week or so, I'm getting sick of seeing her nagging in your inbox.
It is a well-known fact that all Samsung software is utter crap.
We're bashing LG here, not Samsung. It's their turn next week, after we do Microsoft on Monday.
We paid 90 million for something we sold back to the builders for 300k. What the hell man?
Probably out of embarrassment. It may be called the Airlander but Flying Buttcrack
would be a better name. If that thing was flesh-coloured instead of white it'd be on porn sites.
Because the Firefox devs think their browser should pander to the tablet-interface loving users, with advanced features hidden and the GUI dumbed down - while a large part of their user base specifically wants an "advanced" browser with lots of addons which does NOT look like Chrome.
I was rather shocked when I first ran Firefox on Android, I was expecting,well, Firefox, but what I got was some massively dumbed-down piece of junk that was worse than a range of no-name Android-only browsers from vendors I'd never heard of before. I eventually went with one of them, and at one point submitted a bug report. Within a few hours I had a reply, and a fix. It was everything Firefox should be, but isn't.
I've been a Firefox user since Phoenix 0.3, but none of my mobile devices runs it, and desktop is only hanging on because of all the plugins (of which, admittedly, about half are installed just to undo all the crap they've done to the browser in the last few years).
Still, at least they're hard at work on Firefox OS, which is what the market has been crying out for.
I'll show you a thousand year old trick. First, let me put on my robe and wizard hat...
If the next step involves me stroking your magic wand, I'm outta here...
Honestly, the most noticeable change was that the font changed on the tabs and URL bar.
Oh gawd, this obviously means that Firefox will have to make the same change in their Chrome-clone browser. I dread it every time Google makes a change because I know it'll be in the next release of Chromefox...
So... what's to discuss.
It does seem pretty straightforward, I mean, they're Italian, a few guys carrying violin cases turn up, badabing, badabang (mostly badabang), problem solved.
Okay, research paid for with my tax dollars. Where can I download it?
You can't. The title should have read "MIT Publishes Paper Discussing Alleged Integer Overflow Debugger That You'll Never Be Able to Get Your Hands On".
(Incidentally, this isn't the first paper on a tool like this. None of the tools have ever been released for general use, although you can occasionally find buggy, research-prototype level code somewhere. I played with one a year or two ago, after several hours of rewriting their code to try and get it working on something other than the one specific configuration of some old Linux distro they tried it with I gave up).
The flaws in RC4 have been known about for a long time but were thought irrelevant in the scheme of SSL/TLS to the point where RC4 was the preferred cipher suit only a few years ago as it was one of the few that were able to mitigate the BEAST attack. So the GP's comment that there's no surprise since RC4 has been known to be weak for a decade isn't quite the full story.
At least part of the fault lies in the TLS standard and standards process itself. While TLS includes extensive processes for adding new mechanisms of all types to the protocol (and dear God has there been a mountain of crap shovelled in there over the years), there's no procedure whatsoever for taking things out (apart from the very ad-hoc "ZOMG THE SKY IS FALLING TELL EVERYONE NOT TO USE THIS ANY MORE" approach). So the single biggest step towards fixing these problems (there's many of them) is to build in some way of removing these ancient, flaw-riddled mechanisms.
I think that the reason is DoD. A really good telescope could as well be turned towards Earth
You'd think that after President Clark did that with the planetary defense grid, any new deployments would have safety interlocks to prevent it from happening again.
I'd be happy to recommend NameCheap for .com and .com.au domains as well. But I have a question about domain name registration myself: I'll soon have to register some .cn domains, does anyone know a good registrar for .cn domain names with IDNA support?
Check your spam folder for many messages from providers who'd be more than happy to register a .cn for you. They'll also sell you bulletproof hosting if you need it.
So the last sentence in the summary should have read "We've heard time and time again how insecure passwords are, and Microsoft is aiming to replace them with a password-equivalent where you can never change your password when it's compromised, you leave copies of it on everything you touch (or look at), and which can be defeated with a bit of gelatin or a printout of a photo".
Yay, Microsoft!
While I don't agree with the OP, it does seem to be gratuitous bashing of Cruz. AFAIK what he's pointing out is that NASA was chartered to explore space (the NOAA, not NASA, was chartered to do climate research), and yet in my entire lifetime, apart from the 1970s-era Space Shuttle, the only thing of note they've managed to do in this area is launch a few remote/robot probes. Holy fsck, this is an organisation with an $18 billion/year budget that's done basically nothing to further getting mankind into space since the Apollo program ended over forty years ago. They've been busy dicking around with various expensive toys for the last several decades, cancelling one pie-in-the-sky project after another, and presumably will be relying on some of their huge budget to eventually rent room on Russian, or Chinese, or Indian, or whoever else gets there, missions to the moon or Mars.
Looked at another way, if some pro-science senator came along and told them to get their s**t together, would there be such an outcry?