The key to QI charging is to buy decent multi-coil chargers, like the Tylt Vu, for your most common charging locations. They charge reliably regardless of alignment. I use them beside the bed and on my office desk. I have of a few cheap chargers scattered around the house but you do have to place your phone on those ones just right.
Prior to the Nexus 6P I had brought each new model since the Nexus One but I have stuck with the Nexus 6 as the 6P was a step backwards. I see no need for a fingerprint reader, what real world advantage does it offer? From what I see it weakens security by opening a new attack vector. On the other hand I see QI charging as one of the best things to happen to phones in recent years, no more mucking around vs risking a flat battery. Removing QI from the 6P was a deal breaker for me.
The linked article does feel like a fluff piece, lacking anything worth remembering.
I knew Luna is the Latin name for the Moon, but I speak English not Latin. I have never hear anyone say how bright or how beautiful Luna looks. Pink Floyd didn't release and album call "Dark side of Luna" or "Dark side of a moon". How about NASA, you know, the guys who have actually been there? They do tend to be more precise usually referring to it as the Earth's Moon though are rather flexible about Moon vs moon. They mention lunar but not Luna. Even their URL has moon, not luna, http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/pl....
Basically I see no 'real' problem with my post, However, I'm reasonable, no need for descent. I will continue to call it the Moon and you can call it Luna and I'm sure other Slashdot readers will have own idea what it should be called.
I was trying to think of an analogy to use to make the point to the idiots at AP and it occurs the me that the Internet is the most widely known specific internet in the same way the Moon is the most widely know specific moon. If you wanted to be pedantic you could refer to the Moon as the moon in orbit around the Earth (or should that be the earth now?). If you call the Internet just internet how do you specify which internet you want to refer too? What about Internet2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., is that now internet2?
It varies from country to country but my guess is most homes are about 30 years old. Every service in them usually is working on the orginal services because they use simple mechanical principles that are timeless. The doors are on hinges, the lighting has mechanical switches, the water has mechanical valves etc. They are all maintainable and still working 30 years later. How many electronic devices do you own that are 30 years old and if they break can they be fixed. How much of the tech you own today can be expected to be working and maintainable in 30 years? How many of the cloud services do you expect be operation for 30 years?
At one time I worked for a home automation company doing an advance full home automation system aimed at new home builds. It used a local Linux server running on an embedded platform with no moving parts so could be expected to have a long maintenance free standalone life. I did worry about the longer term if it failed. The point become more relevant as that system, installed in a huge mansion, is not easy to understand from a service POV and the company that developed it is history now.
I want to do some home automation in my current home. I have the hardware/software/financial skills and resources to DIY it but what about when I sell my home? I don't want to support it, and indeed my current home is quite new and I am not, so anything I install could be around after I die. Putting in home automation now may actually reduce the resale value as it is a 'risk' for a buyer.
My thoughts are:
- No cloud solutions, who knows when they will go out of business. The intelligence in the system must be standalone and local.
- Use mature standards e.g. Cat 5 cables with RJ45 connections to interconnect remote modules back to a central point.
- Put electronic modules in accessible places. This and the above cabling make it possible to replace the whole electronics with a new generation in future if needed.
- There needs to be more mature and open standards, like X10, So it has a long term future.
I will do home automation but very cautiously and piecemeal with the above point in mind.
The Slashdot summary and the article both fail to mention what country DVDFab is in, but the linked domain implies they are in China. So what was the point of the American court telling them what to do? If the AACS want to shut them down they should be applying Chinese laws in a Chinese court, anything else is just theatrics.
I suspect it is a bigger issue in the USA than other counties partly for cultural reasons. In the US more emphasis is put on looking after yourself and becoming independent at a younger age. The flip side of this is less respect for age and experience. I'm a 50+ Kiwi and I worked in China for a couple of years. I was the oldest employee there by a decade or two and I was managing a team of young engineers. I enjoyed it, they were respectful of my experience so I was able to effectively mentor them, and they were glad of the chance to learn stuff not taught at University.
Now I am back in NZ where we have a selection of both young and old employees. It works well. We older folk respect the education and enthusiasm of the young ones and they respect our experience. The company fosters a culture helping your coworkers so the young ones seek advise when needed and we mentor them. We trust that they generally know what they are doing so don't push our views unless asked. There is no us and them attitude as the culture is one of getting ahead by getting results as a team, not by shafting your coworkers. I suspect that attitude is lacking Silicon Valley?
The biggest challenge I find in getting a job is finding an employer who can afford the extra cost of the salary I expect for my experience and in that respect the young ones do have an advantage, but to call that Ageism is a bit unfair.
Ironically I have gone the opposite way. In my 20s and 30s I had kids and a wife who was not very healthy so need time off often and I could not travel for work easily. Now in my 50s, with a new wife and no kids at home, I'm still healthy but have a lot more flexibility, travel when needed and seldom need time off.
A good post. As a mature employee I think we can, to some extent, be broken in to two groups. Those who learnt a technology and have stuck with that for most of their career and those who keep on learning. When looking for new employment the former group will have trouble and will be tempted to blame ageism. The later group will get further, depending on how much real Ageism there actually is.
A shame, as the problem that HR types don't understand that the quality of work falls off as the hours go up. 50 hours is not a problem but 60+ hours can only be done for a week or two at a time before quality falls off and the extra time actually results in less usable output. The older employees know this, the younger ones have to learn it the hard way while the HR types only capture data on hours, not productivity.
Please don't votes down as flame bait. For those of us not in the USA we do genuinely wonder why someone would chose a capped plan? A few years back here in NZ we were envious of US customers who had unlimited plans while all ISPs here had capped plans. Once the first ISP here offered unlimited data the churn from the other ISPs was huge with the majority of new connections choosing them. Others followed suit and the die hard money grabbing hold out ISPs realised they had to follow suit too or go out of business. Within a couple of years pretty much every ISP offers an unlimited plan now.
While I realise some customers in the USA may have only one choice of ISP the question remains why would someone their chose a capped plan when they had a choice of an unlimited plan? My experience with making products for US customers is they expect everything to 100% perfect, anything less and your product is returned. So it would seem to an outsider that if a customer was told by their existing ISP that their unlimited plan was was being discontinued in favour of a capped plan that they would immediately jump ship to the ISP with the next best unlimited plan. Is this not what happens? Surely the ISPs introducing caps are losing customers in big numbers and those that have unlimited plans are seeing growth from that churn?
Will there be a US and export versions of Windows and Mac OS? I guess the situation with Linux is a bit better e.g. Red Had builds a crippled version for the US market and CentOS do the secure version entirely outside the US. Even if Microsoft and Apple are allowed to make export versions, or do it via an end run around the law, to try and keep customers, would people trust them? Yea, I know, my country is one of many that would pass the same law in the interest of "free trade" so it probably doesn't matter.
You may well be right. It didn't actually happen while I was there, but may have since then. My recommendation was to set up a Linux server spoffing the traffic for a mythical LAN and have it monitor that.
A couple of years ago I spent a couple of years working in China leading a technical team and dealing with the Great Firewall of China. It drove me nuts. Yes you can VPN around it, kind of, for while. I set up private VPNs to servers I ran outside China and I paid for commercial VPN services. They work, but not reliably for any length of time. Every week or two they would stop working and I would have to change my set up. It was just a ongoing PIA. I was so happy to be back home where the Internet just worked.
It grinds you down. A lot of technical people just put up with it and relied on Baidu. Chinese developers are at a significant disadvantage to developers outside China, it feels as if the government just doesn't care how unproductive it makes their developers. I guess they still have too much focus on manufacturing and don't see the value of innovation and development.
Given the size and density of the population in China you can see why the Government wants to control the Internet but the reality of it is depressing when you live with it every day.
I worked for a foreign (New Zealand/USA) company in China that used a VPN to connect back to our offices outside China. We were advised that the government would be needing to install monitoring equipment to our LAN. It had not happened at time I left that company but it sounded like it was simply a case of when not if.
Oh dear, some double checking suggest it may be real. The references actually check out and appears to date back to October 2015. I hate reading news at this time of the year as I never trust half what I read...
If I had mod points I would up vote your post as I was wonder why you couldn't just move you SIM to the new phone. I had assumed the USA had caught up with the rest of the world, I didn't realise they still sold that old tech. I know if I moved to the US I would not sign up with a carrier that was so behind the times.
Yes, but the French claim that the Canadian French is unintelligible. I discovered this when living in China and one staff member accidentally send a sample product to a French customer with the Canadian French video tracks installed. I couldn't blame the Chinese staff member, I was impressed they spoke three languages already and could correctly tell the sound track was French. But the French customer kicked up all hell over being sent a 'foreign' language.
I think pre-check is only available to US citizens. I have APEC that gets me through immigration and customs quicker but not the TSA checks. USA is by far the worst country I have to travel thru and LAX is the worst in the world, no contest. I hate the TSA checks there, so damn slow!
I did have a really pleasant TSA experience leaving North Carolina recently. They allowed travelers to leave shoes and belts on, laptop and toiletries in bags. The end result was an experience on par or better than what I normally have outside the USA. Not sure if it was a one off thing but there was short queues and happy travelers.
From what I have seen from France over the years this could well be true, but not so much anti-American as anti anything not French.
Serious question. Taken to the extreme and all non-French phone manufacturers pull out of France what would be left for consumers to buy? Are there actually any French companies that make phones still? There was Alcatel? Do they still make smart phones? I would love it if the companies got together with a united front and gave the politicians a lesson in public option when the public loose their toys. At the end of the day I think the politicians are assuming they the companies would back down and give them what they demand, which sadly is probably true.
It would be interesting to see who would actually stay. I'm with headkase on this one, I think the right response is to close up shop and pull all products for the shelves. I think even just Apple doing it, making the iPhone unavailable to purchase, would be enough to start a backlash against such a law.
It gets more interesting if the other major players join in and leave the country too. Anybody who stayed, like your suggestion of Microsoft, would be view with suspicion outside France as it would be assumed they are likely share anything with anyone and that could hurt sales elsewhere. Mind you Microsoft can hardly be worried about loosing market share with smartphones so maybe they would stay.
Non-US phone manufactures are not going to upset people by going on record but an Apple loose would be good form them. Sure if Apple is forced to put a back-door in so will the others, but only on USA sold product. Apple would have to back door all phones it sold world wide. The non-US phone companies probably sell more outside the US than they do in the US and on the world market they would have the advantage of being able to offer a secure phone against insecure US models.
Boasting about that advantage before it existed would be bad PR for them. This potential future disadvantage is also probably significant factor in Apple standing against the US government, it could cost then significant sales in future.
What wild guesses? I have watched EVs for about 40 years now. My father ran a fork truck manufacturing company so I was driving EVs before ICs. I have watched them slowly improve to the point they now compete directly with ICs and I have watched the range double every decade. With the intense focus on EVs I think it safe to extrapolate that the battery capacity will continue to improve and cost will continue to come down and at some point in the next decade EVs will exceed ICs in performance.
Hydrogen cars? Never seen one in real life that was moving.
Slashdot Mirror
The key to QI charging is to buy decent multi-coil chargers, like the Tylt Vu, for your most common charging locations. They charge reliably regardless of alignment. I use them beside the bed and on my office desk. I have of a few cheap chargers scattered around the house but you do have to place your phone on those ones just right.
Prior to the Nexus 6P I had brought each new model since the Nexus One but I have stuck with the Nexus 6 as the 6P was a step backwards. I see no need for a fingerprint reader, what real world advantage does it offer? From what I see it weakens security by opening a new attack vector. On the other hand I see QI charging as one of the best things to happen to phones in recent years, no more mucking around vs risking a flat battery. Removing QI from the 6P was a deal breaker for me.
The linked article does feel like a fluff piece, lacking anything worth remembering.
I knew Luna is the Latin name for the Moon, but I speak English not Latin. I have never hear anyone say how bright or how beautiful Luna looks. Pink Floyd didn't release and album call "Dark side of Luna" or "Dark side of a moon". How about NASA, you know, the guys who have actually been there? They do tend to be more precise usually referring to it as the Earth's Moon though are rather flexible about Moon vs moon. They mention lunar but not Luna. Even their URL has moon, not luna, http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/pl....
Basically I see no 'real' problem with my post, However, I'm reasonable, no need for descent. I will continue to call it the Moon and you can call it Luna and I'm sure other Slashdot readers will have own idea what it should be called.
I was trying to think of an analogy to use to make the point to the idiots at AP and it occurs the me that the Internet is the most widely known specific internet in the same way the Moon is the most widely know specific moon. If you wanted to be pedantic you could refer to the Moon as the moon in orbit around the Earth (or should that be the earth now?). If you call the Internet just internet how do you specify which internet you want to refer too? What about Internet2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., is that now internet2?
Apparently AP think it is the moon and some people are not happy about that, http://www.airspacemag.com/dai...
It varies from country to country but my guess is most homes are about 30 years old. Every service in them usually is working on the orginal services because they use simple mechanical principles that are timeless. The doors are on hinges, the lighting has mechanical switches, the water has mechanical valves etc. They are all maintainable and still working 30 years later. How many electronic devices do you own that are 30 years old and if they break can they be fixed. How much of the tech you own today can be expected to be working and maintainable in 30 years? How many of the cloud services do you expect be operation for 30 years?
At one time I worked for a home automation company doing an advance full home automation system aimed at new home builds. It used a local Linux server running on an embedded platform with no moving parts so could be expected to have a long maintenance free standalone life. I did worry about the longer term if it failed. The point become more relevant as that system, installed in a huge mansion, is not easy to understand from a service POV and the company that developed it is history now.
I want to do some home automation in my current home. I have the hardware/software/financial skills and resources to DIY it but what about when I sell my home? I don't want to support it, and indeed my current home is quite new and I am not, so anything I install could be around after I die. Putting in home automation now may actually reduce the resale value as it is a 'risk' for a buyer.
My thoughts are:
- No cloud solutions, who knows when they will go out of business. The intelligence in the system must be standalone and local.
- Use mature standards e.g. Cat 5 cables with RJ45 connections to interconnect remote modules back to a central point.
- Put electronic modules in accessible places. This and the above cabling make it possible to replace the whole electronics with a new generation in future if needed.
- There needs to be more mature and open standards, like X10, So it has a long term future.
I will do home automation but very cautiously and piecemeal with the above point in mind.
The Slashdot summary and the article both fail to mention what country DVDFab is in, but the linked domain implies they are in China. So what was the point of the American court telling them what to do? If the AACS want to shut them down they should be applying Chinese laws in a Chinese court, anything else is just theatrics.
I suspect it is a bigger issue in the USA than other counties partly for cultural reasons. In the US more emphasis is put on looking after yourself and becoming independent at a younger age. The flip side of this is less respect for age and experience. I'm a 50+ Kiwi and I worked in China for a couple of years. I was the oldest employee there by a decade or two and I was managing a team of young engineers. I enjoyed it, they were respectful of my experience so I was able to effectively mentor them, and they were glad of the chance to learn stuff not taught at University.
Now I am back in NZ where we have a selection of both young and old employees. It works well. We older folk respect the education and enthusiasm of the young ones and they respect our experience. The company fosters a culture helping your coworkers so the young ones seek advise when needed and we mentor them. We trust that they generally know what they are doing so don't push our views unless asked. There is no us and them attitude as the culture is one of getting ahead by getting results as a team, not by shafting your coworkers. I suspect that attitude is lacking Silicon Valley?
The biggest challenge I find in getting a job is finding an employer who can afford the extra cost of the salary I expect for my experience and in that respect the young ones do have an advantage, but to call that Ageism is a bit unfair.
Ironically I have gone the opposite way. In my 20s and 30s I had kids and a wife who was not very healthy so need time off often and I could not travel for work easily. Now in my 50s, with a new wife and no kids at home, I'm still healthy but have a lot more flexibility, travel when needed and seldom need time off.
A good post. As a mature employee I think we can, to some extent, be broken in to two groups. Those who learnt a technology and have stuck with that for most of their career and those who keep on learning. When looking for new employment the former group will have trouble and will be tempted to blame ageism. The later group will get further, depending on how much real Ageism there actually is.
A shame, as the problem that HR types don't understand that the quality of work falls off as the hours go up. 50 hours is not a problem but 60+ hours can only be done for a week or two at a time before quality falls off and the extra time actually results in less usable output. The older employees know this, the younger ones have to learn it the hard way while the HR types only capture data on hours, not productivity.
Please don't votes down as flame bait. For those of us not in the USA we do genuinely wonder why someone would chose a capped plan? A few years back here in NZ we were envious of US customers who had unlimited plans while all ISPs here had capped plans. Once the first ISP here offered unlimited data the churn from the other ISPs was huge with the majority of new connections choosing them. Others followed suit and the die hard money grabbing hold out ISPs realised they had to follow suit too or go out of business. Within a couple of years pretty much every ISP offers an unlimited plan now.
While I realise some customers in the USA may have only one choice of ISP the question remains why would someone their chose a capped plan when they had a choice of an unlimited plan? My experience with making products for US customers is they expect everything to 100% perfect, anything less and your product is returned. So it would seem to an outsider that if a customer was told by their existing ISP that their unlimited plan was was being discontinued in favour of a capped plan that they would immediately jump ship to the ISP with the next best unlimited plan. Is this not what happens? Surely the ISPs introducing caps are losing customers in big numbers and those that have unlimited plans are seeing growth from that churn?
Will there be a US and export versions of Windows and Mac OS? I guess the situation with Linux is a bit better e.g. Red Had builds a crippled version for the US market and CentOS do the secure version entirely outside the US. Even if Microsoft and Apple are allowed to make export versions, or do it via an end run around the law, to try and keep customers, would people trust them? Yea, I know, my country is one of many that would pass the same law in the interest of "free trade" so it probably doesn't matter.
Hopefully this proposed law will fail...
You may well be right. It didn't actually happen while I was there, but may have since then. My recommendation was to set up a Linux server spoffing the traffic for a mythical LAN and have it monitor that.
A couple of years ago I spent a couple of years working in China leading a technical team and dealing with the Great Firewall of China. It drove me nuts. Yes you can VPN around it, kind of, for while. I set up private VPNs to servers I ran outside China and I paid for commercial VPN services. They work, but not reliably for any length of time. Every week or two they would stop working and I would have to change my set up. It was just a ongoing PIA. I was so happy to be back home where the Internet just worked.
It grinds you down. A lot of technical people just put up with it and relied on Baidu. Chinese developers are at a significant disadvantage to developers outside China, it feels as if the government just doesn't care how unproductive it makes their developers. I guess they still have too much focus on manufacturing and don't see the value of innovation and development.
Given the size and density of the population in China you can see why the Government wants to control the Internet but the reality of it is depressing when you live with it every day.
I worked for a foreign (New Zealand/USA) company in China that used a VPN to connect back to our offices outside China. We were advised that the government would be needing to install monitoring equipment to our LAN. It had not happened at time I left that company but it sounded like it was simply a case of when not if.
Oh dear, some double checking suggest it may be real. The references actually check out and appears to date back to October 2015. I hate reading news at this time of the year as I never trust half what I read...
The original article has no published date but the source view shows "2016-04-02T20:32:01-04:00" which smells a lot April 1st fodder to me.
If I had mod points I would up vote your post as I was wonder why you couldn't just move you SIM to the new phone. I had assumed the USA had caught up with the rest of the world, I didn't realise they still sold that old tech. I know if I moved to the US I would not sign up with a carrier that was so behind the times.
Yes, but the French claim that the Canadian French is unintelligible. I discovered this when living in China and one staff member accidentally send a sample product to a French customer with the Canadian French video tracks installed. I couldn't blame the Chinese staff member, I was impressed they spoke three languages already and could correctly tell the sound track was French. But the French customer kicked up all hell over being sent a 'foreign' language.
I think pre-check is only available to US citizens. I have APEC that gets me through immigration and customs quicker but not the TSA checks. USA is by far the worst country I have to travel thru and LAX is the worst in the world, no contest. I hate the TSA checks there, so damn slow!
I did have a really pleasant TSA experience leaving North Carolina recently. They allowed travelers to leave shoes and belts on, laptop and toiletries in bags. The end result was an experience on par or better than what I normally have outside the USA. Not sure if it was a one off thing but there was short queues and happy travelers.
Sounds like time to open that ice skating rink in hell...
From what I have seen from France over the years this could well be true, but not so much anti-American as anti anything not French.
Serious question. Taken to the extreme and all non-French phone manufacturers pull out of France what would be left for consumers to buy? Are there actually any French companies that make phones still? There was Alcatel? Do they still make smart phones? I would love it if the companies got together with a united front and gave the politicians a lesson in public option when the public loose their toys. At the end of the day I think the politicians are assuming they the companies would back down and give them what they demand, which sadly is probably true.
It would be interesting to see who would actually stay. I'm with headkase on this one, I think the right response is to close up shop and pull all products for the shelves. I think even just Apple doing it, making the iPhone unavailable to purchase, would be enough to start a backlash against such a law.
It gets more interesting if the other major players join in and leave the country too. Anybody who stayed, like your suggestion of Microsoft, would be view with suspicion outside France as it would be assumed they are likely share anything with anyone and that could hurt sales elsewhere. Mind you Microsoft can hardly be worried about loosing market share with smartphones so maybe they would stay.
Non-US phone manufactures are not going to upset people by going on record but an Apple loose would be good form them. Sure if Apple is forced to put a back-door in so will the others, but only on USA sold product. Apple would have to back door all phones it sold world wide. The non-US phone companies probably sell more outside the US than they do in the US and on the world market they would have the advantage of being able to offer a secure phone against insecure US models.
Boasting about that advantage before it existed would be bad PR for them. This potential future disadvantage is also probably significant factor in Apple standing against the US government, it could cost then significant sales in future.
What wild guesses? I have watched EVs for about 40 years now. My father ran a fork truck manufacturing company so I was driving EVs before ICs. I have watched them slowly improve to the point they now compete directly with ICs and I have watched the range double every decade. With the intense focus on EVs I think it safe to extrapolate that the battery capacity will continue to improve and cost will continue to come down and at some point in the next decade EVs will exceed ICs in performance.
Hydrogen cars? Never seen one in real life that was moving.