-Shades up so other planes can see you better while you are on the ground at night
I haven't heard this reason before, and if you think about it, dedicated freighters don't have passenger windows at all for light to escape through.
One explanation that I have heard is that having the shades open provides better situational awareness during the critical landing and takeoff phases of fight. Suppose the port side engine catches fire. With the shades open, people will see this and the flight attendants will know to direct passengers to evacuate using the starboard side exits only.
Your airplane contained a microcell and wifi base station. This reduces the transmitter power concerns because the mobile unit is able to reduce power because it's close to the base station. It also resolves the problem of a phone being present in many ground cells at once, since the mobile unit instead connects to the aircraft-based cell.
The most popular provider of inflight wifi in the US is Gogo, which uses a ground-based network of CDMA transmitters to link the aircraft's wifi base station with the Internet.
The article doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. They acknowledge the 5GB cap on current plans, then assume that same throttling cap will apply to the new plan as well. Then they state that because you can't tether, it's virtually impossible to hit 5GB anyway.
AT&T has never charged $30 for 2GB. I don't recall what they charged for the original iPhone, but starting with the iPhone 3G it was $30 for unlimited. Then when they introduced tiered pricing, it was $25 for 2GB. Now it's $30 for 3GB.
They'll stay in business because the discount carriers don't offer good phones. Yes, Virgin Mobile has several Android smartphones, but they're not particularly good ones. No Samsung Galaxy or Droid Razr or HTC Evo phones there, instead you get phones like the LG Optimus V or Motorola Triumph or HTC Wildfire S. On some of their phones, they even denote that they come with Android 2.2 as a feature!
Cellphones are an interesting case because having redundant infrastructure isn't quite the eyesore that it is for power and landline phone companies. So its easier to have competition at the physical layer. You still have multiple cell towers, but those aren't be running down every street the way wire-based services do. There's still the spectrum problem, though.
Sounds like the big problem is the link to the nodes is too small for the number of homes. They need to reduce the number of homes off each node even more, or get bigger pipes to each node. Probably both.
As another reply points out, Verizon FIOS does run fiber to each home. AT&T U-Verse is even closer to Cox's architecture in that it's fiber to the node, then copper to the home.
AT&T was also able to reduce the total bandwidth need by building the U-Verse TV network as an IPTV service. Each channel is a separate multicast stream, resulting in the link to the home only having to carry the channels currently being watched/recorded by the customer, rather than having to hold all channels simultaneously as conventional cable TV systems.
So you're one of the people that actually had the cap implemented? They talked about it over a year ago, but I've yet to see it happen on my U-Verse line, which is supposed to be 250GB/month.
As a cable TV provider, Comcast is supposed to be a regulated monopoly. And there's a reason for that, and it's the physical layer.
In most areas, you have one electric company, one phone company, and one cable TV company. That's because each provider has to run their own wires, and a hundred years ago, city leaders didn't want to have all the separate wires running everywhere if each electric company, for example, had to have their own power lines to serve their own customers. To avoid this, they granted a monopoly to a single company, but it's a regulated monopoly -- the rates they charge to customers are controlled by the government; if they want to raise rates, they have to ask for and get approval.
Nowadays, things are a little different in that there are sometimes requirements for the company that built and owns the physical layer to allow other companies to provide end-user service. But since the company that owns the physical layer competes for end users with companies that rely on them to provide the service, there's often not a financial advantage to the end user to use a different company. Regulation would have to force the owner of the physical layer to provide pricing that would allow third party competition.
Internet access is kind of interesting in that essentially the same product can be provided over different physical layers: The cable TV network, the wireline telephone network, satellites, and the cellular telephone networks. The biggest two providers of residential high speed services are the cable TV and wireline phone networks, which have regulated monopoly status due to the historical issues I described above.
Now there is an alternative that's popped up in a few places, such as Ashland, Oregon. In Ashland's case, the city itself built a high speed fiber network throughout the city. But the city itself isn't a content or access provider. Instead, third party companies can compete to offer Internet access through the fiber network. I'm not sure how the cable TV side works, but I know that cable TV comes over the fiber network as well. In that case, all the access providers compete fairly, since the owner of the physical layer doesn't compete with them. Potential issues with this is that the cost to build and maintain the network comes out of taxpayer dollars, so people who choose not to use the service are still paying for it. And in other cases where local government has attempted to build it's own network infrastructure, the existing providers have complained quite loudly.
Hawaiian has two distinct types of flights: The very short inter-island flights that max out around 40-45 minutes (Honolulu-Hilo), and the Trans-Pacific flights to the west coast (and soon New York) and international destinations that start at around 4.5 hours (Honolulu-San Francisco).
The inter-island network has pretty high on-time reliability, but problems can have a big impact. With the number of flights an aircraft performs each day, a significant delay early in the morning can cause delays on several other flights throughout the day that that particular aircraft is scheduled to fly (referred to in the industry as a "line of flying").
The Trans-Pacific network is more delay prone, but since it's a fewer number of flights overall, it's impact on percentage based statistics is less. Most of Hawaiian's Trans-Pacific fleet will start the morning in a west coast city, fly to Honolulu, then turn around and fly back to the west coast and spend the night (I haven't looked closely at the international schedule to see how that works in the scheduling). A late arrival on the west coast can delay the following morning's flight if the same crew is due to fly back to Honolulu, in order to allow the crew to meet their rest requirements.
According to TFA, a the former web designer for one of the Representatives in the state's House created a web page attacking her claiming she owes him money.
I don't know what Boost offers, but Vrigin does have a handful of mid-range Android phones, and unlimited talk/text/data is $55/month. You pay more for the phone up front because you're buying it outright, but when I did the math a while ago (not with the unlimited plan though), you came out saving quite a bit over two years versus getting a phone for free-ish and paying more per month to subsidize an identical phone with Sprint.
Last time I looked, AT&T U-Verse and AT&T DSL were the same price at the same speeds. The difference is that DSL provides slower and cheaper options than U-Verse, while U-Verse provides faster and more expensive options than DSL.
Having had both, along with Time Warner Cable (both RoadRunner and Earthlink), in the same city, I won't even consider TWCs offerings. Random connection failures that are sometimes solved by rebooting the modem and sometimes solved by waiting until the device sorts itself out.
IE 2.0 was the first version for Mac and it came out in 1996. I recall the articles at the time rated it a bit higher, as it felt faster due to its ability to load all the text on a page before embedded images were done. Netscape at the time could only do that if the image sizes were provided in the HTML IMG tag. And with so many of us on dialup at the time, being able to read the text while images were still loading was a pretty big deal.
The lame Apple browser you're thinking of was Cyberdog, which was an OpenDoc based suite of internet apps.
American Express in the US does have the "pay wave" thing, their term for it is Express Pay. I've never used it. You can contact Amex and have the feature disabled on your account so the transactions don't get approved, but the RFID chip is still present in the card so conceivably some bad guy can poll it for data.
Google has Google Groups, which evolved from DejaNews, though it can be used with local Google-hosted groups in addition to Usenet-based groups.
I'm a member of groups on both Google and Yahoo, and don't really know which is better; as I primary use them via a desktop email client. But I do know the Google Groups interface does have the same conversation view that Gmail does.
Well, except for the PlainTalk technology they introduced in 1993.
Google and Microsoft are about to release the next wave of speech products ( e.g. in Android 4 and WP 8 ). These companies have NLP technology Apple hasn't even begin to tackle. Like NLP in all major world languages and across many markets.
So, the technology you can get from Apple today is inferior to technology you'll be able to get from Google and Microsoft at some point in the future. This is neither surprising nor a valid argument.
Nor do you know what Apple is working on for future releases, but it's can be said with reasonably high assurance that Siri 2.0 will be better than the Siri we have today.
I wonder how many of those "1M+ cities with two cable providers" have two companies that actually compete with each other. In San Diego, there are two, Time Warner and Cox, but they don't really compete since they each have separate territories within the city (more or less, Cox covers areas south of the San Diego River while Time Warner covers areas north of the river). So the only way to switch from one to the other is to move.
So there's still only one "cable" option in any given location, the competitors are the satellite companies and AT&T U-Verse.
I thought a few years ago that one of the providers (I want to say either T-Mobile or Cingular since it makes most sense with GSM phones) offered a lower plan price if you brought your own phone to them.
The no-contract/prepaid market seems to be the best way to get a lower, unsubsidized plan price. Virgin Mobile's smartphones cost more upfront than the equivalent Sprint phone (Sprint owns Virign Mobile USA) since you're buying the phone up front, but the monthly plan prices are lower.
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-Shades up so other planes can see you better while you are on the ground at night
I haven't heard this reason before, and if you think about it, dedicated freighters don't have passenger windows at all for light to escape through.
One explanation that I have heard is that having the shades open provides better situational awareness during the critical landing and takeoff phases of fight. Suppose the port side engine catches fire. With the shades open, people will see this and the flight attendants will know to direct passengers to evacuate using the starboard side exits only.
Your airplane contained a microcell and wifi base station. This reduces the transmitter power concerns because the mobile unit is able to reduce power because it's close to the base station. It also resolves the problem of a phone being present in many ground cells at once, since the mobile unit instead connects to the aircraft-based cell.
The most popular provider of inflight wifi in the US is Gogo, which uses a ground-based network of CDMA transmitters to link the aircraft's wifi base station with the Internet.
The article doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. They acknowledge the 5GB cap on current plans, then assume that same throttling cap will apply to the new plan as well. Then they state that because you can't tether, it's virtually impossible to hit 5GB anyway.
Apple is now supporting X11 on Mountain Lion through the open-source XQuartz project:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5293?viewlocale=en_US
http://xquartz.macosforge.org/
Only for 9 more days, as Virgin Mobile USA will release the iPhone 4 and 4S on June 29.
AT&T has never charged $30 for 2GB. I don't recall what they charged for the original iPhone, but starting with the iPhone 3G it was $30 for unlimited. Then when they introduced tiered pricing, it was $25 for 2GB. Now it's $30 for 3GB.
They'll stay in business because the discount carriers don't offer good phones. Yes, Virgin Mobile has several Android smartphones, but they're not particularly good ones. No Samsung Galaxy or Droid Razr or HTC Evo phones there, instead you get phones like the LG Optimus V or Motorola Triumph or HTC Wildfire S. On some of their phones, they even denote that they come with Android 2.2 as a feature!
Cellphones are an interesting case because having redundant infrastructure isn't quite the eyesore that it is for power and landline phone companies. So its easier to have competition at the physical layer. You still have multiple cell towers, but those aren't be running down every street the way wire-based services do. There's still the spectrum problem, though.
I hadn't followed closely enough to the DSL side of things to notice if they'd implemented the cap there. I remember when both were announced.
If they ever do roll out the cap on my U-Verse Internet service, it won't take me very long to place an order with DSLExtreme.
Sounds like the big problem is the link to the nodes is too small for the number of homes. They need to reduce the number of homes off each node even more, or get bigger pipes to each node. Probably both.
As another reply points out, Verizon FIOS does run fiber to each home. AT&T U-Verse is even closer to Cox's architecture in that it's fiber to the node, then copper to the home.
AT&T was also able to reduce the total bandwidth need by building the U-Verse TV network as an IPTV service. Each channel is a separate multicast stream, resulting in the link to the home only having to carry the channels currently being watched/recorded by the customer, rather than having to hold all channels simultaneously as conventional cable TV systems.
That seems fitting. When I was a Comcast customer, DNS requests were so slow it seemed like they may well have been routing them through a black hole.
So you're one of the people that actually had the cap implemented? They talked about it over a year ago, but I've yet to see it happen on my U-Verse line, which is supposed to be 250GB/month.
As a cable TV provider, Comcast is supposed to be a regulated monopoly. And there's a reason for that, and it's the physical layer.
In most areas, you have one electric company, one phone company, and one cable TV company. That's because each provider has to run their own wires, and a hundred years ago, city leaders didn't want to have all the separate wires running everywhere if each electric company, for example, had to have their own power lines to serve their own customers. To avoid this, they granted a monopoly to a single company, but it's a regulated monopoly -- the rates they charge to customers are controlled by the government; if they want to raise rates, they have to ask for and get approval.
Nowadays, things are a little different in that there are sometimes requirements for the company that built and owns the physical layer to allow other companies to provide end-user service. But since the company that owns the physical layer competes for end users with companies that rely on them to provide the service, there's often not a financial advantage to the end user to use a different company. Regulation would have to force the owner of the physical layer to provide pricing that would allow third party competition.
Internet access is kind of interesting in that essentially the same product can be provided over different physical layers: The cable TV network, the wireline telephone network, satellites, and the cellular telephone networks. The biggest two providers of residential high speed services are the cable TV and wireline phone networks, which have regulated monopoly status due to the historical issues I described above.
Now there is an alternative that's popped up in a few places, such as Ashland, Oregon. In Ashland's case, the city itself built a high speed fiber network throughout the city. But the city itself isn't a content or access provider. Instead, third party companies can compete to offer Internet access through the fiber network. I'm not sure how the cable TV side works, but I know that cable TV comes over the fiber network as well. In that case, all the access providers compete fairly, since the owner of the physical layer doesn't compete with them. Potential issues with this is that the cost to build and maintain the network comes out of taxpayer dollars, so people who choose not to use the service are still paying for it. And in other cases where local government has attempted to build it's own network infrastructure, the existing providers have complained quite loudly.
Hawaiian has two distinct types of flights: The very short inter-island flights that max out around 40-45 minutes (Honolulu-Hilo), and the Trans-Pacific flights to the west coast (and soon New York) and international destinations that start at around 4.5 hours (Honolulu-San Francisco).
The inter-island network has pretty high on-time reliability, but problems can have a big impact. With the number of flights an aircraft performs each day, a significant delay early in the morning can cause delays on several other flights throughout the day that that particular aircraft is scheduled to fly (referred to in the industry as a "line of flying").
The Trans-Pacific network is more delay prone, but since it's a fewer number of flights overall, it's impact on percentage based statistics is less. Most of Hawaiian's Trans-Pacific fleet will start the morning in a west coast city, fly to Honolulu, then turn around and fly back to the west coast and spend the night (I haven't looked closely at the international schedule to see how that works in the scheduling). A late arrival on the west coast can delay the following morning's flight if the same crew is due to fly back to Honolulu, in order to allow the crew to meet their rest requirements.
According to TFA, a the former web designer for one of the Representatives in the state's House created a web page attacking her claiming she owes him money.
I don't know what Boost offers, but Vrigin does have a handful of mid-range Android phones, and unlimited talk/text/data is $55/month. You pay more for the phone up front because you're buying it outright, but when I did the math a while ago (not with the unlimited plan though), you came out saving quite a bit over two years versus getting a phone for free-ish and paying more per month to subsidize an identical phone with Sprint.
Last time I looked, AT&T U-Verse and AT&T DSL were the same price at the same speeds. The difference is that DSL provides slower and cheaper options than U-Verse, while U-Verse provides faster and more expensive options than DSL.
Having had both, along with Time Warner Cable (both RoadRunner and Earthlink), in the same city, I won't even consider TWCs offerings. Random connection failures that are sometimes solved by rebooting the modem and sometimes solved by waiting until the device sorts itself out.
FYI, Boost is owned by Sprint, as is Virgin Mobile USA.
IE 2.0 was the first version for Mac and it came out in 1996. I recall the articles at the time rated it a bit higher, as it felt faster due to its ability to load all the text on a page before embedded images were done. Netscape at the time could only do that if the image sizes were provided in the HTML IMG tag. And with so many of us on dialup at the time, being able to read the text while images were still loading was a pretty big deal.
The lame Apple browser you're thinking of was Cyberdog, which was an OpenDoc based suite of internet apps.
Ad Block on Chrome downloads everything and then hides elements
Actually, this was fixed and AdBlock for Chrome has prevented ads from downloading starting with version 2.0.
American Express in the US does have the "pay wave" thing, their term for it is Express Pay. I've never used it. You can contact Amex and have the feature disabled on your account so the transactions don't get approved, but the RFID chip is still present in the card so conceivably some bad guy can poll it for data.
Google has Google Groups, which evolved from DejaNews, though it can be used with local Google-hosted groups in addition to Usenet-based groups.
I'm a member of groups on both Google and Yahoo, and don't really know which is better; as I primary use them via a desktop email client. But I do know the Google Groups interface does have the same conversation view that Gmail does.
Apple had been ignoring this space
Well, except for the PlainTalk technology they introduced in 1993.
Google and Microsoft are about to release the next wave of speech products ( e.g. in Android 4 and WP 8 ). These companies have NLP technology Apple hasn't even begin to tackle. Like NLP in all major world languages and across many markets.
So, the technology you can get from Apple today is inferior to technology you'll be able to get from Google and Microsoft at some point in the future. This is neither surprising nor a valid argument.
Nor do you know what Apple is working on for future releases, but it's can be said with reasonably high assurance that Siri 2.0 will be better than the Siri we have today.
I wonder how many of those "1M+ cities with two cable providers" have two companies that actually compete with each other. In San Diego, there are two, Time Warner and Cox, but they don't really compete since they each have separate territories within the city (more or less, Cox covers areas south of the San Diego River while Time Warner covers areas north of the river). So the only way to switch from one to the other is to move.
So there's still only one "cable" option in any given location, the competitors are the satellite companies and AT&T U-Verse.
I thought a few years ago that one of the providers (I want to say either T-Mobile or Cingular since it makes most sense with GSM phones) offered a lower plan price if you brought your own phone to them.
The no-contract/prepaid market seems to be the best way to get a lower, unsubsidized plan price. Virgin Mobile's smartphones cost more upfront than the equivalent Sprint phone (Sprint owns Virign Mobile USA) since you're buying the phone up front, but the monthly plan prices are lower.