On the contrary, SCTP is a transport protocol just like TCP, except with a large number of added features. The main problem with SCTP has nothing to do with SCTP at all. It is that NAT devices do not support any transport protocol that they haven't been programmed for in advance. This makes SCTP next to impossible to deploy on a broad scale - NAT, that wart upon router-kind, is ubiquitous.
On top of that, SCTP also won't take off in the IPv6 world (where NAT isn't an issue), purely because Microsoft are on record saying they're never going to support it.
Which is a shame, because SCTP is actually a much better fit than TCP for almost all applications that currently use TCP, by virtue of the fact that it is packet based instead of stream based. Also, the multi-streaming would be very beneficial for HTTP, which is something that HTTP/2.0 is instead trying to bodge ontop of TCP.
1. SCTP - identified by a protocol number (132) - acts at the network layer. If a router along the route refuses SCTP, you are screwed
If your ISP is refusing to route protocols other than TCP/UDP/ICMP its time to change ISP - this will equally break GRE, AH, ESP, 6in4 and a whole host of other commonly used protocols.
The other thing SCTP has going for it is that its packet based instead of stream based, which makes it more suitable for almost everything we currently use tcp for...
Uhm, no, you've got that backwards. In the UK, the truth is *always* a valid defence. If you were telling the truth, you will always win a libel suit - there is no way for you to lose.
The reason the UK has a "bad reputation when it comes to libel laws" is because lawyers think it should be like the American system, where it doesn't matter what the truth is as long as you can pay more money than the other guy.
You can't get legal aid for libel suits; so yeah - if you don't have enough money you can't defend yourself.
That is simply not true. One of the reasons that areas like Cornwall and Somerset are getting grants to improve broadband speed is precisely to attract businesses who can work almost anywhere provided they have the bandwidth.
And so businesses can pay for it, just the same as they would pay for an office if they were expecting employees to use that instead of working from home...
(For the record, I too work from home and I don't find 8Mbps too slow at all... I could occasionally do with a faster upstream, but the downstream is fine)
Yea must better to lock into Google. Your best interests are definitely in their mind for the zero dollars/month you give them.
Whilst I tend to agree that using Google isn't the best idea; you're wrong here - you can set up google mail on your own domain, if you want to move you can just move whilst keeping the domain.
That's about what I pay for 6mbps, doesn't sound farfetched to have a little more than three times that speed for the same price in 7 years, seven years ago I had 2 Mbps for a similar price.
You can already get over 20Mbps for under $20 in the UK... the kicker is the "everyone" bit - people out in the sticks can't get 20Mbps cheaply, nor do I really expect them to be able to be 2020... nor am I entirely sure that 20Mbps access for everyone is something that we should be subsidising - you don't need 20Mbps to do the essentials (tax returns, getting the news, etc); the only thing you need that kind of bandwidth for is entertainment, and there are plenty of other non-internet methods of getting entertained already, without the general public having to subsidise another... (Frankly, whilst I certainly wouldn't _mind_ my DSL being upgraded, I don't find my current 8Mbps particularly slow... Upgrading certainly isn't something I'm interested in spending money on, so I'm not sure why I should expect other people to spend it on me instead)
"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."
That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."
The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer. Don't worry - if you run any operating system that either used floppies, or has been developed since floppies came into style, your operating system will read them.
Hmm, I tried sticking a floppy disk into my Android phone and it couldn't read it...
I can understand why you'd do it if the ad was a massive flash blob but many ads by Google or just images aren't resource intensive.
I agree with you that the standard Google adsense ads are ok, blocking them is counterproductive (because websites need income). However, Youtube ads (also operated by Google) have gone way over the line and are way too intrusive; also far too many websites still shove floating divs and the like in your face (in fact, thats something that seems to be increasing), and manually blocking only the intrusive ads becomes far too much effort so invariably all ads get blocked.
I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents - so far, so good. But go a few more generations back and I have 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents
Possibly not - as you go further up the tree the chances of you finding some inbreeding increases. These days people move around a lot, so aren't so likely to inbreed, but previously that hasn't been the case, and with a relatively small population of partners to choose from, inevitably you'll get inbreeding (even more so for people who lived in small villages).
This is nonsense. People still hang up on each other. The load crash just isnt there... instead its a simple call ended. Then they attempt to call back unsure if you did it on purpose only to get voicemail. Then it dawns on them.
Umm, so given that facial recognition is out of the bottle what is your preference.
Tighter government regulation of businesses to prevent big searchable databases being constructed (although admittedly this isn't going to stop governments doing it).
Educate the public as to what uploading your photos/videos to google/facebook/etc. means - there are still far too many people who buy into "if you've got nothing to hide..."
I am surprised to see the push against this, especially in the types of communties like here on slashdot
in the USA to me, this seems just a continuation of the freedom to make photographs in public that people have enjoyed for a long while now. While there have been some challenges.. its been upheld a few times that freedom of speech can include making videos or photographs
I support peoples freedom to take photos/video in public. To my mind, the problem with Google Glass / Facebook / etc. isn't that people are taking photos, its that they are all being uploaded to a big online database, where they can be automatically analysed in great detail. I don't care that someone took a picture of me; I don't even care that other people(*) might see it; I do care that Google / Facebook / The government / whoever, is analysing millions of photos and can create a searchable database of where I've been, who I was there with, etc.
(*) of course the problem with publishing photos online is that it isn't just people who can see it. Nothing stopping a web spider collecting images from the web and analysing them just as facebook could do; its just a little more difficult since the data and metadata isn't all in one neat location and format to begin with, but certainly doable.
Which are utterly useless compared to the xenon flash tube you'll find on even the cheapest, oldest point & shoot...
, and b) while you can't get the same quality as by having less pixels in the same size sensor, you can still mitigate the problem by averaging neighboring pixels
If you spend the same amount installing a higher-resolution sensor that you would implementing optical zoom, you don't have to zoom, at least in a cellphone. And zoom takes up a lot of space.
Conversely a higher res sensor reduces low light performance, so isn't always a good plan (but I've never come across optical zoom in a cell phone, and imagine it takes a fairly huge amount of space).
Yes, I *do* quite like having a portable multipurpose device that performs many communications and data retrieval/display tasks acceptably well.
Multipurpose phones are nice because you've always got it with you when you unexpectedly need some function it provides. But I don't think they are often a replacement for the dedicated hardware...
If I'm out and about and unexpectedly want to take a photo then sure, I'll use my phone. But if I was expecting to want to take photos I take my point and shoot camera or DSLR.
If I unexpectedly need a GPS, I'll use my phone. But if I'm going walking I'll take my dedicated GPS.
Whilst I do use the GPS on my phone a lot, I still have an old dedicated eTrex which I use for walking - the battery lasts a lot longer, its waterproof, the accuracy is better (I'm not actually that bothered about the accuracy, but why is it that my ~10 year old eTrex supports SBAS and I've not seen a single modern smartphone that does?), its generally more robust (IMHO the eTrex is going to survive a drop onto sharp rocks much better than my smartphone with its big glass screen), I don't have to take my gloves off to use it (my smartphone has a capacitative touch screen, so you can't drive it with gloves on).
lower-grade instant cameras
I still have a separate point-and-shoot camera (Canon Ixus) - the phone doesn't come close because it only has an LED flash, doesn't have a viewfinder, doesn't have a lanyard, has a much worse battery life and is probably a lot less robust to knocks and drops. I also have a DSLR, which can't be replaced by a phone. Despite both my DSLR and point & shoot cameras having a much lower pixel count than my phone (which idiots seem to use to indicate the quality of camera), the photos they can produce in a wide range of conditions are much better than the phone. The phone's camera is good so long as you're taking photos in bright daylight and don't want to zoom.
lower grade purpose built hand-held games.
Not something I've owned since I was at school, so not something I'd consider my phone having replaced.
For anything, if you want the "real thing" (like serious camera resolution and lensing) you will stick with the purpose built device. Or, a GPS device for golfing.
As I said, I can think of a lot of things that have been integrated into devices like smartphones, but I can't think of anything that I've actually replaced because of this. The smartphone integrates lots of functionality, but none of it is anywhere close to the dedicated devices, so it gets used only when I don't have the dedicated device with me - if I already know I'm going to need something (say, GPS or camera) then I take the GPS and camera with me.
X10 is a REALLY old protocol. Which happens to be still around and still quite popular, but newer technologies such as z-wave or zigbee are probably taking over. And there are modules available which can be built-in, so your house looks just as nicely designed as any other - but smarter.
Yes, but the post I was replying to was specifically talking about X10.
That said, the zigbee, etc. devices seem to be similarly priced as X10 stuff and still not especially widely available.
You find X10 expensive? Compared to the 50 dollar a piece LED bulbs we're talking about here? Look again then.
No, I wasn't comparing it to a $50 LED bulb. I was saying that X10 is too expensive for all but the most dedicated geek to use... the same happens to apply to pretty much *all* the home automation technologies, which is why you haven't seen home automation take off. And frankly there's no especially good reason for it - you can get a smartphone for $50, WTF does it cost that much to turn a bulb on and off?
I'm not even sure the "consolidation" that has happened actually reduces the number of devices people have though. Sure, I can now play video on my phone, but that doesn't mean I've thrown out the TV - the TV happens to do the job a hell of a lot better. Whilst I can think of a lot of things I can now do on a consolidated device, I can't think of any of them that have actually _replaced_ another device, other than possibly my smartphone which has replaced the PDA/dumbphone pair.
And what if you wish to speak with someone who uses Google's XMPP service?
The same thing that happens if you want to email someone who's email provider is blocking all incoming emails - you tell them their service provider is being a dick and that they need to change to one of the many other service providers out there who aren't being almighty bellends....
"Home control" has been around since the 1990s. It was once promoted with some really annoying blinking pop-up ads for the X10 wireless control system. Around 2001, X10 was the fourth most popular property on the web. You can still buy X10 gear. It works fine. Nobody cares.
X10 has a few problems that come to mind: 1. It's *really* slow. The protocol sends 1 bit per zero-crossing event, which gives you a grand total of 100bps. You may not think you need much bandwidth for lighting control, but with such a slow data rate, doing things like "turn devices A, B and C on at the same time" become noticably "turn device A on, then B, then C". 2. It's really expensive - Not too bad if you just want one or 2 controllable devices, but replacing every light switch/socket in your house with an X10 module really will cost a lot. 3. Pretty much all the X10 modules are bulky and ugly as sin.
Remote off/on control of home lights and appliances just isn't that useful.
I think remove control of lights would be quite useful, but not useful enough to justify the high cost of doing it (with X10). Other appliances would benefit from remote control too, but that would usually be something more than on/off - i.e. I don't just want to turn my heating on/off, I want to be able to set the temperature and stuff too.
When camping with my S3, I made extensive use of airplane mode and it worked wonders. I haven't tried forcing it down off LTE, but I've heard that works well too.
I have frequently heard people saying that switching to GSM instead of 3G (I don't have an LTE phone) saves battery. However, I'm not sure I understand this - the engineer's test specs for my previous phone (HTC Dream) put the 3G standby current draw lower than the GSM standby draw...
Put yourself back in 2007. Many people were not in 3G coverage areas.
Maybe in the US... 3G coverage was pretty wide spread in the UK and across europe - a lot of people wondered WTF apple were smoking, trying to push a so called "smart-phone" that lacked 3G support into a market that was pretty dominated by 3G phones.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, SCTP is a transport protocol just like TCP, except with a large number of added features. The main problem with SCTP has nothing to do with SCTP at all. It is that NAT devices do not support any transport protocol that they haven't been programmed for in advance. This makes SCTP next to impossible to deploy on a broad scale - NAT, that wart upon router-kind, is ubiquitous.
On top of that, SCTP also won't take off in the IPv6 world (where NAT isn't an issue), purely because Microsoft are on record saying they're never going to support it.
Which is a shame, because SCTP is actually a much better fit than TCP for almost all applications that currently use TCP, by virtue of the fact that it is packet based instead of stream based. Also, the multi-streaming would be very beneficial for HTTP, which is something that HTTP/2.0 is instead trying to bodge ontop of TCP.
I think the person you're replying to is taking the "it isn't illegal if you don't get caught" attitude ;)
1. SCTP - identified by a protocol number (132) - acts at the network layer. If a router along the route refuses SCTP, you are screwed
If your ISP is refusing to route protocols other than TCP/UDP/ICMP its time to change ISP - this will equally break GRE, AH, ESP, 6in4 and a whole host of other commonly used protocols.
The other thing SCTP has going for it is that its packet based instead of stream based, which makes it more suitable for almost everything we currently use tcp for...
Big Bang is only a theory.
People who say "$foo is only a theory" probably need to go and look up what the word "theory" actually means...
Uhm, no, you've got that backwards. In the UK, the truth is *always* a valid defence. If you were telling the truth, you will always win a libel suit - there is no way for you to lose.
The reason the UK has a "bad reputation when it comes to libel laws" is because lawyers think it should be like the American system, where it doesn't matter what the truth is as long as you can pay more money than the other guy.
You can't get legal aid for libel suits; so yeah - if you don't have enough money you can't defend yourself.
That is simply not true. One of the reasons that areas like Cornwall and Somerset are getting grants to improve broadband speed is precisely to attract businesses who can work almost anywhere provided they have the bandwidth.
And so businesses can pay for it, just the same as they would pay for an office if they were expecting employees to use that instead of working from home...
(For the record, I too work from home and I don't find 8Mbps too slow at all... I could occasionally do with a faster upstream, but the downstream is fine)
Yea must better to lock into Google. Your best interests are definitely in their mind for the zero dollars/month you give them.
Whilst I tend to agree that using Google isn't the best idea; you're wrong here - you can set up google mail on your own domain, if you want to move you can just move whilst keeping the domain.
That's about what I pay for 6mbps, doesn't sound farfetched to have a little more than three times that speed for the same price in 7 years, seven years ago I had 2 Mbps for a similar price.
You can already get over 20Mbps for under $20 in the UK... the kicker is the "everyone" bit - people out in the sticks can't get 20Mbps cheaply, nor do I really expect them to be able to be 2020... nor am I entirely sure that 20Mbps access for everyone is something that we should be subsidising - you don't need 20Mbps to do the essentials (tax returns, getting the news, etc); the only thing you need that kind of bandwidth for is entertainment, and there are plenty of other non-internet methods of getting entertained already, without the general public having to subsidise another... (Frankly, whilst I certainly wouldn't _mind_ my DSL being upgraded, I don't find my current 8Mbps particularly slow... Upgrading certainly isn't something I'm interested in spending money on, so I'm not sure why I should expect other people to spend it on me instead)
Umm, that's actually a Good Thing... More customers == incentive for more capacity....
"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."
That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."
The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer. Don't worry - if you run any operating system that either used floppies, or has been developed since floppies came into style, your operating system will read them.
Hmm, I tried sticking a floppy disk into my Android phone and it couldn't read it...
I can understand why you'd do it if the ad was a massive flash blob but many ads by Google or just images aren't resource intensive.
I agree with you that the standard Google adsense ads are ok, blocking them is counterproductive (because websites need income). However, Youtube ads (also operated by Google) have gone way over the line and are way too intrusive; also far too many websites still shove floating divs and the like in your face (in fact, thats something that seems to be increasing), and manually blocking only the intrusive ads becomes far too much effort so invariably all ads get blocked.
I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents - so far, so good. But go a few more generations back and I have 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents
Possibly not - as you go further up the tree the chances of you finding some inbreeding increases. These days people move around a lot, so aren't so likely to inbreed, but previously that hasn't been the case, and with a relatively small population of partners to choose from, inevitably you'll get inbreeding (even more so for people who lived in small villages).
This is nonsense. People still hang up on each other. The load crash just isnt there... instead its a simple call ended. Then they attempt to call back unsure if you did it on purpose only to get voicemail. Then it dawns on them.
That the callee's battery has run out?
Umm, so given that facial recognition is out of the bottle what is your preference.
Tighter government regulation of businesses to prevent big searchable databases being constructed (although admittedly this isn't going to stop governments doing it).
Educate the public as to what uploading your photos/videos to google/facebook/etc. means - there are still far too many people who buy into "if you've got nothing to hide..."
I am surprised to see the push against this, especially in the types of communties like here on slashdot
in the USA to me, this seems just a continuation of the freedom to make photographs in public that people have enjoyed for a long while now. While there have been some challenges.. its been upheld a few times that freedom of speech can include making videos or photographs
I support peoples freedom to take photos/video in public. To my mind, the problem with Google Glass / Facebook / etc. isn't that people are taking photos, its that they are all being uploaded to a big online database, where they can be automatically analysed in great detail. I don't care that someone took a picture of me; I don't even care that other people(*) might see it; I do care that Google / Facebook / The government / whoever, is analysing millions of photos and can create a searchable database of where I've been, who I was there with, etc.
(*) of course the problem with publishing photos online is that it isn't just people who can see it. Nothing stopping a web spider collecting images from the web and analysing them just as facebook could do; its just a little more difficult since the data and metadata isn't all in one neat location and format to begin with, but certainly doable.
a) cellphones have LED "flash" lights on them now
Which are utterly useless compared to the xenon flash tube you'll find on even the cheapest, oldest point & shoot...
, and b) while you can't get the same quality as by having less pixels in the same size sensor, you can still mitigate the problem by averaging neighboring pixels
Which makes the zoom useless... Great :)
If you spend the same amount installing a higher-resolution sensor that you would implementing optical zoom, you don't have to zoom, at least in a cellphone. And zoom takes up a lot of space.
Conversely a higher res sensor reduces low light performance, so isn't always a good plan (but I've never come across optical zoom in a cell phone, and imagine it takes a fairly huge amount of space).
Yes, I *do* quite like having a portable multipurpose device that performs many communications and data retrieval/display tasks acceptably well.
Multipurpose phones are nice because you've always got it with you when you unexpectedly need some function it provides. But I don't think they are often a replacement for the dedicated hardware...
If I'm out and about and unexpectedly want to take a photo then sure, I'll use my phone. But if I was expecting to want to take photos I take my point and shoot camera or DSLR.
If I unexpectedly need a GPS, I'll use my phone. But if I'm going walking I'll take my dedicated GPS.
I can think of several: hand held GPS
Whilst I do use the GPS on my phone a lot, I still have an old dedicated eTrex which I use for walking - the battery lasts a lot longer, its waterproof, the accuracy is better (I'm not actually that bothered about the accuracy, but why is it that my ~10 year old eTrex supports SBAS and I've not seen a single modern smartphone that does?), its generally more robust (IMHO the eTrex is going to survive a drop onto sharp rocks much better than my smartphone with its big glass screen), I don't have to take my gloves off to use it (my smartphone has a capacitative touch screen, so you can't drive it with gloves on).
lower-grade instant cameras
I still have a separate point-and-shoot camera (Canon Ixus) - the phone doesn't come close because it only has an LED flash, doesn't have a viewfinder, doesn't have a lanyard, has a much worse battery life and is probably a lot less robust to knocks and drops. I also have a DSLR, which can't be replaced by a phone. Despite both my DSLR and point & shoot cameras having a much lower pixel count than my phone (which idiots seem to use to indicate the quality of camera), the photos they can produce in a wide range of conditions are much better than the phone. The phone's camera is good so long as you're taking photos in bright daylight and don't want to zoom.
lower grade purpose built hand-held games.
Not something I've owned since I was at school, so not something I'd consider my phone having replaced.
For anything, if you want the "real thing" (like serious camera resolution and lensing) you will stick with the purpose built device. Or, a GPS device for golfing.
As I said, I can think of a lot of things that have been integrated into devices like smartphones, but I can't think of anything that I've actually replaced because of this. The smartphone integrates lots of functionality, but none of it is anywhere close to the dedicated devices, so it gets used only when I don't have the dedicated device with me - if I already know I'm going to need something (say, GPS or camera) then I take the GPS and camera with me.
X10 is a REALLY old protocol. Which happens to be still around and still quite popular, but newer technologies such as z-wave or zigbee are probably taking over. And there are modules available which can be built-in, so your house looks just as nicely designed as any other - but smarter.
Yes, but the post I was replying to was specifically talking about X10.
That said, the zigbee, etc. devices seem to be similarly priced as X10 stuff and still not especially widely available.
You find X10 expensive? Compared to the 50 dollar a piece LED bulbs we're talking about here? Look again then.
No, I wasn't comparing it to a $50 LED bulb. I was saying that X10 is too expensive for all but the most dedicated geek to use... the same happens to apply to pretty much *all* the home automation technologies, which is why you haven't seen home automation take off. And frankly there's no especially good reason for it - you can get a smartphone for $50, WTF does it cost that much to turn a bulb on and off?
Your point?
I'm not even sure the "consolidation" that has happened actually reduces the number of devices people have though. Sure, I can now play video on my phone, but that doesn't mean I've thrown out the TV - the TV happens to do the job a hell of a lot better. Whilst I can think of a lot of things I can now do on a consolidated device, I can't think of any of them that have actually _replaced_ another device, other than possibly my smartphone which has replaced the PDA/dumbphone pair.
And what if you wish to speak with someone who uses Google's XMPP service?
The same thing that happens if you want to email someone who's email provider is blocking all incoming emails - you tell them their service provider is being a dick and that they need to change to one of the many other service providers out there who aren't being almighty bellends....
X10! X10! X10! X10! X10! X10! X10! X10!
"Home control" has been around since the 1990s. It was once promoted with some really annoying blinking pop-up ads for the X10 wireless control system. Around 2001, X10 was the fourth most popular property on the web. You can still buy X10 gear. It works fine. Nobody cares.
X10 has a few problems that come to mind:
1. It's *really* slow. The protocol sends 1 bit per zero-crossing event, which gives you a grand total of 100bps. You may not think you need much bandwidth for lighting control, but with such a slow data rate, doing things like "turn devices A, B and C on at the same time" become noticably "turn device A on, then B, then C".
2. It's really expensive - Not too bad if you just want one or 2 controllable devices, but replacing every light switch/socket in your house with an X10 module really will cost a lot.
3. Pretty much all the X10 modules are bulky and ugly as sin.
Remote off/on control of home lights and appliances just isn't that useful.
I think remove control of lights would be quite useful, but not useful enough to justify the high cost of doing it (with X10). Other appliances would benefit from remote control too, but that would usually be something more than on/off - i.e. I don't just want to turn my heating on/off, I want to be able to set the temperature and stuff too.
When camping with my S3, I made extensive use of airplane mode and it worked wonders. I haven't tried forcing it down off LTE, but I've heard that works well too.
I have frequently heard people saying that switching to GSM instead of 3G (I don't have an LTE phone) saves battery. However, I'm not sure I understand this - the engineer's test specs for my previous phone (HTC Dream) put the 3G standby current draw lower than the GSM standby draw...
Put yourself back in 2007. Many people were not in 3G coverage areas.
Maybe in the US... 3G coverage was pretty wide spread in the UK and across europe - a lot of people wondered WTF apple were smoking, trying to push a so called "smart-phone" that lacked 3G support into a market that was pretty dominated by 3G phones.