> ON a digital product like a phone, I'm at a loss to know > why someone would need another keyboard?
Graffiti. Laugh if you must, but I've been using Graffiti for more than 20 years (I got my first Palm Pilot in 1997). By now, it's burned into muscle memory... I don't even have to think about it anymore. It's subconscious. Without it, I'm totally handicapped.
The sad thing, though, is accuracy. A 16MHz Palm III achieved nearly flawless recognition. An 8-core 2GHz+ Nexus 6p still struggles to not fuck up 1 in 20-30 characters. I think cpu speed management is the main culprit... if I lock the cpu governor to max performance with a custom kernel, the accuracy problems mostly go away. The elimination of physical hardkeys on new Android phones also aggravates the problem... every few minutes, my finger will graze a softkey below the input area & trigger an undesired back/home/history keypress. My previous phone (a Galaxy Note 4) also had some serious issues with Graffiti that seemed to be due to Samsung doing funky global things with gesture-recognition in the background... certain strokes seemed to trigger a spike in background activity that caused Graffiti to miss what should have been the next 10-25 samples.
Properly-implemented DRM can have totally open control & ui software... it's just that historically, control-freak content owners and their enablers aren't content to merely prevent you from copying and redistributing their precious content, they ALSO want total control over the way you *consume* it & your viewing experience.
Copy PREVENTION is child's play. Any video subsystem created after Vista & Protected Video Path can prevent copying, because everything from key exchange to hdmi output is done in hardware. Every SoC used by Android & iOS has the same capability.
So, why does Google & Apple still fuck with your ability to watch videos on a rooted/jailbroken device? Because they don't JUST want to prevent you from copying the video, they also want to make sure you can't fast-forward over commercials (or play commercials in a subwindow while you do something else). If they could get away with forced-engagement ads (tracking eye movement & pausing the commercial if you weren't paying enough attention to it), they'd do it in an instant.
In Florida's case, it's because the state allows FPL to more or less dictate the terms of undergrounding, so we end up with absurd requirements like "FPL requires conveyance of a dedicated easement of 20 feet adjacent to a public road for undergrounding", which in many parts of South Florida would require the eminent-domain purchase (and potential destruction) of the ENTIRE FRONT YARD of everyone on one side of the street, and the entire front yard of one or two homes on the other side for the transformers. This is where FPL's insane post-Wilma "three trillion dollar" price tag to bury Dade County's power lines came from.
All the state has to do is pass a law telling FPL, "listen up bitch, you're going to bury power lines in the 10' backyard easement where the current poles are, or we'll make you sell your franchise to someone who WILL".
Of course, Florida will never do that. Mustn't harm the sanctity of a private company's profit margin...
Trust me. Floridians are REALLY PISSED at FPL right now. Southeast Florida barely got nicked by a distant passing storm & had power outages exceeding a week. There's talk about a class-action lawsuit to claw back FPL's profits from the last 5 years & using them to bury power lines.
My point is that Puerto Rico's power grid is no worse than Florida's was pre-Wilma, and isn't much worse than Florida's *present* power grid. Getting lines buried is *hard*, even when there's agreement from the mayors on down that it needs to be done. At the end of the day, FPL can afford to pay its lawyers more and keep swatting down attempts to MAKE them do it.
Just to add... if you hack your own parallel cable, you can also do something like pair a cheap $109 800W Harbor Freight generator with a more expensive 1800-2200 watt inverter generator. Just connect the homemade Y cable to both generators, start up the Harbor Freight generator first, then start up the inverter generator second... it'll see the voltage from the Harbor Freight generator and sync up to it. Once you've gotten everything that needs lots of surge power started up, you can turn off the Harbor Freight generator and leave the inverter generator running.
UPS, I totally agree, is fucked and hopeless. They probably won't even acknowledge the location of packages already in transit until the end of next week. They suck.
FedEx might be do-able early next week if the package were held for pickup at their main facility in San Juan.
Ditto for 3-day Priority Mail. According to USPS.gov, a 55-pound box measuring 22x22x20 would cost around $90 to mail and arrive on Monday, 9/25 (with caveat that their air freight capacity is limited & might sell out at any time)
The only catch is that a 3200-watt generator would probably weigh too much to send via air, so you'd probably have to settle for a 1800-2200 running watt (2500-3000 starting watt) generator.
There's actually another nifty fact I discovered last week: contrary to the official instructions that come with most inverter generators, you don't HAVE to use the manufacturer's official parallel cable, nor do you have to use two identical generators.
Most parallel-capable inverter generators will sync up to ANY source of live voltage they see, regardless of source. You can even use a DC-AC inverter to add a few hundred watts of surge capacity to the generator (say, if your generator is big enough to RUN your air conditioner, but not quite big enough to START the air conditioner without a little extra help).
All you need is a homemade "Y" cable (take two outdoor extension cords, cut off the plugs and receptacles leaving 18-24 inches of cord, then splice the wires from the two plugs onto the receptacle). The main thing you'll lose by making your own hacked cable instead of using the official one (with banana plugs) is passive safety... the official cables are designed so that if someone pulls the cable out from one of the generators, the live voltage will still be at least somewhat shrouded against accidental contact. If someone yanks out one of the plugs on a homemade cable, the pins on the plug will be carrying live voltage. Electrically, though, they're the same as far as the generator is concerned. Behind the plastic panel, those banana plug lugs are wired directly to their corresponding prongs in the receptacle.
Since when did they have concrete utility poles in 19th-century New York?
Seriously. This isn't a street view of some backwards country... it's the street view of a commercial neighborhood in a big city where the power company is in the middle of replacing old wood utility poles with new concrete poles & simply hasn't taken down the old poles and wires yet.
When FPL upgraded poles in Florida, lots of OUR streets looked EXACTLY like that for a year or more. The old wires didn't come down for months, and I think the poles themselves were left in place for another year or two after that.
If you have family members in Puerto Rico and want to do them the greatest favor possible, buy them a 3000-3600 watt inverter-type generator, four 5-gallon gas cans (empty, of course), and one or two Carbon Monoxide detectors (or smoke alarms with CO detection built in), then FedEx (NOT UPS) it to them tomorrow so they'll get it by Monday.
Why 3000-3600 watts? Big enough to start the air conditioner & refrigerator, with enough spare capacity to throttle it down to half-speed to keep them both running overnight. Trust me... if the climate in Puerto Rico is anything like the climate in Miami, air conditioning isn't a luxury, it's life-support.
3000 watts is also big enough to run a second window a/c unit or a washing machine (tip: don't use the dryer... even if your generator is big enough, dryers cause large amounts of outside air to get sucked into the house... including outside air with lots of carbon monoxide from the generator sitting 10 feet away from the door or window that's cracked open so you can feed the extension cords through it.)
Why inverter-type? Fuel efficiency. They're going to be using it for a few weeks, minimum. A traditional 10hp 4800-5600 watt generator burns through about 15-25 gallons of gas PER DAY. It's kind of like comparing a 1970 Cadillac Eldorado to a Toyota Prius. An inverter generator will literally pay for itself in gas savings after 2-3 weeks. Post-Irma, I spent more than $250 to keep my old generator running until the power was finally restored a week later... and THAT was with 4-8 hours/day of non-usage. They're also a LOT quieter than conventional generators, especially when running in "Eco" mode. Imagine trying to sleep over the noise of a typical window a/c AND two lawnmowers running in the back yard... that's what it's like trying to sleep with a traditional generator.
Why gas cans? Gas cans are utterly IMPOSSIBLE to buy for at least a few weeks after a major hurricane. With an inverter generator, four 5-gallon cans should be enough to let them get away with going to the gas station every other day. Five or six are even better, but I was BLOWN AWAY last week when I saw how expensive gas cans are now (I paid $10/can post-Wilma and felt ripped off... now, they're more like $25-30 apiece AND have shitty new safety spouts that turn refueling into a 10+ minute exercise... if you have any old gas cans, treat their spouts like gold).
Why the carbon monoxide detectors? Safety. Carbon monoxide can easily get into the house, and the fumes WON'T wake them up if they're asleep. Put one detector near the door/window that's open for the extension cords, and another next to wherever people are sleeping.
Another tip to share with them: a typical American electric water heater (one or two coils, 240v, approx. 4500 watts) can be powered with 120v from a generator without problems. It'll draw 1/4th the total wattage (ie, around 1100 watts at 120v) and take longer to heat up the water, but it definitely works. Wire it up as follows: generator 120v "hot" to water heater's "240v hot #1". generator's "neutral" to water heater's "240v hot #2". generator's ground to water heater's chassis ground. Try to use an extension cord with at least AWG14 wire or better... AWG16 will work in a pinch, but you'll end up wasting 10-20% of your wattage heating up the extension cord instead of the water.
Other nice features for the generator to have: bluetooth or wifi so you can check remaining fuel/runtime and current power draw using your phone or tablet. Push-button starting (esp. if someone who's not very strong has to start it).
A generator able to sustain 1800W and surge to 2500W might be OK, but inverter-type generators in THAT range tend to have absurdly small gas tanks. Trust me... getting up in the middle of the night to refuel really, REALLY sucks. Especially when it's 89 degrees and 80% humidity outside.
... but, were you streaming music from Amazon Cloud, using waze nonstop, and other similar apps that depend upon continuous data connectivity all the way from WPB down to Miami? Or are you one of those people who could go for HOURS without noticing (or being traumatized by) data-connectivity loss, because you use your phone mainly for making voice calls?
Generally speaking, if I'm someplace without working T-mobile internet, I'm going to be painfully aware of that fact within 7-9 minutes.
Either you got extremely lucky & haven't left your house in 2 weeks, don't use lots of mobile data,
or we have quite different opinions about what's included in the definition of "South Florida" (my definition includes coastal-urban Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Collier, and Lee counties, plus the upper keys north of Islamorada... the middle & lower keys are another matter entirely).
As far as I know, phones with a T-mobile SIM card won't EVER data-roam on AT&T. I've seen plenty of spots in Florida (like Shark Valley in the Everglades) where T-mo phones will roam on AT&T for voice & sms, but won't use AT&T for data at all. Ditto, with Sprint roaming on Verizon. In both cases, AT&T and Verizon users both have working data, but T-mobile & Sprint users don't.
Come to think about it, I've NEVER found a spot (in the US) where a phone with (US) T-mo SIM will data-roam. Ever.
Ok, make that "DS-3". The point is, AT&A and Verizon use backhaul that comes with aggressive SLAs, backed up with escalating fines & liquidated damages whenever there's an outage. T-mo & Sprint generally don't (at least, not for non-voice/sms traffic).
If your business has a DS-1& it goes down for 4+ hours, the telco ITSELF is going to start getting hit with HUGE hourly fines and automatically owe pre-negotiated liquidated damages unless it can convince the FCC and courts it followed their regulations & official procedures to the letter & was hit by a truly hopeless scenario (like flooding in New Orleans post-Katrina).
A 4+ hour outage from Comcast or OtherCheapCo *might* get you a partial refund of the period's service charges... IF you bitch about it & they don't have a clause buried in the fine print that lets them off the hook.
THAT is why businesses that depend upon data for their functioning & existence pay more for a real DS-3 line (and have a Ku-band satellite dish on-site ready to deploy if *that* fails).
A hurricane side-swiping a city with brief category 2 winds & causing regional power outages is expected, and an army of generators and backhaul with aggressive SLAs is the accepted best-practice mitigation. An earthquake, asteroid-strike, or graupel-dumping July ice storm in Miami would qualify as "freak event nobody can be expected to plan for, let alone plan to mitigate".
Warning to anyone in Florida considering a switch to T-mobile: their data network is nowhere CLOSE to having the robustness of Verizon and AT&T. Ask your friends & coworkers... they'll confirm it.
For the past week, T-mobile has had large-scale data outages across Florida that were MUCH more widespread and longer-lasting than Verizon's and AT&T's.
Simply put, T-mobile (like Sprint) uses cheaper, unreliable backhaul providers (like Comcast) for ALL data backhaul. Verizon and AT&T have real T-3 lines at some sites, and private microwave links to those sites from the rest.
T-mobile has NOWHERE NEAR the generator infrastructure (including private fuel depots and trucks) that Verizon and AT&T have. They use battery backup for almost everything.
Simply put, T-mobile's network is very "lean" and has very little/no ability to deal with large-scale commercial power outages (at least, insofar as data is concerned).
If you care about having internet access after a storm, T-mobile is definitely NOT the right network for you. You won't be satisfied with them. At the very least, buy a used Verizon JetPack wifi hotspot on ebay & keep it around so you can activate it for a month whenever T-mo fails you... because inevitably, it WILL.
Fuck "natural language", I just want them to give us back the search primitive for +"must contain this literal text". Or complex boolean queries that rigorously observe parentheses, double-quotes, and proximity.
I wrote an app a few years ago that ran a query, then automatically fetched every search result & bruteforce-searched through them via regex for the real results, but Google's server detected something amiss & started throwing captcha challenges at it.
In a very real sense, Andrew's eyewall basically *was* a 15-mile diameter EF-3 stovepipe tornado ringed by hundreds or thousands of transient stronger vortices.
I grew up in Miami & was told by a friend who lived further south that if you went outside during the eye to look around, you could actually SEE a ring of tornado-like vortices along the approaching eyewall's inner edge.
This also explains the damage pattern. Areas even a mile beyond the eyewall path had lots of damage, but the area INSIDE the eyewall path was utterly *destroyed*. Driving south on US-1 from UM (Coral Gables) afterwards, you went through about a mile of bad seemingly-random tornado-like damage that suddenly turned into "oh my FUCKING GOD!" - level damage between sw 80th street & sw 88th street (Kendall Drive), and rapidly got even WORSE over the next mile until you got to the point where even concrete walls & roofs collapsed (around sw 104th street, continuing all the way down to Homestead).
A brief tornado is also the only real explanation for the car that got flipped in the NHC parking lot... neighboring buildings had damage, but nothing like what you'd expect to see from a storm capable of overturning a car (I think Venturi effect was a definite factor). The building actually HAD an underground garage in addition to the surface lot where the car was located, but was prone to flooding even during a bad summer rainstorm. The whole reason why I even *evacuated* for Andrew was because I had a brand new car & lived in a building with a semi-underground garage... everyone just took for granted that it would flood.
> This merde was never more than "change for the sake of change."
I think it was at least partially driven by a management directive to accommodate low-end, egregiously-underpowered tablets with shit hardware specs. IMHO, Aero Glass was about as close as you can get to perfection without realtime raytracing if you had an i7 & respectable 3D card.
Except that also means even older NEXUS devices might not be able to run newer versions once Google EOLs them. Remember, Linux kernel modules are specific to not only a particular VERSION of Linux, they're specific to a particular combination of build options on specific hardware (in contrast to Windows, which in many cases can be coaxed into using drivers that are literally 20 years old due to Windows' strong hardware abstraction).
AOSP might be open-source, but a real-world Android device built around a Qualcomm SoC is still 100% dependent upon Qualcomm making new binaries available (at least, if you want the radio modem, wi-fi, bluetooth, gps, camera, OpenGL ES, and everything else to work, too).
Access to "the kernel source" is necessary, but mere availability doesn't necessarily assure the ability to build a working kernel for a particular device from scratch.
The sad fact is that many of the best Android ROMs at XDA are cut 'n paste "kitchen" ROMs that are no different from the way Windows Mobile ROMs used to be made, and plenty of others only run (limp?) with the phone's official OEM kernel.
Not even NEXUS phones are released with official build scripts capable of building the phone's complete 'stock' ROM from source.
The main problem with Scala is that it enables experienced Scala developers to write idiomatic code that's utterly indecipherable by anyone besides other, comparably-sophisticated Scala developers who've internalized that same idiom.
With Java, a less-experienced Java developer can still generally make sense of code that's above his skill level and eventually figure out how it works. With Scala, a less-experienced developer is just plain dead in the water because Scala allows *so much* to be implicitly defined by context & convention.
IntelliJ's Scala team is painfully aware of this. For years, they've been trying to mitigate Scala's problem at the IDE level by having the IDE sniff out code idioms defined by convention & context and display them semi-inline with the code itself. It helps, but in many cases it's more like fragile training wheels subject to breaking off at any time. And it makes Scala even more IDE-bound than Java... with Java, a good IDE is necessary for keeping sane & grunt-work automation... with Scala, it's an almost-essential part of deciphering code written by someone else *at all.* It's very hard to join a team of experienced Scala devs as an experienced Java developer and work efficiently alongside them... the Java-to-Scala learning curve is nowhere close to being as straightforward as most people initially think.
In short, Scala attempts to resolve Java's endless boilerplate code that needs an IDE for humans to manage efficiently with dense, idiomatic code that needs an IDE (doing de-facto realtime-decompilation & reverse-engineering) to be understood by humans.
With a good IDE, both meet somewhere near the middle of the "source readability" spectrum. My point is that Scala trades one major shortcoming (excessive boilerplate) for one that's approximately equal in magnitude, but opposite in details.
In theory, a good Scala developer can find a "happy middle path" that straightens up Java's boilerplate mess without becoming unreadable... but in the real world, Scala tends to just invert the old problem into an equally-bad new one.
CS without GenEd would produce grads who *might* be able to get decently-paying jobs right after graduation, but the moment they got laid off after the next recession or merger/acquisition/bankruptcy/outsourcing-fetish, they'd be totally fucked unless they had the resources to spend another year or two taking classes on whatever's hot today.
CS isn't about "learning to code" -- it's about learning HOW to learn, and gaining the background knowledge that might save your ass someday and help you to remain relevant as the industry continues moving forward while you're spending 5 years maintaining some project that's only relevant to your current employer and distracted after work by family life.
Bootcamps can be useful for getting programmers who already have expertise in one area to quickly gain a solid grounding in another, by ushering them through the awkward "clueless n00b" phase so they at least know what to search for on Google & Stack Overflow.
I know that I'm *personally* vulnerable to falling into "X-Y Problems" when learning something radically new (getting stumped trying to solve problem X, concluding that solving Y will at least put me on the path to solving X, then getting so caught up in Y that X gets totally forgotten about & I end up finding a brilliant, creative solution to the wrong problem). In these cases, a few days of structure and personal attention from an instructor can save me *weeks* of semi-random thrashing around.
Examples of bootcamp-type hands-on seminars that would have been useful at various points in my life:
* C# and Visual Studio for senior Java developers.
* Android Studio w/Gradle for Maven-experienced Android developers who know how to use Eclipse & ADK.
* Intro to AppCompatV4, Fragments, and everything else that ICS added/changed from Eclair/Froyo/Gingerbread.
* A Git bootcamp for developers who are at least intermediate-level Subversion users.
* Developing Android apps with Kotlin using Android Studio & Gradle (with optional Thursday prequel on Gradle basics, and Friday prequel on advanced Gradle).
* Building a working AOSP-derived custom ROM and kernel (including Google services & apps) for recent Nexus devices.... you get the idea. Basically, longer versions of the hands-on labs at many conferences.
For multi-week bootcamps, it would have to be something like "Introduction to IOS development for experienced Android developers" (or vice-versa)... and even *those* would probably require optional prerequisite tracks for Windows developers with no pre-existing experience with Linux (for Android) or OS X (for IOS).
The idea of taking a dozen random people with no real background in programming & turning them into commercially-useful developers of *anything* meaningful in just a week or two is crazy, and borderline fraud.
There were also a bunch of eclipse glasses made using film certified for photography, which is a tiny bit less-dark than what's officially required for direct viewing (especially by children... adults generally have some degree of pre-cataracts providing a bit of extra UV protection).
So, yeah. For adults, it's mainly a regulatory & certification matter. If you used them to look at the sun a few times pre- and post-totality, plus maybe 2-3 minutes before and after, you'd probably sustain more REAL damage from direct-viewing without glasses in the seconds before & after totality than the difference between camera- and direct-view-certified glasses would have prevented.
If you stared nonstop at the sun for an hour, you'd probably at least see lingering artifacts for a few hours EVEN WITH glasses that are certified to be safe, because that's just how human vision actually works.
Staring at the sun is bad, but the fact is, we ALL look directly at the sun a few times per year, even if it's just looking up into the sky, reflections from a mirror, or driving home from work with the sun straight ahead to the west at sunset. Humans are fragile, but we aren't *that* fragile. If we were, lots of us would be blind by adulthood.
IMHO, at least 99% of the "zOMG, I was blind3d by teh 3clipz" we're seeing now is just mass hysteria.
The problem is that Amazon doesn't keep merchandise segregated by seller. So vendor #1 can do everything right, source high-quality ISO-certified glasses, and send them to Amazon for warehousing & fulfillment. Vendors #2 through 87 can buy counterfeit glasses with identical packaging and send them to Amazon. A customer orders glasses from the reputable vendor, but Amazon sends him a counterfeit pair... then fucks the reputable seller because it can't be bothered to even TRY and tell them apart.
That's why it's so common to see reviews on Amazon that don't even seem to be for the same product... often, they *aren't*. One person gets a legit item & writes a good review. Another person gets a knockoff item that fails, and writes a one-star review. Eventually, Amazon just lashes out & indiscriminately punishes everyone, bad AND good alike. They don't actually *care* about trite folkways like "justice" when it's cheaper to just smash everyone within 10 feet with a sledgehammer.
There's really nothing magic about satellite phones. Decades ago, satellites had low-power transmitters (they were basically like an incandescent night light bulb in orbit), so you needed a big dish to have enough gain to receive the signal. Because dishes were so directional, it became commonplace to re-use RF spectrum for adjacent satellites. Fast forward to the late-90s/early 00s... satellites NOW have transmitters that can output hundreds of watts... but there are so many of them, spectrum-reuse becomes almost a necessity. So we now reuse spectrum by using a small dish to boost the signal strength of one target satellite above the strength of its neighbors, then attenuate it so the desired signal is weak and adjacent signals drop off entirely.
Services like Sirius/XM work because they combine powerful transmitters with a license to use their spectrum throughout all of north America, including Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Since there's no spectrum-reuse (by satellites, anyway), you can tune it with a regular antenna.
Sat phones just take it a step further by moving the directional focusing to the satellite itself (ie, "spot beams") so the downlink only occupies a chunk of spectrum in an area a few hundred miles wide, using a combinaton of TDMA & CDMA techniques to further reduce interference, then use TDMA for the uplink.
The main reason why Iridium uses low-orbit satellites instead of geostationary ones is spectrum-reuse... using geostationary satellites would be like trying to run a mobile phone service on a single chunk of spectrum shared by an entire hemisphere of users. There's just not enough. By using satellites in low orbit, they reduce the spectrum footprint of each one, allowing cellular-like spectrum reuse (basically, using them like 200 mile high cell towers with super-regional coverage, including areas too remote or politically-hostile for normal cellular phone service).
The main problem is that the PATENTS on Dolby Digital have expired by now, but the TRADEMARKS remain in full force. So, you (as a manufacturer) could DO it (transcoding PCM5.1 to DD5.1 via SPDIF)... but you'd have a feature that cost money to implement, couldn't be advertised (at least, not in any way that wouldn't totally confuse or be overlooked by most consumers), and would leave you at risk of a major lawsuit if an employee with loose lips ever said anything about it in a way that infringed upon Dolby's trademark.
There's even a good example of this... back in the 1980s, I remember seeing low-end cassette decks sold with "Dynamic Noise Reduction" (or just a mysterious feature called "DNR"). It was Dolby-B, and "everybody" knew it was Dolby-B, but nobody could openly ADMIT it. Dolby-B was cheap & easy to implement (even in low-end audio gear) and the patents had all expired by the late 1970s, but Dolby was EXTREMELY aggressive about defending all of their various trademarks related to Dolby-B. I believe Dolby even went so far as to sue magazine publishers who dared to print articles using "Dolby B" in the same sentence as the name of any gear that supported it, but wasn't an official Dolby licensee.
There's also the problem of GETTING the bitstream into something that can transcode it. As of now, there's basically one supported way for consumer devices to output PCM 5.1 or 7.1 audio: over HDMI. Licensing HDMI requires licensing HDCP. HDCP imposes an avalanche of restrictions, #1 of which is "thou shall not output protected audio in digital form, unless it's PCM2.0". Any box from China that can extract DD5.1 from HDMI and output it over SPDIF without first downsampling it to stereo is officially infringing (and I have yet to see a single such box that actually WORKS as advertised... I've owned two... the first couldn't spoof EDID (so the source saw the PCM2.0 TV and killed the surround sound), the second couldn't transcode DD+7.1 to DD5.1 (so I could use it to bitstream DD5.1 from Amazon Instant Video, but Netflix was still a no-go because it could only bitstream DD+7.1... and my 5.1-only amp just gives up when it sees extra data chunks it doesn't understand, instead of ignoring them like it's technically supposed to).
For me, the most frustrating thing is that there's no real way to even know for sure whether the PCM2.0 stereo audio contains Prologic-encoded surround... it's subtle to begin with, and my amp ALWAYS shows its mode as "ProLogic" when it sees SPDIF PCM2.0, so I'm usually annoying my guests cycling through ProLogic, Prologic Movie, Prologic Music, and Simulated Surround for the first half hour of any movie desperately trying to find the one that sounds the least like shit.
No, because if ANYTHING happens to the phone during that year, you're totally at the lessor's mercy. They can charge you the full original MSRP (and probably a penalty on top) if the phone gets lost/stolen/broken during the year, or if you return it in less than shrinkwrap-pristine condition (their official definitions of "normal wear & tear" almost certainly deviates from YOUR understanding of what it means). And if you DO need to buy a replacement at some point during the year, there's usually a clause requiring that you purchase that replacement FROM THEM, at WHATEVER PRICE THEY DICTATE... if you bought an identical replacement from Amazon or Newegg, they'd be entitled to refuse it (since the phone's serial number wouldn't match the serial number of the one they sent you), charge you some inflated shipping & handling fee to send the refused phone back to you, AND charge you their official inflated replacement price (plus some penalty) anyway. The fact that they're probably going to turn around and sell the returned phones to someone like Asurion for $10/pound as scrap doesn't matter... there's almost certainly a mandatory arbitration clause, and you'd spend 100 times the phone's purchase price on a lawyer attempting to PROVE it to the arbiter.
With consumer-item leases, the deck is totally and hopelessly 100% stacked against you. Sure, you might get lucky... but if you lose the dice roll, you're going to be in a world of pain by the time they're finished throwing arbitrary penalties at you. Especially if there's no language allowing you to purchase the item at the end of the lease.
If you truly intend to keep the phone for a year, buy it outright, then sell it yourself using swappa.com, craigslist, or ebay after buying your new one. At least then, you'll be able to fix it if it breaks, and buy replacements from whomever gives you the best deal, instead of being totally at the lessor's mercy.
Just to give you a small idea of how evil some companies can be, after Hurricane Wilma, I got a letter that was sent to me by mistake by Enterprise Rent-a-Car (I'd rented a car from them a few weeks earlier, and their loss department fucked up and sent the letter to me by mistake) demanding the immediate payment of almost $7,000 for damage to a rental car caused by flooding (Wilma caused extensive flooding in Miami). Anyway, they admitted it was sent to me by mistake, but what I'll never forget was the first paragraph of the letter, which basically said, "the Loss Damage Waiver doesn't include coverage from flooding", then conceded in the next sentence that the language in the brochure might have been "confusing" since it implied "total coverage" (you know, the usual excuse of corporate America... "total" on the marketing materials means "total coverage for what we decide it covers, subject to any exclusions incorporated by reference into the fine print of Article VIII, section c(iii), page 84, on file with the state Department of Commerce). A few months later, I remember seeing a story on the evening news about thousands of complaints filed by consumers against rental car companies who tried doing that exact thing. From what I recall, the state eventually ruled against most of the rental car companies, but the only penalty was that they had to eat the loss and refund any amount already paid. In other words, it was a totally safe gamble for them... "heads they would have won, tails they merely broke even".
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> ON a digital product like a phone, I'm at a loss to know
> why someone would need another keyboard?
Graffiti. Laugh if you must, but I've been using Graffiti for more than 20 years (I got my first Palm Pilot in 1997). By now, it's burned into muscle memory... I don't even have to think about it anymore. It's subconscious. Without it, I'm totally handicapped.
The sad thing, though, is accuracy. A 16MHz Palm III achieved nearly flawless recognition. An 8-core 2GHz+ Nexus 6p still struggles to not fuck up 1 in 20-30 characters. I think cpu speed management is the main culprit... if I lock the cpu governor to max performance with a custom kernel, the accuracy problems mostly go away. The elimination of physical hardkeys on new Android phones also aggravates the problem... every few minutes, my finger will graze a softkey below the input area & trigger an undesired back/home/history keypress. My previous phone (a Galaxy Note 4) also had some serious issues with Graffiti that seemed to be due to Samsung doing funky global things with gesture-recognition in the background... certain strokes seemed to trigger a spike in background activity that caused Graffiti to miss what should have been the next 10-25 samples.
So yes, thirdparty keyboards matter to me. A lot.
Properly-implemented DRM can have totally open control & ui software... it's just that historically, control-freak content owners and their enablers aren't content to merely prevent you from copying and redistributing their precious content, they ALSO want total control over the way you *consume* it & your viewing experience.
Copy PREVENTION is child's play. Any video subsystem created after Vista & Protected Video Path can prevent copying, because everything from key exchange to hdmi output is done in hardware. Every SoC used by Android & iOS has the same capability.
So, why does Google & Apple still fuck with your ability to watch videos on a rooted/jailbroken device? Because they don't JUST want to prevent you from copying the video, they also want to make sure you can't fast-forward over commercials (or play commercials in a subwindow while you do something else). If they could get away with forced-engagement ads (tracking eye movement & pausing the commercial if you weren't paying enough attention to it), they'd do it in an instant.
In Florida's case, it's because the state allows FPL to more or less dictate the terms of undergrounding, so we end up with absurd requirements like "FPL requires conveyance of a dedicated easement of 20 feet adjacent to a public road for undergrounding", which in many parts of South Florida would require the eminent-domain purchase (and potential destruction) of the ENTIRE FRONT YARD of everyone on one side of the street, and the entire front yard of one or two homes on the other side for the transformers. This is where FPL's insane post-Wilma "three trillion dollar" price tag to bury Dade County's power lines came from.
All the state has to do is pass a law telling FPL, "listen up bitch, you're going to bury power lines in the 10' backyard easement where the current poles are, or we'll make you sell your franchise to someone who WILL".
Of course, Florida will never do that. Mustn't harm the sanctity of a private company's profit margin...
Trust me. Floridians are REALLY PISSED at FPL right now. Southeast Florida barely got nicked by a distant passing storm & had power outages exceeding a week. There's talk about a class-action lawsuit to claw back FPL's profits from the last 5 years & using them to bury power lines.
My point is that Puerto Rico's power grid is no worse than Florida's was pre-Wilma, and isn't much worse than Florida's *present* power grid. Getting lines buried is *hard*, even when there's agreement from the mayors on down that it needs to be done. At the end of the day, FPL can afford to pay its lawyers more and keep swatting down attempts to MAKE them do it.
Just to add... if you hack your own parallel cable, you can also do something like pair a cheap $109 800W Harbor Freight generator with a more expensive 1800-2200 watt inverter generator. Just connect the homemade Y cable to both generators, start up the Harbor Freight generator first, then start up the inverter generator second... it'll see the voltage from the Harbor Freight generator and sync up to it. Once you've gotten everything that needs lots of surge power started up, you can turn off the Harbor Freight generator and leave the inverter generator running.
UPS, I totally agree, is fucked and hopeless. They probably won't even acknowledge the location of packages already in transit until the end of next week. They suck.
FedEx might be do-able early next week if the package were held for pickup at their main facility in San Juan.
Ditto for 3-day Priority Mail. According to USPS.gov, a 55-pound box measuring 22x22x20 would cost around $90 to mail and arrive on Monday, 9/25 (with caveat that their air freight capacity is limited & might sell out at any time)
The only catch is that a 3200-watt generator would probably weigh too much to send via air, so you'd probably have to settle for a 1800-2200 running watt (2500-3000 starting watt) generator.
There's actually another nifty fact I discovered last week: contrary to the official instructions that come with most inverter generators, you don't HAVE to use the manufacturer's official parallel cable, nor do you have to use two identical generators.
Most parallel-capable inverter generators will sync up to ANY source of live voltage they see, regardless of source. You can even use a DC-AC inverter to add a few hundred watts of surge capacity to the generator (say, if your generator is big enough to RUN your air conditioner, but not quite big enough to START the air conditioner without a little extra help).
All you need is a homemade "Y" cable (take two outdoor extension cords, cut off the plugs and receptacles leaving 18-24 inches of cord, then splice the wires from the two plugs onto the receptacle). The main thing you'll lose by making your own hacked cable instead of using the official one (with banana plugs) is passive safety... the official cables are designed so that if someone pulls the cable out from one of the generators, the live voltage will still be at least somewhat shrouded against accidental contact. If someone yanks out one of the plugs on a homemade cable, the pins on the plug will be carrying live voltage. Electrically, though, they're the same as far as the generator is concerned. Behind the plastic panel, those banana plug lugs are wired directly to their corresponding prongs in the receptacle.
Since when did they have concrete utility poles in 19th-century New York?
Seriously. This isn't a street view of some backwards country... it's the street view of a commercial neighborhood in a big city where the power company is in the middle of replacing old wood utility poles with new concrete poles & simply hasn't taken down the old poles and wires yet.
When FPL upgraded poles in Florida, lots of OUR streets looked EXACTLY like that for a year or more. The old wires didn't come down for months, and I think the poles themselves were left in place for another year or two after that.
If you have family members in Puerto Rico and want to do them the greatest favor possible, buy them a 3000-3600 watt inverter-type generator, four 5-gallon gas cans (empty, of course), and one or two Carbon Monoxide detectors (or smoke alarms with CO detection built in), then FedEx (NOT UPS) it to them tomorrow so they'll get it by Monday.
Why 3000-3600 watts? Big enough to start the air conditioner & refrigerator, with enough spare capacity to throttle it down to half-speed to keep them both running overnight. Trust me... if the climate in Puerto Rico is anything like the climate in Miami, air conditioning isn't a luxury, it's life-support.
3000 watts is also big enough to run a second window a/c unit or a washing machine (tip: don't use the dryer... even if your generator is big enough, dryers cause large amounts of outside air to get sucked into the house... including outside air with lots of carbon monoxide from the generator sitting 10 feet away from the door or window that's cracked open so you can feed the extension cords through it.)
Why inverter-type? Fuel efficiency. They're going to be using it for a few weeks, minimum. A traditional 10hp 4800-5600 watt generator burns through about 15-25 gallons of gas PER DAY. It's kind of like comparing a 1970 Cadillac Eldorado to a Toyota Prius. An inverter generator will literally pay for itself in gas savings after 2-3 weeks. Post-Irma, I spent more than $250 to keep my old generator running until the power was finally restored a week later... and THAT was with 4-8 hours/day of non-usage. They're also a LOT quieter than conventional generators, especially when running in "Eco" mode. Imagine trying to sleep over the noise of a typical window a/c AND two lawnmowers running in the back yard... that's what it's like trying to sleep with a traditional generator.
Why gas cans? Gas cans are utterly IMPOSSIBLE to buy for at least a few weeks after a major hurricane. With an inverter generator, four 5-gallon cans should be enough to let them get away with going to the gas station every other day. Five or six are even better, but I was BLOWN AWAY last week when I saw how expensive gas cans are now (I paid $10/can post-Wilma and felt ripped off... now, they're more like $25-30 apiece AND have shitty new safety spouts that turn refueling into a 10+ minute exercise... if you have any old gas cans, treat their spouts like gold).
Why the carbon monoxide detectors? Safety. Carbon monoxide can easily get into the house, and the fumes WON'T wake them up if they're asleep. Put one detector near the door/window that's open for the extension cords, and another next to wherever people are sleeping.
Another tip to share with them: a typical American electric water heater (one or two coils, 240v, approx. 4500 watts) can be powered with 120v from a generator without problems. It'll draw 1/4th the total wattage (ie, around 1100 watts at 120v) and take longer to heat up the water, but it definitely works. Wire it up as follows: generator 120v "hot" to water heater's "240v hot #1". generator's "neutral" to water heater's "240v hot #2". generator's ground to water heater's chassis ground. Try to use an extension cord with at least AWG14 wire or better... AWG16 will work in a pinch, but you'll end up wasting 10-20% of your wattage heating up the extension cord instead of the water.
Other nice features for the generator to have: bluetooth or wifi so you can check remaining fuel/runtime and current power draw using your phone or tablet. Push-button starting (esp. if someone who's not very strong has to start it).
A generator able to sustain 1800W and surge to 2500W might be OK, but inverter-type generators in THAT range tend to have absurdly small gas tanks. Trust me... getting up in the middle of the night to refuel really, REALLY sucks. Especially when it's 89 degrees and 80% humidity outside.
Typical current draws I noted after Irma:
6000 BTU air conditioner: 5A, 550 watts
8000 BTU air conditioner: 8A, 900 watts
Side by
... but, were you streaming music from Amazon Cloud, using waze nonstop, and other similar apps that depend upon continuous data connectivity all the way from WPB down to Miami? Or are you one of those people who could go for HOURS without noticing (or being traumatized by) data-connectivity loss, because you use your phone mainly for making voice calls?
Generally speaking, if I'm someplace without working T-mobile internet, I'm going to be painfully aware of that fact within 7-9 minutes.
Either you got extremely lucky & haven't left your house in 2 weeks, don't use lots of mobile data,
or we have quite different opinions about what's included in the definition of "South Florida" (my definition includes coastal-urban Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Collier, and Lee counties, plus the upper keys north of Islamorada... the middle & lower keys are another matter entirely).
As far as I know, phones with a T-mobile SIM card won't EVER data-roam on AT&T. I've seen plenty of spots in Florida (like Shark Valley in the Everglades) where T-mo phones will roam on AT&T for voice & sms, but won't use AT&T for data at all. Ditto, with Sprint roaming on Verizon. In both cases, AT&T and Verizon users both have working data, but T-mobile & Sprint users don't.
Come to think about it, I've NEVER found a spot (in the US) where a phone with (US) T-mo SIM will data-roam. Ever.
Ok, make that "DS-3". The point is, AT&A and Verizon use backhaul that comes with aggressive SLAs, backed up with escalating fines & liquidated damages whenever there's an outage. T-mo & Sprint generally don't (at least, not for non-voice/sms traffic).
If your business has a DS-1& it goes down for 4+ hours, the telco ITSELF is going to start getting hit with HUGE hourly fines and automatically owe pre-negotiated liquidated damages unless it can convince the FCC and courts it followed their regulations & official procedures to the letter & was hit by a truly hopeless scenario (like flooding in New Orleans post-Katrina).
A 4+ hour outage from Comcast or OtherCheapCo *might* get you a partial refund of the period's service charges... IF you bitch about it & they don't have a clause buried in the fine print that lets them off the hook.
THAT is why businesses that depend upon data for their functioning & existence pay more for a real DS-3 line (and have a Ku-band satellite dish on-site ready to deploy if *that* fails).
A hurricane side-swiping a city with brief category 2 winds & causing regional power outages is expected, and an army of generators and backhaul with aggressive SLAs is the accepted best-practice mitigation. An earthquake, asteroid-strike, or graupel-dumping July ice storm in Miami would qualify as "freak event nobody can be expected to plan for, let alone plan to mitigate".
Warning to anyone in Florida considering a switch to T-mobile: their data network is nowhere CLOSE to having the robustness of Verizon and AT&T. Ask your friends & coworkers... they'll confirm it.
For the past week, T-mobile has had large-scale data outages across Florida that were MUCH more widespread and longer-lasting than Verizon's and AT&T's.
Simply put, T-mobile (like Sprint) uses cheaper, unreliable backhaul providers (like Comcast) for ALL data backhaul. Verizon and AT&T have real T-3 lines at some sites, and private microwave links to those sites from the rest.
T-mobile has NOWHERE NEAR the generator infrastructure (including private fuel depots and trucks) that Verizon and AT&T have. They use battery backup for almost everything.
Simply put, T-mobile's network is very "lean" and has very little/no ability to deal with large-scale commercial power outages (at least, insofar as data is concerned).
If you care about having internet access after a storm, T-mobile is definitely NOT the right network for you. You won't be satisfied with them. At the very least, buy a used Verizon JetPack wifi hotspot on ebay & keep it around so you can activate it for a month whenever T-mo fails you... because inevitably, it WILL.
Fuck "natural language", I just want them to give us back the search primitive for +"must contain this literal text". Or complex boolean queries that rigorously observe parentheses, double-quotes, and proximity.
I wrote an app a few years ago that ran a query, then automatically fetched every search result & bruteforce-searched through them via regex for the real results, but Google's server detected something amiss & started throwing captcha challenges at it.
In a very real sense, Andrew's eyewall basically *was* a 15-mile diameter EF-3 stovepipe tornado ringed by hundreds or thousands of transient stronger vortices.
I grew up in Miami & was told by a friend who lived further south that if you went outside during the eye to look around, you could actually SEE a ring of tornado-like vortices along the approaching eyewall's inner edge.
This also explains the damage pattern. Areas even a mile beyond the eyewall path had lots of damage, but the area INSIDE the eyewall path was utterly *destroyed*. Driving south on US-1 from UM (Coral Gables) afterwards, you went through about a mile of bad seemingly-random tornado-like damage that suddenly turned into "oh my FUCKING GOD!" - level damage between sw 80th street & sw 88th street (Kendall Drive), and rapidly got even WORSE over the next mile until you got to the point where even concrete walls & roofs collapsed (around sw 104th street, continuing all the way down to Homestead).
A brief tornado is also the only real explanation for the car that got flipped in the NHC parking lot... neighboring buildings had damage, but nothing like what you'd expect to see from a storm capable of overturning a car (I think Venturi effect was a definite factor). The building actually HAD an underground garage in addition to the surface lot where the car was located, but was prone to flooding even during a bad summer rainstorm. The whole reason why I even *evacuated* for Andrew was because I had a brand new car & lived in a building with a semi-underground garage... everyone just took for granted that it would flood.
> This merde was never more than "change for the sake of change."
I think it was at least partially driven by a management directive to accommodate low-end, egregiously-underpowered tablets with shit hardware specs. IMHO, Aero Glass was about as close as you can get to perfection without realtime raytracing if you had an i7 & respectable 3D card.
I still hate flat UI design, though.
Except that also means even older NEXUS devices might not be able to run newer versions once Google EOLs them. Remember, Linux kernel modules are specific to not only a particular VERSION of Linux, they're specific to a particular combination of build options on specific hardware (in contrast to Windows, which in many cases can be coaxed into using drivers that are literally 20 years old due to Windows' strong hardware abstraction).
AOSP might be open-source, but a real-world Android device built around a Qualcomm SoC is still 100% dependent upon Qualcomm making new binaries available (at least, if you want the radio modem, wi-fi, bluetooth, gps, camera, OpenGL ES, and everything else to work, too).
Access to "the kernel source" is necessary, but mere availability doesn't necessarily assure the ability to build a working kernel for a particular device from scratch.
The sad fact is that many of the best Android ROMs at XDA are cut 'n paste "kitchen" ROMs that are no different from the way Windows Mobile ROMs used to be made, and plenty of others only run (limp?) with the phone's official OEM kernel.
Not even NEXUS phones are released with official build scripts capable of building the phone's complete 'stock' ROM from source.
The main problem with Scala is that it enables experienced Scala developers to write idiomatic code that's utterly indecipherable by anyone besides other, comparably-sophisticated Scala developers who've internalized that same idiom.
With Java, a less-experienced Java developer can still generally make sense of code that's above his skill level and eventually figure out how it works. With Scala, a less-experienced developer is just plain dead in the water because Scala allows *so much* to be implicitly defined by context & convention.
IntelliJ's Scala team is painfully aware of this. For years, they've been trying to mitigate Scala's problem at the IDE level by having the IDE sniff out code idioms defined by convention & context and display them semi-inline with the code itself. It helps, but in many cases it's more like fragile training wheels subject to breaking off at any time. And it makes Scala even more IDE-bound than Java... with Java, a good IDE is necessary for keeping sane & grunt-work automation... with Scala, it's an almost-essential part of deciphering code written by someone else *at all.* It's very hard to join a team of experienced Scala devs as an experienced Java developer and work efficiently alongside them... the Java-to-Scala learning curve is nowhere close to being as straightforward as most people initially think.
In short, Scala attempts to resolve Java's endless boilerplate code that needs an IDE for humans to manage efficiently with dense, idiomatic code that needs an IDE (doing de-facto realtime-decompilation & reverse-engineering) to be understood by humans.
With a good IDE, both meet somewhere near the middle of the "source readability" spectrum. My point is that Scala trades one major shortcoming (excessive boilerplate) for one that's approximately equal in magnitude, but opposite in details.
In theory, a good Scala developer can find a "happy middle path" that straightens up Java's boilerplate mess without becoming unreadable... but in the real world, Scala tends to just invert the old problem into an equally-bad new one.
CS without GenEd would produce grads who *might* be able to get decently-paying jobs right after graduation, but the moment they got laid off after the next recession or merger/acquisition/bankruptcy/outsourcing-fetish, they'd be totally fucked unless they had the resources to spend another year or two taking classes on whatever's hot today.
CS isn't about "learning to code" -- it's about learning HOW to learn, and gaining the background knowledge that might save your ass someday and help you to remain relevant as the industry continues moving forward while you're spending 5 years maintaining some project that's only relevant to your current employer and distracted after work by family life.
Bootcamps can be useful for getting programmers who already have expertise in one area to quickly gain a solid grounding in another, by ushering them through the awkward "clueless n00b" phase so they at least know what to search for on Google & Stack Overflow.
I know that I'm *personally* vulnerable to falling into "X-Y Problems" when learning something radically new (getting stumped trying to solve problem X, concluding that solving Y will at least put me on the path to solving X, then getting so caught up in Y that X gets totally forgotten about & I end up finding a brilliant, creative solution to the wrong problem). In these cases, a few days of structure and personal attention from an instructor can save me *weeks* of semi-random thrashing around.
Examples of bootcamp-type hands-on seminars that would have been useful at various points in my life:
* C# and Visual Studio for senior Java developers.
* Android Studio w/Gradle for Maven-experienced Android developers who know how to use Eclipse & ADK.
* Intro to AppCompatV4, Fragments, and everything else that ICS added/changed from Eclair/Froyo/Gingerbread.
* A Git bootcamp for developers who are at least intermediate-level Subversion users.
* Developing Android apps with Kotlin using Android Studio & Gradle (with optional Thursday prequel on Gradle basics, and Friday prequel on advanced Gradle).
* Building a working AOSP-derived custom ROM and kernel (including Google services & apps) for recent Nexus devices. ... you get the idea. Basically, longer versions of the hands-on labs at many conferences.
For multi-week bootcamps, it would have to be something like "Introduction to IOS development for experienced Android developers" (or vice-versa)... and even *those* would probably require optional prerequisite tracks for Windows developers with no pre-existing experience with Linux (for Android) or OS X (for IOS).
The idea of taking a dozen random people with no real background in programming & turning them into commercially-useful developers of *anything* meaningful in just a week or two is crazy, and borderline fraud.
There were also a bunch of eclipse glasses made using film certified for photography, which is a tiny bit less-dark than what's officially required for direct viewing (especially by children... adults generally have some degree of pre-cataracts providing a bit of extra UV protection).
So, yeah. For adults, it's mainly a regulatory & certification matter. If you used them to look at the sun a few times pre- and post-totality, plus maybe 2-3 minutes before and after, you'd probably sustain more REAL damage from direct-viewing without glasses in the seconds before & after totality than the difference between camera- and direct-view-certified glasses would have prevented.
If you stared nonstop at the sun for an hour, you'd probably at least see lingering artifacts for a few hours EVEN WITH glasses that are certified to be safe, because that's just how human vision actually works.
Staring at the sun is bad, but the fact is, we ALL look directly at the sun a few times per year, even if it's just looking up into the sky, reflections from a mirror, or driving home from work with the sun straight ahead to the west at sunset. Humans are fragile, but we aren't *that* fragile. If we were, lots of us would be blind by adulthood.
IMHO, at least 99% of the "zOMG, I was blind3d by teh 3clipz" we're seeing now is just mass hysteria.
The problem is that Amazon doesn't keep merchandise segregated by seller. So vendor #1 can do everything right, source high-quality ISO-certified glasses, and send them to Amazon for warehousing & fulfillment. Vendors #2 through 87 can buy counterfeit glasses with identical packaging and send them to Amazon. A customer orders glasses from the reputable vendor, but Amazon sends him a counterfeit pair... then fucks the reputable seller because it can't be bothered to even TRY and tell them apart.
That's why it's so common to see reviews on Amazon that don't even seem to be for the same product... often, they *aren't*. One person gets a legit item & writes a good review. Another person gets a knockoff item that fails, and writes a one-star review. Eventually, Amazon just lashes out & indiscriminately punishes everyone, bad AND good alike. They don't actually *care* about trite folkways like "justice" when it's cheaper to just smash everyone within 10 feet with a sledgehammer.
There's really nothing magic about satellite phones. Decades ago, satellites had low-power transmitters (they were basically like an incandescent night light bulb in orbit), so you needed a big dish to have enough gain to receive the signal. Because dishes were so directional, it became commonplace to re-use RF spectrum for adjacent satellites. Fast forward to the late-90s/early 00s... satellites NOW have transmitters that can output hundreds of watts... but there are so many of them, spectrum-reuse becomes almost a necessity. So we now reuse spectrum by using a small dish to boost the signal strength of one target satellite above the strength of its neighbors, then attenuate it so the desired signal is weak and adjacent signals drop off entirely.
Services like Sirius/XM work because they combine powerful transmitters with a license to use their spectrum throughout all of north America, including Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Since there's no spectrum-reuse (by satellites, anyway), you can tune it with a regular antenna.
Sat phones just take it a step further by moving the directional focusing to the satellite itself (ie, "spot beams") so the downlink only occupies a chunk of spectrum in an area a few hundred miles wide, using a combinaton of TDMA & CDMA techniques to further reduce interference, then use TDMA for the uplink.
The main reason why Iridium uses low-orbit satellites instead of geostationary ones is spectrum-reuse... using geostationary satellites would be like trying to run a mobile phone service on a single chunk of spectrum shared by an entire hemisphere of users. There's just not enough. By using satellites in low orbit, they reduce the spectrum footprint of each one, allowing cellular-like spectrum reuse (basically, using them like 200 mile high cell towers with super-regional coverage, including areas too remote or politically-hostile for normal cellular phone service).
The main problem is that the PATENTS on Dolby Digital have expired by now, but the TRADEMARKS remain in full force. So, you (as a manufacturer) could DO it (transcoding PCM5.1 to DD5.1 via SPDIF)... but you'd have a feature that cost money to implement, couldn't be advertised (at least, not in any way that wouldn't totally confuse or be overlooked by most consumers), and would leave you at risk of a major lawsuit if an employee with loose lips ever said anything about it in a way that infringed upon Dolby's trademark.
There's even a good example of this... back in the 1980s, I remember seeing low-end cassette decks sold with "Dynamic Noise Reduction" (or just a mysterious feature called "DNR"). It was Dolby-B, and "everybody" knew it was Dolby-B, but nobody could openly ADMIT it. Dolby-B was cheap & easy to implement (even in low-end audio gear) and the patents had all expired by the late 1970s, but Dolby was EXTREMELY aggressive about defending all of their various trademarks related to Dolby-B. I believe Dolby even went so far as to sue magazine publishers who dared to print articles using "Dolby B" in the same sentence as the name of any gear that supported it, but wasn't an official Dolby licensee.
There's also the problem of GETTING the bitstream into something that can transcode it. As of now, there's basically one supported way for consumer devices to output PCM 5.1 or 7.1 audio: over HDMI. Licensing HDMI requires licensing HDCP. HDCP imposes an avalanche of restrictions, #1 of which is "thou shall not output protected audio in digital form, unless it's PCM2.0". Any box from China that can extract DD5.1 from HDMI and output it over SPDIF without first downsampling it to stereo is officially infringing (and I have yet to see a single such box that actually WORKS as advertised... I've owned two... the first couldn't spoof EDID (so the source saw the PCM2.0 TV and killed the surround sound), the second couldn't transcode DD+7.1 to DD5.1 (so I could use it to bitstream DD5.1 from Amazon Instant Video, but Netflix was still a no-go because it could only bitstream DD+7.1... and my 5.1-only amp just gives up when it sees extra data chunks it doesn't understand, instead of ignoring them like it's technically supposed to).
For me, the most frustrating thing is that there's no real way to even know for sure whether the PCM2.0 stereo audio contains Prologic-encoded surround... it's subtle to begin with, and my amp ALWAYS shows its mode as "ProLogic" when it sees SPDIF PCM2.0, so I'm usually annoying my guests cycling through ProLogic, Prologic Movie, Prologic Music, and Simulated Surround for the first half hour of any movie desperately trying to find the one that sounds the least like shit.
No, because if ANYTHING happens to the phone during that year, you're totally at the lessor's mercy. They can charge you the full original MSRP (and probably a penalty on top) if the phone gets lost/stolen/broken during the year, or if you return it in less than shrinkwrap-pristine condition (their official definitions of "normal wear & tear" almost certainly deviates from YOUR understanding of what it means). And if you DO need to buy a replacement at some point during the year, there's usually a clause requiring that you purchase that replacement FROM THEM, at WHATEVER PRICE THEY DICTATE... if you bought an identical replacement from Amazon or Newegg, they'd be entitled to refuse it (since the phone's serial number wouldn't match the serial number of the one they sent you), charge you some inflated shipping & handling fee to send the refused phone back to you, AND charge you their official inflated replacement price (plus some penalty) anyway. The fact that they're probably going to turn around and sell the returned phones to someone like Asurion for $10/pound as scrap doesn't matter... there's almost certainly a mandatory arbitration clause, and you'd spend 100 times the phone's purchase price on a lawyer attempting to PROVE it to the arbiter.
With consumer-item leases, the deck is totally and hopelessly 100% stacked against you. Sure, you might get lucky... but if you lose the dice roll, you're going to be in a world of pain by the time they're finished throwing arbitrary penalties at you. Especially if there's no language allowing you to purchase the item at the end of the lease.
If you truly intend to keep the phone for a year, buy it outright, then sell it yourself using swappa.com, craigslist, or ebay after buying your new one. At least then, you'll be able to fix it if it breaks, and buy replacements from whomever gives you the best deal, instead of being totally at the lessor's mercy.
Just to give you a small idea of how evil some companies can be, after Hurricane Wilma, I got a letter that was sent to me by mistake by Enterprise Rent-a-Car (I'd rented a car from them a few weeks earlier, and their loss department fucked up and sent the letter to me by mistake) demanding the immediate payment of almost $7,000 for damage to a rental car caused by flooding (Wilma caused extensive flooding in Miami). Anyway, they admitted it was sent to me by mistake, but what I'll never forget was the first paragraph of the letter, which basically said, "the Loss Damage Waiver doesn't include coverage from flooding", then conceded in the next sentence that the language in the brochure might have been "confusing" since it implied "total coverage" (you know, the usual excuse of corporate America... "total" on the marketing materials means "total coverage for what we decide it covers, subject to any exclusions incorporated by reference into the fine print of Article VIII, section c(iii), page 84, on file with the state Department of Commerce). A few months later, I remember seeing a story on the evening news about thousands of complaints filed by consumers against rental car companies who tried doing that exact thing. From what I recall, the state eventually ruled against most of the rental car companies, but the only penalty was that they had to eat the loss and refund any amount already paid. In other words, it was a totally safe gamble for them... "heads they would have won, tails they merely broke even".