Actually, in at least half the cases, yes... we should be able to. The problem with this whole goddamn industry is that everyone in it is determined to pretend that drives don't fail, rather than designing them to fail gracefully and in ways from which data can be recovered by means besides black magic.
In the case of rotating drives, something as straightforward as storing the drive's firmware on real flash, instead of on one of the platters, would probably eliminate the root cause of at least 20-30% of unrecoverable (without thousands of dollars) drive failures. Modern hard drives have literally dozens of failure points, any one of which is enough to completely torpedo it beyond consumer recovery. Expecting a mountable filesystem is a bit much, but expecting to be able to rip raw bits from the drive for offline recovery is, IMHO, 100% reasonable.
Regardless, SSDs need it more badly than rotating disks, because rotating disks don't totally crap and lose everything out if they lose power at the wrong moment. And SSDs have very, very few things that can mechanically fail in ways that someone with ham radio or arduino experience couldn't fix, given adequate documenetation and community-developed software to do it with. In Sandforce's case, it's like they decided that data-recovery companies have a civil right to extract extortionate amounts of money for data recovery in perpetuity, even if they could -- with minimal effort -- make recovery by motivated and technically-adept end users borderline trivial.
When my UPS battery starts going bad, the first sign is that it just cuts the power without warning. If you have a SSD, that could be the deathblow that sends your data bye-bye.
The bigger question, though, is WHY THE FUCK can't we either disable whole-drive encryption, or at least set it to a key WE control, with some means to read the bits from even a drive that's totally nonfunctional SATA-wise (JTAG, SPI, whatever) and reconstruct it offline? That's why I despise Sandforce so much. As if it's not bad ENOUGH that Sandforce-based drives can just die from a single corrupted write, they have to go a step further and make it impossible for end users to do any kind of meaningful data recovery. There's NO REASON why a corrupted SSD should require thousands of dollars of commercial data recovery. If they'd just give us some fucking way to rip the raw bits from the drive, document the data structures, and give us control over the encryption, a fucked up SSD would just be an annoyance.
I'm still trying to process the fact that there are new SSDs that DON'T have ultracaps. You'd think that what happened to OCZ might have taught the industry a lesson or something. Well, besides, "There's a sucker born every minute!"
apple doesn't force people to buy their products any less than samsung does.
No, but it would dearly love to. If Apple could use "I desperately want _(some-non-negotiable-feature)_" as a way to force Android users to grudgingly surrender themselves into the soul-crushing (if tastefully-appointed) captivity of Apple's walled garden, it would do it in a heartbeat. Apple and Microsoft would dearly love to close "the Android Hole" that empowers users to run whatever they fucking feel like running, instead of limiting their software to apps that are neatly aligned with the priorities and agendas of the manufacturer and mobile carrier.
Unless you're talking about outdoor light fixtures in Florida... where the atmosphere is maybe two or three steps less-corrosive than the atmosphere of Venus insofar as light bulbs with active electronics are concerned. LED and CFL bulbs in a porch light have a lifespan measured in MONTHS here.
It's not even the endless rain per se... it's the dew that condenses inside the bulb just about every night/morning. People who've never lived in South Florida just don't "get" how quickly and completely stuff here gets destroyed when it's left directly exposed to outdoor air, even in a sheltered location that doesn't get directly exposed to actual rain.
Going off slightly onto a diagonal tangent, but relevant due to Christmas shopping and the annual agony of trying to pick a new router before giving up in disgust... is there actually such a thing as a high-end router that DOESN'T seem to have page after page of 4- and 5-star reviews, sprinkled with 5-10% of 1-star reviews, and a pattern something like...
***** Awesome! Kicks ass! The greatest router I've ever had! Problem free, works flawlessly, and perfect in every way. {technical details}.
* Total garbage. Pure shit. 5GHz connections dropped after a day, and the router had to be rebooted to fix it.
***** (another overwhelmingly-positive review)
* Worked like a champ for {3-9 months}, then crapped out and left me in misery until I finally gave up and bought a new one.
***** (another positive review claiming it's a gift from ${deity})
* Junk. 2.5GHz works for 3 hours, then the router forgets how to route traffic between wireless and wired. 5GHz doesn't work reliably with Apple devices, and works reliably with Android devices only if you remove the network, reboot the phone, then add it as a new network.
* Terrible range and speed. I connected to this AP with my laptop from 5 feet away, and got barely 1mbps on an unused 5GHz channel. I disconnected it, reconnected my old $49 access point, and benchmarked 36mbps. WTF?!?... and so on. Case in point: just about every dual-band 3-antenna router from ASUS, Netgear, Linksys, and Buffalo router that costs more than $150.
As far as I can tell, it basically comes down to:
* None of them have adequate heat-removal, especially if they're in a closet or cabinet of any kind. The electrolytic capacitor plague continues unabated 15 years later.
* Poor antenna impedance-matching, so RF gets reflected back into the radio module and progressively damages it.
* RF modules have real limits that nobody ever talks about, and certain permutations of features that just can't work, but because nobody from the manufacturer will ever come out and identify what those precise constraints are, end users are left to randomly flail about and wonder why certain things just don't work.
* Crap component quality pushed to the absolute limit of its design capabilities, then pushed 5% further, and guaranteed to fail eventually.
* Zero quality control besides "could we power it up enough to flash it"?
The problem with using a FPGA is that THEN you're buying a chip that costs more than Intel's second- or third-most expensive i7, and getting a CPU with the approximate performance of a 500MHz Pentium III.
More importantly, even if you DO build your own CPU using a FPGA, at least 95% of your VHDL is going to come from somebody else if you want to have it meaningfully working, with Ethernet and USB, before you die someday. If somebody is so paranoid about security that he doesn't think he can trust a COTS CPU from someone like Intel, what makes him think that ${government-espionage-agency} doesn't have the resources to plant exploits in the VHDL components he'd download and add?
And before someone brings up China... frankly, if my hardware is going to be pwn3d by ANY government espionage agency, I'd PREFER to have it be pwn3d by China's instead of the NSA (or some other American agency, or the agency of some obedient American vassal state). At least China doesn't have the legal authority to deprive me of my life and liberty based upon data mining for technical violations of some obscure law.
Well... in the case of Cyanogenmod, it's more like, "Google kind of turns a blind eye to end users installing them, because it knows that 99.9% of the people downloading them are installing them on phones that shipped with GApps to begin with." It's kind of like how if you ask a Microsoft Licensing Specialist about using an OEM copy of Windows to install a virgin copy of the same version of Windows on a computer that shipped with a crapware-laden copy from the manufacturer, they'll tell you it's officially forbidden... but if you get your hands on an install disc somehow, call Microsoft to phone activate it, and give them the number printed on the COA on the bottom of the computer, they'll activate it anyway.
Google doesn't give a shit if someone with a Samsung phone installs GApps after reflashing it to Cyanogen. They care ENORMOUSLY if a carrier somewhere in the world sells phones from Shenzhen with unlicensed copies of GApps. As long as the barrier to doing it is high enough to require a fair amount of technical skill to install GApps on never-licensed hardware (as opposed to originally-licensed hardware that was just reflashed), they don't really care. And more importantly, they know that if they tried TOO hard to stop people with the skills to reflash from doing it, it would cost them several orders of magnitude more sales and lost goodwill, because we're the ones that two dozen people ask for advice when it's time to buy a new phone.
If you don't believe me, find a friend or family member who owned a Motorola Android phone that got its bootloader permalocked (Photon, Electrify, Atrix2, others) and ask them what they think about Motorola's current phone.... Make sure you're wearing asbestos clothing, because you'll need it...
I hate to break it to you, but frequency bands are the LEAST of our problems. Google "LTE Lock-in" and read the tales of misery about how even two nominally-GSM networks (AT&T and T-Mobile) have managed to make themselves almost as proprietary & hardware-locked as Sprint & Verizon, unless you're willing to live without LTE. As of this moment, there's ONE (maybe two... not sure about the Nexus 5) phone(s) known to be capable of doing LTE on both AT&T and T-Mobile (the HTC One... IF you buy the special Google Edition; the carrier-branded variants are LTE-locked at the radio modem level EVEN IF you remove the SIM lock).
Leave it to American mobile phone networks to find a way to pwn even GSM.God forbid, if Sprint ends up being allowed to buy T-Mobile, they'll probably program their new tower hardware so it refuses to talk to phones with SprinT-Mobile SIM card unless the ESN is in their holy database of carrier-branded phones.
Apparently, other carriers learned nothing from the total well-deserved hate Sprint took over the Photon Q's "sealed SIM" that locked you into their rip-off roaming rates when outside the US on GSM networks.
In the end, the Photon Q was one of the worst-selling phones in Sprint history. The sealed SIM was such a staggeringly huge anti-feature, even people who didn't CARE about international travel wouldn't even give it a second glance once they found out about it.
> This led me to wonder what a feminist programming language would look like, > one that might allow you to create entanglements
Ah... in other words... a language based upon dependency-injection for non-deterministic multithreaded runtime environments with planned monthly maintenance cycles. It's mostly interrupt based and requires extensive exception-handling.:-D
If you want to see some real fun, find a way to post a sequence of example pics that supposedly show how people with anomalous trichromatic color vision see the world, then pull out the bowl of popcorn when actual deuteranomalous and protanomalous individuals scream, "WTF, these examples are just WRONG... but THIS is an example that works and is, to me, indistinguishable from the control picture" and the editors defend keeping the wrong pics as examples because the edits and new example pics made by actual individuals with anomalous color vision don't represent a "Neutral Point of View" (as if there can possibly BE a neutral point of view over something that is by definition about subjective sensory perception).
> The US is one of the least dense countries in the world -- especially at its population.
Yes, and no. If you ignore the most rural 20% of the US, Britain, and France, there's really not that much of a difference. France & Britain have some pretty huge expanses of rural wilderness, too. Yeah, we have hundreds of thousands of square miles of desolate wilderness out west and in Alaska, but those areas are about as relevant & meaningful to the daily lives of people who live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, DC, and Miami as they are to the lives of people who could walk out their front door and throw a rock into the Seine or Thames. If you limited gigabit internet to the subset of Americans who live at the average population density of Watford, Cambridge, or LIverpool, the overwhelming majority of us would STILL be enjoying gigabit internet.
Exactly. Signal processing has definitely improved, but a huge chunk of the range-improvement has come from better provisioning and wire management. 10 years ago, if you called SBC for DSL, the salesperson would query the mainframe to look up your distance, and if it said you were even a single foot more than their arbitrary cut off for g.Lite, as far as SBC was concerned you weren't getting DSL. Period, end of story. AT&T is still pretty anal, and you practically have to know as much about VDSL2 and outside wiring as their own sales people AND be threatening to cancel within the first 30 days of signing up for new service to get them to roll a truck to even TRY getting anything faster than 18/1.5mbps with U-Verse... but it's still a huge improvement over 10 years ago, when they'd have just told you to have a nice day & transferred you to someone who'd try selling you dialup.
The fundamental problem we have in most of the US today is the fact that AT&T's capital investment horizon is roughly 5 years. If they won't see guaranteed ROI within that horizon, they won't do it. And since they've colluded with Comcast to get states to pass laws making it damn near impossible for uppity municipalities to take matters into their own hands and lay their own fiber, they can get away with it... for now.
The thing is, the A500 really *wasn't* that expensive relative to the 128. Circa 1989, an A500 with a meg, built-in floppy, and monitor was only $999. By the time you added up the cost of the 128, the floppy drive, and the same multisync monitor (without which you couldn't use 80-column mode), the 128 was *maybe* two hundred bucks less, and basically pointless.
I think you just accidentally misread it... I said that M-discs are basically non-LTH BD-R discs with DVD track geometry.
LTH discs are the ones made with organic dyes, just like DVD+/-R.
M-Disc is NOT made with organic dyes. It's a phase-change magneto-optical recordable DVD that's readable by normal drives/players, but requires a BD-R drive with the right firmware to burn.
EEPROM also happens to be the ancestor of SLC flash, not MLC, TLC or worse.
Flash is like a leaky bucket that starts out full of water, and gets drained to some level when a cell's value is set:
SLC == "The bucket is either totally empty (0), or has some water in it (1)"
MLC == "The bucket can be totally empty (00), non-empty to ~33% full (01), 33%-~66% full (10), or 66-100% full (10). After 1/3 the water leaks out, the cell's value is corrupt.
TLC == same idea as MLC, but the bucket has EIGHT levels instead of four. Do the math to figure out how much metaphorical water can leak out before the cell's value becomes corrupted.
BIOS eeproms are also a larger process than high-density flash, so the buckets themselves are larger while the leaks remain relatively constant in size. In other words, you're comparing a metaphorical 55 gallon drum with a slow drip that has to be completely empty to change from 1 to 0 to a thimble with 8 tick marks on the side and a leak of the same size.
If you're storing anything besides DVDs that need to be capable of direct casual playback on a DVD player, you're better off just burning the files (or even the.iso file of a DVD) to a non-LTH BD-R disc.
M-Disc is just a non-LTH BD-R with DVD geometry. It's an elegant solution for preserving DVDs in a way that gives you the best of both non-LTH BD-R and casual playability of a DVD, but it's stupid to spend M-disc prices for bulk data backup, including digital photos, when you can buy a brand new BD-R drive and two 25-gig non-LTH discs for what you'll spend on a 10-pack of 5-gig M-discs alone.
There's nothing exotic about BD-R anymore. DL and 3L BD-R discs are pretty expensive, but single-layer 25-gig non-LTH BD-R discs are cheap online, and an OEM-wrapped bare drive with software bundle costs maybe $50 more than a DVD+/-RW drive. And if you have a laptop that doesn't officially have a BD-R drive, you can probably buy a bare drive on eBay and swap it out yourself as long as your computer isn't a Macbook or weird ultra-ultra-thin PC notebook. For more normal laptops, there are basically two optical-drive form factors with two loading-forms (tray or slot). As long as you don't mind cannibalizing the bezel from the laptop's original drive, the hardest part of the whole thing is the bezel swap.
One warning: 95% or more of the BD-R discs you'll find at any retail store (Best Buy, Tiger Direct, etc) are going to be LTH, and manufacturers don't exactly bend over backwards to make it obvious that the discs in a package ARE LTH type. Make sure you consult Google -- or at least Newegg -- before buying blanks, and if the discs are less than a buck apiece, they're almost GUARANTEED to be LTH.
If you use LTH discs, all longevity bets are off. LTH discs are inferior junk made with cheap organic dye, just like DVD+/-R discs are. LTH discs exist for exactly one reason -- cost reduction. Genuine phase-change discs aren't cheap to manufacture, disc manufacturers spent lots of money tooling up to make blank DVD media based on organic dyes, and LTH lets them repurpose it for making cheap BD-R media. If you're burning a disc that only has to last until next week, go ahead & use LTH. If you're burning a disc that you want to be readable (at least, without expensive data recovery and bit rot) 25 years from now, spend a few bucks more on phase-change media.
Use non-LTH BD-R media. It's seriously the best media we've ever had for long-term archival storage, hands-down, no contest. Unlike DVD+/-R, it's phase-change magneto-optical WORM... the laser liquefies the plastic, the magnet orients little shiny planar mirrors, the plastic solidifies, and the bits are about as close to 'carved in stone' as you're likely to ever get. As a technology, it's not cheap... but it definitely minimizes the number of things that can go wrong over a ~25-year timeframe:
* decouples media from its player... the achilles heel of hard drive-based backup schemes. A broken hard drive means a spectacularly expensive data-recovery job. A broken BD drive means buying a new one.
* phase-change MO media doesn't bleach or darken with age... and if it's going to delaminate or anything (like early optical discs often do), it's overwhelmingly likely to happen sooner rather than later (while you still have the originals available to re-archive if necessary).
* I think we can safely accept that future evolution to optical discs will remain downwards-compatible with reading older media. Seriously, CDs are THIRTY YEARS OLD, and any Blu-Ray player from China can still play them just fine (plus everything that's ever been commonly burned/stamped into them). A 2037 Apple Eve might have the masses drooling over its legacy-free minimalist purity, but the rest of us will have a 600 petabyte optical drive manufactured by a sweatshop in Uganda or Haiti that can read old BD-R discs just fine (at least, after opening it up and soldering a wire across two pads on the circuit board to make it think it's supposed to be their $6,000 enterprise version instead).
What's kind of sad is that technically, VGA *did* have some of the same low-level capabilities of the C64 (besides sprites, obviously). At least, if you had a VRAM-based card like the ET4000. They just weren't supported by the BIOS, so they were (almost) never used in commercial software. You had to know how the video subsystem was wired together, where the various control registers were mapped, and bitbang them directly by hijacking system timers and dead reckoning.
One of the more hardcore examples I remember involved setting an interrupt handler to fire on VBLANK, using THAT handler to set a timer to fire (by dead reckoning) at the moment you hoped would give you enough time to pre-load the 486's registers, NOP a few cycles, then blindly ram new values into the VGA card's control registers during (what you hoped was) the horizontal retrace. From what I remember, it only worked (in 1991, at least) on a Tseng ET4000 video card (I'm pretty sure it required VRAM to avoid bus contention). As far as I know, no commercial software EVER took advantage of this trick, but lots of Eurodemos did.
Another cool capability that was very rarely used: you could rewrite soft fonts on the fly. As far as I know, exactly two real apps actually DID it... the MS/DOS 6 shell, and ProTracker. They replaced whatever was under the mouse with a 3x3 matrix of custom characters, then redefined them to whatever characters they replaced & XOR'ed a mouse pointer on top. Kludgy, but elegant in a way.
OMG. You just reminded me about my first (sort of) "robot" -- I connected an Erector Set motor's power lugs to the switched power traces on the cassette interface of my c64 using alligator clips, and attached a weak rubber band to pull it back. It was utterly useless, and did nothing besides pivot a rod back and forth, but it WAS technically a crude robot capable of moving atoms via software;-)
Thank ${deity} I didn't fry the cassette port. That would have really sucked, and it's the kind of thing that doesn't even OCCUR to you when you're ~12 years old:-D
> If you can not program Java without an IDE, you can not program at all.
It's not the language syntax per se, it's the fact that there are thousands of objects, with thousands of different constructors and methods whose syntax-consistency falls somewhere between "clusterfuck" and "bukkake" (read: Swing).
I mean, for ${deity}'s sake... we didn't even get to have a real constant representing UTF-8 Charsets until Java 7 (java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets.UTF_8) that could be used without having to explicitly try/catch for an UnsupportedEncodingException that's frankly impossible per JLS unless you used the old String-named syntax and misspelled it.
The fundamental problem is that AT&T is too big now for its own good. Everyone -- including AT&T's own shareholders -- would be better off if the federal government broke up AT&T again... but THIS time, into AT&T Wireless and U-verse, with their fiber, ROW, and trunk lines held by a third company as a co-op jointly owned by ATTWS and U-Verse (so ATTWS couldn't stop U-Verse from aggressive expansion, and U-verse would HAVE to aggressively expand to remain relevant & profitable).
The hard part would be structuring the third company's charter to ensure that AT&T Wireless and U-Verse both had the right to lay their own fiber within their shared ROW, and could fiber connectivity to others without being able to limit the other partner's ability to do the same. So U-verse could sell fiber to Sprint & T-Mobile, and AT&T Wireless could sell fiber to Comcast, even if neither one would willingly sell fiber to their "partner's" fiber customers.
IMHO, making the third company truly independent (instead of a bitterly fought-over co-op between the two new AT&T fiefdoms that neither could truly control) would be a mistake on par with Britain's Railtrack experiment. When you have one company that only owns bulk infrastructure, its main incentive is to spend nothing and wring every bit of equity it can from it while running it into the ground. On the other hand, if there were two companies at each other's throats (AT&T Wireless and U-verse) with every tragedy-of-the-commons incentive to overbuild & try selling surplus capacity to others, that's exactly what's likely to happen. And when it comes to fiber, more == better.
> One more thing...and this is a FCC policy thing...We could create an "emergency" mode where a quad-band cell phone will talk to any network in range
Most high-end Android phones ALREADY have all the hardware they need to do that. Google "MSM8960", and be happy knowing that it's inside most of the high-end Android phones sold in the US over the past 2 years or so. The only reason why an AT&T Galaxy S3 (for example) can't roam on Sprint or Verizon is Qualcomm's fucked up licensing model, and American cellular carrier business policy. Ditto, for Sprint and Verizon phones roaming on AT&T and T-Mobile, but in THEIR case, it's even MORE fucked up... most of THEIR phones CAN roam on GSM, but they get Qualcomm to hardcode the radio modem firmware to blacklist AT&T and T-Mobile so it'll refuse to use them, but still allow GSM roaming outside the US.
LTE is still problematic (mostly by carrier intent), but as far as network cross-compatibility within the US goes, 800-vs-1900MHz and CDMA-vs-GSM hasn't been a hardware-limited constraint on high-end Android phones and recent iPhones (since at least the 4 or 4S) in YEARS.
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Actually, in at least half the cases, yes... we should be able to. The problem with this whole goddamn industry is that everyone in it is determined to pretend that drives don't fail, rather than designing them to fail gracefully and in ways from which data can be recovered by means besides black magic.
In the case of rotating drives, something as straightforward as storing the drive's firmware on real flash, instead of on one of the platters, would probably eliminate the root cause of at least 20-30% of unrecoverable (without thousands of dollars) drive failures. Modern hard drives have literally dozens of failure points, any one of which is enough to completely torpedo it beyond consumer recovery. Expecting a mountable filesystem is a bit much, but expecting to be able to rip raw bits from the drive for offline recovery is, IMHO, 100% reasonable.
Regardless, SSDs need it more badly than rotating disks, because rotating disks don't totally crap and lose everything out if they lose power at the wrong moment. And SSDs have very, very few things that can mechanically fail in ways that someone with ham radio or arduino experience couldn't fix, given adequate documenetation and community-developed software to do it with. In Sandforce's case, it's like they decided that data-recovery companies have a civil right to extract extortionate amounts of money for data recovery in perpetuity, even if they could -- with minimal effort -- make recovery by motivated and technically-adept end users borderline trivial.
> Isn't this why god created UPS?
When my UPS battery starts going bad, the first sign is that it just cuts the power without warning. If you have a SSD, that could be the deathblow that sends your data bye-bye.
The bigger question, though, is WHY THE FUCK can't we either disable whole-drive encryption, or at least set it to a key WE control, with some means to read the bits from even a drive that's totally nonfunctional SATA-wise (JTAG, SPI, whatever) and reconstruct it offline? That's why I despise Sandforce so much. As if it's not bad ENOUGH that Sandforce-based drives can just die from a single corrupted write, they have to go a step further and make it impossible for end users to do any kind of meaningful data recovery. There's NO REASON why a corrupted SSD should require thousands of dollars of commercial data recovery. If they'd just give us some fucking way to rip the raw bits from the drive, document the data structures, and give us control over the encryption, a fucked up SSD would just be an annoyance.
I'm still trying to process the fact that there are new SSDs that DON'T have ultracaps. You'd think that what happened to OCZ might have taught the industry a lesson or something. Well, besides, "There's a sucker born every minute!"
apple doesn't force people to buy their products any less than samsung does.
No, but it would dearly love to. If Apple could use "I desperately want _(some-non-negotiable-feature)_" as a way to force Android users to grudgingly surrender themselves into the soul-crushing (if tastefully-appointed) captivity of Apple's walled garden, it would do it in a heartbeat. Apple and Microsoft would dearly love to close "the Android Hole" that empowers users to run whatever they fucking feel like running, instead of limiting their software to apps that are neatly aligned with the priorities and agendas of the manufacturer and mobile carrier.
> LEDs are cheaper
Unless you're talking about outdoor light fixtures in Florida... where the atmosphere is maybe two or three steps less-corrosive than the atmosphere of Venus insofar as light bulbs with active electronics are concerned. LED and CFL bulbs in a porch light have a lifespan measured in MONTHS here.
It's not even the endless rain per se... it's the dew that condenses inside the bulb just about every night/morning. People who've never lived in South Florida just don't "get" how quickly and completely stuff here gets destroyed when it's left directly exposed to outdoor air, even in a sheltered location that doesn't get directly exposed to actual rain.
Going off slightly onto a diagonal tangent, but relevant due to Christmas shopping and the annual agony of trying to pick a new router before giving up in disgust... is there actually such a thing as a high-end router that DOESN'T seem to have page after page of 4- and 5-star reviews, sprinkled with 5-10% of 1-star reviews, and a pattern something like...
***** Awesome! Kicks ass! The greatest router I've ever had! Problem free, works flawlessly, and perfect in every way. {technical details}.
* Total garbage. Pure shit. 5GHz connections dropped after a day, and the router had to be rebooted to fix it.
***** (another overwhelmingly-positive review)
* Worked like a champ for {3-9 months}, then crapped out and left me in misery until I finally gave up and bought a new one.
***** (another positive review claiming it's a gift from ${deity})
* Junk. 2.5GHz works for 3 hours, then the router forgets how to route traffic between wireless and wired. 5GHz doesn't work reliably with Apple devices, and works reliably with Android devices only if you remove the network, reboot the phone, then add it as a new network.
* Terrible range and speed. I connected to this AP with my laptop from 5 feet away, and got barely 1mbps on an unused 5GHz channel. I disconnected it, reconnected my old $49 access point, and benchmarked 36mbps. WTF?!? ... and so on. Case in point: just about every dual-band 3-antenna router from ASUS, Netgear, Linksys, and Buffalo router that costs more than $150.
As far as I can tell, it basically comes down to:
* None of them have adequate heat-removal, especially if they're in a closet or cabinet of any kind. The electrolytic capacitor plague continues unabated 15 years later.
* Poor antenna impedance-matching, so RF gets reflected back into the radio module and progressively damages it.
* RF modules have real limits that nobody ever talks about, and certain permutations of features that just can't work, but because nobody from the manufacturer will ever come out and identify what those precise constraints are, end users are left to randomly flail about and wonder why certain things just don't work.
* Crap component quality pushed to the absolute limit of its design capabilities, then pushed 5% further, and guaranteed to fail eventually.
* Zero quality control besides "could we power it up enough to flash it"?
The problem with using a FPGA is that THEN you're buying a chip that costs more than Intel's second- or third-most expensive i7, and getting a CPU with the approximate performance of a 500MHz Pentium III.
More importantly, even if you DO build your own CPU using a FPGA, at least 95% of your VHDL is going to come from somebody else if you want to have it meaningfully working, with Ethernet and USB, before you die someday. If somebody is so paranoid about security that he doesn't think he can trust a COTS CPU from someone like Intel, what makes him think that ${government-espionage-agency} doesn't have the resources to plant exploits in the VHDL components he'd download and add?
And before someone brings up China... frankly, if my hardware is going to be pwn3d by ANY government espionage agency, I'd PREFER to have it be pwn3d by China's instead of the NSA (or some other American agency, or the agency of some obedient American vassal state). At least China doesn't have the legal authority to deprive me of my life and liberty based upon data mining for technical violations of some obscure law.
Well... in the case of Cyanogenmod, it's more like, "Google kind of turns a blind eye to end users installing them, because it knows that 99.9% of the people downloading them are installing them on phones that shipped with GApps to begin with." It's kind of like how if you ask a Microsoft Licensing Specialist about using an OEM copy of Windows to install a virgin copy of the same version of Windows on a computer that shipped with a crapware-laden copy from the manufacturer, they'll tell you it's officially forbidden... but if you get your hands on an install disc somehow, call Microsoft to phone activate it, and give them the number printed on the COA on the bottom of the computer, they'll activate it anyway.
Google doesn't give a shit if someone with a Samsung phone installs GApps after reflashing it to Cyanogen. They care ENORMOUSLY if a carrier somewhere in the world sells phones from Shenzhen with unlicensed copies of GApps. As long as the barrier to doing it is high enough to require a fair amount of technical skill to install GApps on never-licensed hardware (as opposed to originally-licensed hardware that was just reflashed), they don't really care. And more importantly, they know that if they tried TOO hard to stop people with the skills to reflash from doing it, it would cost them several orders of magnitude more sales and lost goodwill, because we're the ones that two dozen people ask for advice when it's time to buy a new phone.
If you don't believe me, find a friend or family member who owned a Motorola Android phone that got its bootloader permalocked (Photon, Electrify, Atrix2, others) and ask them what they think about Motorola's current phone.... Make sure you're wearing asbestos clothing, because you'll need it...
I hate to break it to you, but frequency bands are the LEAST of our problems. Google "LTE Lock-in" and read the tales of misery about how even two nominally-GSM networks (AT&T and T-Mobile) have managed to make themselves almost as proprietary & hardware-locked as Sprint & Verizon, unless you're willing to live without LTE. As of this moment, there's ONE (maybe two... not sure about the Nexus 5) phone(s) known to be capable of doing LTE on both AT&T and T-Mobile (the HTC One... IF you buy the special Google Edition; the carrier-branded variants are LTE-locked at the radio modem level EVEN IF you remove the SIM lock).
Leave it to American mobile phone networks to find a way to pwn even GSM.God forbid, if Sprint ends up being allowed to buy T-Mobile, they'll probably program their new tower hardware so it refuses to talk to phones with SprinT-Mobile SIM card unless the ESN is in their holy database of carrier-branded phones.
Apparently, other carriers learned nothing from the total well-deserved hate Sprint took over the Photon Q's "sealed SIM" that locked you into their rip-off roaming rates when outside the US on GSM networks.
In the end, the Photon Q was one of the worst-selling phones in Sprint history. The sealed SIM was such a staggeringly huge anti-feature, even people who didn't CARE about international travel wouldn't even give it a second glance once they found out about it.
> This led me to wonder what a feminist programming language would look like,
> one that might allow you to create entanglements
Ah... in other words... a language based upon dependency-injection for non-deterministic multithreaded runtime environments with planned monthly maintenance cycles. It's mostly interrupt based and requires extensive exception-handling. :-D
If you want to see some real fun, find a way to post a sequence of example pics that supposedly show how people with anomalous trichromatic color vision see the world, then pull out the bowl of popcorn when actual deuteranomalous and protanomalous individuals scream, "WTF, these examples are just WRONG... but THIS is an example that works and is, to me, indistinguishable from the control picture" and the editors defend keeping the wrong pics as examples because the edits and new example pics made by actual individuals with anomalous color vision don't represent a "Neutral Point of View" (as if there can possibly BE a neutral point of view over something that is by definition about subjective sensory perception).
> The US is one of the least dense countries in the world -- especially at its population.
Yes, and no. If you ignore the most rural 20% of the US, Britain, and France, there's really not that much of a difference. France & Britain have some pretty huge expanses of rural wilderness, too. Yeah, we have hundreds of thousands of square miles of desolate wilderness out west and in Alaska, but those areas are about as relevant & meaningful to the daily lives of people who live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, DC, and Miami as they are to the lives of people who could walk out their front door and throw a rock into the Seine or Thames. If you limited gigabit internet to the subset of Americans who live at the average population density of Watford, Cambridge, or LIverpool, the overwhelming majority of us would STILL be enjoying gigabit internet.
Exactly. Signal processing has definitely improved, but a huge chunk of the range-improvement has come from better provisioning and wire management. 10 years ago, if you called SBC for DSL, the salesperson would query the mainframe to look up your distance, and if it said you were even a single foot more than their arbitrary cut off for g.Lite, as far as SBC was concerned you weren't getting DSL. Period, end of story. AT&T is still pretty anal, and you practically have to know as much about VDSL2 and outside wiring as their own sales people AND be threatening to cancel within the first 30 days of signing up for new service to get them to roll a truck to even TRY getting anything faster than 18/1.5mbps with U-Verse... but it's still a huge improvement over 10 years ago, when they'd have just told you to have a nice day & transferred you to someone who'd try selling you dialup.
The fundamental problem we have in most of the US today is the fact that AT&T's capital investment horizon is roughly 5 years. If they won't see guaranteed ROI within that horizon, they won't do it. And since they've colluded with Comcast to get states to pass laws making it damn near impossible for uppity municipalities to take matters into their own hands and lay their own fiber, they can get away with it... for now.
The thing is, the A500 really *wasn't* that expensive relative to the 128. Circa 1989, an A500 with a meg, built-in floppy, and monitor was only $999. By the time you added up the cost of the 128, the floppy drive, and the same multisync monitor (without which you couldn't use 80-column mode), the 128 was *maybe* two hundred bucks less, and basically pointless.
I think you just accidentally misread it... I said that M-discs are basically non-LTH BD-R discs with DVD track geometry.
LTH discs are the ones made with organic dyes, just like DVD+/-R.
M-Disc is NOT made with organic dyes. It's a phase-change magneto-optical recordable DVD that's readable by normal drives/players, but requires a BD-R drive with the right firmware to burn.
EEPROM also happens to be the ancestor of SLC flash, not MLC, TLC or worse.
Flash is like a leaky bucket that starts out full of water, and gets drained to some level when a cell's value is set:
SLC == "The bucket is either totally empty (0), or has some water in it (1)"
MLC == "The bucket can be totally empty (00), non-empty to ~33% full (01), 33%-~66% full (10), or 66-100% full (10). After 1/3 the water leaks out, the cell's value is corrupt.
TLC == same idea as MLC, but the bucket has EIGHT levels instead of four. Do the math to figure out how much metaphorical water can leak out before the cell's value becomes corrupted.
BIOS eeproms are also a larger process than high-density flash, so the buckets themselves are larger while the leaks remain relatively constant in size. In other words, you're comparing a metaphorical 55 gallon drum with a slow drip that has to be completely empty to change from 1 to 0 to a thimble with 8 tick marks on the side and a leak of the same size.
If you're storing anything besides DVDs that need to be capable of direct casual playback on a DVD player, you're better off just burning the files (or even the .iso file of a DVD) to a non-LTH BD-R disc.
M-Disc is just a non-LTH BD-R with DVD geometry. It's an elegant solution for preserving DVDs in a way that gives you the best of both non-LTH BD-R and casual playability of a DVD, but it's stupid to spend M-disc prices for bulk data backup, including digital photos, when you can buy a brand new BD-R drive and two 25-gig non-LTH discs for what you'll spend on a 10-pack of 5-gig M-discs alone.
There's nothing exotic about BD-R anymore. DL and 3L BD-R discs are pretty expensive, but single-layer 25-gig non-LTH BD-R discs are cheap online, and an OEM-wrapped bare drive with software bundle costs maybe $50 more than a DVD+/-RW drive. And if you have a laptop that doesn't officially have a BD-R drive, you can probably buy a bare drive on eBay and swap it out yourself as long as your computer isn't a Macbook or weird ultra-ultra-thin PC notebook. For more normal laptops, there are basically two optical-drive form factors with two loading-forms (tray or slot). As long as you don't mind cannibalizing the bezel from the laptop's original drive, the hardest part of the whole thing is the bezel swap.
One warning: 95% or more of the BD-R discs you'll find at any retail store (Best Buy, Tiger Direct, etc) are going to be LTH, and manufacturers don't exactly bend over backwards to make it obvious that the discs in a package ARE LTH type. Make sure you consult Google -- or at least Newegg -- before buying blanks, and if the discs are less than a buck apiece, they're almost GUARANTEED to be LTH.
If you use LTH discs, all longevity bets are off. LTH discs are inferior junk made with cheap organic dye, just like DVD+/-R discs are. LTH discs exist for exactly one reason -- cost reduction. Genuine phase-change discs aren't cheap to manufacture, disc manufacturers spent lots of money tooling up to make blank DVD media based on organic dyes, and LTH lets them repurpose it for making cheap BD-R media. If you're burning a disc that only has to last until next week, go ahead & use LTH. If you're burning a disc that you want to be readable (at least, without expensive data recovery and bit rot) 25 years from now, spend a few bucks more on phase-change media.
Use non-LTH BD-R media. It's seriously the best media we've ever had for long-term archival storage, hands-down, no contest. Unlike DVD+/-R, it's phase-change magneto-optical WORM... the laser liquefies the plastic, the magnet orients little shiny planar mirrors, the plastic solidifies, and the bits are about as close to 'carved in stone' as you're likely to ever get. As a technology, it's not cheap... but it definitely minimizes the number of things that can go wrong over a ~25-year timeframe:
* decouples media from its player... the achilles heel of hard drive-based backup schemes. A broken hard drive means a spectacularly expensive data-recovery job. A broken BD drive means buying a new one.
* phase-change MO media doesn't bleach or darken with age... and if it's going to delaminate or anything (like early optical discs often do), it's overwhelmingly likely to happen sooner rather than later (while you still have the originals available to re-archive if necessary).
* I think we can safely accept that future evolution to optical discs will remain downwards-compatible with reading older media. Seriously, CDs are THIRTY YEARS OLD, and any Blu-Ray player from China can still play them just fine (plus everything that's ever been commonly burned/stamped into them). A 2037 Apple Eve might have the masses drooling over its legacy-free minimalist purity, but the rest of us will have a 600 petabyte optical drive manufactured by a sweatshop in Uganda or Haiti that can read old BD-R discs just fine (at least, after opening it up and soldering a wire across two pads on the circuit board to make it think it's supposed to be their $6,000 enterprise version instead).
What's kind of sad is that technically, VGA *did* have some of the same low-level capabilities of the C64 (besides sprites, obviously). At least, if you had a VRAM-based card like the ET4000. They just weren't supported by the BIOS, so they were (almost) never used in commercial software. You had to know how the video subsystem was wired together, where the various control registers were mapped, and bitbang them directly by hijacking system timers and dead reckoning.
One of the more hardcore examples I remember involved setting an interrupt handler to fire on VBLANK, using THAT handler to set a timer to fire (by dead reckoning) at the moment you hoped would give you enough time to pre-load the 486's registers, NOP a few cycles, then blindly ram new values into the VGA card's control registers during (what you hoped was) the horizontal retrace. From what I remember, it only worked (in 1991, at least) on a Tseng ET4000 video card (I'm pretty sure it required VRAM to avoid bus contention). As far as I know, no commercial software EVER took advantage of this trick, but lots of Eurodemos did.
Another cool capability that was very rarely used: you could rewrite soft fonts on the fly. As far as I know, exactly two real apps actually DID it... the MS/DOS 6 shell, and ProTracker. They replaced whatever was under the mouse with a 3x3 matrix of custom characters, then redefined them to whatever characters they replaced & XOR'ed a mouse pointer on top. Kludgy, but elegant in a way.
OMG. You just reminded me about my first (sort of) "robot" -- I connected an Erector Set motor's power lugs to the switched power traces on the cassette interface of my c64 using alligator clips, and attached a weak rubber band to pull it back. It was utterly useless, and did nothing besides pivot a rod back and forth, but it WAS technically a crude robot capable of moving atoms via software ;-)
Thank ${deity} I didn't fry the cassette port. That would have really sucked, and it's the kind of thing that doesn't even OCCUR to you when you're ~12 years old :-D
> If you can not program Java without an IDE, you can not program at all.
It's not the language syntax per se, it's the fact that there are thousands of objects, with thousands of different constructors and methods whose syntax-consistency falls somewhere between "clusterfuck" and "bukkake" (read: Swing).
I mean, for ${deity}'s sake... we didn't even get to have a real constant representing UTF-8 Charsets until Java 7 (java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets.UTF_8) that could be used without having to explicitly try/catch for an UnsupportedEncodingException that's frankly impossible per JLS unless you used the old String-named syntax and misspelled it.
> We're also hitting diminishing returns with game graphics.
No, we're just temporarily semi-stalled on a plateau waiting for realtime hardware-accelerated ray tracing to commercially arrive.
The fundamental problem is that AT&T is too big now for its own good. Everyone -- including AT&T's own shareholders -- would be better off if the federal government broke up AT&T again... but THIS time, into AT&T Wireless and U-verse, with their fiber, ROW, and trunk lines held by a third company as a co-op jointly owned by ATTWS and U-Verse (so ATTWS couldn't stop U-Verse from aggressive expansion, and U-verse would HAVE to aggressively expand to remain relevant & profitable).
The hard part would be structuring the third company's charter to ensure that AT&T Wireless and U-Verse both had the right to lay their own fiber within their shared ROW, and could fiber connectivity to others without being able to limit the other partner's ability to do the same. So U-verse could sell fiber to Sprint & T-Mobile, and AT&T Wireless could sell fiber to Comcast, even if neither one would willingly sell fiber to their "partner's" fiber customers.
IMHO, making the third company truly independent (instead of a bitterly fought-over co-op between the two new AT&T fiefdoms that neither could truly control) would be a mistake on par with Britain's Railtrack experiment. When you have one company that only owns bulk infrastructure, its main incentive is to spend nothing and wring every bit of equity it can from it while running it into the ground. On the other hand, if there were two companies at each other's throats (AT&T Wireless and U-verse) with every tragedy-of-the-commons incentive to overbuild & try selling surplus capacity to others, that's exactly what's likely to happen. And when it comes to fiber, more == better.
> One more thing...and this is a FCC policy thing...We could create an "emergency" mode where a quad-band cell phone will talk to any network in range
Most high-end Android phones ALREADY have all the hardware they need to do that. Google "MSM8960", and be happy knowing that it's inside most of the high-end Android phones sold in the US over the past 2 years or so. The only reason why an AT&T Galaxy S3 (for example) can't roam on Sprint or Verizon is Qualcomm's fucked up licensing model, and American cellular carrier business policy. Ditto, for Sprint and Verizon phones roaming on AT&T and T-Mobile, but in THEIR case, it's even MORE fucked up... most of THEIR phones CAN roam on GSM, but they get Qualcomm to hardcode the radio modem firmware to blacklist AT&T and T-Mobile so it'll refuse to use them, but still allow GSM roaming outside the US.
LTE is still problematic (mostly by carrier intent), but as far as network cross-compatibility within the US goes, 800-vs-1900MHz and CDMA-vs-GSM hasn't been a hardware-limited constraint on high-end Android phones and recent iPhones (since at least the 4 or 4S) in YEARS.