I don't know about AT&T, but I know that as of about a year ago, it was literally impossible to buy an unactivated Sprint phone with no strings attached and ready-to-use MSL code from any authorized retail store -- full price or not. That's right... even full-priced Sprint phones sold without subsidy are locked to Sprint, and have their MSL code withheld from purchasers.
In other words, if you walked into a Sprint store last year (or Best Buy, or Radio Shack), threw $600 on the counter, and said, "I want to buy a Sprint Galaxy S2 (last fall's #1 Sprint phone) at full retail cost with no strings attached, in a sealed box, and walk out the door with it without activation or associating it with an existing Sprint account, with the MSL in my possession so I can activate it for any compatible CDMA carrier in the world (like India).", they would literally say 'no' and refuse to sell you the phone. Or, if you somehow got someone at a Radio Shack to sell the phone to you, they'd refuse to furnish the MSL code, even though you purchased the phone at full retail cost. Several users from XDA-developers.com who were visiting the US and wanted to buy a CDMA SGS2 to use in India tried, failed, and complained loudly about it. One reported that Best Buy's computer system literally would not allow them to ring up the phone without a contract or activation of the phone for an existing Sprint account.
Sprint's official excuse was that the phone was sold with software licensed exclusively for use by Sprint customers... like their "popular" NASCAR app (you know... the one that has probably motivated more "how do I delete that stupid app" postings in web forums than any other app in Sprint history).
As far as I know, this policy has not changed, and it's still officially impossible to buy a full-priced unsubsidized Sprint phone without tying it to an active account and obtain its MSL code.
Big tip for anybody who's trying to roll his own access point: stick to PCI or PCI-express (1x is fine) interfaces (maybe... MAYBE Cardbus or Expresscard, as long as you make sure it's not "USB-over-Expresscard"), and forget about USB.
To say that "AP mode" via USB (even Atheros) is "bleeding-edge experimental" would be a gross oversimplification of just how hard it is to get something that even pretends to briefly work over USB. AFAIK, Atheros is the only chipset that can even halfway work in AP mode over USB... and even Atheros is a major reach.
The problem is that a proper AP mode implementation imposes very tight timing constraints that don't apply to other modes... and some of those constraints are just too tight to reliably work over USB. You can semi force it by abusing the way USB is supposed to work, and USB3 might have better results but I've NEVER seen it work well with anything that resembles a USB interface, a laptop, and the USB ports on that laptop. In contrast, AP mode over PCI(-express) is totally painless. Stick in the card, run hostapd, and you're good to go.
For INSIDE a house, fiber really is gross overkill. Most DATACENTERS don't even go all the way and use fiber for connections between devices in the same room. If you end up having to plug the fiber at both ends into an adapter box to turn it into gigabit wired ethernet, what have you *really* accomplished besides ego-masturbation and slightly increased latency due to two more conversion steps?
It's like Toslink... everyone thinks it's the ultimate L33t way to run SPDIF signals between your player and amp, and both Monster Cable and Toshiba have done their best to reinforce that notion... except actually, it's not. If you look at real-world performance, Toslink positively BUTCHERS the signal, and turns it into metaphorical mush that Solomon-Reed error correction can *barely* keep up with and fix. Toslink falls over and dies with relatively short lengths where a video-grade RCA cable works flawlessly. Optical interconnects for signals running less than a hundred feet, or within a single room, are almost ALWAYS counterproductive. Toslink, like passive fiber interconnects in general, is one of those things that sounds really cool in theory, but ends up sucking in real life because you're taking something straightforward and making it 200 times more complicated than it has to be.
Remember, 10-gigabit ethernet over copper ALREADY exists. It's not suitable for direct use, but with anticipated improvements to DSP technology, I think it's safe to say that when the day comes that you need to casually shovel 10gbps around your house, if push came to shove you'd be able to buy a pair of 10-gigE switches so you could multiplex the traffic of up to 10 gigabit devices into a single cat6 cable for up to a few hundred feet... at worst, using the same basic technology used to make VDSL work (just more wires operating in parallel to spread the work around).
Actually, 2.4GHz ended up as an ISM band because microwave ovens rendered it commercially useless (remember, microwave ovens are basically thousand-watt 2.4GHz radio transmitters that cook by rapidly altering the polarity of the signal to make water molecules rock back and forth... all the faraday cage around a microwave oven's cavity does is diffuse the signal & scramble its polarity so it won't cause water molecules in your eyeball to start rocking back and forth, too. The 2.4GHz RF signal itself radiates from the room like an arc light.
Why is there seemingly not a SINGLE product available for consumers to buy -- access point, interface, or otherwise -- for 802.11y?
OK, sure... you have to fork out a whopping hundred bucks for a 10-year license, but Jesus H. Christ, you get to run with sufficiently high power to achieve 5km range, and better yet... you get to have the EXCLUSIVE local usage rights to your licensed chunk of spectrum. I'd pay a hundred bucks for 10 years to have my own exclusive chunk of the wifi band in a HEARTBEAT.
* No more dealing with neighbors stomping over the entire 2.4GHz band so they can pretend their economy 768k DSL is really 300mbps.
* No more "I lost the 5.8GHz 802.11n signal after closing the bedroom door" grief.
* Propagation that's not quite as nice as 2.4GHz, but WAY better than real-world 5.8GHz. And you won't have the connection drop down to near-uselessness every time somebody within a half mile turns on their microwave oven.
* 3-mile range, and government-enforced spectrum exclusivity, for a PITTANCE of a licensing fee that has the added bonus of keeping the riffraff out and ensuring it remains an exclusive club for the computer elite.
It's a fsck'ing gift from the great Nerd God himself, yet nobody even knows it exists. WHY?!?
When many of us here at Slashdot were in high school, it was more or less taken for granted that dinosaurs were cold-blooded reptiles with scales...and later, around college, books started to mention birds as the likely descendants of dinosaurs. Are big dinos like T.Rex, Stegosaurus, etc.still widely believed by researchers to have been cold-blooded reptiles, or is it more likely that dinos like T.Rex were more like a big ostrich than an alligator walking on its hind legs, and that they might have been warm-blooded and/or more recognizably "avian" than "reptilian" (particularly their brains)? Or is viewing the mightiest of the "alpha dinosaurs" (like T.Rex) as ancient birds going a bit overboard, with feathered & avian-like dinos having likely been the exception rather than the norm?
> The cultures and sub-cultures that we are part of need to be more caring
Actually, our communities DO tend to be "more caring" -- we just happen to have a different definition of "caring" than most people.
If somebody who's known on a computer/tech-related forum says that he's depressed because he feels overwhelmed by ${some-problem}, he'll get dozens or hundreds of replies, most of which will be genuine attempts to be helpful, with specific suggestions for things to try and solve that problem. Some might be from people willing to work quite hard to help solve their specific problem.
What he's NOT going to get are warm, fuzzy, "tell me about your feelings about the world's unjustness" replies.
It's just how we are. We're systemizers, not empaths.We love to solve problems. We get annoyed when people whine about things that can't be defined and constrained to some clear context or scope where it's possible to define what even CONSTITUTES a "solution"... unless we happen to be in a mood to commiserate. The fact that such commiseration tends to amplify, reinforce, and legitimize the other's depression is just an unfortunate side effect.
Imagine, for a moment, a hypothetical Slashdot story with a headline like "Joe Python is a programmer who wants to kill himself in the most efficient way possible... what are his options, what are the relative advantages and drawbacks of each, and what equipment will he need to procure in order to carry it out?" Does anybody doubt for a NANOSECOND that it wouldn't get several hundred replies, 90% of which would involve lethal injection cocktail recipes, nitrogen asphyxiation, pre-suicide arrangements for the care and feeding of pets, equipment reviews, countdown checklists (wipe computer, note passwords you want to share with others, update your will, etc) and other suggestions that are mostly intended to be helpful by posters for whom it doesn't quite sink in that the guy wants to literally kill himself?
We DO care. We'll work hard to solve the problems of people we care about. We just won't pretend to care when they go on and on about something they can't be reasoned with. By the time we feel like we've made our third full circle without progress or resolution, we'll get bored and go to lunch. Or head over to Slashdot.
Despair at seeing Linux's most influential distro doing its best to ruin itself as badly as Windows 8 has.
We naively thought Linux was an island of sanity, and believed abominations like Unity were something that only happened to Windows people.
Ubuntu scared the shit out of all of us by making it clear that Linux isn't immune to the insanity propagated by those who think crippling desktop apps to the limited functionality of phone apps is a *good* idea.
I don't remember the year or exact details, but I could swear that Star Micronics or Apple actually made a funky replacement printhead for their dot matrix printers that you could swap out with your real one and use as a crude scanner for barcodes. The idea was that magazines would print programs as scannable barcodes instead of as listings, and you'd use your printer "in reverse" to enter them. For better or worse, it flopped (in the US, at least).
The problem wasn't the breakup of Bell. The problem was allowing it to re-aggregate itself, then allowing it to swallow up a major wireless company, multiplied by state legislatures eager to be the new monolith's favorite bitch and show their loyalty by abolishing most of the laws that forced them to be as good as you remember. The AT&T of today isn't the AT&T of 25 years ago. It's not even the BellSouth of 10 years ago.
The company we now know as AT&T has been caught red-handed, in state after state, using fees state regulators approved 10-20 years ago in the name of fiber deployment to build fiber to THEIR OWN towers, while doing everything possible to let the rest of their network rot into the ground. They don't want to own and operate anything that isn't wireless, except to service their own towers... but they don't want anybody ELSE to own and operate anything that isn't wireless, either.
The FCC needs to break up AT&T again -- this time, into a wireless company, a "common-carrier last-mile infrastructure" company, and U-verse (leasing copper and fiber from the infrastructure company to provide tv/internet/phone today, and compete with newcomers who'd be able to get the new common-carrier last-mile infrastructure company to lease them fiber on the same wholesale terms as U-verse and AT&T wireless.
From what I've gathered from various sources, the specific problem is that the server used to authenticate the RG to U-verse is borked. So... as long as your RG was authenticated PRIOR to the outage, your service should keep working. HOWEVER, if you lose power (or something else happens that requires it to re-authenticate), your service will go bye-bye too until they get the problem fixed.
Right now, I'm hoping that authentication isn't required for DHCP renewal... because if it is, those of us who had service this morning probably have close to 50-50 odds of NOT having service tonight (or tomorrow morning... odds assume 1-week DHCP lease).
All I can say is, if my service goes down & I get a nastygram from AT&T for tethering, I'll be seriously torn between:
a) challenging them to just TRY and decrypt my VPN traffic to prove it, or
b) telling them to fuck off, and demanding a free gigabyte of overage data per week (or fraction thereof) until my service gets restored... unless they want to risk losing a customer with TV (U300), internet (24/3), VoIP (unlimited), AND mobile phone (Android450 w/3gb data and unlimited text/mobile2mobile) service.
Under common law, yes. Under civil law, not necessarily -- it depends entirely upon whether Quebec's provincial government has passed a law explicitly extending that common-law concept to them.
Under common law, everything not explicitly PROHIBITED by law (or legal precedent) is legal (but can still end up as a private tort). If the gov't wants to prosecute, the burden is on them to demonstrate guilt.
Under civil law, anything not explicitly allowed by statute is presumed to be illegal. The government wins by default.
In practice, the distinction isn't quite that lopsided, because prosecutors in civil-law jurisdictions rarely have the kind of unlimited resources available to prosecutors in the US. In the US, we have this idea that since defendants are presumed innocent, it's ok for the government to go after unpaid library fines with the same zeal as cold-blooded mass murder. At least, when the fines have accrued against some long-forgotten book for 40 years, and finally satisfy the minimum amount for a felony.
Intellectual property for American 1980s videogames is a clusterfuck mess. Companies entered into short-term and limited-scope licensing for music, trademarks, images, and the rights to port games from other platforms. And just about every non-Japanese company in business circa 1983 was bankrupt by the mid-90s.
Some platforms, like Colecovision, are such a mess (legally), it would be basically impossible to EVER commercially re-release most of its old games in their original binary form. Coleco in particular signed licensing agreements that literally specified rom cartridges (one of the Adam's fatal flaws, since it meant they couldn't make tape-based versions with more conrent), expired in 10 years, etc. You'd have to spend millions researching ownership, then spin the roulette wheel and try negotiating new licensing agreements with owners who -- almost without exception -- would act like they hit the jackpot and demand outrageous amounts of money that would kill the product dead, anyway.
I believe this was a major motive behind the development of MAME -- the realization that some games were doomed to legally rot in limbo for eternity due to licensing problems.
Great. So when someone steals your device, or you lose it, or it gets broken, or Google decides that they don't like the name you're using online, you're completely fucked in every conceivable way and subjected to the online equivalent of "Universal Default". Even better if it happens when you're traveling and away from home. Frosting-on-the-cake IDEAL if your voicemail, security system, transit smart card, and ability to pay for lunch at McDonald's depends on it, too.
Never, ever, EVER allow one single party to have the authority to nuke you without remorse, recourse, or even any hard requirement to confirm that they've done it and give any specific reason *why*. There's probably even an Antipattern named after this, with a name like "Single Point of Failure"
Does it matter? If it has an APU, it would STILL need battery backup. Modern jets can't fly without electricity to power their computers. If you make the jet's ability to fly dependent upon a functioning APU, someday a failed APU will cause a crash. And even if it has redundant APUs, batteries are so cheap relative to the cost of a crash due to total power loss, Boeing would have had to be completely INSANE to make a plane without battery backup power.
I don't know about AT&T DSL, but I can definitely say that if my AT&T U-verse 3801 residential gateway has a real IPv6 address in addition to its IPv4 address, they've done an incredibly good job of making it non-obvious and hiding it from me. My RG (U-verse parlance for "VDSL2 modem + router") is ~3 months old, and AFAIK, it's the newest model they have and use in FTTN neighborhoods that are 1500 feet from the VRAD).
For shits & giggles, I had my friend's Netgear 3700 (rev.3) router autodetect IPv6 on his Comcast cable modem. It found IPv6 and displayed what appeared to be a legit IPv6 address, but identified it as a tunnel broker. Apparently, Comcast isn't rolling out "real" IPv6... they're just making it easier to kludge by offering their own tunnel-brokering service to customers. The big innovation is that routers can autodetect it, instead of having to set it up by hand. Yawn. It's not real IPv6 until the modem can route both natively all the way back to the NOC without having to wrap one in the other first.
No, they wouldn't move the whole company, they'd outsource their web hosting to an American (or Canadian, or French, or German, or some other country) company that supported both IPv4 and IPv6, and continue as always.
The companies that a law mandating immediate and exclusive use of IPv6 would put out of business are British web hosting companies, because their services would become commercially worthless compared to web hosting services in countries where both IPv4 and IPv6 were legal. VPN'ing isn't commercially viable, because it adds latency and expense for no good reason. A Linux/Windows box on the Internet in a country with English-speaking staff and cheap fiber backbone connectivity is pretty much a commodity. A customer in London can SSH into a colocated server in Virgina, New York, or California as easily as he can SSH into a colocated server in London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, or Manchester. If hosting companies in Britain weren't allowed to offer IPv4-routed hosting services, they'd cease to be competitive with hosting companies in other countries who could offer both IPv4 AND IPv6 routing.
> If a country the size of the UK were to set a switchover date and move to ipv6, the vast majority of > English language sites would be running ipv6 by the switchover date for fear of losing that audience.
Yes... that worked REALLY WELL with RoHS, didn't it? (hint: it didn't). For components that were basically in "legacy old-stock mode" (new ones hadn't been made in years, but new old stock was widely available), new RoHS-compliant parts DIDN'T appear. The components just became officially unavailable in Europe, with no compatible alternatives to replace them with.
If British ISPs switched over to exclusively IPv6, British customers would be screwed. And lots of British sysadmins would be unemployed or forced to consider emigration, because British companies would move their web hosting to the US to avoid losing ~400 milllion English-speaking customers with only IPv4.
The main problem is that in America, high-speed internet basically means "AT&T", "Comcast", "TWC", "Verizon", etc. Huge corporations are allergic to "risk", and *hate* to do *anything* in an experimental, adhoc manner. They want to Roll Out IPv6 in one huge, monolithic program that involves spending as little capital expenditure as possible. The problem is, especially when it comes to networks, that nothing EVER works "in the wild" the way it works under controlled "lab" conditions. End users have an amazing way of breaking assumptions and invalidating models. And what the end users don't break or invalidate, hackers WILL.
What NEEDS to happen is for companies like Comcast and AT&T to make IPv6 *available* to customers who ask for it NOW, without screwing with IPv4 at the same time and trying to deploy CGN or something like it at the same time. Let us have IPv6 to screw around and experiment with, use with open routers capable of running things like OpenWRT, and just leave everyone alone for a year or two. Or three, or five. At some point, the early adopters will buy new hardware, and increasingly decide that IPv6 is more convenient than NAT & port forwarding, creating a larger and larger market for things like IP cameras and stuff that will actually WORK with IPv6 (as opposed to "theoretically be compatible with" it).
In the US (and to a large extent, Europe), we're lucky. We don't *HAVE* to drop everything and wantonly break things to deploy IPv6 as the one and only networking protocol tomorrow. We just need to have it *available* without resorting to latency-adding kludges like tunneling. Make it available, and the people who'll ultimately be creating the devices and apps that run under IPv6 will slowly start to drift towards it. The problem is that right now, our ISPs see it as an either/or false dichotomy -- IPv6 + CGN, or IPv4 only. Let us have an IPv6/48 prefix of our own AND a public DHCP-assigned IPv4 address of our own like we've had for the last 15 years, and give IPv6 a chance to emerge on its own in the same organic fashion IPv4 largely did.
Yes, I said that IPv4 evolved organically. The harsh truth is that the idea that the internet we have today was "defined" by IETF is a delusional fantasy. IETF didn't define shit. It documented the status quo, and occasionally reconciled conflicting guerrilla standards already out in the wild, so that later generations of hardware could interoperate with it. The problem is, the people behind IPv6 have been bought into the fantasy of IETF-omnipotence hook, line, and sinker, and convinced ISPs like AT&T and Comcast that it's the truth, while companies like Cisco metaphorically roll their eyes, cringe, and humor them because it means they'll be selling lots of new hardware to replace slightly less new hardware.
What a wonderfully-naive view of the internet. As we all know, consumers in Britain and America have bountiful high-speed low-latency broadband choices within a healthy, competitive marketplace. We have cable OR dsl... maybe cable AND dsl if we're incredibly lucky, and... er...um...
Ok, right then. We're fucked.
Cellular data has low caps and rapidly gets expensive if you're allowed to exceed them without getting throttled to sub-dialup speeds. Satellite data has insane latency, and *insidious* caps whose throttling kicks in at thresholds that aren't necessarily transparent or obvious from the marketing literature. Fiber to the home barely exists, and with the exception of Google in Kansas City, is still the exclusive fiefdom of basically one incumbent large corporation with its own agenda that's vehemently opposed to network neutrality. And those incumbent carriers have all done their best to bribe/buy/bully state officials into passing laws making it illegal for communities (or even existing neighborhoods) to take matters into their own hands, leapfrog over those incumbent carriers, and lay their own open-access fiber *anyway*.
Exactly. The HF bands are almost commercially useless today. If you need reliable commercial communication in the most remote parts of central Africa or the western Amazon, you'd use a satellite phone. You might carry a ham radio with you for social communication, but you'd have to be insane & suicidal to head off into the African jungle or Amazon with nothing but a 20m radio. Even IF the US decided to unilaterally hijack the HF bands and sell them off to commercial users, interference from everyone else in the world would render it almost unusable.
For anyone who needs more proof, witness the stampede of American TV stations AWAY from VHF. 25 years ago, VHF was the beachfront property of the broadcasting world, and UHF was the housing project where the poor local broadcasters got warehoused. Now, nobody wants VHF anymore (esp. channels 2-5), and channels 14-~30 are the hottest and most completely prime channels money can lease.
> CW is allowed on any part of the band. Morse code 4 evar!
Ah, yes. Especially the ~200wpm computer-generated Morse we innocently and naively splattered across the HF bands as teenagers (back when the mean old guys at the FCC wouldn't let us use packet, Amtor, or RTTY on HF until we got our Morse speeds up to speeds they deemed worthy).
Of course, back then, we thought of a CW carrier the way we thought of rays in geometry (zero width, infinite length from some starting point), and had NO IDEA that turning the carrier on and off fast enough to make the relay buzz recognizable audio tones of differing frequencies (while using it to turn the transmitter itself on and off) actually created real-world AM-like interference as surely as if we'd plugged a mic into the radio and broadcast the sound of the relay buzzing away. Sigh. The joyful summer-vacation innocence of youth:-D
Hmmm... would someone mind again explaining how to robustly disable the Java plugin from Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome...
* WITHOUT uninstalling the JRE or JDK,
* WITHOUT globally disabling plugins (like Flash) in general,
* ROBUSTLY, in a way that can't be subverted by Oracle's installer or brain-damaged update logic, and
* in a way that allows you to permanently or temporarily re-enable the Java plugin for a domain, specific host, or wildcard/regex-matched URL... and allows you to do it retroactively, AFTER the page has loaded, without resubmitting a form (if that's how you got to the page in the first place) or restart the browser after re-enabling Java. Few things suck more than completing an online purchase for Java-delivered premium content, or going through some extended login process involving hardware tokens and one-time passwords, only to have to repeat the whole thing from scratch (or try to get a refund) because you forgot (or didn't notice) that Java has to be enabled before you start?
> Android does save Activity state, it's lifecycle 101. Just look at the onCreate method signature. What do you think "savedInstanceState" means?
Yes, it does save its state. But after roughly 30 minutes, Android will become increasingly determined to kill it off at the slightest pretense and first possible opportunity. It's kind of like Windows and virtual memory... you can have 16 gigs, with 13 free, and Windows will STILL swap stuff out to virtual memory. Likewise, you can have plenty of free ram on your phone, and an app with a relatively small footprint, but after roughly 30 minutes, Android wants it dead & gone (even if it means relaunching it from scratch 2 seconds later) so it can scrub the heap clean and reclaim its space RIGHT NOW.
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I don't know about AT&T, but I know that as of about a year ago, it was literally impossible to buy an unactivated Sprint phone with no strings attached and ready-to-use MSL code from any authorized retail store -- full price or not. That's right... even full-priced Sprint phones sold without subsidy are locked to Sprint, and have their MSL code withheld from purchasers.
In other words, if you walked into a Sprint store last year (or Best Buy, or Radio Shack), threw $600 on the counter, and said, "I want to buy a Sprint Galaxy S2 (last fall's #1 Sprint phone) at full retail cost with no strings attached, in a sealed box, and walk out the door with it without activation or associating it with an existing Sprint account, with the MSL in my possession so I can activate it for any compatible CDMA carrier in the world (like India).", they would literally say 'no' and refuse to sell you the phone. Or, if you somehow got someone at a Radio Shack to sell the phone to you, they'd refuse to furnish the MSL code, even though you purchased the phone at full retail cost. Several users from XDA-developers.com who were visiting the US and wanted to buy a CDMA SGS2 to use in India tried, failed, and complained loudly about it. One reported that Best Buy's computer system literally would not allow them to ring up the phone without a contract or activation of the phone for an existing Sprint account.
Sprint's official excuse was that the phone was sold with software licensed exclusively for use by Sprint customers... like their "popular" NASCAR app (you know... the one that has probably motivated more "how do I delete that stupid app" postings in web forums than any other app in Sprint history).
As far as I know, this policy has not changed, and it's still officially impossible to buy a full-priced unsubsidized Sprint phone without tying it to an active account and obtain its MSL code.
Fair enough.That's definitely a good reason. :-)
Big tip for anybody who's trying to roll his own access point: stick to PCI or PCI-express (1x is fine) interfaces (maybe... MAYBE Cardbus or Expresscard, as long as you make sure it's not "USB-over-Expresscard"), and forget about USB.
To say that "AP mode" via USB (even Atheros) is "bleeding-edge experimental" would be a gross oversimplification of just how hard it is to get something that even pretends to briefly work over USB. AFAIK, Atheros is the only chipset that can even halfway work in AP mode over USB... and even Atheros is a major reach.
The problem is that a proper AP mode implementation imposes very tight timing constraints that don't apply to other modes... and some of those constraints are just too tight to reliably work over USB. You can semi force it by abusing the way USB is supposed to work, and USB3 might have better results but I've NEVER seen it work well with anything that resembles a USB interface, a laptop, and the USB ports on that laptop. In contrast, AP mode over PCI(-express) is totally painless. Stick in the card, run hostapd, and you're good to go.
For INSIDE a house, fiber really is gross overkill. Most DATACENTERS don't even go all the way and use fiber for connections between devices in the same room. If you end up having to plug the fiber at both ends into an adapter box to turn it into gigabit wired ethernet, what have you *really* accomplished besides ego-masturbation and slightly increased latency due to two more conversion steps?
It's like Toslink... everyone thinks it's the ultimate L33t way to run SPDIF signals between your player and amp, and both Monster Cable and Toshiba have done their best to reinforce that notion... except actually, it's not. If you look at real-world performance, Toslink positively BUTCHERS the signal, and turns it into metaphorical mush that Solomon-Reed error correction can *barely* keep up with and fix. Toslink falls over and dies with relatively short lengths where a video-grade RCA cable works flawlessly. Optical interconnects for signals running less than a hundred feet, or within a single room, are almost ALWAYS counterproductive. Toslink, like passive fiber interconnects in general, is one of those things that sounds really cool in theory, but ends up sucking in real life because you're taking something straightforward and making it 200 times more complicated than it has to be.
Remember, 10-gigabit ethernet over copper ALREADY exists. It's not suitable for direct use, but with anticipated improvements to DSP technology, I think it's safe to say that when the day comes that you need to casually shovel 10gbps around your house, if push came to shove you'd be able to buy a pair of 10-gigE switches so you could multiplex the traffic of up to 10 gigabit devices into a single cat6 cable for up to a few hundred feet... at worst, using the same basic technology used to make VDSL work (just more wires operating in parallel to spread the work around).
Actually, 2.4GHz ended up as an ISM band because microwave ovens rendered it commercially useless (remember, microwave ovens are basically thousand-watt 2.4GHz radio transmitters that cook by rapidly altering the polarity of the signal to make water molecules rock back and forth... all the faraday cage around a microwave oven's cavity does is diffuse the signal & scramble its polarity so it won't cause water molecules in your eyeball to start rocking back and forth, too. The 2.4GHz RF signal itself radiates from the room like an arc light.
Why is there seemingly not a SINGLE product available for consumers to buy -- access point, interface, or otherwise -- for 802.11y?
OK, sure... you have to fork out a whopping hundred bucks for a 10-year license, but Jesus H. Christ, you get to run with sufficiently high power to achieve 5km range, and better yet... you get to have the EXCLUSIVE local usage rights to your licensed chunk of spectrum. I'd pay a hundred bucks for 10 years to have my own exclusive chunk of the wifi band in a HEARTBEAT.
* No more dealing with neighbors stomping over the entire 2.4GHz band so they can pretend their economy 768k DSL is really 300mbps.
* No more "I lost the 5.8GHz 802.11n signal after closing the bedroom door" grief.
* Propagation that's not quite as nice as 2.4GHz, but WAY better than real-world 5.8GHz. And you won't have the connection drop down to near-uselessness every time somebody within a half mile turns on their microwave oven.
* 3-mile range, and government-enforced spectrum exclusivity, for a PITTANCE of a licensing fee that has the added bonus of keeping the riffraff out and ensuring it remains an exclusive club for the computer elite.
It's a fsck'ing gift from the great Nerd God himself, yet nobody even knows it exists. WHY?!?
When many of us here at Slashdot were in high school, it was more or less taken for granted that dinosaurs were cold-blooded reptiles with scales...and later, around college, books started to mention birds as the likely descendants of dinosaurs. Are big dinos like T.Rex, Stegosaurus, etc.still widely believed by researchers to have been cold-blooded reptiles, or is it more likely that dinos like T.Rex were more like a big ostrich than an alligator walking on its hind legs, and that they might have been warm-blooded and/or more recognizably "avian" than "reptilian" (particularly their brains)? Or is viewing the mightiest of the "alpha dinosaurs" (like T.Rex) as ancient birds going a bit overboard, with feathered & avian-like dinos having likely been the exception rather than the norm?
> The cultures and sub-cultures that we are part of need to be more caring
Actually, our communities DO tend to be "more caring" -- we just happen to have a different definition of "caring" than most people.
If somebody who's known on a computer/tech-related forum says that he's depressed because he feels overwhelmed by ${some-problem}, he'll get dozens or hundreds of replies, most of which will be genuine attempts to be helpful, with specific suggestions for things to try and solve that problem. Some might be from people willing to work quite hard to help solve their specific problem.
What he's NOT going to get are warm, fuzzy, "tell me about your feelings about the world's unjustness" replies.
It's just how we are. We're systemizers, not empaths.We love to solve problems. We get annoyed when people whine about things that can't be defined and constrained to some clear context or scope where it's possible to define what even CONSTITUTES a "solution"... unless we happen to be in a mood to commiserate. The fact that such commiseration tends to amplify, reinforce, and legitimize the other's depression is just an unfortunate side effect.
Imagine, for a moment, a hypothetical Slashdot story with a headline like "Joe Python is a programmer who wants to kill himself in the most efficient way possible... what are his options, what are the relative advantages and drawbacks of each, and what equipment will he need to procure in order to carry it out?" Does anybody doubt for a NANOSECOND that it wouldn't get several hundred replies, 90% of which would involve lethal injection cocktail recipes, nitrogen asphyxiation, pre-suicide arrangements for the care and feeding of pets, equipment reviews, countdown checklists (wipe computer, note passwords you want to share with others, update your will, etc) and other suggestions that are mostly intended to be helpful by posters for whom it doesn't quite sink in that the guy wants to literally kill himself?
We DO care. We'll work hard to solve the problems of people we care about. We just won't pretend to care when they go on and on about something they can't be reasoned with. By the time we feel like we've made our third full circle without progress or resolution, we'll get bored and go to lunch. Or head over to Slashdot.
> What changed?
Despair at seeing Linux's most influential distro doing its best to ruin itself as badly as Windows 8 has.
We naively thought Linux was an island of sanity, and believed abominations like Unity were something that only happened to Windows people.
Ubuntu scared the shit out of all of us by making it clear that Linux isn't immune to the insanity propagated by those who think crippling desktop apps to the limited functionality of phone apps is a *good* idea.
Well, let's not go overboard with the nostalgia. I don't think anybody learned much of anything by spending 3 days with MLX ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLX_(software) )
I don't remember the year or exact details, but I could swear that Star Micronics or Apple actually made a funky replacement printhead for their dot matrix printers that you could swap out with your real one and use as a crude scanner for barcodes. The idea was that magazines would print programs as scannable barcodes instead of as listings, and you'd use your printer "in reverse" to enter them. For better or worse, it flopped (in the US, at least).
The problem wasn't the breakup of Bell. The problem was allowing it to re-aggregate itself, then allowing it to swallow up a major wireless company, multiplied by state legislatures eager to be the new monolith's favorite bitch and show their loyalty by abolishing most of the laws that forced them to be as good as you remember. The AT&T of today isn't the AT&T of 25 years ago. It's not even the BellSouth of 10 years ago.
The company we now know as AT&T has been caught red-handed, in state after state, using fees state regulators approved 10-20 years ago in the name of fiber deployment to build fiber to THEIR OWN towers, while doing everything possible to let the rest of their network rot into the ground. They don't want to own and operate anything that isn't wireless, except to service their own towers... but they don't want anybody ELSE to own and operate anything that isn't wireless, either.
The FCC needs to break up AT&T again -- this time, into a wireless company, a "common-carrier last-mile infrastructure" company, and U-verse (leasing copper and fiber from the infrastructure company to provide tv/internet/phone today, and compete with newcomers who'd be able to get the new common-carrier last-mile infrastructure company to lease them fiber on the same wholesale terms as U-verse and AT&T wireless.
From what I've gathered from various sources, the specific problem is that the server used to authenticate the RG to U-verse is borked. So... as long as your RG was authenticated PRIOR to the outage, your service should keep working. HOWEVER, if you lose power (or something else happens that requires it to re-authenticate), your service will go bye-bye too until they get the problem fixed.
Right now, I'm hoping that authentication isn't required for DHCP renewal... because if it is, those of us who had service this morning probably have close to 50-50 odds of NOT having service tonight (or tomorrow morning... odds assume 1-week DHCP lease).
All I can say is, if my service goes down & I get a nastygram from AT&T for tethering, I'll be seriously torn between:
a) challenging them to just TRY and decrypt my VPN traffic to prove it, or
b) telling them to fuck off, and demanding a free gigabyte of overage data per week (or fraction thereof) until my service gets restored... unless they want to risk losing a customer with TV (U300), internet (24/3), VoIP (unlimited), AND mobile phone (Android450 w/3gb data and unlimited text/mobile2mobile) service.
Under common law, yes. Under civil law, not necessarily -- it depends entirely upon whether Quebec's provincial government has passed a law explicitly extending that common-law concept to them.
Under common law, everything not explicitly PROHIBITED by law (or legal precedent) is legal (but can still end up as a private tort). If the gov't wants to prosecute, the burden is on them to demonstrate guilt.
Under civil law, anything not explicitly allowed by statute is presumed to be illegal. The government wins by default.
In practice, the distinction isn't quite that lopsided, because prosecutors in civil-law jurisdictions rarely have the kind of unlimited resources available to prosecutors in the US. In the US, we have this idea that since defendants are presumed innocent, it's ok for the government to go after unpaid library fines with the same zeal as cold-blooded mass murder. At least, when the fines have accrued against some long-forgotten book for 40 years, and finally satisfy the minimum amount for a felony.
Intellectual property for American 1980s videogames is a clusterfuck mess. Companies entered into short-term and limited-scope licensing for music, trademarks, images, and the rights to port games from other platforms. And just about every non-Japanese company in business circa 1983 was bankrupt by the mid-90s.
Some platforms, like Colecovision, are such a mess (legally), it would be basically impossible to EVER commercially re-release most of its old games in their original binary form. Coleco in particular signed licensing agreements that literally specified rom cartridges (one of the Adam's fatal flaws, since it meant they couldn't make tape-based versions with more conrent), expired in 10 years, etc. You'd have to spend millions researching ownership, then spin the roulette wheel and try negotiating new licensing agreements with owners who -- almost without exception -- would act like they hit the jackpot and demand outrageous amounts of money that would kill the product dead, anyway.
I believe this was a major motive behind the development of MAME -- the realization that some games were doomed to legally rot in limbo for eternity due to licensing problems.
Great. So when someone steals your device, or you lose it, or it gets broken, or Google decides that they don't like the name you're using online, you're completely fucked in every conceivable way and subjected to the online equivalent of "Universal Default". Even better if it happens when you're traveling and away from home. Frosting-on-the-cake IDEAL if your voicemail, security system, transit smart card, and ability to pay for lunch at McDonald's depends on it, too.
Never, ever, EVER allow one single party to have the authority to nuke you without remorse, recourse, or even any hard requirement to confirm that they've done it and give any specific reason *why*. There's probably even an Antipattern named after this, with a name like "Single Point of Failure"
> Does this aircraft not have an APU?
Does it matter? If it has an APU, it would STILL need battery backup. Modern jets can't fly without electricity to power their computers. If you make the jet's ability to fly dependent upon a functioning APU, someday a failed APU will cause a crash. And even if it has redundant APUs, batteries are so cheap relative to the cost of a crash due to total power loss, Boeing would have had to be completely INSANE to make a plane without battery backup power.
I don't know about AT&T DSL, but I can definitely say that if my AT&T U-verse 3801 residential gateway has a real IPv6 address in addition to its IPv4 address, they've done an incredibly good job of making it non-obvious and hiding it from me. My RG (U-verse parlance for "VDSL2 modem + router") is ~3 months old, and AFAIK, it's the newest model they have and use in FTTN neighborhoods that are 1500 feet from the VRAD).
For shits & giggles, I had my friend's Netgear 3700 (rev.3) router autodetect IPv6 on his Comcast cable modem. It found IPv6 and displayed what appeared to be a legit IPv6 address, but identified it as a tunnel broker. Apparently, Comcast isn't rolling out "real" IPv6... they're just making it easier to kludge by offering their own tunnel-brokering service to customers. The big innovation is that routers can autodetect it, instead of having to set it up by hand. Yawn. It's not real IPv6 until the modem can route both natively all the way back to the NOC without having to wrap one in the other first.
No, they wouldn't move the whole company, they'd outsource their web hosting to an American (or Canadian, or French, or German, or some other country) company that supported both IPv4 and IPv6, and continue as always.
The companies that a law mandating immediate and exclusive use of IPv6 would put out of business are British web hosting companies, because their services would become commercially worthless compared to web hosting services in countries where both IPv4 and IPv6 were legal. VPN'ing isn't commercially viable, because it adds latency and expense for no good reason. A Linux/Windows box on the Internet in a country with English-speaking staff and cheap fiber backbone connectivity is pretty much a commodity. A customer in London can SSH into a colocated server in Virgina, New York, or California as easily as he can SSH into a colocated server in London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, or Manchester. If hosting companies in Britain weren't allowed to offer IPv4-routed hosting services, they'd cease to be competitive with hosting companies in other countries who could offer both IPv4 AND IPv6 routing.
> If a country the size of the UK were to set a switchover date and move to ipv6, the vast majority of
> English language sites would be running ipv6 by the switchover date for fear of losing that audience.
Yes... that worked REALLY WELL with RoHS, didn't it? (hint: it didn't). For components that were basically in "legacy old-stock mode" (new ones hadn't been made in years, but new old stock was widely available), new RoHS-compliant parts DIDN'T appear. The components just became officially unavailable in Europe, with no compatible alternatives to replace them with.
If British ISPs switched over to exclusively IPv6, British customers would be screwed. And lots of British sysadmins would be unemployed or forced to consider emigration, because British companies would move their web hosting to the US to avoid losing ~400 milllion English-speaking customers with only IPv4.
The main problem is that in America, high-speed internet basically means "AT&T", "Comcast", "TWC", "Verizon", etc. Huge corporations are allergic to "risk", and *hate* to do *anything* in an experimental, adhoc manner. They want to Roll Out IPv6 in one huge, monolithic program that involves spending as little capital expenditure as possible. The problem is, especially when it comes to networks, that nothing EVER works "in the wild" the way it works under controlled "lab" conditions. End users have an amazing way of breaking assumptions and invalidating models. And what the end users don't break or invalidate, hackers WILL.
What NEEDS to happen is for companies like Comcast and AT&T to make IPv6 *available* to customers who ask for it NOW, without screwing with IPv4 at the same time and trying to deploy CGN or something like it at the same time. Let us have IPv6 to screw around and experiment with, use with open routers capable of running things like OpenWRT, and just leave everyone alone for a year or two. Or three, or five. At some point, the early adopters will buy new hardware, and increasingly decide that IPv6 is more convenient than NAT & port forwarding, creating a larger and larger market for things like IP cameras and stuff that will actually WORK with IPv6 (as opposed to "theoretically be compatible with" it).
In the US (and to a large extent, Europe), we're lucky. We don't *HAVE* to drop everything and wantonly break things to deploy IPv6 as the one and only networking protocol tomorrow. We just need to have it *available* without resorting to latency-adding kludges like tunneling. Make it available, and the people who'll ultimately be creating the devices and apps that run under IPv6 will slowly start to drift towards it. The problem is that right now, our ISPs see it as an either/or false dichotomy -- IPv6 + CGN, or IPv4 only. Let us have an IPv6 /48 prefix of our own AND a public DHCP-assigned IPv4 address of our own like we've had for the last 15 years, and give IPv6 a chance to emerge on its own in the same organic fashion IPv4 largely did.
Yes, I said that IPv4 evolved organically. The harsh truth is that the idea that the internet we have today was "defined" by IETF is a delusional fantasy. IETF didn't define shit. It documented the status quo, and occasionally reconciled conflicting guerrilla standards already out in the wild, so that later generations of hardware could interoperate with it. The problem is, the people behind IPv6 have been bought into the fantasy of IETF-omnipotence hook, line, and sinker, and convinced ISPs like AT&T and Comcast that it's the truth, while companies like Cisco metaphorically roll their eyes, cringe, and humor them because it means they'll be selling lots of new hardware to replace slightly less new hardware.
> That will be a problem of the ISP then
What a wonderfully-naive view of the internet. As we all know, consumers in Britain and America have bountiful high-speed low-latency broadband choices within a healthy, competitive marketplace. We have cable OR dsl... maybe cable AND dsl if we're incredibly lucky, and... er...um...
Ok, right then. We're fucked.
Cellular data has low caps and rapidly gets expensive if you're allowed to exceed them without getting throttled to sub-dialup speeds. Satellite data has insane latency, and *insidious* caps whose throttling kicks in at thresholds that aren't necessarily transparent or obvious from the marketing literature. Fiber to the home barely exists, and with the exception of Google in Kansas City, is still the exclusive fiefdom of basically one incumbent large corporation with its own agenda that's vehemently opposed to network neutrality. And those incumbent carriers have all done their best to bribe/buy/bully state officials into passing laws making it illegal for communities (or even existing neighborhoods) to take matters into their own hands, leapfrog over those incumbent carriers, and lay their own open-access fiber *anyway*.
Exactly. The HF bands are almost commercially useless today. If you need reliable commercial communication in the most remote parts of central Africa or the western Amazon, you'd use a satellite phone. You might carry a ham radio with you for social communication, but you'd have to be insane & suicidal to head off into the African jungle or Amazon with nothing but a 20m radio. Even IF the US decided to unilaterally hijack the HF bands and sell them off to commercial users, interference from everyone else in the world would render it almost unusable.
For anyone who needs more proof, witness the stampede of American TV stations AWAY from VHF. 25 years ago, VHF was the beachfront property of the broadcasting world, and UHF was the housing project where the poor local broadcasters got warehoused. Now, nobody wants VHF anymore (esp. channels 2-5), and channels 14-~30 are the hottest and most completely prime channels money can lease.
> CW is allowed on any part of the band. Morse code 4 evar!
Ah, yes. Especially the ~200wpm computer-generated Morse we innocently and naively splattered across the HF bands as teenagers (back when the mean old guys at the FCC wouldn't let us use packet, Amtor, or RTTY on HF until we got our Morse speeds up to speeds they deemed worthy).
Of course, back then, we thought of a CW carrier the way we thought of rays in geometry (zero width, infinite length from some starting point), and had NO IDEA that turning the carrier on and off fast enough to make the relay buzz recognizable audio tones of differing frequencies (while using it to turn the transmitter itself on and off) actually created real-world AM-like interference as surely as if we'd plugged a mic into the radio and broadcast the sound of the relay buzzing away. Sigh. The joyful summer-vacation innocence of youth :-D
Hmmm... would someone mind again explaining how to robustly disable the Java plugin from Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome...
* WITHOUT uninstalling the JRE or JDK,
* WITHOUT globally disabling plugins (like Flash) in general,
* ROBUSTLY, in a way that can't be subverted by Oracle's installer or brain-damaged update logic, and
* in a way that allows you to permanently or temporarily re-enable the Java plugin for a domain, specific host, or wildcard/regex-matched URL... and allows you to do it retroactively, AFTER the page has loaded, without resubmitting a form (if that's how you got to the page in the first place) or restart the browser after re-enabling Java. Few things suck more than completing an online purchase for Java-delivered premium content, or going through some extended login process involving hardware tokens and one-time passwords, only to have to repeat the whole thing from scratch (or try to get a refund) because you forgot (or didn't notice) that Java has to be enabled before you start?
> Android does save Activity state, it's lifecycle 101. Just look at the onCreate method signature. What do you think "savedInstanceState" means?
Yes, it does save its state. But after roughly 30 minutes, Android will become increasingly determined to kill it off at the slightest pretense and first possible opportunity. It's kind of like Windows and virtual memory... you can have 16 gigs, with 13 free, and Windows will STILL swap stuff out to virtual memory. Likewise, you can have plenty of free ram on your phone, and an app with a relatively small footprint, but after roughly 30 minutes, Android wants it dead & gone (even if it means relaunching it from scratch 2 seconds later) so it can scrub the heap clean and reclaim its space RIGHT NOW.