Actually what shortens an iPhone life, is the fact the OS no longer supports devices after 4 years.
Five years for me. My iPhone 5 just got it's last OS update, though I've had security and bugfix releases on my old 3GS after the final OS release.
Still quite a bit better than most Android devices (my Asus tablet shipped with an old OS, and eventually was updated to a slightly less old OS, and they are still selling it as a current device) Except for Nexus/Pixel gear which is rather good.
Planet Money did a great pieces on the intrinsic value of gold. It's intrinsic value is that it is an excellent metal for use as a store of value. It doesn't degrade. It doesn't react with anything. It's easily worked into coins. It's not poisonous. It's relatively easy to mine and extract from rock. It's common, but not too common. If you factor in all the requirements for a store of value / unit of trade, you end up with silver, gold, palladium... all the precious metals that are commonly used as stores of value.
It's almost as if thousands of years of economic activity figured out that these metals are valuable as a store of value.
If there are not safe guards in place for the internet as a public utility to protect the market then we are at risk of damaging the entire economic market (possibly causing yet another recession) in order to provide special treatment to a small amount of participants namely Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner.
The problem is that traditional utilities are pretty much stable. Water distributions systems haven't changed significantly in 80 years. Ditto the electrical system. The internet changes rapidly. Delivery systems change. Services change. Protocols change. The only thing that is significantly similar is TCP/IP, BGP and DNS.
So how do you regulate that without killing off any potential improvements that run afoul of said regulation?
You leave it alone until something is obviously broken, then you pass a law to fix it.
This isn't a small detail, it's monumentally important. Can you imagine what the computer industry would look like if some bureaucrat decided that, in 1982, a "home computer" would be defined as a 6502 CPU with 128K of RAM, and anything else would be disallowed? Or that CP/M would be the standardized OS? Makes it easier to regulate the market and protect consumers when everything is standardized.
Houston has had stable rents and housing prices for decades. Even during the worst of the housing collapse, home values only decreased a few percentage points. This is because they do not have zoning laws. This means that occasionally you have something weird like an office building near a residential area, but you don't end up with factories in the middle of apartment buildings as factories are built where land is cheap, and residential areas are relatively expensive.
So the question is what is more valuable, a stable housing market with a good mix of affordable and expensive homes, or being able to control it? Most of the time you can't have both.
When someone asks me what software development is like, I respond:
"It's like doing crossword puzzles. Except you don't have all of the clues, sometimes the clues change, sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes there are five answers that work but only one or two is correct. When you are done everyone looks at your results and critiques them. And you only have a set amount of time to do it all in."
Furthermore, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) are supporting Sen. Ed Markey's (D-MA) plan to introduce a Congressional Review Act resolution to undo the FCC vote.
Why don't they introduce a bill allowing the FCC to regulate broadband throttling? The FCC board's (and Patel's) issue with the previous legislation was it was introduced under common carrier requirements.
Lilo & Stitch Lilo & Stich 2 Leroy & Stitch Moana Mulan Hercules Zootopia Finding Dory Atlantis Tarzan II Kronk's New Groove An Extremely Goofy Movie Phineas & Ferb A bunch of the Tinkerbell movies Fox & Hound Mickey's Christmas Carol Pete's Dragon The BFG
That's all I'm going to bother to list, but there are dozens more.
The "basic" QoS traffic shaping you refer to you be used by Verizon and Comcast to prioritize their own streaming services only, not streaming services in general.
Then that's not basic QoS. That's why I said service and connection agnostic rules. VOIP gets priority over streaming video. Streaming video gets priority over web sites. Web sites get priority over downloads. That's all that should be allowed.
The fact that the internet can get "slowed down" during a major event (like Xmas day) is the direct result of a complete separate problem compared to NN. The lack of available bandwidth is caused by the big ISPs having little to no incentive to build out their network infrastructure because of the monopolistic contracts they hold in most areas. They suck up endless profits while investing only the bare minimum back into their equipment.
You don't build out your infrastructure assuming everyone is going to be using the maximum amount of what you are providing. The water system isn't designed for every household to take a shower, run their dishwasher and washing machine all at the same time. Roads aren't designed for everyone in town to be on them at the same time. The electrical grid isn't designed for everyone to draw the maximum amount of current their breaker box can handle at the same time.
THAT's why there are slowdowns every now and then. You don't design your broadband infrastructure assuming everyone is going to be downloading huge files all at the same time. If you did you'd be paying twice as much for broadband, because the network would be hugely overbuilt.
You build out your network to handle maximum throughput for 80% of the time. The other 20% QoS kicks in.
1. The way the FCC imposed net neutrality rules is dumb. When broadband first rolled out, the FCC tried to regulate it by pretending it was the same as cable TV. That didn't work out, so now they are regulating it by pretending that it's the same as the telephone system. That's also stupid. The internet isn't a phone, or cable, or satellite TV, it's the internet.
2. Getting rid of "net neutrality" in it's current form, simply means the FTC will be regulating it instead of the FCC. That's good or bad, depending on your point of view.
3. The correct way to fix this is to have congress pass legislation letting the FCC regulate broadband as a service- and connection-agnostic data provider. IMHO they should be allowed to do basic QoS traffic shaping, so on Christmas morning when everyone's console starts downloading 2GB game "patches" it doesn't choke off streaming video, or your VOIP phone.
4. If you are skeptical of the current congress, or any potential congress, doing something about it, you are probably correct.
Your not sure if broadband is regulated but your sure they blocked comcast until they had two providers?
Not sure if it's regulated by the city in other municipalities. In our entire state, it's on a city-by-city basis. Could be different in other states. I'm sure of it because I remember it happening.
A link would be nice.
This happened in the 1980s. A link would be to drive to the local library and look up the local newspaper on microfilm. In any case we have WOW, Comcast, and AT&T available. It wasn't originally WOW, it was another local cable provider (one of the first in the area) that WOW bought out.
Still, if your city is acting stupid, elect better city leaders.
Where we live and in most municipalities, I believe, broadband is regulated by the city. In the city where we live, when Comcast wanted to move in, city council wouldn't let them until another provider could also move in.
Want to fix the problem in rural areas? The federal government owns more than half of the available RF spectrum. Free up some so we can get wireless broadband going.
Von Neumann has an early computer architecture named after him. Everyone who takes a computer architecture class knows who he is. One of my professors brought up the "Goto Considered Harmful" paper as well.
In the general populace, not so much, but the article in question is talking about the computer industry specifically.
But she wasn't forgotten. There was a 60 minutes piece about her in the 1980's. Back when people in the computer industry didn't often make the news. Reagan making her Commodore made the news and the papers. Everyone in the industry knew her, and a lot of people outside of the industry did, too.
But nowadays when people mention women in the computer industry they talk about Ada Lovelace... and that's pretty much it.
Grace Hopper *was* a developer. Did amazing work. Wrote one of the first compilers. Remington Rand made her director of programming languages for the UNIVAC project. She made rank of Captain in the Navy, then honorary rank of Commodore (then Rear Admiral.) They named a ship after her.
But nobody seems to talk about her that much these days. Weird.
If I were to run a "plan" economy country I'd steal a page from the market economy playbook and have them all do internal billing in Government Credits. You technically don't need private industry to have an internal market. And then you could watch prices and if steel got too expensive build more steelworks.
That's a great idea in theory. What happens in practice is, now that you've essentially politicized the economy, whom gets the credits (and how many credits are available to use) is now a political matter. Assuming this is a democratic affair, whichever political group promises the most credits to the most powerful industrial collective will get the votes. Again, you see this play out in other planned economies. In the Soviet Union, you saw a lot of resources allocated to the industrial and technology sectors. The farmers got screwed when it came to resource allocation.
The main problem with communism is the efficient distribution of limited resources. It's basic information theory - you have a complicated set of interdependent production units that have varying needs for resources on each other. To make steel you need water, to move water around water you need pipes pumps, to make pipes pumps you need steel... and on and on ad infinitum.
A market system works pretty well at distributing these resources. If you make steel you don't need to know anything about demand other than the price of steel.
A planned / communist economy relies on meetings to figure out what gets made. The problem is nobody has all the information needed to plan out production, especially on a large scale. This is why you have perpetual shortages of goods in countries with planned economies.
... like any genre, most anime is pretty bad. I noticed this back when it was really taking off in the US. I used to go to a monthly anime screening at a college near me and they'd show a couple of decent movies and a few episodes of a good TV series all hand-subtitled by the Japanese club's members. After a few years it devolved into, maybe, one decent movie or OVA, and a slew of shlocky romantic comedy, high school students fighting demons, or DBZ knockoff TV shows. The last screening I went to they played a few episodes from three different TV series that were all vampire high school romantic drama/comedies. I gave them a chance and, except for a few scenes of well done animation that I'm sure ate up most of their budgets, they were all garbage.
Blocks all of that crap. I once loaded a news site I frequent in another browser and laughed at all of the garbage that popped up and ate up screen real estate. With NoScript the site doesn't look as pretty but it's far more usable.
Narcotics interfere with your brain's ability to use certain neurotransmitters. Stopping narcotics cold turkey, in general, is a bad idea, as your brain won't function properly without them. You need to be weened off, usually with a different, analog substance.
Gambling and the internet you can quit cold turkey. You'll be really, really upset, but you won't go through the same physical withdrawal symptoms as with narcotics.
So, no, a cocaine addiction isn't like a gambling addiction at all.
I used to field test satellite radios in vans, it wasn't that difficult. We used a lot of the same gear they use in field testing cell phones. Nowadays they have apps that can do it for you - constantly send SMSes and count the failures, attempt to download something and check throughput, etc... You put three or four of each phone under test in powered cradles in the back of a truck and drive them around running the test apps. The trick is to run the same route over and over again to build up your test data. For control you have another set of phones stationary somewhere along the test route.
That's interesting. Get them out in the field. Sensitivity is not the only measurement that matters. In some cases, it's the least important measurement. Noise rejection and selectivity are usually more important in urban environments when you get crazy ghosting from signals bouncing off of buildings. Unless you have an insanely expensive RF capture and playback setup, you aren't replicating that in the lab.
Nope we had a fancy "Infra-Red" remote control unit. Here's a website dedicated to it, because of course there is one on the internet: http://vintageelectronics.beta...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually what shortens an iPhone life, is the fact the OS no longer supports devices after 4 years.
Five years for me. My iPhone 5 just got it's last OS update, though I've had security and bugfix releases on my old 3GS after the final OS release.
Still quite a bit better than most Android devices (my Asus tablet shipped with an old OS, and eventually was updated to a slightly less old OS, and they are still selling it as a current device) Except for Nexus/Pixel gear which is rather good.
Planet Money did a great pieces on the intrinsic value of gold. It's intrinsic value is that it is an excellent metal for use as a store of value. It doesn't degrade. It doesn't react with anything. It's easily worked into coins. It's not poisonous. It's relatively easy to mine and extract from rock. It's common, but not too common. If you factor in all the requirements for a store of value / unit of trade, you end up with silver, gold, palladium... all the precious metals that are commonly used as stores of value.
It's almost as if thousands of years of economic activity figured out that these metals are valuable as a store of value.
If there are not safe guards in place for the internet as a public utility to protect the market then we are at risk of damaging the entire economic market (possibly causing yet another recession) in order to provide special treatment to a small amount of participants namely Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner.
The problem is that traditional utilities are pretty much stable. Water distributions systems haven't changed significantly in 80 years. Ditto the electrical system. The internet changes rapidly. Delivery systems change. Services change. Protocols change. The only thing that is significantly similar is TCP/IP, BGP and DNS.
So how do you regulate that without killing off any potential improvements that run afoul of said regulation?
You leave it alone until something is obviously broken, then you pass a law to fix it.
This isn't a small detail, it's monumentally important. Can you imagine what the computer industry would look like if some bureaucrat decided that, in 1982, a "home computer" would be defined as a 6502 CPU with 128K of RAM, and anything else would be disallowed? Or that CP/M would be the standardized OS? Makes it easier to regulate the market and protect consumers when everything is standardized.
Houston has had stable rents and housing prices for decades. Even during the worst of the housing collapse, home values only decreased a few percentage points. This is because they do not have zoning laws. This means that occasionally you have something weird like an office building near a residential area, but you don't end up with factories in the middle of apartment buildings as factories are built where land is cheap, and residential areas are relatively expensive.
So the question is what is more valuable, a stable housing market with a good mix of affordable and expensive homes, or being able to control it? Most of the time you can't have both.
When someone asks me what software development is like, I respond:
"It's like doing crossword puzzles. Except you don't have all of the clues, sometimes the clues change, sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes there are five answers that work but only one or two is correct. When you are done everyone looks at your results and critiques them. And you only have a set amount of time to do it all in."
Furthermore, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) are supporting Sen. Ed Markey's (D-MA) plan to introduce a Congressional Review Act resolution to undo the FCC vote.
Why don't they introduce a bill allowing the FCC to regulate broadband throttling? The FCC board's (and Patel's) issue with the previous legislation was it was introduced under common carrier requirements.
On Netflix as of right now:
Lilo & Stitch
Lilo & Stich 2
Leroy & Stitch
Moana
Mulan
Hercules
Zootopia
Finding Dory
Atlantis
Tarzan II
Kronk's New Groove
An Extremely Goofy Movie
Phineas & Ferb
A bunch of the Tinkerbell movies
Fox & Hound
Mickey's Christmas Carol
Pete's Dragon
The BFG
That's all I'm going to bother to list, but there are dozens more.
The "basic" QoS traffic shaping you refer to you be used by Verizon and Comcast to prioritize their own streaming services only, not streaming services in general.
Then that's not basic QoS. That's why I said service and connection agnostic rules. VOIP gets priority over streaming video. Streaming video gets priority over web sites. Web sites get priority over downloads. That's all that should be allowed.
The fact that the internet can get "slowed down" during a major event (like Xmas day) is the direct result of a complete separate problem compared to NN. The lack of available bandwidth is caused by the big ISPs having little to no incentive to build out their network infrastructure because of the monopolistic contracts they hold in most areas. They suck up endless profits while investing only the bare minimum back into their equipment.
You don't build out your infrastructure assuming everyone is going to be using the maximum amount of what you are providing. The water system isn't designed for every household to take a shower, run their dishwasher and washing machine all at the same time. Roads aren't designed for everyone in town to be on them at the same time. The electrical grid isn't designed for everyone to draw the maximum amount of current their breaker box can handle at the same time.
THAT's why there are slowdowns every now and then. You don't design your broadband infrastructure assuming everyone is going to be downloading huge files all at the same time. If you did you'd be paying twice as much for broadband, because the network would be hugely overbuilt.
You build out your network to handle maximum throughput for 80% of the time. The other 20% QoS kicks in.
1. The way the FCC imposed net neutrality rules is dumb. When broadband first rolled out, the FCC tried to regulate it by pretending it was the same as cable TV. That didn't work out, so now they are regulating it by pretending that it's the same as the telephone system. That's also stupid. The internet isn't a phone, or cable, or satellite TV, it's the internet.
2. Getting rid of "net neutrality" in it's current form, simply means the FTC will be regulating it instead of the FCC. That's good or bad, depending on your point of view.
3. The correct way to fix this is to have congress pass legislation letting the FCC regulate broadband as a service- and connection-agnostic data provider. IMHO they should be allowed to do basic QoS traffic shaping, so on Christmas morning when everyone's console starts downloading 2GB game "patches" it doesn't choke off streaming video, or your VOIP phone.
4. If you are skeptical of the current congress, or any potential congress, doing something about it, you are probably correct.
Just my $0.02.
100% Correct. :)
Your not sure if broadband is regulated but your sure they blocked comcast until they had two providers?
Not sure if it's regulated by the city in other municipalities. In our entire state, it's on a city-by-city basis. Could be different in other states. I'm sure of it because I remember it happening.
A link would be nice.
This happened in the 1980s. A link would be to drive to the local library and look up the local newspaper on microfilm. In any case we have WOW, Comcast, and AT&T available. It wasn't originally WOW, it was another local cable provider (one of the first in the area) that WOW bought out.
Still, if your city is acting stupid, elect better city leaders.
My point exactly.
Where we live and in most municipalities, I believe, broadband is regulated by the city. In the city where we live, when Comcast wanted to move in, city council wouldn't let them until another provider could also move in.
Want to fix the problem in rural areas? The federal government owns more than half of the available RF spectrum. Free up some so we can get wireless broadband going.
- Bigfoot - what to serve for breakfast... is tea OK?
Well, that's obvious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(Sifl & Olly)
Von Neumann has an early computer architecture named after him. Everyone who takes a computer architecture class knows who he is. One of my professors brought up the "Goto Considered Harmful" paper as well.
In the general populace, not so much, but the article in question is talking about the computer industry specifically.
But she wasn't forgotten. There was a 60 minutes piece about her in the 1980's. Back when people in the computer industry didn't often make the news. Reagan making her Commodore made the news and the papers. Everyone in the industry knew her, and a lot of people outside of the industry did, too.
But nowadays when people mention women in the computer industry they talk about Ada Lovelace... and that's pretty much it.
Grace Hopper *was* a developer. Did amazing work. Wrote one of the first compilers. Remington Rand made her director of programming languages for the UNIVAC project. She made rank of Captain in the Navy, then honorary rank of Commodore (then Rear Admiral.) They named a ship after her.
But nobody seems to talk about her that much these days. Weird.
If I were to run a "plan" economy country I'd steal a page from the market economy playbook and have them all do internal billing in Government Credits. You technically don't need private industry to have an internal market. And then you could watch prices and if steel got too expensive build more steelworks.
That's a great idea in theory. What happens in practice is, now that you've essentially politicized the economy, whom gets the credits (and how many credits are available to use) is now a political matter. Assuming this is a democratic affair, whichever political group promises the most credits to the most powerful industrial collective will get the votes. Again, you see this play out in other planned economies. In the Soviet Union, you saw a lot of resources allocated to the industrial and technology sectors. The farmers got screwed when it came to resource allocation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You have the same problems of capitalism that communism was supposed to fix, they've just been transferred to political organs instead of the market.
The main problem with communism is the efficient distribution of limited resources. It's basic information theory - you have a complicated set of interdependent production units that have varying needs for resources on each other. To make steel you need water, to move water around water you need pipes pumps, to make pipes pumps you need steel... and on and on ad infinitum.
A market system works pretty well at distributing these resources. If you make steel you don't need to know anything about demand other than the price of steel.
A planned / communist economy relies on meetings to figure out what gets made. The problem is nobody has all the information needed to plan out production, especially on a large scale. This is why you have perpetual shortages of goods in countries with planned economies.
... like any genre, most anime is pretty bad. I noticed this back when it was really taking off in the US. I used to go to a monthly anime screening at a college near me and they'd show a couple of decent movies and a few episodes of a good TV series all hand-subtitled by the Japanese club's members. After a few years it devolved into, maybe, one decent movie or OVA, and a slew of shlocky romantic comedy, high school students fighting demons, or DBZ knockoff TV shows. The last screening I went to they played a few episodes from three different TV series that were all vampire high school romantic drama/comedies. I gave them a chance and, except for a few scenes of well done animation that I'm sure ate up most of their budgets, they were all garbage.
Blocks all of that crap. I once loaded a news site I frequent in another browser and laughed at all of the garbage that popped up and ate up screen real estate. With NoScript the site doesn't look as pretty but it's far more usable.
Narcotics interfere with your brain's ability to use certain neurotransmitters. Stopping narcotics cold turkey, in general, is a bad idea, as your brain won't function properly without them. You need to be weened off, usually with a different, analog substance.
Gambling and the internet you can quit cold turkey. You'll be really, really upset, but you won't go through the same physical withdrawal symptoms as with narcotics.
So, no, a cocaine addiction isn't like a gambling addiction at all.
I used to field test satellite radios in vans, it wasn't that difficult. We used a lot of the same gear they use in field testing cell phones. Nowadays they have apps that can do it for you - constantly send SMSes and count the failures, attempt to download something and check throughput, etc... You put three or four of each phone under test in powered cradles in the back of a truck and drive them around running the test apps. The trick is to run the same route over and over again to build up your test data. For control you have another set of phones stationary somewhere along the test route.
That's interesting. Get them out in the field. Sensitivity is not the only measurement that matters. In some cases, it's the least important measurement. Noise rejection and selectivity are usually more important in urban environments when you get crazy ghosting from signals bouncing off of buildings. Unless you have an insanely expensive RF capture and playback setup, you aren't replicating that in the lab.
OP Here:
Nope we had a fancy "Infra-Red" remote control unit. Here's a website dedicated to it, because of course there is one on the internet:
http://vintageelectronics.beta...
You're assuming it's not a honeypot?