I have a laptop I infrequently use that has Windows 10 (non-Pro) installed on. I boot it up once a month to install updates (so I don't need to wait for update installs when I need to use it for other things) and I always use the "check for updates" button to make sure there aren't any more updates to install. I absolutely do not want beta updates installed on this machine nor would it be good for beta testing them since I hardly use it. This is just giving me more incentive to finally get around to wiping it and putting Linux on it.
160 MHz of band 41 (2.5 GHz) spectrum is a 5G goldmine. Most 5G will be deployed in the mm-wave bands above 6 GHz which will have absolutely minuscule building penetration even compared to band 41. Sprint's band 26 (800 MHz) spectrum will also be useful in areas where T-Mobile doesn't have band 12 (700 MHz) licenses before handsets with band 71 (600 MHz) become common. Sprint's spectrum isn't necessarily terrible, it's just very lopsided towards high-band (which is great for throughput but pretty bad for coverage) and Sprint has not done a good job of managing it (partly due to lack of capital to invest in their network and partly due to incompetence).
Why not upgrade your existing home computer to Ubuntu now? Firefox is ending support for XP this year and it's the last major browser to do so; after that you get no new web features or security updates (not to mention the years of security updates for other system components you've missed out on, such as the Meltdown and Spectre mitigations).
The original analog broadcast formats are still widespread, and in many cases, are still better quality than their digital replacements.
What? Digital television has much quality better than analog under pretty much every circumstance. Just eliminating composite color dots is a huge improvement, not to mention the resolution increase and progressive scanning. Quality is really only a problem when the broadcaster tries to cram too many streams into a broadcast signal and starves the video of bits.
The Android Edge browser is just a wrapper around Chromium with Microsoft account integration (for bookmarks/history/etc. sharing with Edge Desktop). AFAIK Firefox is the only full-featured Android browser that ships its own rendering engine.
They definitely seem to have heavily optimized for the video playback use-case. On my slow (but cheap) Atom-based notebook video playback is noticeably smoother and uses less CPU than Firefox even though Edge is noticeably slower at actual web rendering.
I currently have 40 tabs open in my Firefox for Android session and I haven't experienced any slowdown or crashes due to it (though Firefox tends to only keep the mostly recently-viewed 2-3 of them loaded at any time to save memory).
CDMA2000 is a dead technology even without government mandates. Verizon can't wait to dump it since it uses up so much of their spectrum that would be better used for 4G LTE and the upcoming 5G standard. They are planning to shut down their 2G CDMA 1x network in 2019 and will likely kill their 3G CDMA EVDO network in the mid 2020s. They initially intended to start rolling out handsets without CDMA radios last year but I don't think they've been able to implement that due to their rural roaming partners having not fully overlaid their CDMA coverage area with LTE and/or activated VoLTE support on their networks yet.
T-Mobile hasn't had contracts since 2013 so your story is at least a few years old. Over the past few years they've completely revamped their network and rolled out lots of new coverage (mostly by acquiring "low-band" spectrum that lets them cover 4x the area per tower of their previous "mid-band" spectrum). They've also rolled out wifi calling (which lets you make and receive calls and texts over wifi) and "CellSpot" units that let you use your home internet to provide cell coverage at your house if you're in a complete dead zone.
Small transactions will be on the (short term) honour system.
One of the big selling points Bitcoin proponents use to try to get businesses to accept them is that Bitcoins "have no chargebacks." It seems like having every transaction "be on the honor system" is a much, much worse situation than getting virtually-instantaneous confirmation for all transactions upfront and then getting hit with a chargeback every once in a while.
I[n] the days before we had electronic credit card verification the store would take an imprint and only find out later whether the card was good or not.
Yes, and businesses also used to accept personal checks. Have you tried to use one lately? I can't think of any businesses I regularly patronize that accept them today. It used to be that the businesses had to account for bounced checks and declined credit transactions in their business overhead which was ultimately passed on to consumers. By accepting only cash, credit and debit cards with instant electronic verification (my newest credit card doesn't even have the raised lettering for imprint machines since so few transactions use them these days) they can remove this overhead and cut their prices, making them more competitive in the free market.
There are very definitely broadcasts at 60 FPS, at least in North America. The ATSC standard for digital television used in North America requires receivers to support 59.94/60 FPS progressive-scan modes at the 1280x720, 704x480 and 640x480 resolutions. Many sports events are broadcast at 59.94 frames per second in progressive scan due to the advantages it provides over interlaced scanning for fast motion.
There are no hard sci fi movies, at least from the past 20 years
Moon, which came out in 2009, is a good hard sci-fi film. If that isn't hard enough for you, check out 2004's Primer which is by far the "hardest" take on time travel yet (warning: you will need a guide to understand what's going on in most of the film).
I completely agree with this. One of the big problems with Valve attempting something like the SteamBox is Steam and games being tied to the Windows and OS X platforms. Apple definitely wouldn't allow a third party to use their OS and it's questionable whether Microsoft would let someone build a console on Windows technology that would compete with the Xbox. Not to mention that even if Microsoft did, consoles generally have a negative or very thin profit margin and paying for an OEM OS licenses on top of the cost of the hardware is the last thing you'd want to do in that circumstance.
From Valve's perspective, building a game console on Linux would be highly preferable to Windows because it would leave them in full control of the software stack without any license fees. Not to mention that a set baseline of hardware would allow them to do mitigate the biggest problem facing gaming on Linux (after game availability) which is the poor and inconsistent state of 3d graphics drivers by providing guarantees for what will work to developers.
If they are truly interested in building their own game console, porting Steam (and Source) to Linux would be a good first step.
Due to the design of the on-board power regulator it needs to at least 6 volts of input to generate 5 volts for the built-in USB host ports (most of the rest of the board runs off a separate 3.3v regulator). This is one of the most-requested features on their message board so they're looking into whether it would be possible to bypass the 5 volt regulator if the board is supplied with 5 volts in the first place but there are no promises and for now the official power specs are still 6 volts minimum (20 volts max).
Conservation of energy, or to be more explicit, where "ghosts" get their energy from, is one aspect of physics which seems to be completely ignored by "paranormal investigators" (perhaps because it requires more carefully designed experiments compared with the usual "investigations" which seem to mostly be people walking around with cameras and voice recorders in "spooky" locations). If ghosts or poltergeists (or at least the physical activities attributed to them) are real then energy must have been expended by some physical phenomenon to effect those activities.
Of particular interest should be the apparent correlation between "cold spots" and other "paranormal" activity, such as measurable EM fields. Perhaps the phenomenon behind many "hauntings" is actually some form of direct conversion of heat energy into electricity; if you could prove that and find the physical mechanism behind it you would become famous. Of course, part of the problem with investigating this aspect of the physics of "hauntings" is that you need to find a site where you can perform repeatable measurements and then you must carefully document where all the energy is coming from and going to.
Whoops, you're right. In reviewing the page you linked it looks like Wikimedia Commons does guarantee licensing for reproduction at least in the context of copies of Wikipedia. However I was also wrong that all of the images from Wikipedia come from Wikimedia Commons. The Wikimedia Commons collection doesn't include "fair use" images and some other types of images which are used on Wikipedia (e.g. this image of Superman). That means that some of the images on Wikipedia are definitely okay for redistribution, but not all of them. As the Wikipedia database dump page puts it, "in conclusion, download [the] images [used on Wikipedia] at your own risk."
Unfortunately Wikimedia Commons, the source for all the images on Wikipedia, does not guarantee that all the images it hosts can be redistributed (even solely for the purpose of inclusion with "offline" versions of Wikipedia) and doesn't provide a one-stop download to get all of its content (like Wikipedia provides). Tools to download (scrape) all of Wikimedia Commons do exist, but as of a year or two ago there was already 500 gigabytes of content if you wanted a full mirror and I can only imagine that the amount of content has grown significantly since then. So even if they could do it legally, they wouldn't be able to practically unless wanted to add a hard drive to the design (drastically increasing the cost).
Slashdot Mirror
I have a laptop I infrequently use that has Windows 10 (non-Pro) installed on. I boot it up once a month to install updates (so I don't need to wait for update installs when I need to use it for other things) and I always use the "check for updates" button to make sure there aren't any more updates to install. I absolutely do not want beta updates installed on this machine nor would it be good for beta testing them since I hardly use it. This is just giving me more incentive to finally get around to wiping it and putting Linux on it.
Yes, and they're partnering with Chinese firm Zhaoxin to design a new x86 CPU microarchitecture.
160 MHz of band 41 (2.5 GHz) spectrum is a 5G goldmine. Most 5G will be deployed in the mm-wave bands above 6 GHz which will have absolutely minuscule building penetration even compared to band 41. Sprint's band 26 (800 MHz) spectrum will also be useful in areas where T-Mobile doesn't have band 12 (700 MHz) licenses before handsets with band 71 (600 MHz) become common. Sprint's spectrum isn't necessarily terrible, it's just very lopsided towards high-band (which is great for throughput but pretty bad for coverage) and Sprint has not done a good job of managing it (partly due to lack of capital to invest in their network and partly due to incompetence).
Why not upgrade your existing home computer to Ubuntu now? Firefox is ending support for XP this year and it's the last major browser to do so; after that you get no new web features or security updates (not to mention the years of security updates for other system components you've missed out on, such as the Meltdown and Spectre mitigations).
Ah, I forgot that digital radio was a thing since it hasn't taken off in the US at all.
The original analog broadcast formats are still widespread, and in many cases, are still better quality than their digital replacements.
What? Digital television has much quality better than analog under pretty much every circumstance. Just eliminating composite color dots is a huge improvement, not to mention the resolution increase and progressive scanning. Quality is really only a problem when the broadcaster tries to cram too many streams into a broadcast signal and starves the video of bits.
The Android Edge browser is just a wrapper around Chromium with Microsoft account integration (for bookmarks/history/etc. sharing with Edge Desktop). AFAIK Firefox is the only full-featured Android browser that ships its own rendering engine.
I'm using the mainline release version (57.0.1 right now), not Beta, Nightly, or Focus (which is just a Chromium wrapper).
They definitely seem to have heavily optimized for the video playback use-case. On my slow (but cheap) Atom-based notebook video playback is noticeably smoother and uses less CPU than Firefox even though Edge is noticeably slower at actual web rendering.
I currently have 40 tabs open in my Firefox for Android session and I haven't experienced any slowdown or crashes due to it (though Firefox tends to only keep the mostly recently-viewed 2-3 of them loaded at any time to save memory).
This is the most informative comment I've seen on Slashdot in literally years.
CDMA2000 is a dead technology even without government mandates. Verizon can't wait to dump it since it uses up so much of their spectrum that would be better used for 4G LTE and the upcoming 5G standard. They are planning to shut down their 2G CDMA 1x network in 2019 and will likely kill their 3G CDMA EVDO network in the mid 2020s. They initially intended to start rolling out handsets without CDMA radios last year but I don't think they've been able to implement that due to their rural roaming partners having not fully overlaid their CDMA coverage area with LTE and/or activated VoLTE support on their networks yet.
T-Mobile hasn't had contracts since 2013 so your story is at least a few years old. Over the past few years they've completely revamped their network and rolled out lots of new coverage (mostly by acquiring "low-band" spectrum that lets them cover 4x the area per tower of their previous "mid-band" spectrum). They've also rolled out wifi calling (which lets you make and receive calls and texts over wifi) and "CellSpot" units that let you use your home internet to provide cell coverage at your house if you're in a complete dead zone.
Just use the Let's Encrypt client in manual mode (letsencrypt-auto certonly --manual) then install the generated certificates the "old" way.
One of the big selling points Bitcoin proponents use to try to get businesses to accept them is that Bitcoins "have no chargebacks." It seems like having every transaction "be on the honor system" is a much, much worse situation than getting virtually-instantaneous confirmation for all transactions upfront and then getting hit with a chargeback every once in a while.
Yes, and businesses also used to accept personal checks. Have you tried to use one lately? I can't think of any businesses I regularly patronize that accept them today. It used to be that the businesses had to account for bounced checks and declined credit transactions in their business overhead which was ultimately passed on to consumers. By accepting only cash, credit and debit cards with instant electronic verification (my newest credit card doesn't even have the raised lettering for imprint machines since so few transactions use them these days) they can remove this overhead and cut their prices, making them more competitive in the free market.
There are very definitely broadcasts at 60 FPS, at least in North America. The ATSC standard for digital television used in North America requires receivers to support 59.94/60 FPS progressive-scan modes at the 1280x720, 704x480 and 640x480 resolutions. Many sports events are broadcast at 59.94 frames per second in progressive scan due to the advantages it provides over interlaced scanning for fast motion.
Moon, which came out in 2009, is a good hard sci-fi film. If that isn't hard enough for you, check out 2004's Primer which is by far the "hardest" take on time travel yet (warning: you will need a guide to understand what's going on in most of the film).
I completely agree with this. One of the big problems with Valve attempting something like the SteamBox is Steam and games being tied to the Windows and OS X platforms. Apple definitely wouldn't allow a third party to use their OS and it's questionable whether Microsoft would let someone build a console on Windows technology that would compete with the Xbox. Not to mention that even if Microsoft did, consoles generally have a negative or very thin profit margin and paying for an OEM OS licenses on top of the cost of the hardware is the last thing you'd want to do in that circumstance.
From Valve's perspective, building a game console on Linux would be highly preferable to Windows because it would leave them in full control of the software stack without any license fees. Not to mention that a set baseline of hardware would allow them to do mitigate the biggest problem facing gaming on Linux (after game availability) which is the poor and inconsistent state of 3d graphics drivers by providing guarantees for what will work to developers.
If they are truly interested in building their own game console, porting Steam (and Source) to Linux would be a good first step.
They did a video report on the Google Opt-Out Villiage.
Due to the design of the on-board power regulator it needs to at least 6 volts of input to generate 5 volts for the built-in USB host ports (most of the rest of the board runs off a separate 3.3v regulator). This is one of the most-requested features on their message board so they're looking into whether it would be possible to bypass the 5 volt regulator if the board is supplied with 5 volts in the first place but there are no promises and for now the official power specs are still 6 volts minimum (20 volts max).
Conservation of energy, or to be more explicit, where "ghosts" get their energy from, is one aspect of physics which seems to be completely ignored by "paranormal investigators" (perhaps because it requires more carefully designed experiments compared with the usual "investigations" which seem to mostly be people walking around with cameras and voice recorders in "spooky" locations). If ghosts or poltergeists (or at least the physical activities attributed to them) are real then energy must have been expended by some physical phenomenon to effect those activities.
Of particular interest should be the apparent correlation between "cold spots" and other "paranormal" activity, such as measurable EM fields. Perhaps the phenomenon behind many "hauntings" is actually some form of direct conversion of heat energy into electricity; if you could prove that and find the physical mechanism behind it you would become famous. Of course, part of the problem with investigating this aspect of the physics of "hauntings" is that you need to find a site where you can perform repeatable measurements and then you must carefully document where all the energy is coming from and going to.
Whoops, you're right. In reviewing the page you linked it looks like Wikimedia Commons does guarantee licensing for reproduction at least in the context of copies of Wikipedia. However I was also wrong that all of the images from Wikipedia come from Wikimedia Commons. The Wikimedia Commons collection doesn't include "fair use" images and some other types of images which are used on Wikipedia (e.g. this image of Superman). That means that some of the images on Wikipedia are definitely okay for redistribution, but not all of them. As the Wikipedia database dump page puts it, "in conclusion, download [the] images [used on Wikipedia] at your own risk."
Unfortunately Wikimedia Commons, the source for all the images on Wikipedia, does not guarantee that all the images it hosts can be redistributed (even solely for the purpose of inclusion with "offline" versions of Wikipedia) and doesn't provide a one-stop download to get all of its content (like Wikipedia provides). Tools to download (scrape) all of Wikimedia Commons do exist, but as of a year or two ago there was already 500 gigabytes of content if you wanted a full mirror and I can only imagine that the amount of content has grown significantly since then. So even if they could do it legally, they wouldn't be able to practically unless wanted to add a hard drive to the design (drastically increasing the cost).
What it does to "Be evil!" is also pretty good.
Does this mean we'll finally get 32 gigabyte MicroSDHC cards?