When so many plans are "unlimited calls and texts, some GB of data and if you go over you pay", calls are effectively free once you've paid your monthly base rate. You could spend the entire month on the phone 24/7 and not pay a cent more than if you never make a voice call. But for the carrier, each call consumes resources on their network, and if too many people make calls they have to upgrade their network or quickly gain a reputation for dropped calls. Therefore, a carrier would prefer if you pay for unlimited calls and then not make any.
Data also consumes resources on the carrier's network, and I would guess it's more of a strain on the network than voice. Voice gets routed once at the start of a call and again if you handoff to another tower, and is a constant rate throughout the call. Data is routed per packet, and is very bursty. But it counts against a limit set in your plan, so your carrier would like you to use a lot of it because then they can charge you more.
Then again, some carriers are starting to offer truly unlimited plans where you never pay extra and they just put you in a lower priority bracket if you use excessive amounts of data.
Which makes the argument even more ridiculous. The fact that there aren't alternative camera and gallery apps doesn't make Apple's platform superior. There is no confused and muddled mess unless you go looking for one. If you buy a Samsung phone, it's pretty darned clear that Samsung intends you to use the camera app that's at the bottom of the homescreen by default, the one that you get if you double-click the home button if that setting is enabled, Samsung's.
If Samsung wants to innovate in their camera, there's nothing stopping them. They can put fancy camera hardware that no other phone has, write a custom camera driver for it, add custom API support, and add the functionality to their camera app, same as Apple does. The result is every bit as integrated into the phone as you buy it as Apple's solution. Of course it won't be added upstream unless Google decides to add it, and most 3rd party camera apps won't support Samsung's additions. But none of that affects the Samsung phone you bought. You can still use Samsung's new features in their camera app, and if it's a competent camera app you probably won't need 3rd party ones.
Yes there are other camera apps available, but if you get a phone that has a good camera app installed, there isn't much reason to touch them. 3rd party camera apps are generally to provide functions that are often missing from the preloaded app on many phones, like some adjustments, raw shooting, or filters. Similarly, additional gallery apps are available, and are typically used to bring functions many builtin galleries lack, like automatic upload to another cloud service, browsing remote network shares directly, or viewing or creating animated GIFs or webms.
If your phone comes with camera and gallery apps that are sufficient for what you want to do, there's no reason to look elsewhere. To argue that the presence of alternative options makes Android inferior is just stupid though. Same thing but even more so with homescreens, lockscreens and keyboards, all of which I occasionally see described as having a bewildering array of options in arguments that iPhones are better. Having a default that most people will be happy with is a feature; disallowing those who aren't happy with it from changing it is not.
Also: Android stock Camera app? I can't even find that on my Galaxy S7. Samsung has replaced it with their customized one. Sure I can download the apk someplace and install it if I want, but that's now going to lead anyone to confusion as to which app they're supposed to use.
I'm still on Gchat. Hangouts wastes screen space with user icons, makes it less obvious who's online than the old colored dots, doesn't obey its own "compact" view setting, and lags in Firefox on my i7. It also seems more prone to convert pasted code snippets into useless emoticons.
"Somehow, somewhere they'll have to make money." Yes. They'll make money off you when you first buy the iPhone through them, and then again after a year when you start paying $50 a month for service. The $1 is an introductory offer.
"If the telco does that well enough they go out of business. Problem solved." The fear is that they'll do it and eat the losses until all viable competitors go under. Then they're a monopoly and are free to charge sky high-prices for bottom-of-the-barrel service, because your only other choice is no phone at all.
Most modern CDMA phones *do* use SIMs because they use LTE. I believe the SIMs are just as swappable as normal GSM ones.
However, SIMs can be locked to phones and phones can be locked to SIMs. The most restrictive arrangement I've seen was on my old GSM Tracfone. Put its SIM in another phone and it comes up as corrupted or unrecognized. Put another SIM in the Tracfone and it rejects it without a way to enter an unlock code. The reason for this is that some of Tracfone's minute accounting seemed to be done on the phone itself, so they required special firmware on the phone. (Since then they have started allowing non-customized devices on their network and offering BYOD SIM kits, so they've obviously reworked whatever was requiring heavily customized firmware.)
I have no idea if Virgin is doing anything restrictive like this to keep other phones off their network. My point is merely that it's possible to lock things down this much in a SIM based system.
Never mind all that. Most airports I've been at, you could pretty easily walk into the luggage claim area of the terminal, mill around a bit, grab a bag off a carousel, and walk out. Only real reason it doesn't happen much is that you never know what's in the bags, and quite often it's just going to be full of dirty laundry. But if this goes into effect the chances of random bags being worth stealing will go way up.
Would the same not be accomplished by simply running the game at Above Normal priority and with an elevated I/O priority? It doesn't really matter if background tasks are consuming CPU time the game or other foreground task leaves idle, so long as these tasks don't starve it of any time.
I'd never heard of such an option in the US, but another way to accomplish the same is to get a Google Voice number and forward it to your real number. As a plus, you can have this as a single number that rings both your cell and landline.
"listening to VMs is usually not free" -- The only provider I've been on that charged to listen to voicemail was Tracfone, and it cost because the call to the voicemail line counted as a call and consumed minutes.
I've had Verizon landline, which charges a flat fee for having voicemail in the first place, but the fee was the same regardless of how much or little I used the service. Comcast "landline", Boost Mobile and T-Mobile have all had voicemail packaged into the base rate for no additional charge. Boost and T-Mobile both have visual voicemail apps for Android that are free to use, and an additional flat fee to transcribe all voicemails to text.
Still, the only case where a "private"/"anonymous" number has anything legitimate to say is if someone's activated it by accident. These numbers NEVER leave a message.
Why have one revenue stream when they can have two? Charge spammers to be allowed to leave messages in the first place. Charge users to block the spam. Offer spammers a more expensive tier that bypasses the blocking. Then offer users a more expensive stronger blocking plan that blocks those.
You can actually browse without signing up by clicking the tiny "Sitemap" link at the bottom, but who's going to know that? Appearing to require registration to even see what communities are available inside is a terrible decision, especially for a small site nobody's heard of.
I've got an S7 Edge and it's 534 DPI. If I draw a non-antialiased line, I can still see jaggies, though small, with it about a foot from my face. And when I put it in a Gear VR, the RGB dots are very noticeable.
It's not supposed to be a desktop replacement. Mobile tech simply isn't there yet. However, it does have a place. It would be quite nice for travel to be able to use a small gadget to plug your phone into a keyboard, mouse and monitor or TV, and have something in between phone and desktop. You could check email, write documents, browse the web, use webapps, write and compile code, etc., all on a larger more comfortable screen than your phone can offer, and without the travel weight or bulk of a laptop. You could then unplug at any point and take your work with you. Or you could connect it to a TV and wireless clicker thing to do a presentation with nothing but your phone and a couple wires.
This really ought to be made into a USB C to HDMI + audio + multiple USB + charger input octopus cable rather than a dock.
>I don't know what the current state of compatibility is for Windows 10
32 bit Windows 10 still runs Windows 3.1 programs. I'm not sure how good the compatibility is, but it works. 64 bit can't run them at all because VM86 mode isn't available from in 64 bit mode on the CPU.
Linux also runs Windows 3.1 programs pretty well, with Wine.
Seriously. Can't use backspace to go back. Can't customize much of anything. And now this.
I get that people click it accidentally, but that's no reason to remove it. Do what they did on Android and have the option, but provide an undo for a few seconds after it's clicked.
I would imagine and sincerely hope the internal and interbank stuff is pretty secure. Many banks' user-facing systems aren't though.
My bank forces me to use a password between 8 and 32 characters long. If I log in from a different machine, they quiz me on things that an attacker could easily look up in public records, like which people I've lived with or which small street I've never heard of is closer to my home. Some banks even ask for selected characters from your password as verification -- which at the very least means they're storing some characters of your password and subtracting from its entropy, and likely means they're storing passwords rather than hashes of them!
Compare to something as relatively unimportant as my Tumblr blog, where I can use longer passwords and proper two-factor authentication using Google Authenticator. And when I was locked out of Facebook, they asked me questions that I could actually answer without referring to Google Maps, yet ones that an attacker would have a harder time answering.
Every flight I've been on recently has been overbooked. A half hour before boarding they start asking for volunteers to be bumped to the next flight in exchange for a voucher.
And ever since they started with the checked-bag fees, the overhead bins have been overfull and the flight is late taking off because they have to tag and gate-check excess bags for free.
Interesting -- I have some old 32-bit Win95-era games that run with fewer glitches in Wine than in Windows 10. And some 16-bit ones that don't run at all on 64-bit Windows, but work great in Wine on 64-bit Linux.
There's a lot to be said about that theme. You can customize freaking everything about it, every color it uses, the width and font of every element. Today you get what, one color choice and maybe an option to change one font. Anything more and you need difficult-to-create themes and hacked theme DLLs.
You can get back the Windows 7 games pretty easily. The only thing preventing the same EXEs from working on 10 is an OS version check that was probably originally intended to keep people from running them on Vista or XP. WinAero has made a package of modified EXEs: http://winaero.com/blog/get-wi...
Stop buying routers. Instead get a Raspi and USB wifi adapter capable of master mode. Put together a preconfigured "router" distro for it that can simply be loaded onto an SD card and configured via a web interface like a normal router.
No. As I understand it, a Fresnel lens works exactly the same as a normal lens, no smaller-than-wavelength metamaterial structures involved. You merely take lateral slices of a normal lens and collapse them to form concentric rings. A Fresnel lens does not give a better image than an equivalent conventional lens. It just reduces the thickness and mass required.
You can use a millimeter thick Fresnel lens to do what would normally need a very thick and heavy conventional lens.
Slashdot Mirror
When so many plans are "unlimited calls and texts, some GB of data and if you go over you pay", calls are effectively free once you've paid your monthly base rate. You could spend the entire month on the phone 24/7 and not pay a cent more than if you never make a voice call. But for the carrier, each call consumes resources on their network, and if too many people make calls they have to upgrade their network or quickly gain a reputation for dropped calls. Therefore, a carrier would prefer if you pay for unlimited calls and then not make any.
Data also consumes resources on the carrier's network, and I would guess it's more of a strain on the network than voice. Voice gets routed once at the start of a call and again if you handoff to another tower, and is a constant rate throughout the call. Data is routed per packet, and is very bursty. But it counts against a limit set in your plan, so your carrier would like you to use a lot of it because then they can charge you more.
Then again, some carriers are starting to offer truly unlimited plans where you never pay extra and they just put you in a lower priority bracket if you use excessive amounts of data.
Which makes the argument even more ridiculous. The fact that there aren't alternative camera and gallery apps doesn't make Apple's platform superior. There is no confused and muddled mess unless you go looking for one. If you buy a Samsung phone, it's pretty darned clear that Samsung intends you to use the camera app that's at the bottom of the homescreen by default, the one that you get if you double-click the home button if that setting is enabled, Samsung's.
If Samsung wants to innovate in their camera, there's nothing stopping them. They can put fancy camera hardware that no other phone has, write a custom camera driver for it, add custom API support, and add the functionality to their camera app, same as Apple does. The result is every bit as integrated into the phone as you buy it as Apple's solution. Of course it won't be added upstream unless Google decides to add it, and most 3rd party camera apps won't support Samsung's additions. But none of that affects the Samsung phone you bought. You can still use Samsung's new features in their camera app, and if it's a competent camera app you probably won't need 3rd party ones.
Yes there are other camera apps available, but if you get a phone that has a good camera app installed, there isn't much reason to touch them. 3rd party camera apps are generally to provide functions that are often missing from the preloaded app on many phones, like some adjustments, raw shooting, or filters. Similarly, additional gallery apps are available, and are typically used to bring functions many builtin galleries lack, like automatic upload to another cloud service, browsing remote network shares directly, or viewing or creating animated GIFs or webms.
If your phone comes with camera and gallery apps that are sufficient for what you want to do, there's no reason to look elsewhere. To argue that the presence of alternative options makes Android inferior is just stupid though. Same thing but even more so with homescreens, lockscreens and keyboards, all of which I occasionally see described as having a bewildering array of options in arguments that iPhones are better. Having a default that most people will be happy with is a feature; disallowing those who aren't happy with it from changing it is not.
Also: Android stock Camera app? I can't even find that on my Galaxy S7. Samsung has replaced it with their customized one. Sure I can download the apk someplace and install it if I want, but that's now going to lead anyone to confusion as to which app they're supposed to use.
I can already see it: A new form of ransomware that uses an exploit to modify the access settings on all your folders so only it can access them.
I'm still on Gchat. Hangouts wastes screen space with user icons, makes it less obvious who's online than the old colored dots, doesn't obey its own "compact" view setting, and lags in Firefox on my i7. It also seems more prone to convert pasted code snippets into useless emoticons.
"Somehow, somewhere they'll have to make money."
Yes. They'll make money off you when you first buy the iPhone through them, and then again after a year when you start paying $50 a month for service. The $1 is an introductory offer.
"If the telco does that well enough they go out of business. Problem solved."
The fear is that they'll do it and eat the losses until all viable competitors go under. Then they're a monopoly and are free to charge sky high-prices for bottom-of-the-barrel service, because your only other choice is no phone at all.
Most modern CDMA phones *do* use SIMs because they use LTE. I believe the SIMs are just as swappable as normal GSM ones.
However, SIMs can be locked to phones and phones can be locked to SIMs. The most restrictive arrangement I've seen was on my old GSM Tracfone. Put its SIM in another phone and it comes up as corrupted or unrecognized. Put another SIM in the Tracfone and it rejects it without a way to enter an unlock code. The reason for this is that some of Tracfone's minute accounting seemed to be done on the phone itself, so they required special firmware on the phone. (Since then they have started allowing non-customized devices on their network and offering BYOD SIM kits, so they've obviously reworked whatever was requiring heavily customized firmware.)
I have no idea if Virgin is doing anything restrictive like this to keep other phones off their network. My point is merely that it's possible to lock things down this much in a SIM based system.
Never mind all that. Most airports I've been at, you could pretty easily walk into the luggage claim area of the terminal, mill around a bit, grab a bag off a carousel, and walk out. Only real reason it doesn't happen much is that you never know what's in the bags, and quite often it's just going to be full of dirty laundry. But if this goes into effect the chances of random bags being worth stealing will go way up.
>Unless you're jailbroken there is little reason to not install the latest version of iOS
How about if you have an iPhone that isn't the newest model, and don't want it to turn into a laggy, unusable mess?
Would the same not be accomplished by simply running the game at Above Normal priority and with an elevated I/O priority? It doesn't really matter if background tasks are consuming CPU time the game or other foreground task leaves idle, so long as these tasks don't starve it of any time.
I'd never heard of such an option in the US, but another way to accomplish the same is to get a Google Voice number and forward it to your real number. As a plus, you can have this as a single number that rings both your cell and landline.
"listening to VMs is usually not free" -- The only provider I've been on that charged to listen to voicemail was Tracfone, and it cost because the call to the voicemail line counted as a call and consumed minutes.
I've had Verizon landline, which charges a flat fee for having voicemail in the first place, but the fee was the same regardless of how much or little I used the service. Comcast "landline", Boost Mobile and T-Mobile have all had voicemail packaged into the base rate for no additional charge. Boost and T-Mobile both have visual voicemail apps for Android that are free to use, and an additional flat fee to transcribe all voicemails to text.
Still, the only case where a "private"/"anonymous" number has anything legitimate to say is if someone's activated it by accident. These numbers NEVER leave a message.
Why have one revenue stream when they can have two? Charge spammers to be allowed to leave messages in the first place. Charge users to block the spam. Offer spammers a more expensive tier that bypasses the blocking. Then offer users a more expensive stronger blocking plan that blocks those.
This would be searchable by candidate, not number. After all, you vote for candidates, not phone numbers.
I'll be implementing a simpler system: Spam my phone, lose a vote.
You can actually browse without signing up by clicking the tiny "Sitemap" link at the bottom, but who's going to know that? Appearing to require registration to even see what communities are available inside is a terrible decision, especially for a small site nobody's heard of.
I've got an S7 Edge and it's 534 DPI. If I draw a non-antialiased line, I can still see jaggies, though small, with it about a foot from my face. And when I put it in a Gear VR, the RGB dots are very noticeable.
It's not supposed to be a desktop replacement. Mobile tech simply isn't there yet. However, it does have a place. It would be quite nice for travel to be able to use a small gadget to plug your phone into a keyboard, mouse and monitor or TV, and have something in between phone and desktop. You could check email, write documents, browse the web, use webapps, write and compile code, etc., all on a larger more comfortable screen than your phone can offer, and without the travel weight or bulk of a laptop. You could then unplug at any point and take your work with you. Or you could connect it to a TV and wireless clicker thing to do a presentation with nothing but your phone and a couple wires.
This really ought to be made into a USB C to HDMI + audio + multiple USB + charger input octopus cable rather than a dock.
>I don't know what the current state of compatibility is for Windows 10
32 bit Windows 10 still runs Windows 3.1 programs. I'm not sure how good the compatibility is, but it works. 64 bit can't run them at all because VM86 mode isn't available from in 64 bit mode on the CPU.
Linux also runs Windows 3.1 programs pretty well, with Wine.
Seriously. Can't use backspace to go back. Can't customize much of anything. And now this.
I get that people click it accidentally, but that's no reason to remove it. Do what they did on Android and have the option, but provide an undo for a few seconds after it's clicked.
I would imagine and sincerely hope the internal and interbank stuff is pretty secure. Many banks' user-facing systems aren't though.
My bank forces me to use a password between 8 and 32 characters long. If I log in from a different machine, they quiz me on things that an attacker could easily look up in public records, like which people I've lived with or which small street I've never heard of is closer to my home. Some banks even ask for selected characters from your password as verification -- which at the very least means they're storing some characters of your password and subtracting from its entropy, and likely means they're storing passwords rather than hashes of them!
Compare to something as relatively unimportant as my Tumblr blog, where I can use longer passwords and proper two-factor authentication using Google Authenticator. And when I was locked out of Facebook, they asked me questions that I could actually answer without referring to Google Maps, yet ones that an attacker would have a harder time answering.
Next on TED-Ed: Is water wet?
Every flight I've been on recently has been overbooked. A half hour before boarding they start asking for volunteers to be bumped to the next flight in exchange for a voucher.
And ever since they started with the checked-bag fees, the overhead bins have been overfull and the flight is late taking off because they have to tag and gate-check excess bags for free.
Interesting -- I have some old 32-bit Win95-era games that run with fewer glitches in Wine than in Windows 10. And some 16-bit ones that don't run at all on 64-bit Windows, but work great in Wine on 64-bit Linux.
There's a lot to be said about that theme. You can customize freaking everything about it, every color it uses, the width and font of every element. Today you get what, one color choice and maybe an option to change one font. Anything more and you need difficult-to-create themes and hacked theme DLLs.
You can get back the Windows 7 games pretty easily. The only thing preventing the same EXEs from working on 10 is an OS version check that was probably originally intended to keep people from running them on Vista or XP. WinAero has made a package of modified EXEs: http://winaero.com/blog/get-wi...
Stop buying routers. Instead get a Raspi and USB wifi adapter capable of master mode. Put together a preconfigured "router" distro for it that can simply be loaded onto an SD card and configured via a web interface like a normal router.
No. As I understand it, a Fresnel lens works exactly the same as a normal lens, no smaller-than-wavelength metamaterial structures involved. You merely take lateral slices of a normal lens and collapse them to form concentric rings. A Fresnel lens does not give a better image than an equivalent conventional lens. It just reduces the thickness and mass required.
You can use a millimeter thick Fresnel lens to do what would normally need a very thick and heavy conventional lens.