Posts by Kevin McMurtrie 3560 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007
Low and midrange phones usually support just the one most popular LTE band in each sales region. That causes severe congestion on that one channel in urban areas. 3G towers are being converted to LTE in the US so the phone's decision to drop down to a slower rate makes it worse.
Apple has always been just as buggy as anyone else. From the Apple ][ with the backwards sector interleaving, all the way to today. Serious bugs were left unfixed for years. It didn't matter as long as it made a good demo.
The difference is the walled garden. There was a time when you could buy 3rd party products to patch or replace Apple's. Some even posted free patches and productivity apps. That's gone and it took a lot of solutions with it. Your OS is digitally signed, the UI enforces one workflow, your apps have been screened for strict compliance, and your data might not belong to you as much as you think it does. Even root access on desktop computers is being phased out. A lack of workarounds makes even the simplest problem a big deal. Knowing that Apple is actively blocking solutions, as if you don't own what you bought, is frustrating as hell.
I had a Sprint Galaxy S2 a long time ago. This WiMAX version was notorious for EMPing itself due to badly placed antennas. The GPS sensor would gradually die and the capacitive button sensor would go crazy. After several replacements, Samsung starting sending it back with the technically correct description of "working normally." Samsung and Sprint both said I should buy a new S3 to fix it.
My experience is that, thanks to crappy software, cell phone batteries last one year. That's it. Just one year. A LiPo battery is good for about 300 to 500 full charge cycles. When the shovelware from Google and the phone maker run the battery dead by the end of each night, you're doing a full charge cycle every day. When that shovelware is buggy for a few months and running the battery dead in the afternoon, that's 1.5 to 2 charge cycles per day. I think I've just purchased my last fancy phone with a permanent battery. The next one has a removable battery or it's dirt cheap.
microSD card isn't negotiable. I need offline storage.
I'm on a "grandfathered" plan where I can disable Bing-On. I'm ditching T-Mo the second it becomes mandatory. If there's a 1.5 Mbps version of the video available, it looks pixelated and turns to mud when anything moves. Anything needing more than 1.5 Mbps of streaming simply doesn't work.
Clearly expressing my feelings towards Bing-On would make me sound too much like John Legere and the moderators would probably delete my post.
Two ways to make money from AI software:
A: Sell a complete system for $200 that makes life easier.
B: Free cloud connected app that manipulates people for profit.
I hope working AI isn't invented while Plan B is still in fashion. There are so many great ideas that can never turn into great products because people expect them to be crappy and free.
Java has already attempted to blend high and low level coding designs. Java 8 added lambdas, processing streams, and more modern concurrency. It's hit and miss. It provides a clean framework for efficiently performing complex operations while at the same time making it much easier to write the lazy bloated crap that gives Java a bad reputation. Honestly, I'd let the Java world spend more time figuring out how this concept should work before throwing together another half-assed language.
MPG ratings are pretty much a scam.
My lemoned 2005 Honda Accord Hybrid was rated 29/37 MPG but the actual was 9/32. Yes, that's 9 MPG city. The hybrid system would overheat after a few stop signs and become massive deadweight. To make matters worse, it didn't re-enable 1st gear to compensate for the electric motor being off. This car must have been tested somewhere REALLY cold to keep the electronics running.
Current 2016 Golf R might be capable of meeting EPA estimates, but I need to double check whether or not the computer is lying about gas consumption. There have been a couple of times where odometer/pump came out to 22 MPG when the computer said 28 MPG.
There's potential for headphones to improve with power and a digital signal source. Tradeoffs in driver design are more relaxed when local electronics can compensate for certain types of defects. It opens the possibility for a customized active design that outperforms a passive component design.
The shame is that Apple didn't fix any of this in a practical manner. Bluetooth doesn't have enough digital bandwidth to sound good and the Lightning port is proprietary. Their quest for a walled garden has killed this idea.
One day iPhone will just be an elegant little featureless slab you keep in your pocket.
Screen, headphones, iWatch, camera, mic, stylus, cell radio, WiFi radio, speakers, charger brick, iPhone charger base, headphone charger base, iWatch charger, camera charger base, mic charger base, cell charger base, WiFi charger base, speaker charger base, USB hub, USB-C hub, power hub, and cables will need their own shoulder bag.
That's not how authentication hashes are supposed to work. I wonder the experiment was performed on a LAN with bad security and everyone configured their laptop to enable blacklisted protocols. Toss a 1990s era music file server on the network and post instructions for connecting. sudo sysctl -w ...
I did some random tests just now and IPv4 appears dominant because most web sites are using edge caches. Those don't consume a unique IP address for each site so they're probably in no hurry to upgrade. The Reg is using double-agent CloudFlare.
The biggest problem I see is that most routers are complete garbage. It says "IPv6" on the box but it doesn't work. The best I've seen so far is a functional switch that enables and disables incoming WAN connections. Forget about attempting to use firewall rules. I mean, most small business routers got support for multiple WAN IPv4 addresses working just a couple of years ago. Give Cisco/Linksys/D-Link/Netgear another 20 years for IPv6.
I've tried cheap NAS before. It sounds like lots of fun - an instant way to share files without infrastructure. Soon you get tired of waiting for it. Simon's 100MB test works out to ADSL modem speeds so you might as well leave it at home plugged into your router's storage port.
It would be nice if these things got fast.
T-Mobile only knows how much tethering data you're using when it passes through their custom tethering app. Without it, tethering data is normal data like it should be. It's an odd and expensive penalty for buying your phone from a T-Mo store rather than from the manufacturer.
I'm not sure why you'd want to compile an Applet with Java 9 when there will be nothing to run Java 9 Applets. It wasn't just security concerns that ended Applets. Java's GUI, multimedia, and certificate APIs are pretty miserable on their own. Trying to get them working properly through a browser plug-in is futile. For all of JavaScript's flaws, it's still a million times better than Java Applets.
99% of PlayStore would vanish if Google removed all apps that were vulnerable to click-fraud, phishing, and hijacks through malicious adverts. That's not good business to a company making money from data collection and advertising.
The real motivation is for Google blocking online crap is that it's not Google's online crap.
Does this mean letting people run their own low power community cellular services? This would actually be a great way to share Internet and fill in small areas where signals are blocked or roaming fees are too high. Auctioning it to telcos, or any large commercial deployment, would be a complete waste of public bandwidth.
Meanwhile, 26.965 to 27.405 MHz is still there for trolls leveling up their skills on a giant 1/2 wave antenna before heading to the Internet.
About that plateau on the Moto graph: Lenovo has halted updates. As of right now, the X Pure is Android 6.0.0 with the February 2016 security patch. The May 2016 security patch is partially deployed and the 6.0.1 update seems to have been abandoned after a limited release. VoLTE isn't entirely working and there are no plans for a fix.
Of course Google tries to watch everything you do. It's in the disclaimer that everyone dismisses the first time they signed in to Chrome or "improved" their GPS settings.
The difference is that Google offers nice stuff for your soul. It's hard to feel like you're getting a good deal with Edge and Starbucks.
About that Linux flame war - One consistent problem with Android is CPU core control. I have yet to see a governor determine accurately determine how many CPUs are needed and how fast they should be running. They need to know how many tasks may execute concurrently and whether or not intermittent loads are coming from a single operation (latency sensitive) or many operations (not sensitive). The hacks that try to make this work will make you cringe.
A new mobile OS that can control the CPU cores better could have at least 50% more battery life and 50% better performance for everyday tasks. A full-throttle benchmark would look the same, of course, but most uses are bursty.
Google and Apple have been saying the same about India without success. Google likes personal data collection, advertisements, social manipulation, cloud storage, and other things that drain batteries and data plans in an instant. Apple likes sky-high margins, new technology, flashy looks, and customer lock-in. Neither one suits India. Even Apple's and Google's current markets are growing a bit weary of these designs.
Some phone makers do understand it - replaceable battery, splash resistant, protective rim around the glass edge, minimal OS that runs for days on a charge, unlocked bootloader for free third party OS upgrades, microSD slot for cheap storage upgrades, and a bit of extra bulk to avoid exotic construction.
I put a 'scope on the door handle. Touching the handle emits a coded EM signal in the audio frequency range that the transponder replies to. I was able to activate the transponder from a distance using a crappy old Archer Mini Amplifier (LM386 demo circuit in a box) and a couple of coils as a low frequency signal relay. A Satellite TV amp should be able to relay the return path from the transponder. Add directional antennas and you have an open car.
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