Re: I live in Lewisham and....
Small world, and yet I have had no problems with 3, O2 and T Mobile signals in my part of Lewisham. The gods of Telecoms must hate you.
2645 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007
The problem is that there are all these freetards that have bought an "unlimited" 3G contract and are determined to get the most out of it. The result is that the network slows to a crawl at lunch times and doesn't pick up much during the afternoon.
4G promises to fix that, though in the short term at least it's being sold as a premium service. The same kind of thing happened when 3G launched BTW, you had a whole bunch of cheapskates who complained that it was expensive and limited in coverage, and there was no way that they would be paying for it.
But no-one in the world is providing a 300Mbit service. The best you're likely to get in practice at the moment is about 40Mbit. Blowing through 512MB on that would take you near 2 minutes, and that's only if you are being foolish enough to download a file that size. It should be good enough for a number of hours of constant web browsing.
Those rates give you unlimited calls and texts, I assume you ascribe some value for them, otherwise you'd have a dongle rather than a phone.
There are both fixed and variable costs in servicing a line. That's why companies like BT charge line rental plus a per call charge. It's hardly unusual that the cost per item comes down the more of them that you buy.
But pressure is quoted in either inches of mercury or millibars. Hence the following radio exchange between a US aircraft and UK air traffic control:
AT: Descend to altitude 10,000 feet on a QNH of 1015
AC: Can you give me that in inches
AT: Certainly, descend to an altitude of 120,000 inches on a QNH of 1015
There's nothing stopping review sites buying them retail after release (which, unlike some other companies, is normally quite close to the announcement date) and writing what they like about them. El Reg was quite complementary about the iPhone 5 for example, and they never get a launch invite.
Apple only sell their kit because of advertising? Other companies can't advertise themselves? "Get this on your iPad" generally means that they've written an app that does additional things than just showing web pages and video. Android doesn't have an app? I wonder why that might be?
People don't know other pads exist? Samsung went out and advertised their Galaxy Pad range like mad. Third party stores have shelves full of Android devices, normally right next to the iPad stand. Shopping channels plug Android devices like crazy, with easy payment terms even. People STILL keep buying the Apple version because the OS works far better for a given spec of hardware, even if you do have JB on your Android device. ICS is just poor in comparison. That and the third party software library is vastly larger.
Once again, if you can sell a larger, more expensive version first and then add a smaller, cheaper model to your range later then you'd be a fool not to. Companies are out to make money. Trying that the other way around would make them less money. Why would they want to do that?
There's a saying that goes “There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and he who considers price only is that man's lawful prey.”
I guess you are that man's lawful prey if you think that your £40 special will match even a decent spec Android machine.
How long has it taken for 7 inch pads to shift in any kind of volume compared to the 10" models? I'd have said that Apple got their approach spot on. Sell the expensive, large model first and then expand into the smaller, cheaper range if there turns out to be significant interest.
If correct, the 7.85" screent that has been mooted is still significantly larger than the Nexus 7 et al as it's 4:3 ratio (about 40% more screen area), while still having a ready supply of software that will work with it.
The standard, free to use signal is accurate to 1 metre, but there are four additional services that the system transmits.
There's an encrypted commercial navigation signal accurate to the centimetre. That's good enough for precision approaches to airfields that lack glideslope equipment (which is expensive to install and maintain).
There's an unencrypted safety of life service that includes error detection and warning.
There's an encrypted public regulated service that is resistant to jamming and is guaranteed to remain active if the other services are disabled.
There's also a Search & Rescue service that can pick up distress beacons and can send messages back to the beacon confirming reception and that rescuers are on the way.
The big political bonus is that the system is outside of the control of the US military so the EU can make its own decision if and when to disable the network.
The iPhone 5 baseband is by Qualcomm for instance (the same chip that Samsung use in the Galaxy SIII). Qualcomm already have a cross-licence with Samsung, which Samsung tried to withdraw ONLY for Apple.
The whole point of FRAND (which is what Samsung committed to when they made their patents part of the UMTS 3G standard) is that YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO USE THEM TO BLOCK COMPETITORS. All the patents that Apple have been using are nonessential, you can build a smartphone without infringing them.
Oh, and as to 3GPP membership, you only need to be a member if you are involved in creating the standard, NOT using it. So far Apple hasn't been involved in creating the standard (they simply bought the Nortel patents, and Nortel were), but they have been involved in other standards setting processes like MP4/h.264. When it comes to creating extensions to LTE or developing 5G expect them to start showing an interest.
The original iPhone not having 3G was nothing to do with the ownership of patents, it was to do with battery life (early 3G chipsets were heavy on power) and the international state of 3G rollout (patchy at best in 2007). The whole point of an international standard and FRAND is that anyone can make a device using it and be guaranteed of receiving a licence after it is launched.
Apple bought a whole stack of Nortel patents, some of which cover 3G and some 4G. The point here is that Samsung have refused to simply cross-licence their 3G patents (which Apple offered) and are trying for terms that definitely don't match the definition of FRAND.
Firstly Apple own a whole stack of SEPs, covering h.264, 3G and 4G among others. They've committed not to use these offensively.
Secondly where they have been arguing over licensing, the argument has been over the amount asked. Samsung had, for example, been asking for 2.4% of the selling price of Apple's devices when most of the rest if the market get their licence as part if their $10 baseband chip.
If FRAND can be properly codified, so everyone knows up front what using a standard will cost them, and if companies who fail to pay a court mandated license amount (but only those companies) can have their products blocked then I think the main problems of SEPs are covered.
So you skipped the bits in the article about patent dates? All of this stuff was patented by the original inventor and, after 25 years became public domain.
The alternative to patents is for inventors to keep this kind of thing as a trade secret, which results in much slower adoption and makes it hard for others to build on the work.
At the time it was competing with machines like the Altair 8800 (which needed a teletype terminal) and the IBM 5100 (a $10K+ device). It was, if not the first then one of the first, reasonably affordable pre-assembled microcomputers with video output and QWERTY key input. It set the pattern for the PC boom of the later 70's and early 80's.
Pilots routinely land aircraft manually so that they keep their skills current - there's no point in saving the pilot for when the automatics fail if they can't remember how to do it.
By the time a pilot gets to fly commercial jets they typically have 2000 hours of flying time, they've normally got landings fairly well sussed out by that point.
iTunes, CIFS etc are pull formats, AirPlay is push. Either you need a smart app on your NAS that does track selection etc (by web?) or you need a device that takes the pull data and pushes it to the AirPlay device (pretty much any i device, a Mac, assorted players on Android etc). There's no GUI or even UI on the speakers. AppleTV is a little smarter, but doesn't seem to be able to connect to third party iTunes servers for some reason.
You need to compress audio to run it across BT, and you loose quality in doing so. Definitely not HiFi.
There are also issues over range and driving multiple speakers.
DNLA? The standard is a complete mess. Getting two DNLA devices to talk to each other can be a nightmare because CODEC support is optional for many formats.
Airplay is turning out to be one of the better options. Although it is proprietary its based on open components and has been mostly reverse engineered. The result is that non Apple devices can quite happily play to Airplay speakers, discovery is automatic and transparent and quality is pretty good (providing your wireless network isn't crappy before someone starts off on this)
OS X was doing hardware compositing a la Aero back in 2002. Before that, back in 1985, the Amega used off screen buffer space for windows and then blitted them in place in the correct Z order. MS are well behind the curve on this one, and to make matters worse in Vista they did most of the work in software and reserved an extra 512MB of RAM to handle the buffer space.
WPA is supposed to negotiate a new key every hour, it's part of the spec in order to prevent hackers from deducing the AES/TKIP key. If your network is running half decently you shouldn't notice it.
The AppleTV (I'm assuming you are talking about the 2nd generation black rectangle) only needs a sustained data rate of 4Mbit/sec to work so you've either got a lot of competing networks on the same frequency or lots of RF noise. Try switching the router to channels 1,6 and 11. See which one works best. If its still not working well (and WiFi in tight urban areas is a problem for everyone) then get a new dual band router that does both 2.4 and 5GHz at the same time. The Apple TV and newer devices will run on the 5GHz band (and the router is required to be able to find its own free channel at 5GHz) leaving 2.4 free for your older devices.
The 4S could not ever connect to 5GHz, it simply can't see signals at that frequency. A dual band router normally announces a different SID for the same AP at 5GHz so it should have been obvious that the phone never saw the 5GHz signal. The OP also said that it worked just fine at 2.4GHz so it's not a legacy hardware issue, he also said that it worked fine at 5GHz for a short time - it's this bit that implies that he was either doing something stupid and misinterpreting the results or being economical with the truth.
And many of those 730 posts are from the same users. Your point being?
If it was a general problem there'd be a lot more Internet chatter on multiple forums, not just there. There are going to be SOME 5s with faulty WiFi due to the law of averages. There are going to be some people with poor WiFi setups that they will blame on the 5. There are probably some bugs in the WiFi stack in iOS 6 (it's hard to find any code that is 100% bug free), but the combined numbers don't yet add up to a significant blip.
You are rather limited where it will take you though (any bus stop in London, plus parts of the tube network depending on how much you paid). You're also limited as to load, can't take passengers (unless they also buy a card) and have a restricted service at night. There are many reasons that lots of people in London own cars also.