Posts by Henry Wertz 1

True in a sense

What Verizon says is true in a sense -- from what I've gathered of this situation, Netflix's slowdowns are not happening within Verizon's network, and Verizon is not throttling the traffic.

However, Netflix has plenty of connectivity to these peering points, and are paying for every last bit of it (I have to mention this because US ISP propaganda now is to claim Netflix et. al are getting a "free ride" or "not paying their share"). It is Verizon letting their connection to these peering points hit 100% capacity and failing to upgrade it. They think (even though Netflix is already paying for adequate connectivity to peering points) that they should be able to double-dip and demand that Netflix pay a second time to pay Verizon to upgrade their connection, rather than Verizon allocating some of those numerous profits they make from their own paying customers to maintain the connectivity the customers are paying for.

I mean, I wouldn't get away running an ISP with a 10gbps fiber backbone and some 1.5mbps DSL links to the internet at large, then go around demanding Google, Amazon, etc. all pay me to upgrade the 1.5mbps DSL lines, would I? This is *exactly* what AT&T, Verizon, etc. are expecting to happen; charging customers for internet connectivity, but pocketing that as profit and expecting third parties pay for the internet connectivity instead.

"The good news is that as customers continue to sign up, we won’t necessarily see speeds fall any further. That’s because providers are hoisting more masts to cope with the extra demand."

We've been through this in the US. The tricky bits:

Will carriers keep up on turning down the number of 2G and 3G channels, and turn on more 4G, as usage shifts? This isn't as easy as it sounds; a new cell site may well have software defined radio, so the company could log in (perhaps even remotely), turn off the 2G and 3G and turn on 4G in it's place. Otherwise, it requires physical modifications to the cell site. Another tricky part, 3G uses at least 5mhz (paired) channels; if a carrier was running paired 20mhz of 3G, they can't turn it off a bit at a time, it's 25% at a time.

Will carriers actually keep up on building capacity sites, or focus on expansion of coverage, or neither one? I don't have anything to say to expand on this.

Here in the US:

T-Mobile has pretty much has focused on urban markets; they've been upgraded, re-upgraded, and re-re-upgraded (including adding sites); very fast HSPA+ (at least dual-channel in most markets) and very fast LTE... in a given city, but EDGE and even GPRS outside the city proper. If you are in a HSPA+ or especially LTE coverage area, they are usually by far the fastest of the "big 4", but get out of that area and it may be T-Mo GPRS versus "other carrier" LTE 8-) They plan to upgrade these 1900mhz EDGE/GPRS sites to 1900mhz LTE in the next year or two.

Sprint has focused almost exclusively on expanding LTE coverage, they're running a minimal amount of LTE spectrum (I'm not sure if it's even 5mhz, it might be a 1.4mbps or 3mhz slice) but trying to get it over their whole network. They do have plans to use 1900mhz and other spectrum to add to LTE, but Sprint accelerates, cancels, or changes buildout plans so often, who knows what they'll do?

VZW (Verizon Wireless) had focused on coverage, they already have nearly 100% of their network upgraded to LTE, one 10mhz 700mhz channel. However, some areas that got >75mbps peak at launch now get <1mbps, VZW is now having to focus on adding capacity and cell sites ASAP in these areas.

AT&T is somewhere in between VZW and T-Mo's strategy, not expanding as fast as VZW but faster than T-Mo; and not focusing on urban markets as much as T-Mo but more than VZW was when they were focuses on rural buildout.

"lengthy time-to-market and lack of a key consumer use case"

Mainly the latter as far as I'm concerned.

Lengthy time to market? I don't care if I have to mail order something, and jump through a few hoops, or have dozens of extras laying on the store shelf. If I am motivated to get some product I'll get it.

On the other hand, I can't think of a single actual use for Google Glasses. Are they cool? Yes (from a technological standpoint; I know fashionwise they are considered nerdy and uncool, I don't care about that.) Can I think of an actual use case? Nope! If I got some, I'd end up playing with them for a half hour or maybe a few hours, and go back to using the phone (obviously I mean if I got some for free, I wouldn't spend that kind of money on something I wouldn't use.)

What I'm interested in...

What I'm interested in is how quickly Apple gets the patches out. They researcher has agreed to withold public disclosure *until*January, but hopefully Apple could patch something like this quite a bit quicker than that.

"We first had this debate when desktop internet access came in the '90s. My wise old boss, the infrastructure manager back then, held the opinion it was inherently self-limiting. Certainly people could spend all day on dodgy Geocities sites, but it would soon show up in their output. It was a line management issue, and the best managers manage their people by what the achieve, not by the hours they put in."

This. Some people now, rather than "gathering around the water cooler", they tweet and so on. If they do it too much, they will be unproductive. As an anecdote of when it's obvious someone's being unproductive, I was unloading some pallets of PCs with some student employees, which took maybe 10 minutes. One or two of the guys stop dead in their tracks like 2 or 3 minutes in, start reading and firing off messages the whole time, while everyone else is moving computers. Almost all the rest of them used their phones too, but after the unloading was done when there was nothing much to do for the next 10 or so minutes. There's an easy to follow etiquette, don't use the phone when you're in the middle of something, and use common sense and moderation.

Taking Victor Vinge's view on these things, I would say some of this usage makes the phone actually count as an external cybernetic enhancement. I've seen a few people that can actually text or whatever and hold a voice conversation at the same time; they are not alternating between speech and typing, they can speak articulately (not just a "Yeah.." or whatever) and type at full speed (at least full speed for a phone keyboard...) at the same time. Some of these people really do find it difficult to deal with being out of contact all day, it's like telling them they can't speak.

"I know a couple of smaller time musicians. The only money they *really* make is from touring. Everything else is coffee money, once the various entities above them in the "rights" tree get their cut.

Which defines where the problem really lies. The business model is br0ken, and the businesses need to die, but being "too big", ......."

And, to expand on this... Spotify is (per the article) largely record company owned. So I can see pulling music off Spotify -- no-one can expect to get paid as much for a stream as for a music purchase... but Spotify follows and encourages the model of the traditional record company, where the artist gets peanuts.

Wifi is just plain bad for crowded venues

Wifi is just plain bad for crowded venues. Why?

The *original* wifi spec had an option that was called "point coordination function", the access point itself would coordinate access to the given channel between itself and everything associated to it. This option has never actually been implemented AFAIK; so, instead, the access point and stations attempt to wait for the channel to be clear then transmit. On a busy channel this means collission city, frequent collissions mean a increasing fraction of the time on the channel transmits no useful data, and eventually you get congestion collapse (connections retransmit and time out without useful information making it through.)

Wifi also has no power control. In a dense environment with many APs, the power on each access point should be turned down since the goal is no longer maximizing range, but covering a specific area with different APs covering the neighboring areas. But the APs typically have no way to tell the client to transmit at reduced power; so usually they don't, they broadcast full power and crap up the channel for everyone else.

Nevertheless, the rudimentary fixes are: 1) Use as many channels as possible (5ghz channels as well as 2.4ghz). 2) Set power control on APs relatively low, since you have many APs and want to reduce overlap. 3) To the extent possible, keep APs on the same channel as seperate as possible. 4) High end APs have various other black magic, best practices, proprietary options, and so on, to try to maximize throughput in a heavy usage environment.

"I've been ruminating on the subject, and it appears the UI changes in Win 8 may be part of a devilish scheme:"

If only. Microsoft simply had some rather out of control executives thinking they could force this Metro UI on people; and convince people that programming for desktop Metro, Windows for phone, Windows RT for tablet, which are all incompatible with each other, would somehow be a good idea. It was an abject failure, those responsible have been pushed aside and they are simply backtracking for WIndows 10.

Personally, I think it's time for some of these people to try out a nice Linux distro. Maybe Mint? Actually, Ubuntu is a Metro-like disaster out of the box too (sorry but Unity is pants), but it's easy to install, say, gnome-session-flashback (which looks like "traditional" gnome desktop). I sure wouldn't want to deal with Windows 8 (I *also* couldn't figure out how to shut it down! And the answer was dumb, like hitting the windows key and waiting for some unlabelled icon to float onto the side of the screen or some damn thing). Windows 8.1 looks marginally more useable at least, but if I were forced to use Windows I'd much prefer Windows 7 too.

"I may be being simplistic in my understanding of the equipment described, and I share in the heart-felt expressions of sadness posted here, but shouldn't there be an over-speed lock on even thinking about engaging an air-brake / stabilizer device on such a craft as this?"

Actually an under-speed lockout, it's meant to operate at a minimum speed of mach 1.4. I don't know; even with airplanes, you have everything ranging from fully manual controls and minimal instrumentation (well cargo planes), to an Airbus where the plane just won't let the pilot do anything considered out-of-range. Manual controls are more prone to human error; but automated controls are complex and have to at least account for possible intermittent or permanent sensor faults. A human can react easily if a reading is dropping low or 0 every so often due to bad sensor wire; an automated system, you wouldn't want to have some controls start cutting in and out because of this. This is after all a test flight so I'm not surprised it wouldn't have this yet. I also wouldn't be surprised if the next one didn't at least lock out the tailbooms until it's past mach 1.

This is done in the US

This is done in the US. But here, it was due to market forces due to anything else. 10 years ago, the "big 4" hadn't built out as much coverage or bought up as many carriers as they have now. They all had significant coverage gaps filled in by roaming, and plans began to include free in-US roaming. This also ended up incentivizing the carriers to build out coverage; a coverage hole doesn't directly cost the carrier anything, a coverage hole where tons of people are roaming on another carrier does.

T-Mobile tends to provide less roaming coverage but roams on some GSM carriers; Sprint roams on every available CDMA carrier pretty much and some LTE roaming; Verizon roams on Sprint and regional CDMA carriers (with LTE on quite a few); AT&T roams on T-Mobile and regional GSM carriers (some of this is EDGE, some HSPA+). If you pick a regional carrier it'll usually include some kind of roaming coverage too.

But, if roaming is not happening between networks there, it really is to everyone's benefit to get it going. I've seen the coverage maps for UK and they all have holes this'd help fill in. And, it might get the carriers to improve their own coverage out better too.

Disagree with a few points.

I have to take issue with a few points:

"The reason is that people investing in stuff – in factories, buildings, machinery, new products – is what makes next year and the following ones richer than this one."

I've heard this, some in the US (who want to give the wealthy tax breaks) going so far as to refer to them as "job creators". The problem? It's not happening! The wealthiest here are bankers or investers; the investers use high frequency stock trading systems, so the investment uses flaws in the trading platform to get them money, taking it away from everyone else. The investments they make do not result in helping the companies they invest in, or result in any extra factories, buildings, machinery, or new products. The banks can be as incompetent as they want, and will get bailed out using money taken from everyone else. A lot of the banks are not agressively making loans, so people sticking this money sitting in the bank, it's not going back out to provide business (or personal) loans either.

"But any money that you'd put away into savings (broadly defined, cash in the bank, a holiday home, stocks, a pension) would then be deducted from that income. And then you pay income tax (or more accurately, a “consumption tax”) on the amount of money that you've spent that year."

The trouble with this, those near the poverty line will be spending 100% of their income already; they'd be short if you want to throw heavier taxes on everything they are buying now. The very wealthy can spend even well under 1% to get buy if they wanted and save the rest tax-free. We've got here in the US 0.1% of the population holding onto 21.5% of the wealth, the bottom 90% hold onto 25.6%. The bottom 50% has 1.1%. You could take EVERYTHING the bottom 50% have as tax, and it'd amount to a 5% tax rate on the wealth of the top 0.1%. This simply doesn't seem fair to me.

There still are intermediate cameras

There are still intermediate-range cameras. Or at least there were a few years ago. I found my phone camera unsatisfactory; I still use it a lot of the time, but it's really not that good. It wasn't good on my previous phones and it's nothing special on my current one either. It's just the reasons given in the article; tiny lens for packaging reasons, and the obsession with huge-megapixel count on a tiny sensor ruining low-light sensitivity and just yielding high-pixel-count but poorly focused photos.

I really do view these cell phones cameras as equivalent to the typical film camera -- which is not the quality products in the article, but the little camera where one sticks in film, winds it, hits the button and hopes for the best; no focus control (possibly just a single "infinite focus" lens), and sometimes not even a way to disable the auto flash.

One point on this, that is even worse than implied -- some people will zoom in rather than framing the shot.. yes. But MOST of these cameras with "zoom" aren't even actually zooming, it's "digital zoom" so it is just pre-cropping the photo!

The one point I have to disagree on though -- it's not "crap camera" or "eye-wateringly expensive."

I got a Panasonic Lumix camera a few years back; it was under $250. 7.2 megapixel (when most cameras where pushing over 12 megapixels) i.e. they went for pic quality rather than "most megapixels". Leica lens, not as big as on an SLR but way bigger than the thumbnail-sized typical lens. 6x optical zoom (which i try to avoid using, but it is very sharp, I can read text down the street that I couldn't read no matter how hard I squint without the camera.) It has very good low light sensitivity, if I can see reasonably well with naked eye it'll take a good photo without flash. (Below twilight or so, it does take pretty noisy photos.) It has autofocus, auto-f-stop and auto-exposure but these can also all be controlled manually as well. Sharp, high-resolution photos, and the color reproduction is nice.

Pros would want RAW mode and replaceable lenses; nevertheless, nice cameras (a lot better than what's in any phone) do exist without having to spend the amount for a high-end camera.

I say again...

I said on the original article, and say again, Tweets are public. I wasn't sure of the status of private tweets, the Samaritans clarify that they do not process private tweets even if the user is subscribed. I'm not at all sure if the Data Protection Act does apply or not.

That said, they really should respond to Section 12 requests by saying they don't think the Data Protection Act applies, but they'll honor your request anyway, rather than insisting on people subscribing on twitter to do it.

Turing

"I wonder why it is then that so many films insist on wandering into showing characters are "straight" when it has no real bearing on the story? Double standards at play methinks."

Ithinks you're wrong and are seeing what you want to see. Although there are plenty of movies that *do* show the characters.. I guess I'll say cavorting.. there are plenty that show nothing more than a little flirt and many more that have nothing like this at all. This is a documentary, conditions made it dangerous for him to even seek out other men, and he himself described it as a "sexual desert" (meaning to me he was unsuccessful in finding any men to go out with anyway), so it's natural that he would not be cavorting with a man in the movie.

" No wonder there are so few gay role models for young gay people, it seems the media cannot bring itself to link outstanding achievement /braveness by a gay man in too positive a light"

It's a documentary. And it sounds like it does cover Turing's achievements just fine. This documentary chose to go for accuracy, not be all revisionist and pretend that Turing could be as flamboyant as he wants to be. Or maybe he was as flamboyant as he wanted to be -- maybe his gay flamboyance and nerdy non-flamboyance were cancelling each other out and he just wasn't that flamboyant 8-) .

"£4M is a tiny amount when it comes to public spending. If it's done in the name of starting new companies and creating jobs then I'm in favour of it."

OK, give me £4M. I'll create so many jobs and companies!

But seriously... don't be for or against something because of what they say the goal is; Quangocrats always have the best intentions but just don't know what they're doing (usually.)

In this case, some big empty space with windows and very uncomfortable looking seats? How is that going to create jobs or business?

Isn't that a bit risky?

Isn't that a bit risky? On the one hand, they should be able to get a far lower licensing price, since Microsoft buying Nokia really does scuttle the portion of the agreement about Microsoft helping Samsung produce Windows phones. On the other hand, if the license is considered null and void it means Samsung's been using these various patents without a license, and this could lead to penalties.

It did seem a little overboard

I thought it did seem all a little overboard.

Coming out (even though it was already obvious he was gay?) Sure.

Statement hoping that his coming out helps others out? Fair enough.

The news coverage? I don't know if this is really news. But the US so-called news shows already advertise Apple tat any time they are asked to (not just as filler, but bumping aside REAL news to do so), even for non-existant products like the watch. So, whatever, at that point letting the CEO make personal statements is little different.

Counting "being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me"? Umm, seems over the top. I've heard (straight) men saying they are God's gift to women, but not that being straight is a gift given unto themselves. It seems a bit odd to claim your sexual orientation is a gift given to you either way.

Malice or incompetence?

So, does anyone have an opinion here, was this malice or incompetence?

That is, is this a cryptosystem where the Australian spy agencies could have some interest in introducing a cryptosystem that at first glance appears OK but has weaknesses? (This "at first glance" part doesn't seem to work, those who design in intentional weaknesses seem to underestimate the capabilities of civilian cryptoanlysts to find these weaknesses.) Or is this not the case?

Regarding incompetence -- I don't mean this as a big insult to whoever worked on this. Writing your own secure cryptosystem is difficult to the point that it's ill-advised for most people to do so; and even a crypto expert could overlook something or other. It's fairly ill-advised to ship a product based on a new cryptosystem without letting other crypto experts look it over first to check for just the kind of weaknesses found in the article; then the cryptosystem can either be fixed or it can be scrapped if it's inherently flawed.

Hmm...

I always find it very difficult to use "value for money" and anything Apple in the same sentence -- it's almost always some bunch of faff involving comparing it to the most overpriced (non-Apple) PCs on the market (like some Sony) and then going on about "comparable" parts (adding arbitrary price onto the PC for anything that is lower-spec while ignoring specs where the Apple is lower-specced).

In this case, though, I wouldn't spend that much on a system or a monitor... but that is a pretty good price for a display alone, let alone having some kind of computer in it.

Oh.. one point though.. if everything on the new screen seems brighter than on the old one, it means your screen hasn't been calibrated (probably either one.) Time to set the gamma.

Oh, also.. since the article doesn't say what a "Fusion drive" actually is -- it's a 1TB hard drive with 128GB SSD slapped on, and some indeterminate technology* to try to shuffle more frequently used data onto the SSD.

*I call it "indertminate technology" because the writeups I saw about it say they don't even know for certain if it's block-based or file-based, if it's under OS control or if there's some controller hooked up to the SSD and hard disk. They haven't been able to characterize the behavior to even make a guesstimate at it's algorithm, is it most recently used, or does it base it on how frequently it's accessed? Does it ignore linear read/writes in favor of trying to speed up usage that involves lots of disk seeks?

Encryption is a good option

Honestly, link encryption would be a good option. I don't know if any router would be fast enough at crypto to handle a say 1tbps link though.

Twitter is not a private forum

Is this app a good idea? I don't know. But:

1) Tweets are public by default. These people may have some expectation of privacy, but this expectation is unrealistic, anyone can view these tweets.

2) There is a "protected" tweet option (I didn't know about this until i just googled to check), in this case the user is manually approving every twitter follower before they can see the tweets. It may be a good idea to have this app ignore "protected" tweets? I don't know, though, it really depends on if the info is sent on to the Samaritans, or if it just tells the user who installed the app (they, after all, already get the tweets in question.)

3) However, it is the follower running the Samaritan app, not someone data mining through all tweets available.

As for legality? That I don't know; here in the US, there essentially is no privacy, companies are virtually unregulated in what info they can collect and the big data broker firms have shocking amounts on most people; some federal agencies ignore the law and the Constitution *cough*NSA*cough*, and other agencies are strictly regulated in what information they can collect, but they aren't prohibited from buying up exactly the same information from private companies. I'm quite sure it's 100% lega l here.

Europe? No idea, the privacy regs there are infinitely stricter than here. I don't know if it'd cover the public tweets or not. The tricky part with the private tweets, is if the app does all the processing on-phone (which is entirely likely since it just does some keyword search) then no data is actually sent to a 3rd party.

Bleh

An LTE access point? I'd be interested in this, LTE is (a little) more spectrally efficient than 802.11n, and has actual provisions to coordinate access to the channel (unlike wifi where it's like a free-for-all, and channel access tends to completely go to pieces with multiple devices vying for access to the channel.) Also, I could be wrong, but I suspect LTE speeds would drop of more gradually as the signal degrades; wifi may drop from 130mbps to 78mbps (running the whole channel at a reduced speed), in a condition where LTE could run some subchannels at full speed and others at reduced speeds.

An LTE microcell that just allows access to LAN resources as well? Hell no, the carriers here in the US (except T-Mobile) ALL consider microcell use to be billable usage, even though the microcell is using your own internet connection to provide access (albeit going through the carrier the way it's set up now). I also don't need even more stuff using up the 2.4ghz spectrum, thanks.

Debunk

I want to debunk a few points. I don't see the problem with having people take off the google glasses since there's no way to know if it's recording or not.

"I've had Glass for a fair while now, and there's no frigging way it could be used to pirate a movie. It's designed to records seconds, or at most minutes, of video at a time."

It doesn't matter what it's designed for; it's got video record capability and GBs of space. It's running Android, so if the stock video record app is crap and only supports a few minutes of recording (I doubt it really has a time limit), aftermarket apps are available for almost anything.

"If you tried to use it to record a frigging movie, first, the quality would be appalling unless you had a neck brace to hold your head still staring straight at the screen for two hours, second it would STILL be crappy quality"

Yep, cam copies are crap, and I do wonder why people bother.

", and third, it wouldn't work anyway because Glass would overheat and shut down and/or run out of battery long before the movie was half-way through."

Just like most modern smartphones, Google Glass' ARM chip(s) support NEON, which already makes the CPU time involved in video encodes and decodes VERY much lower than you'd expect; most video chipsets used in smartphones also support hardware video encode in addition to video decode. You will not have problems with heat or battery life with either of these solutions.

Google's not Apple

"Google would be well within their rights to do the same and block it."

Except Google is not Apple and does not go around banning whole classes of apps.

Not unexpected

"Apple’s customers paid a premium for their products and were promised, and came to expect, the highest levels of performance, graphical richness, and durability. "

Why would they expect that? Apple's machines have been plagued by reliability issues. One model will be rock solid reliable, another will have all sorts of reliability problems (usually heat-related.) This has seriously been going on for at least the last 15 years; every time it happens, the Apple fanbois convince themselves that it's just some 1-time fluke and that it won't happen again.

Now, fanbois, don't reply with a list of other computers that overheat; I know this isn't an Apple-specific problem.

I've seen 3 big problems vendors have:

1) Some vendors put enough cooling capacity in, but seem to think it's just fine to let the chip run to like 90C before they kick the fan up (it's really not). This was what did in the NVidia chips, the temps on these systems was within the allowable limits of the die but the solder didn't tolerate the temperature. In some cases a BIOS update was simply released to kick the fan up at a lower temperature. Apple has had a long and troubled history with this, Jobs HATED fan noise apparently, and would have fans removed from designs that should have had one, and in other cases they'd set the fan to run FAR later than it should have.

2) Some seem to think it's fine to assume the CPU and GPU won't be run 100% for long and put like 20W of cooling on a 35W TDP chip (this is a flat-out dumb setup IMHO!) When the P4 came out, some vendors decided since it thermal throttles anyway, why put in proper cooling? (Even on a few desktops!). Ugh.

3) And of course, some will put exactly 35W of cooling in a 35W TDP solution, which works great until you get a little dust in there, then the cooling is inadequate.

'If 64GB+ storage was the norm then finding a free 5GB would not be an issue."

Unless you actually use all your space.

"Too many complaints from clients that their 8GB/16GB iDevice is full... 32GB should be entry level now."

Or the OS update could be less bloated. Honestly 1GB isn't too bad -- but why should it take *5GB* to update that? Even if the old OS was 1GB, download was 1GB (it should be less if it extracts to 1GB), and the download is extracted before it overwrites the old OS (another 1GB), that's 3GB, not 5GB.

Porting difficulties

So Googling this, NT 3.5 supported IA-32, MIPS, and Alpha; NT 4.0 supported IA-32, MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC. Windows 2000 if I recall, DEC had up through some beta version of Windows 2000 running before they dropped it. The HAL is still there. The problem they ran into as I understand it was by XP, the HAL was still there and portable, kernel was still prety portable, but above this portable level the libraries and execuables they pulled in from Win9x series, and some of the newly written code, was not particularly portable (assuming 32-bit little endian for instance). Keep in mind Xbox also runs a Windows kernel on PowerPC (just not the usual Windows userland.)

Looking in my crystal ball here.. first off, I'm assuming Windows Server for ARM will be traditional and not WinRT-based. OK. Windows for Itanium was a full port; if you look at it's feature list, it's rather incomplete. But, the features it does support are a likely bare minimum of what I would expect Windows Server for ARM would support, these portions are likely already portable.

Maybe useful?

First off, I still don't think I'm that happy about these; there's a jobs shortage, and eliminating further jobs is not a positive thing.

That said, I was all ready to slag off trying to tell some robot what I'm looking for (I have an awful time with these types of systems, and if it came to telling some robot what I want and following it around the store until it gets it right, I'd just mail order my stuff). But showing it a door hinge or something and having it go to the door hinge isle might actually be useful.

Was it Larry Ellison?

Honestly when I read this, the first thing I thought (for some reason) was Larry Ellison tooling around in his racing sail yacht 8-).

The problem I saw...

The problem I saw here... AT&T kept vaguely saying "top 5%", without giving any idea what the figure was. Per companies who DID give figures, it is HIGHLY unlikely that the 95th percentile usage was actually 2GB, it would have been a bit higher than that. Also, changing a plan from "unlimited" to "unlimited with a throttle" is a material change to the contract and should have allowed people to get out of the plan without ETF if they had wanted to. I don't think very many people tried, but those who tried and were charged an ETF should get it refunded. This was a case where when they started signing up these iphones, they got them on a 2-year contract and changed their terms like a month or two into it.

Regarding the meaning of "unlimited" -- to me, unlimited does mean unlimited. BUT, I do think it's reasonable to be able to have "truly unlimited" or "unlimited" (which straight up has to be unlimited), and have "unlimited, throttled to x kbps at y usage" (or whatever description -- before VZW apparently backed out, they were going to put heavier users with unlimited data in a lower QoS tier -- they could get full speed most of the time, but would be in the slow lane on cell sites busy enough that their use was actually slowing down other users.) My concern if carriers aren't allowed to do this is that (at least here in the US) we'd end up with no choices at all where one doesn't have to buy a high-priced per-GB plan and then worry about overages.

Daily charge? Sure. IWatch? Hell no.

Would I object to a watch having to get a daily charge? Well, it sure doesn't help anything... but, sure, if there's a good reason to.

Would I object to a very overpriced piece of kit that requires charging every day while providing no discernable benefits? Yes. I don't see the point of seeing like half a text or a portion of an E-Mail subject line on my wrist (while still AFAIK relying on the phone to supply the watch this information.) And I certainly wouldn't pay Apple prices for the privilege! Of course, if I want a watch that just tells time, I can get one with significantly better battery life (5 years is pretty typical. Oh and the watch battery is replaceable -- given Apple's track record, what are the odds the IWatch will have a replaceable battery?)

lower complexity to manufacture?

"Even to this day, I'm stunned as to how much importance people place power consumption on lighting. Big things first, small things last, and lighting is a small thing - especially when they still use bar heaters."

Agreed. Going from incadescents to fluroscents, you get the big savings, like 50-85W a bulb (depending on if you're replacing a 60W or 100W). Going from CFL to LED? Like 5W maybe? I certainly wouldn't replace a working CFL with an LED just for power savings. (If I had to wait for them to warm up like 7? Yeah I'd replace them and save the CFLs as spares for somewhere warmer.)

I also have to agree... LED bulbs should have much lower manufacturing complexity... after all, rather than a high-voltage power supply, starting circuit, and a curvy bit of glass with fluorescent material and gas inside it, you've got a circuit board with some LEDs etched on it, and a low-voltage power supply (and I guess some plastic up front to diffuse the light.)

Clever

This is clever, and should be pretty effective. After all, (this is true in Windows and Linux as well), if there's some "naughty" executable on there, but it never actually gets executed... it's basically a bit of data taking up space. Knowing about what gets loaded up on boot is the first line of defense against malware on any system.

So...

So, my question is, does this system treat the 7 cores more or less independently (so if a normal fiber is single core, you could get about 1/7th the throughput -- still an impressive 36Tbps.) Or is it using some techniques that'd work exclusively on multiple-core fibers? I'm impressed either way; luckily I don't have any fiber installed in my place yet so I don't have to worry about it being obsolete 8-)

skelband beat me to it:

"Well its official. The terrorists have won. They have us quaking in our boots, sensitive to the slightest little thing."

The point of terrorism in general is to terrorize; the stated point of (some of the) middle-east-based terror groups is to cause more and more disruption in the west to normal functions such as air travel, not by actually disrupting them themselves, but by vaguely implying they PLAN to disrupt them and have the response (from TSA et. al) disrupt them much more. (Although some *cough* ISIS *cough* seem to simply plan on murder and mayham.)

A) Having this much of an overreaction to a silly network name demonstrates this clearly. B) Furthermore, why didn't someone just spend a few minutes to physically locate the source of the network (probably some phone or mifi) rather than disrupting the whole airport? Tracking down a wifi network's via signal strength is not hard at all.

P/E ratio

"Growth rate can't be the only measure by which a business is measured - yet that is exactly what investors seem to be doing year in and year out. "

To expand on this a bit, when I was in college I took a few econ classes; it was odd, because the book and class were this mix of conventional economic theory and, well, there was a chapter in the book about how Enron was great that we skipped over since they'd just collapsed. P/E (price to earnings ratio) for typical utilities companies (low growth but steady income) was about 7-12 (so stock price is about 7-12x earnings per share) and other companies up to maybe 20. Now P/E ratios of 50 or more are commonplace, which would have conventionally been considered a stock bubble. Amazon's P/E for 2013 was 530,

Partially Ballmer's comments are sour grapes I think, but what he says is also true; it's odd for a company that in the long term breaks even (more or less, it makes money one year and loses the next...) to have such a high stock value.

Oh yes...

Oh yes, my mom had so much fun with them when they kept calling. "So, what's this Microsoft you refer to?" They'd explain all about how (in one case) her "Microsoft" had problems, and a few times here Microsoft OS. She'd string them on for a while trying to ask how they know, and they'd be "Oh, we're quite sure". Finally she'd point out "Well, that's interesting, my computer has Linux on it." Hopefullly she kept good records so she can collect the $10,000 fine per call for violating the Do Not Call list (the telemarketing laws do allow individuals to collect!)

Not innocent

"Mr. Heyward seems like a lesser copy of Mr. Zuckerberg, kind of a likeable, innocent nerd guy who stumbles into piles of privacy doo-doo, over and over again. I suppose it really is just a coincidence."

Well, not innocent really. And I don't think it can be considered "stumbling" into privacy problems when he's wholesale tracking people, using location info when it's turned off in the app, and finding juicy info for journalists and whoever else.

I don't think there's any endgame for Whisper. Heyward could be serious, use proper encryption the whole way, fix the location stuff, and so on, and still nobody's going to trust the service after such egregious past behavior.

Learn something new every day

I didn't know telnet had an encryption option either. I learn something every day 8-)

"So... AT&T locks a SIM card, but you can get a replacement, for free, and it's trivial to remove and replace the locked card. So you have two: one for AT&T, one for Sprint and T-Mobile. Or three: the last one's for Verizon, who doesn't allow switching."

So much more convenient to have 3 SIMs instead of 4. Yeah

Anyway, "booooo!" to AT&T for doing this. It does seem like the kind of thing they'd do though; man is AT&T greasy.

BMI and bodybuilders

"BMI is a decent measure of a population's tubbiness, which is what it was intended as."

Except it's not a decent measure; it's hard to take BMI seriously when it classifies most bodybuilders as morbidly obese.

" A group of Koreans aged from 26 to 34 told The Register they cared about their privacy, but couldn't be bothered to change app because "everyone I know uses it"."

Yep, meaning they don't care about their privacy. This happens here in the US too of course -- far too many people will claim "Look at how Facebook violates my privacy! Of *COURSE* I care about privacy!" then go straight to posting everything and anything on facebook.

"Have the governed ever trusted their government?"

Yeah apparently it happens. In some cases, the populace have a functional political system and can replace anyone distrustful (not here in the US and it's effectively one-party system!) In some cases, the gov't just by dumb luck turns out to be benign and unobjectionable for a while. And, governments which are good enough at propaganda can have a populace that's treated pretty shabbily but don't mind it one bit; either they think they are treated well enough, or aren't too chuffed but have been convinced that any other political setup will treat them even worse.

Unofficial position

"The Reg asked Microsoft whether it had any official position on hardware vendors using drivers to enforce intellectual property concerns, but Redmond declined to comment on policy."

Microsoft may not have an official position. But there's numerous cases where in Linux, some driver will work with a range of devices... sometimes it's multiple OEMs using the same chips, sometimes it's clones and knockoffs; whereas in Windows, you could end up with a seperate driver for each and every device in these cases. In some cases it's clear that one OEM's driver and the next OEM's driver is just the same, they are just getting an OEM driver and putting their device ID in; sometimes, not at all. Usually these clone and knockoff vendors also have an independently-written driver that is missing a few features or has a few bugs.

In other words, having a driver damage hardware? I'm sure Microsoft would not condone that. But, I don't expect FTDI's Windows drivers to keep supporting clones and knockoffs, they put a lot of effort into the Windows drivers. Linux, on the other hand, I'm sure will follow the tradition of supporting as much as possible; in addition, the in-tree FTDI driver thanks FTDI for providing protocol information, but it appears FTDI were not the ones to actually develop this driver.

"Load LibreOffice and type the following keyboard shortcut: Alt-IOF

Does the LibreOffice formula editor appear?"

Yes, in Ubuntu 14.04 at least. But I'm using the "Gnome Flashback" desktop (which looks like "traditional" Gnome), not Unity. I don't know if that affects this or not.

I must say this is one thing I like about Linux. I think Unity is awful, but, I don't have to use it! It's trivially easy to install alternatives (and if someone else *does* like Unity, they can log out, select Unity, and log back in, no fuss, no muss.) Imagine how much easier time Microsoft would have had foisting Windows 8 onto people if one could have just changed the desktop UI out for a better one!

"I wish we (the US) had some sort of real truth in advertising. When companies use terms like "unlimited" and sign contracts to that effect then they should absolutely be held to it."

In this case, they did hold to their terms; they are now saying they are ending providing service on these terms.

As for referring to heavy usage as "abuse", I seriously doubt it's abuse. I know a few people who have TB after TB of stuff.... why? I don't know, but they do. And if they got "infinite" storage for $10/month they'd probably stick every last bit of it online just in case. I'd say it's simply foolish to provide infinite storage at that price, at least without some caveats (one backup service had if not still has an unlimited plan, but they straight-up said the mbps speed in and out would be limited at some point.)

"I'm grandfathered in an "unlimited" data plan with my phone provider. Of course, to them, unlimited means up to 5GB of data transfer and if I go over then they purposefully slow me down."

I've got you beat -- here in the good ol' US of A, a few MVNOs falsely advertise "unlimited", but will TERMINATE YOUR DATA SERVICE at something like 1.5-2GB! The price one of them has is good IF they provided unlimited like they falsely advertise; for the 1.5-2GB of service they *actually* provide their monthly price is pretty poor. How other carriers or MVNOs have not sued for false advertising (since this directly hurts their sales) is a mystery to me.

Doing it wrong

"No, the reason it isn't as mainstream is that it's a darn sight harder to use."

Really it's not. The things that give (most) Linux distros a strong edge in ease of use over Windows is they don't get viruses, spyware, and ad-ware at random intervals (my friends Windows box spontaneously decided to not even boot to a desktop because of some spyware that claimed it was a "Chrome update".) Unlike Windows, Linux won't decide to just execute some random executeable it's pulled off the internet, because downloads do not have the executeable bit set. You also don't get hassled by all sorts of software decided to let you know it has updates like in Windows. I can plug in scanners, printers, or whatever, and have them just work right out of the box. It's not what it was 10 or 15 years ago.

"Last time I tried Linux and attempted to install Firefox I first had to find an installer for the distribution I was using. Then I had to decide from a swathe of nonsensical file types, gar, tar, bar har-de-har-har (with no explanation of what they meant or do)"

I don't know what you were doing, but (if firefox weren't already pre-installed, which it usually is), you go to your installer, type "firefox" in a search box, and choose install in most distros. Windows? if you're going to pretend picking the package for your distro is confusing -- well, I've seen plenty of Windows apps where they have an .exe, a different .exe, a .msi, with no description (you know, unless you read the text on the web page) of which to pick.

========================

Back on topic -- I don't know what the hell Microsoft was thinking with Windows 8 (well, I do, but I don't know how they possibly thought it'd work out.) Thank goodness it at least appears that Windows 10 is backing out of this.

I'd agree

I wouldn't expect to be able to go along checking my phone while I'm out on a date. I would think wearing Google Glasses would be effectively the same thing. I'm sure some people don't mind but there's no way to know ahead of time.