thewayne: (Default)
Very clever, doesn't sound like it would add significantly to the cost per mile of road as it's an additive, not a replacement for something important.

They reformulated salt so it's not sodium chloride, combined it with some other stuff, then micro-encapsulated it. Mixed it with the top asphalt layer and laid it down on a freeway offramp. And it stayed ice-free! Every time someone drives across it, it ruptures some of the micro-encapsulated stuff and it releases, constantly fighting the ice. It's estimated that it could last five to seven years.

https://newatlas.com/materials/asphalt-salt-additive-ice-roads/
thewayne: (Default)
Some AT&T phones have been displaying 5Ge on their phones for a while now, but they are not, in fact, 5G. It's a newer form of 4G, allegedly faster.

It's not.

A group called Open Signal tested it for a month, and it's actually SLOWER than Verizon and T-Mobile's 4G networks!

I love techfail! Pay more, get less!

https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/22/opensignal-atts-5g-e-falls-short-of-t-mobile-and-verizon-4g-speeds/


If you want 5G with Verizon, there's a couple of things to be aware of. The biggest thing is that you only have one phone available: a Motorola Z3, which is surprisingly affordable at $240. Except it needs a $200 modification to work 5G. And the service is only being rolled out in Chicago and Minneapolis initially. Still, it will supposedly be pretty durn fast.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/03/verizon-begins-rolling-out-its-5g-wireless-network-for-smartphones.html


But the best thing about Verizon's 5G service? You get to pay an extra $10 a month for it! It's only available on their unlimited data plans, and it's going to cost you $85-105 A MONTH!

Best thing for Verizon.

So new phone. Upgrade phone. Then maybe upgrade your plan.

Samsung is going to introduce a 5G phone next year, and I expect we'll be seeing everyone else introducing 5G phones in the next 2-3 years, by which time everyone will have upgraded their networks or be nearly done with upgrades.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/verizon-to-charge-10-extra-for-5g-but-wont-do-any-throttling-for-now/


I am more and more thinking about going back to an iPhone 5S. It's a smaller form factor, which I like, and I think it's 4G, which is all I need. And I can purchase it for about $150. Case is going to be a bit of an issue, it won't be easy getting a BookBook for it. But it runs the current iOS, at least for now.
thewayne: (Cyranose)
Well, it's a new wireless data transfer specification. 802.11 is the IEEE standard for "... is a set of physical layer standards for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication in the 2.4, 3.6, 5 and 60 GHz frequency bands" (Wikipedia), and currently there are four finalized and approved standards: A, B, G, N (not in their order of approval). The latest is N, it was only finalized a couple of years ago.

Now wireless networking makers like Belkin, etc., are advertising AC networking! Isn't that wonderful! Well, not really. First off, AC is not yet an approved, codified, standard. So lots of people are working on it, and it's guaranteed that it will change before it gets approved. Which means any equipment that you buy now that supports AC may or may not work when the standard is finalized and approved. I personally don't like throwing out equipment if I can avoid it. Second, faster networking may or may not benefit you. There are numerous bottlenecks in networking and the internet, and the biggest bottleneck is totally out of your control: it starts where your router plugs in to the wall. Internally, maybe your router is a 10/100, which means it can handle both 10 megabit per second and 100 mb/s data transfer over a wired connection, and if it's a wireless router, maybe it's a 54 mb/s router. Wow!, you think, that's really fast! Well, yes and no. If you have two computers on your network moving large files back and forth, like ISO images or video files, then yes, faster routers and faster wireless specs can be beneficial. But the bottleneck is at the wall: when your router plugs in to the cable modem or DSL router or whatever, the speed on the other side of that device drops drastically. I get about 1.5 mb/s download from my ISP, I haven't seen faster than 8 mb/s in residential installations. So internally you can sling files around pretty fast, but once you hit the actual internet, you're back down to a crawl. It's still hugely faster than the fastest dial-up modems, but most won't appreciate the speed increase.

So unless you sling huge amounts of data around your internal network between connected computers, you're not going to appreciate much of a bonus there. Of course, you might be paying for a faster internet connection, but chances are you're still going to be slower than what your router can really crank out.

Why do I mention this? At Apple's annual World Wide Developer's Conference recently they announced including AC in their new line of laptops. I believe they also have a wireless router that's AC. But this, by itself, is not a selling point. I do think that Apple will have a good enough wireless card that it can be updated when the AC spec is finalized, whenever that is, but in and of itself AC is not sufficiently compelling to replace equipment at this time.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/06/802-11ac-apple-wwdc/
thewayne: (Default)
Talking with my oldest friend this morning via email, he mentioned that he's still running an accounting system that he wrote 25 years ago in FoxBase. I'm the one who turned him on to FB, which was the crux of the conversation. While writing my reply, I had the following observation:

"It's really amazing to look at my (messy) office: BluTooth keyboard and trackpad, magnetic-coupled power on my (closed) laptop, 23" LCD monitor, WiFi color laser printer, a telephone that has 64 gig of memory plus a video camera plus a still camera plus it plays music plus you can run pre-written programs on it, and two dead Palm Pilots. Plus a 3 terabyte external hard drive for backups. Talk about something that was absolutely and in all ways inconceivable 25 years ago.

I meant to add "This word I keep using, I think it means what I think it means." but forgot to.
thewayne: (Default)
"...a report that Sprint, in an attempt to extricate itself from the Carrier IQ drama, has "ordered that all of their hardware partners remove the Carrier IQ software from Sprint devices as soon as possible." Sprint confirmed that they've disabled the use of Carrier IQ on their end, saying, "diagnostic information and data is no longer being collected." The software is currently installed on roughly 26 million Sprint phones, though the company has only been collecting data from 1.3 million of them."

Good. I find the numbers in the last sentence to be curious, I'd like to know if the software on the other 24.7 million phones had not been activated, or had it been turned on in the 1.3 for tech monitoring and never turned off? Could 1.3 million phones being actively monitored be normal for a cell carrier? That's what, half a million phones per state having active technical problems?

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/16/2039237/sprint-orders-all-oems-to-strip-carrier-iq-from-their-phones


In other Carrier IQ news, some carriers claim that "we" consent to Carrier IQ-like monitoring with the impenetrably-dense EULA that we have to agree to or the contracts that we sign. Verizon did not deploy Carrier IQ, and though it was installed in iPhones it apparently was never activated.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/telcos-say-you-consented/

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