I'm frankly baffled at all these reports of IR being unreliable and slow. It... wasn't. Not for the file sizes of the day. I exchanged plenty of files back in the day, even at 115200bps a picture would be 2-3 seconds tops (pictures were small!). And when devices started supporting 4Mbps, even a large-ish MP3 would go in 5-6 seconds. All without setup or pairing, beautiful. Huge files (like full resolution pictures from an SLR camera) would take a while - but frankly they took almost the same time with a cable! You'd just have to plug their memory card directly into your computer if you were in a hurry.
The only really clunky use case for me was internet access - keeping phone and laptop positioned and aligned for 30 minutes was limiting.
And yes there IS plenty of bandwidth at those frequencies. In fact latest IR standards reach 1Gbps, but it's pretty much extinct. There was an attempt called Li-Fi to use it for as a wireless networking but I don't think it went far.
What I really miss is OBEX (Object Exchange), which worked also over Bluetooth, and which Apple sadly chose not to implement: simplest protocol to just ship a file or a contact vCard over, no setup, just worked - and it's been a standard for 20+ years. Early Android had it too, it was since dropped I think. Sigh.
You’re either misremembering things or talking about an era after Bluetooth had already taken off.
In the days before Bluetooth, transferring MP3s over IR took multiple minutes, even on high end (for the time) handsets.
And the fact that you needed to keep line of sight during the whole process meant your phone couldn’t be used that whole time. Which was a real pain in the arse if you got a text message or phone call while trying to transfer a file.
IR was really more designed for swapping contacts. In fact that’s exactly how BlackBerry (or was it Palm?) marketed IR on their device: a convenient way to swap contact details. But you’re talking about a few KB vs several MBs for an MP3.
The tech has definitely moved on since. But then so has Bluetooth, WiFi and GSM et al too.
At 9600bps. Almost every device supported 115200 - that would cut it down to to 72 seconds. And as I mentioned - pictures were often small (20-30kbytes) back in the day - that's barely 1-2 seconds at 115200. And the later 4Mbps speeds would move that megabyte in 2 seconds flat.
The jury's still out on this case. When historians look back a hundred years from now, will they consider it beneficial that Apple survived? Or will they see it as an unfortunate reprieve for a company that wrought unfathomable destruction upon our society via the creation of the smartphone and the attention economy that soon followed?
It's really hard to argue counterfactuals on this one. Perhaps the smartphone would have been built by Google anyway. I can't really imagine how, given the state of the mobile phone market at the time of the iPhone's release.
There is an increase of posts with casual confidence in their own absolute correctnes. I originally attributed it to the influence of llms, but it is becoming so common now it is hard to dismiss.
I just mean that GPL is a bit of a religion. There are very strong opinions and principles behind it. Whereas the BSD license is more like "do whatever you want". It makes sense that the followers of the former care more deeply about it, right?
Personally I don't care about or obey any software licenses, as a user.
But this is kinda the vibe I get from other BSD users if a license discussion comes up. Maybe it's my bubble, that's possible.
I have to strongly disagree with you that GPL is a religion. While there Are certainly people who sound religious in nature when they talk about the GPL, The real reason it is important is because of what it forces developers to do on behalf of the users. It balances somewhat the power between the developer and the user.
Under other licensing, developers wield an extraordinary amount of power over the users. Yes, The user could opt not to run that code, but realistically that isn't an option in the modern day. Developers can and will abuse their access to your machine to serve their ends regardless of whether it adds value to you or not. For example, how much data collection is in nearly all modern software?
Perhaps you would argue that what I've said above only applies to a very tiny minority of users who have the technical skills to actually utilize the code, and everyone else It's just a religious argument. I don't fully disagree with that. There is another clear benefit That even those untechnical users received from the GPL, and that is the essentially forced contribution back from companies who want to build on top of it. I don't think there's any better example than the Linux kernel, which has gotten lots of contributions from companies that are otherwise very proprietary in nature and would never have open sourced things. This has benefited everyone and has acted as a rising tide lifting All boats. Without the requirements in the GPL, this most certainly would not happen.
My response to it however, is that those users still get a good amount of protection because The code is out there
Oops that last sentence (which is a sentence fragment) was supposed to be deleted, but slipped in some how and it's too late to edit. The point I was going to make was just that with the code being out there, the odds that some offensive thing the devs might do can be discovered by someone and have the issue raised. It also provides a powerful incentive to not stick something gross in there for risk of it being discovered and getting called out for it :-)
I get what you mean and probably there are people like that, but I consider it mostly an exaggeration.
Simply - the GPL has some clauses enforcing some obligations (to prevent some rights from being taken away from you, the end user - according to their wording, and I agree), these and other clauses make it legally incompatible with the inclusion of ZFS (CDDL license) in the Linux kernel (GPL). You can build it yourself (so indeed as a user you get to not care or obey) but not distribute it (this is the problem of your distribution's maintainer).
Canonical's lawyers think this is not a problem if the ZFS code is distributed as a module, instead of compiled into the kernel itself, and since 2016 Ubuntu shipped with ZFS support.
The BSD license is considered perfectly compatible with the inclusion of CDDL licensed code and therefore many BSD distros ship with ZFS (and Dtrace) out of the box without legal worries. Indeed Oracle hasn't come knocking.
TL;DR: it's not a vibe. Some licenses are compatible with each other, some aren't. It also depends on how different licenses come into play into a "finished product" (e.g. kernel module vs monolithic build)
On the ground? Sure. Orbiting? I'm amazed they reach sub-mm. The gravitational field of a planet or star is not uniform, subtle variations in their density are enough to impart tiny variations to an orbiting object, and they add up over time.
Can't find a reference right now but I recall someone proposed even a positioning system relying only on accurate gravimetric sensors and a (very good) map of the strength at every relevant ___location on Earth. Good for submarines, GPS reception is not so good underwater.
After the TCP handshake, the very first payload will be the HTTPS negotiation - and even if you don't use encrypted client hello / encrypted SNI, you still can't spoof it because the certificate chain of trust will not be intact - unless you somehow control the CAs trusted by the browser.
With an intact trust chain, there is NO scenario where a 3rd party can see or modify what the client requests and receives beyond seeing the hostname being requested (and not even that if using ECH/ESNI)
Your "if you don't have an out-of-band reason to trust the server cert" is a fitting description of the global PKI infrastructure, can you explain why you see that as a problem? Apart from the fact that our OSes and browser ship out of the box with a scary long list of trusted CAs, some from fairly dodgy places?
let's not forget that BEFORE that TCP handshake there's probably a DNS lookup where the FQDN of the request is leaked, if you don't have DoH.
Because it's completely wrong. The tires indeed experience the same force and don't care where the energy is dumped. As other posters wrote, the increased tire pollution from EVs is because they tend to be heavier, and because their considerable extra torque is likely to be (ab)used by their drivers. Yours truly included, guilty as charged, though I do practice restraint... often.
This is deliberate. To my knowledge, absolutely no US airports allow you to transit without going through immigration, and stopovers in the US are very hard to avoid because the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country unless they stop at a US airport.
So it's very expensive to overfly the US without landing, and once you land you can't avoid immigration even if you are just transiting on your way to another country.
> the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country
The overland fee is $61.75 per 100 nautical miles (and it's a lower $26.51 per 100 nautical miles)[1]. Is this really that high? Let's say a flight from Canada to Mexico has to cross 1600 nautical miles overland the US. That would cost 16 x 61.75 = $988. Isn't that pretty low? On a flight with 200 passengers, that's an extra $5 per passenger.
> Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient? Or does this just need more time? I'm honestly not sure, but I've sure been tempted to start a competitor to very silly old fashion "you shall come here and sit at a computer where I can see you" type companies.
Sadly yes. I was grumbling about finding a solution to a problem and a colleague overheard me and supplied a perfect solution, as he had the same issue a month before. Same colleague was grumbling about needing a specific non-OSS software and the paperwork around requesting it and I told him we have a subscription already and he can get access to it. Wouldn't have happened if not in the office.
My boss tries to keep me informed of what's happening and what will come, but often enough the best stuff is learned serendipitously at the coffee machine. A couple of times I challenged what I learned and it ended up correcting our strategy and saving money.
Ok but don't you have engineering wide slack/teams channels where these discussions can happen? If I think to my self 'man this is really hard to achieve for whatever company specific reason' I don't just stew on it for days by myself.
If you always post complaints to these channels, and nobody else supports you - you look like a complainer. If you first find some people with the same problem at the water cooler and you say "we have this problem as a group" then you are proactive.
> It's a speaker system. It plays sound. Why could it possibly have AI, tracking, or ad delivery?
To recognize what you listen to, build a profile, feed it back to Samsung, which will use it in deciding what crap to display on your Samsung TV (and any other devices) associated to the same profile. For all we know it's even listening to your conversation in the room, I mean, it's Samsung - they literally do this:
How much benefit could that bring versus burning reputation and losing it all? These companies are so big and powerful but time and time again they keep on forgetting that they can't exist without the users and when users start leaving it's hard to reverse that trend.
It's so out in the open if you know, or more likely, worked in media advertising.
Their competitor, Vizio, owns iSpot[1] which is, in my opinion, the best in the space.
Samba TV[2] is it's nearest competitor and they have their hooks into 24 Smart TV brands globally[3]. These brands are listed on their website as Philips, Sony, Toshiba, beko, Magnavox, TCL, Grundig, Sanyo, AOC, Seiki, Element, Sharp, Westinghouse, Vestel, Panasonic, Hitachi, Finlux, Telefunken, Digihome, JVC, Luxor, Techwood, and Regal.
There is no reputation to burn, they're well known to do this kind of stuff by anyone bothering to look it up, and nearly nobody looks it up anyway.
It's a pity because I liked some of their hardware in the past (an NX camera I still have, hard disks back in the IDE stone age, 3 LCD screens back from when they were a novelty - they only had a VGA connector) but I just stay away from them now. But 0.01% of their customers staying away is completely insignificant when they consider the profit opportunity of violating our privacy.
Come on, did you read more than just the headlines?
> Samsung's spokeswoman continued: " Should consumers enable the voice recognition capability, the voice data consists of TV commands, or search sentences, only. Users can easily recognize if the voice recognition feature is activated because a microphone icon appears on the screen."
So it is not like it was listening without your knowledge. Only when you use the voice features is the data being sent over. Like with every other online service. As much as I don't like samsung, this is a bullshit reason to hate them.
And why provide two links basically saying the same about the same story?
> 1) Trump might be alienating his traditional allies and cosying up to Russia, but he still apparently sees China as a problem or adversary.
That's not a guarantee at all. The only thing he's every been honest, consistent and truthful about is that nothing is sacred, everything's on sale, no values (economic, patriotic, environmental, political) will stand in the way of his own profit, there's always the willingness to make a deal and sell something (someone) off, and fuck the consequences, no matter how gigantic, embarrassing, and suicidally bad they are. Negative-sum deals are absolutely on the table as long as he comes out richer or more powerful.
China just needs to make a good offer and Taiwan's fucked when it comes to Trump's support.
Sure, but I'm imagining a situation where China ensures the ongoing operations of TSMC via negotation with TSMC and the Trump government, to the satisfaction of all parties, and then being 'allowed' to take Tiawan as a result. For example, they could allow TSMC to function as an American-run entity for a number of years, or offer US companies very friendly terms, or something similar.
This doesn't account for the actions of Tiawanese nationalists working in TSMC setting off the kill routine themselves, irrespective of the deal struck, but it's still an interesting scenario.
The only really clunky use case for me was internet access - keeping phone and laptop positioned and aligned for 30 minutes was limiting.
And yes there IS plenty of bandwidth at those frequencies. In fact latest IR standards reach 1Gbps, but it's pretty much extinct. There was an attempt called Li-Fi to use it for as a wireless networking but I don't think it went far.
What I really miss is OBEX (Object Exchange), which worked also over Bluetooth, and which Apple sadly chose not to implement: simplest protocol to just ship a file or a contact vCard over, no setup, just worked - and it's been a standard for 20+ years. Early Android had it too, it was since dropped I think. Sigh.
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