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Comment My sense (Score 1) 536

My sense is that the MEAN Stack (Mongo, Express, AngularJS, Node) is sort of winning. There's some packaging of it over at mean.io.

Personally, I'm really getting interested in Meteor (www.meteor.com). Watch the videos, and realize I saw a smart non-coder go from zero to *ridiculously* interactive site design in three months.

Comment RFC 6238 or GTFO (Score 1) 47

This is part of why I don't bother to support half-assed roll-your-own 2FA systems like PayPal's, or stupid SMS-based schemes like Apple's. If you want to offer 2FA, offer me RFC 6238 so I can handle all my 2FA accounts in one convenient app and I know you didn't invent it yourself.

Mind you, I guess PayPal's programmers would have just implemented RFC 6238 client side and sent an extra parameter to say I'd got the code right.

Comment Re:the joker in the formula (Score 1) 686

You are ignoring the fact that it seems like one highly intelligent and technology-developing species could probably not evolve in coexistence with another one on the same planet, at some point one would win and kill off the other one.

I'm sure it's been proposed/discussed many times before, but I don't know if this concept has an "official" name or not.

Comment Re:Progenitors? (Score 4, Interesting) 686

Directionality is a mostly irrelevant consideration.

The fact that an antenna is 9db or 30db higher in one direction quickly becomes irrelevant with the vast distances of space. Antennas don't work like flashlights. They are more like a light bulb with a two-way mirror on one side that reflects 50% of the light and lets 50% of it through out the back. At VHF and above, things like mountains act like mirrors that reflect signals straight up (among other directions), as well.

You are somewhat wrong about AM... at least broadcast band AM is mostly only directional in the sense that there's dead zones straight off the ends of the dipole. They are shooting quite a bit of signal upward. Our ionosphere does strongly reflect and attenuate what would make it out to space in those bands though.

This goes toward your comment about the 50s and 60s... we have far more powerful transmitters in operation now (some VHF TV the better part of 1 megawatt!), and in bands that aren't reflected by the ionosphere. If anything we are getting louder and louder.

Unfortunately the first thing they might see of humanity is free-to-air broadcast TV, and just assume that we are all complete idiots.

Submission + - Verizon Wireless outage (verizonwireless.com)

ascii3f writes: Verizon Wireless is suffering a major computer outage affecting its web site and customer service (*611). People are unable to upgrade service/phones. As of 4:00pm EST they say that no estimate of when service will be restored. Does not appear to affect the ability to make/receive calls.

Comment Re:Not the phone (Score 1) 243

KitKat is the latest model, on the Moto G. 4.2.2 is recent enough that I considered it "late model" enough, which is on the Moto X.

I don't consider either version particularly usable.

The Republic Wireless Moto X is running 4.4.2 Kitkat as well. If you order now, you may receive the phone with Jellybean (4.2.2), but it will upgrade immediately after activation.

Comment Re:Unmetered != unlimited (Score 1) 243

I understood what was meant: "A subscriber on this carrier is entitled to 5 GB of fast data and unmetered slow data in each month."

But I think BitZtream might be playing word games as a way to remind you that nothing is truly "unlimited". No computer is Turing complete because memory is bounded; at best they're linear bounded automata. There is no way to physically transfer "unlimited" information to a computer, even with a 10 Gbps Ethernet drop. And cutting a subscriber's speed to, say, 64 kbps is a substantial limit on how much the subscriber can transfer during a month. Assume 10 payload bits per byte to account for TCP/IP overhead, then 64×86400×30÷10÷1000000 = 16.5 GB if the subscriber leaves the phone running 24/7 after the fast data expires.

I assume that people that have this issue have never had a smartphone, or home internet connection, or perhaps they're a bit special. The term 'unlimited' in the context of cell data and internet means 'unlimited usage' not 'a trillion quadrillion bits per second'. You can have unlimited dial-up internet at 52Kb/s or unlimited internet over fiber at 10Gb/s. The data rate is not a factor in the terminology.

Comment Re:Not the phone (Score 1) 243

I like how they list "unlimited wifi" as a feature of all their plans. XD

Too bad they only seem to support two phones, and both are Moto and running late-model android versions. :P

They "only" offer two current generation, less than 6-month old, Motorola phones: the Moto G and Moto X, both highly rated. "Late-model android versions" means the current version, which is Kitkat (Android 4.4.2). Who's running a new version?

Comment Re:Not the phone (Score 1) 243

I'll do you one better. My dumbphone costs me $100 US a year for voice and messages (I turn text messages off, though -- the phone's too small to type on with my fat thumbs), and any money I don't spend on calls gets rolled over to the next year. The phone doesn't use data, and I don't need it to. Email and Internet's what my laptop is for. Why would I want to spend $35 each month when what I've got now is more than I need? Oh, and that $35 is just the starting point. After you add state and federal fees, it's more like $50 a month.

It's $25/month (voice/text/data on 3G and WiFi), and the taxes and fees are about $3, depending on the state and locality. If you're replacing a landline, they have a $5/month plan that's WiFi only. The advantage of course is that you can take it with you anywhere you have WiFi, and from the phone you can switch to the $10, $25 or $40 plan instantly on a daily prorated basis. So that's about the same annual cost after taxes and fees, but you get a smartphone and all the functionality that comes with that.

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