Comment Re:Must Be (Score 1) 66
I'm seeing "Spy vs Spy" here...Sergio, we miss you...
I'm seeing "Spy vs Spy" here...Sergio, we miss you...
You can only fix what's local to you. Good job building for the future, here. Extra capacity at the edge, ready to grow. THIS is what we as a country should be doing, everywhere. You're never in a million years, going to get Comcast or Charter to replace their aging coax-based infrastructure. We ned a national push to build FTTH for the future.
Of course, we need the roads, bridges and water systems first.
It works.
...worked...
(but at a pretty significant cost)
RIP
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're The Phone Company." -- Lily Tomlin as Ernestine
No more analog coax, no more HFC. Fiber only. In conduit, and to each house.
The telephone copper plant is dead, analog and HFC CATV are rapidly becoming obsolete. Fiber is the only way forward.
It is far easier to clean up ocean surface, than it is to clean the volume and bottom.
But what is really needed is to get nations to stop dumping their trash into the oceans. China and Viet Nam ( surprisingly ) were shown to have done the vast majority of the ocean pollution. Rather than keeping cleaning up, we need to get ALL nations to stop dumping.
Agreed -- removing what's there is only half the problem, but good on Slat and his team for *doing something* about GPGP. It's on all of us to manage our use and disposal of plastics. As with almost everything else, there are tremendous benefits and equally horrendous consequences to plastics.
Another happy Mint user here. Been using Linux on the desktop for many years. I'll be the first to admit it has its warts (and a few inadvisable "improvements") but by and large, it "doesn't suck any worse than Windows" as far as I'm concerned.
Linux isn't for everyone, but if you can make it work for you, you get more control over your computer and what it does (and doesn't do) for you. Sure, there are tradeoffs, but from my experience, Linux keeps getting better, more reliable and easier to install/upgrade. It seems to work best on 3-5 year old machines, and, by my experience, seems a bit "zippier" than Windows. Windows, OTOH, seems to be stuck in an "upgrade" cycle that does little for the user, but increases Microsoft's control over your "computing experience" with every new release. That, and Microsoft's inability to pick a standard UI for their OS and Office apps, and stick with it, are my two biggest complaints. Windows has been around for long enough that there should be a basic version of it that doesn't need constant tweaking, but that concept seems to be beyond the folks in Redmond.
Someone in a meeting, said, "Why don't we add a helicopter?", which precipitated a lot of interesting discussions about whether it would be possible to fly on Mars, and what it would take to accomplish that. Then, a huge design effort, in parallel with talking the project management into letting them try it, and at the end of it all, a home run. Mind you, it took almost 30 years between concept and flight:
I am always impressed by the lengths the caretakers of these machines will go to in order to keep them running.
Just this week, I read about the MAVEN orbiter and its IMU issues. Its caretakers reprogrammed it to use stars to orient itself as a backup to the unreliable IMUs.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/...
Real Engineers, to be sure.
Try to compose a shot on a phone screen in the sunlight. Now try it with a DSLR. With one, you can see what you're doing.
I will be the first to admit that the quality of smartphone images is amazing. But if you are trying to do something outside their envelope, it's quite difficult. Time exposures, control of aperture, shutterspeed or focus...to do what they do, smartphones want to control these, leaving no completely manual option. Smartphones are optimised, DSLRs are general purpose tools.
I've noticed payphones are still to be found (but you have to look for them) at bus and train stations and at airports.
Phone booths are definitely an endangered species. They also command a decent price on eBay. Moving them is not trivial. They are large and they are heavier than you might think. I helped a friend move one. It took three of us, two furniture dollies and a liftgate rental truck.
So 100 megabits is not really that great of a deal. Especially, considering that I regularly get closer to 300/300.
Internet service is crazy overpriced in the US. I switched to FIOS after Comcast busted through the $80 barrier for 100/15 in my town.
Everything the article says makes me think...hmm...useless for DSL but if you had 4 of these pairs it might be a good future Ethernet standard.
If you're only interested in going 100m, sure.
When are we just going to bite the bullet and wire all homes for fiber?
Twisted pair is dead, dead, dead, and no variant of DSL is going to make it different.
Coax is damn near dead, what with its requirement for amplifiers, splitters, crimps, etc. It's a stunningly poor choice for data.
Just put in fiber.
All the cool kids are wearing Driza-bone vests
The only two Cs I got in college were in 2d and 3d semester Calculus. Never took DiffEq (I was terrified of it). I am just not that good at symbolic integration (the whole process of guessing what the form of the integral of an equation is). I completely understood modulation theory and Fourier and Laplace transforms, statistics and even passed a Discrete Math course. I just have a blank spot for certain types of math, and get bored memorizing theorems.
Nevertheless, I managed to get a BS and an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and spent 40 years designing circuits.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
