sirbryan
About
- Username
- sirbryan
- Joined
- Visits
- 28
- Last Active
- Roles
- member
- Points
- 117
- Badges
- 0
- Posts
- 35
Reactions
-
This is why Apple TV 4K Siri Remote scrubbing doesn't work on Disney+, other apps
Apple's player API is extremely limiting if you want to do custom overlays, play more than one program at a time (2-,3-,4-up), or preview information from other channels or programs, etc. You also have limits on knowing if the content meets the user's content restriction criteria because they don't make that available unless you use their player controller. There's more than one reason there are dozens of custom player API's. Most of them are lousy.
I wrote my own that supported swiping to scrub through the stream, among other things. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple announces those API's at WWDC next week and all this hoopla is over nothing, presuming the dev teams adopt the new gesture recognizers.
-
Carrier marketing email confirms 'iPhone 12' 5G support
Remember, 5G is a specification, not the bands themselves. 2G (EDGE/CDMA), 3G (UMTS/CDMA), 4G (LTE), and 5G [have] run on existing 800-, 900-, 1700-, 1900-, 2100MHz cellular bands, as well as the new hotness in 700- and 600Mhz.
Theoretically, chipsets could be designed to run 5G-spec'd RF signals from DC to daylight. But even then, that's just the RF portion of the specifications.
Also, just because the spec carves out use in the Part-15 bands (2.4-, 5-, 24-, 60GHz) and other licensed bands (28GHz, etc.) does not mean all manufacturers and chipsets will (immediately) provide support for all of them. (That's a lot of antennas and/or antenna tuning tech to cram into a handset.) There's a lot of room in there for IoT devices, hotspots, fixed wireless applications, etc.
-
Parallels Desktop 16 revamped to run Windows faster on macOS Big Sur
macOS has had "hypervisor.framework" for a while, but offline discussions and tea leaf reading leads me to believe this is the first year VMware and Parallels may have gone "all-in" with it (perhaps the reason for "25 person-years" of work). Based on release notes for betas and tech previews, it also appears to be the first year that the new version of those hypervisors will not work on previous versions of macOS, likely due to the kext changes.razorpit said:Certain Windows apps would previously fail because they required hardware that Parallels wasn't able to mimic. Many of these will now work, with Parallels saying its new version can run over 200,000 Windows apps.Would love to know what one or two of those apps are. I had to run SolidWorks 2020 on a 2010 Mac mini yesterday for some testing. While it was painfully slow, it worked.
Parallels Desktop 16 for Mac also claims to run those apps faster than before, with Windows launching twice as fast, and resuming or shutting down up to 20% quicker. It also improves on the previously significant issue that virtual Windows could request extra disk space, but not then return it when shut down.My comprehension is a little off. If you are running an older version of Mac OS will you notice these advancements as well? I skipped Catalina, I did have it on one test machine for support purposes. I may be a little more open to Big Sur.
-
FCC formally approves T-Mobile and Sprint merger
rob53 said:
Forget about the fallacy of competition driving innovation, all we're seeing is certain areas getting service while others don't because the companies only provide service where they can make money.
For 100 years, AT&T had the opportunity to build out to everybody. And they didn't. For the same reason you just mentioned. Money. It makes no difference if it's 10 big companies, four big companies, or one single company. When decisions are left up to managers who have to meet a budget, the needs of the consumer are faceless, lost in a sea of balance sheets.
In the 1960's, farmers in rural areas of Utah and Nevada were deemed too expensive for Ma Bell to spend the time serving. One of my former bosses got a certificate from the FCC to serve those customers. He strung copper lines along fenceposts, built some of the switching gear by hand, and bought old surplus equipment to patch together a working phone company. For years the gear sat in old semi-trailers, and he would fly his Mooney like a bush pilot, going from ranch to ranch for installs, maintenance, and repairs. Over the next 50 years the company grew to cover communities in 11 counties across both states.
That company deployed gigabit fiber to the home in 2007 to those originally unserved communities, and expanded the lines to include customers who had never had a phone in their life. Meanwhile I twiddle my thumbs with CenturyLink's measly 3Mbps DSL in a suburban area: that service hasn't changed a bit since 2007.
Without incentive, large companies like the RBOCs and cable companies stagnate, period. That incentive comes in the form of potential loss of customers revenue. When Google Fiber announced it was coming to Utah, Comcast and CenturyLink either slashed prices or began massive upgrades--but only in areas where Google announced it was planning to build out.
-
FCC re-examining iPhone RF levels after controversial report
Picking at nits here, but...
"Sample cellphone tower that you can probably see from your house right now"
The towers pictured are not traditional cell towers, and have little to no cellular on them. You have a bunch of UHF/VHF (the yagis and the dipoles), a couple of colored patches (which could possibly be cellular, but are more likely Part 15 PTMP), and a lot of microwave point-to-point links (the dishes). [Edit: Upon further inspection, there appear to be a some on the left tower about 2/3's up that could be for 1900-2100MHz LTE and a couple of scattered omni's similar to those in the photo below.]
Most cell towers (that I can probably see from my house) have an array of 2-4 patch antennas on each side, with the "sides" typically arranged in a triangular pattern, and the exact number of antennas dependent on the number of frequencies and companies colocated on the tower, something like this.
