Oh for sure, but at least Alexa’s rankings were rather transparent and somewhat trusted built up on a reputation.
I hadn’t even realized Amazon bought and discontinued the service, but that’s clearly exactly the type of instance that needs to be guarded against. I’m sure that a big part of why Amazon wanted that Alexa gone was because it would show rising competition, and Jeff can’t have that.
But that just tells you all the people that have visited the site and downloaded a script.
I find it hard to believe that OpenMandriva is the most popular distro. I distrohop quite a bit and never even came across it (currently using Nobora on my PC, KDE Neon in the living room, tumbleweed on the kids laptops (though I may move them to silverblue or another immutable), and Pop on my laptop. It takes me a minute when I sit at any console to remember which package manager is the right one)
If you want honest results of actual use on general-purpose PCs…I’d wish for something like Alexa Page Rankings that could get deep enough to know Distro, but that’s not possible (I don’t think, without every distro having its own User Agent signature in the browsers), and Amazon bought Alexa and discontinued those services
Yeah, I know.
Add to that “secret” repeaters. Take for example the Amazon Echo Chime. Combination Smart doorbell speaker/802.11n repeater (2.4GHz only).
You connect to that, good luck.
Oh and people installing repeaters not knowing how they work, putting them someplace with a piss-poor signal and putting their computer next to it, thinking it will be better now that they have “full” signal. Their laptop may have a strong signal to the repeater, but the repeater to the AP is weak, so everything connected to the repeater is weak.
It’s often not a matter of speed but of reliability.
Simple fact is, there are very few occasions where you truly need more than 10Mbps or so, which can handle 1080p, or 25 for 4k.
High speeds are great for the infrequent download, but for most day-to-day internet tasks…it’s largely unnoticed.
The real killer of wifi is latency, jitter, and loss. And these will present themselves as slowdowns when browsing or low-quality video when streaming…but on a sensitive application (gaming, real-time voice/video, many enterprise/corporate VPNs, especially under heavy use), they can cause serious performance hits.
And there’s tons of factors that go into causing these conditions on wireless that are simply not a concern on wired.
Yeah your wifi sucks dude. Or your area.
It’s pretty much impossible to get decent wifi in a dense urban area where there’s competing signal.
The channel has to be clear before any station can talk. So if there’s another ssid or another router on the same channel, you’re waiting for it.
More devices on the wireless (including your neighbors wireless, if you’re on the same channel) means more waiting. More waiting means slower speed.
Add to this that most AX+ gear is defaulting to 80MHz channels and avoid UNII-2 bands (for good reason), bringing us back to 3 usable, non-overlapping channels on 5GHz.
And when you double the channel width, you double the noise with no increase to signal, cutting your SNR (signal/noise ratio) by a good 3dB compared to 40MHz and 6dB compared to 20MHz. The increase in potential speed simply isn’t worth it for the drop in overall quality for a lot of people. But it’s the default, and most people don’t know or think to change it.
Add to that, that a lot of consumer gear defaults to a static channel. Or says “auto” but really just sticks to one channel. Xfinity routers are notorious for this.
Also, no broadcast/multicasr suppression and enabling legacy rates, also default behavior on a lot of consumer routers and sometimes even unchangeable. Legacy rates (support for circa-2000 802.11b) define the minimum speed that is allowed (usually 1Mbps), and that speed is used for all broadcast and multicast. And these get said by the device and then repeated by the router.
Now we also have smart speakers (like Sonos and Google) that use multicast to make multi-speaker groups. That destroys the wifi. Worse, if your neighbor is playing music and you’re on the same channel. It’ll destroy your wifi.
Printers and their drivers like to spam multicast too. Even if they’re wired, because its still the same network.
Old unused port forwards too. Your router will keep looking on the wire and wireless networks for the destination, using ARPs (which are broadcast traffic). If the IP is offline, it can spam the network looking for it.
If you want good wifi, find a clean channel and thoroughly understand https://www.wiisfi.com/. It is by far the best deep dive on wireless and many of its flaws.
What it doesn’t talk about is shit mesh systems. You want a decent mesh it must be tri-band with a dedicated backhaul. Even that is gonna slow down if you’ve got multiple hops between device and gateway. Much better to wire in all the endpoints.
But if you’ve got a clear channel and good, well-configured hardware, and good placement…you can get good speeds on wireless.
But you really should still use a wire (or something like MoCA or Powerline if that’s not an option) for anything more than light browsing and streaming services (not realtime!). Wireless is prone to latency and jitter and some applications (voice/video, work VPNs, gaming) are far more sensitive to that than others.
Edit to add: it doesn’t help that we’re conditioned to think 3 or 4 bars of wifi is “good enough”. Speed and stability drops off very quick with signal, and that only really reflects SNR.
Your weak signal clients are also sending/receiving data much slower and probably retransmitting more frequently, which will occupy more channel time and reduce performance of your other devices.
This also extends to old devices (like an old printer or digital photo frame or w/e), even if it has a good signal. The router slows down to talk to them, which occupies more time, which slows down everyone else.
And the same rule applies to being on the same channel as your neighbor, if they have an old/weak device.
And also, if your phone/laptop can hear the neighbor but the router can’t…your phone is still waiting for the channel to clear from both sides, and likely hearing the router and the neighbor talking over each other.
Eeros like to put all mesh nodes on the same channel and I hate that. That greatly limits the scalability of the environment, since all devices throughout the house are sharing the same airtime.
Tl/Dr: speed is a function of time. Time is a finite resource and you have to share it with all your devices and potentially your neighbors devices too. Think of 1 second of wifi as a pie. We can’t “make more pie”, only make smaller slices of the pie we have.
Yes, the Nazis were revered for the comprehensive trials that occured before shipping any Jew off to a concentration camp.
/s
As others have said, highly location dependent.
I switched from Xfinity to T-Mobile 4 years ago because tmobiles speed (raw speed) blew Xfinity out of the water…especially for upload. Latency and jitter suffered a bit but not enough to greatly effect voice calls. It didn’t help my online gaming skills, but likely would’ve if I were a higher-caliber gamer. For me, the latency between chair and gamepad was much more impactful.
However Xfinity did some upgrades in my area and the roles have reversed so I’m back to Xfinity. Tmo is still absolutely usable, but Xfinity now offering 250mbps upload makes my mouth water.
Not buying another modem when the ISP quietly upgrades the CMTS and makes more speed available in your neighborhood.
Nah wifi was actually originally on 5GHz spectrum, with 802.11a. It came out shortly before 802.11b, which used 2.4GHz, and was objectively better…but component shortages for 802.11a devices made the inferior 802.11b more successful on the market.
Then in 2009, after 802.11b and 802.11g came 802.11n, which used the 5GHz spectrum, and introduced dual-band routers to consumers.
Most recently, 6GHz got allocated with the advent of Wifi 6E and Wifi 7.
This exactly. Wifi is damn near unusable in dense residential settings. It’ll cut it for streaming and web browsing, but much more than that and you’ll feel the pain of interference from all the other wifi APs in the area.
Especially with most of them defaulting to 80MHz on 5GHz and many of those defaulting away from UNII-2. which leaves 4 non-overlapping channels (with one of them giving trouble with a lot of devices). We’re right back to where we were in 2.4. Even worse, I think, since wifi is more ubiquitous.
Isn’t that the plan?
“cheap” is a relative term.
Nobody should be buying a DOCSIS 3.0 modem these days. They are obsolete and for some reason still being sold.
A decent DOCSIS 3.1 modem is at least $200. A Next Gen like S34 is at least $220. At least at the big blue big box store. And then you have to get your own wifi.
(However, that big blue store also will give you a 15% discount on any networking purchase if you recycle an old network device…I traded in an old modem but you should be able to find a switch or router at a thrift store and still come out ahead)
It pays for itself pretty quick (by not paying rental fees), but that doesn’t necessarily make it cheap.
I absolutely prefer using my own equipment, and do…but it’s also worth mentioning that in many markets, Xfinity removed data caps if you have a rented modem.
Yeah I got a USB wifi dongle that’s a bit tricky. It doesn’t work out of the box in most distros but there is drivers for it that do work, fairly well.
Anybody ever get Winmodems to work or did they all give up on it?
Back in the day, it was hard enough getting dialup internet working on Linux (especially before you had internet in your pocket, so you had to print out HowTos or write down a bunch of notes before you tried to do it).
But it was downright impossible with a class of modems that was designed essentially as a softmodem, heavily reliant on closed-source firmware and drivers, making them practically impossible to work on Linux.
I think that wouldn’t work unless the mine is perfectly sealed.
The pulp would still get eaten and digested microorganisms and carbon released to air.
Plus there would be a ton of wasted carbon on harvest, pulpifying, transport…unless those are all done with green energy.
The reason why we have fossil fuels is because of the carbon that didn’t get released to the atmosphere. It got trapped in a hypoxic water/swamps where bacteria and microorganisms couldn’t decompose it.
We could build hypoxic lakes for disposal of large chunks of “organic” (as in alive) carbon to be sequestered…but it couldn’t be done at a scale to even begin to touch what we’ve released. Maybe if we gmod some bacteria or plankton to chew it up and poop it up real fast. And put all the carbon we can find into the pit.
Yes I think you missed the point.
If you are purged you can’t vote. That becomes a problem on election day.
You might get a feel-good provisional ballot but no real way to track that it got counted.
This is what happened last year, except by a bunch of randos claiming that so-and-so wasn’t a legal voter, with no proof or recourse.
So now they can just check against RNC registered voters and “disable” 10% of people who aren’t registered RNC and no way to prove or possibly even know until after the election passes.
No thanks.
Not to mention they could run this against the voter rolls, so you show as eligible if you check your registration status, but have your ballot tossed (or get turned around at the polling place) because you’re not on this other database.
Social Engineering is hacking cmv.
That means there are highschool seniors who weren’t even alive while Bill Gates was at Microsoft. Interns might not even know who he is.
Where does the CO2 go when it dies?
Look…man…the whole thing about carbon is the carbon cycle, right?
Well we are breaking that cycle by digging up long-sequestered carbon (in the form of long-chain hydrocarbons aka “fossil fuels”) and burning them up in alarming quantities.
At absolute best, this material will be carbon neutral.
We need more phytoplankton…when that consumes CO2 and dies, most of it sinks to the ocean depths forever, instead of coming up to the atmosphere.
You can do it, Aussie. Bite his freaking head off.