Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 329 posts

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#191

Post by JustSomeNobody »

phreaky wrote: post #117
lostlogin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a failing of mine or a regional thing, but what does this comment mean? I read it literally as saying that Apple has done what carriers want and has made iMessage to suit carriers. I suspect that this is the opposite of what is intended though, as iMessage disempowers carriers imho. How does culturestate's comment work?

"Could give a damn" and "couldn't give a damn" can be used as synonyms in American slang. Or it might just be the South.

As a Southerner, no, they are not interchangeable.

Annoys me to no end...

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#192

Post by WalterBright »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #154
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had an outage in years. I've never had a switch or any network equipment die on me either. We also bury our cables here (everything except the high-voltage power distribution network) so there is no risk of trees falling on wires. Seriously, why would you run cables on poles, that seems super fragile to me.

Well, lucky you. For the rest of the world though, Internet isn't a thing to be taken for granted. Sure it works 99% of the time, but it's not like electricity which work 99.999999% of the time, and then you have workarounds like batteries and gas tanks and stuff. And by "rest of the world" I don't mean third world countries or something. AFAIK Internet infrastructure in the US sucks hard compared to Europe, and here…

Trees cut the lines here about 1 to 4 times a year. The longest outage was 10 days, the shortest was about 3 hours. Most everyone in my neighborhood eventually buys a generator.

The power company told me it costs $15,000 per span to bury the wires. They find it cheaper to send a repair crew out to rebuild the wires regularly.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#194

Post by drdaeman »

kalleboo wrote: post #157
drdaeman wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the problem with this tax (or however it's called): you're basically paying for some third party actions that you have no control over. Someone emits some electromagnetic radiation that you may or may not care about, but for some odd reason you have to pay for that. That feels... wrong. Can't remember any other tax-like charges where one has to pay for something artificial that they could be completely unrelat…

If you remove the abstractions down to "someone emits some electromagnetic radiation" then yeah it makes no sense. Just like saying "someone out there is mixing hydrocarbons with rocks and dumping it on the ground that you may or may not care about". Most people would rather discuss it in terms of "funding an independent source of media" and "building road infrastructure to move goods and services".

I'm not sure comparing radio with roads is correct.

For roads, maybe somewhere it's the same, but there are also funding ways that work differently. If you use the road (have a vehicle) you (probably, depends on where you are) pay the tax, either directly or included with the fuel price. If you don't drive a vehicle but use the roads indirectly (because the services you use, use that roads) you pay indirectly - trough your funding of those services and their respective use of vehicles. E.g. you buy stuff in a grocery store, the store pays to a transportation company, the transportation company pays taxes for their trucks - everyone's paying for what they actually use. So, it still feels fundamentally different from the broadcast taxes to me.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#195

Post by jimhefferon »

donretag wrote: post #62
smegel wrote: post #39

Australian here, also find it bizarre that this is a problem in the US. Biggest problem I have in my Android phone requires the head-phones to be plugged in to listen to FM...as it acts as the aerial.

I do not think the issue is with the US, but with iphones. Every Android phone I have owned has always had an FM radio app.

When I bought from Verizon I was told it was not possible.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#196

Post by JustSomeNobody »

abalone wrote: post #177
briandear wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Apps" -- that means streaming data. The point of the article is that FM would work when cellular signals won't. The entire internet is available except when it's not. This article is about receiving FM signals.

Ok, functioning in a disaster is one point the article made. But the premise that Apple is excluding it because of their own streaming services is patently false.

> ... patently false.

You have references?

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#198

Post by welterde »

stestagg wrote: post #176
ddalex wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we want the information to be free. If the web server is serving a document, you can do all sorts of stuff with it - you can index it, you can transform it, you can save it for later. If the web server is serving a DRM-ed program, that loads the human-viewable data over non-standard interfaces, all that breaks. Only humans in front of the web browser will be able to see the data. Or sufficiently dedicated peo…

I like the term DRP (Digital Revenue Protection) Seems to cover the intent of things quite nicely :)

RMS always refers to DRM as Digital Restrictions Management.

Also conveys the intent quite nicely - plus you can keep the acronym ;-)

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#199

Post by damptowel »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #152
frigo_1337 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Why? I don't understand why people inherently dislike Javascript (aside from, y'know, creepy ad networks).

Because, besides the creepy ad networks and stuff, it's most often used in a mix of shitty engineering and user-hostile practices. Let's consider a web document like this article here. Its stated goal is to be read by the visitor and thus deliver him value. So presumably, an article that's easier to read is better than one harder to read. An article that, ceteris paribus, consumes less resources on user end is better…

I once was smart enough to burst into a rant about exactly this in an interview question.

I didn't get the job.

Next I was joking with a friend that all the layers of abstraction added to the web are probably part of some big conspiracy by web developers to create artificial demand and job security. You run a heavy CMS but the bells and whistles confuse rather than help the user, and they'd rather pay for an hour of hour time than figure things out themselves. Your spa makes a simple series of documents feel like an app, with all the added complexity, but in the end the user couldn't care less about the full page transitions or parallax scrolling.

I have one simple rule: if it's about information retrieval, it's supposed to be a simple bloody document. If it's supposed to act like an app, it should look like an app. The latter is the propper use case for JS, but people are applying the latter to the former. This is not user centric design.

Re: Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

#200

Post by JustSomeNobody »

jrockway wrote: post #42

More interesting would be getting the weather radio signal (not on the FM broadcast band, it's AM around 160MHz), and having the phone change which SAME code it's sensitive to as you move around. I know you are supposed to get an SMS or something whenever there is a severe weather event, but after a million amber alerts and a flood warning a few states away, that's the first thing I turn off when I get a new phone. I…

This is actually a really great idea.
Post reply on HN