• 13 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2024
  • evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.orgOPtoEurope@europe.pub•Europe is ditching FM radio. Not smart.
    1·
    3 months ago

    well, I can just choose something that suits my tastes instead from the internet?

    I have no Internet, because the war on cash means there is tolerance for ISPs to effectively (and unlawfully) refuse to serve unbanked people. Being offline makes other info sources much more important. Unbanked people can get Internet but it’s a much higher price because only prepaid GSM providers are willing to take cash.

    (In practice, I would rather that we had more resilient mobile infrastructure, as more and more people have phones and can receive SMSs in an emergency; and more people getting into CB due to the possibility for bi-directional communication)

    Is that possible? SMS is notoriously unreliable. Sometimes I receive an SMS a full day after it was sent. Sometimes I never receive an SMS that someone is absolutely certain they sent. The tech seems to be inherently unreliable. Radio pagers from the 1980s are reliable. So it was foolish to ditch radio pagers, IMO. I wish I could buy a radio pager and subscribe. Some emergency response operations (firefighting and ambulance services) were smart enough to continue using radio pagers, but this service is not offered to the general public.

    Is there a technical requirement for the 3+ seconds of decoding before sound output? Or is this a matter of simply waiting for buffers to be filled before outputting?

    It’s a limitation of physics. No computer takes zero time to execute instructions. I don’t know to what extent buffering contributes to that, but it does not matter. You can’t really have a situation where all receivers are in sync with their decoding times. The only possibility would be to choose an easily achievable timespan, then mandate that all players add a delay. But this is borderline crazy talk. WRT point #1: given no legal interference, it would be possible for a radio to have several tuners so when someone is channel surfing, it could theoretically anticipate the need to give them the next signal in chronological sequence, to give an FM-like tuning experience.

    Your points about 1 and 7 really seem like a product issue more than a technology issue

    They are solvable issues, apart from point 4 (and realistically point 6 as well). That does not excuse a nationwide oppressive mandate to cut off FM transmissions and render all FM radio receivers as needless e-waste.

    Point 6 is not really the fault of DAB but instead of how the infrastructure is setup. FM transmitters could be source their data from the cloud too, and would be vulnerable to the same things.

    I would like to see the physical size difference between a vacuum tubes FM tuner and a DAB tuner. I doubt anyone will be making tubes DAB radios, but if they did there is a heck of a lot more complexity due to the AAC digital compression which must be replicated in analog circuits.

  • evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.orgOPtoOpen Source@europe.pub•no sidebar? what is the scope? 🇪🇺-only?English
    1·
    5 months ago

    Some redundancy is useful because some moderators suck. So it’s good to have some moderation diversity. But 15 forums in the decentralised non-Cloudflare part of the fedi is a bit too much redundancy.

    I was thinking about how there is not a single community specifically for the “public money → public code” movement that Italy initiated. The FSFE has a PMPC campaign. Not even the centralised big tech portion of the fedi (LW, sh.itjust.works, programming.dev, etc) has a community for that. And I think the PMPC principle has not spread outside of Europe.

    OTOH, PMPC may be slightly too narrow to get much posting action. It’s disturbing that European govs push closed-source proprietary phone apps with trackers, but because they merely promote an existing program, it escapes PMPC applicability. PMPC only applies when the gov directly writes code. They can buy MS Windows licenses all they want.

    So it might be useful to have a community that’s broadly focused on public (gov) divestment from non-free software. Though that would not be so specific to Europe.

    *@europe.pub communities should be Europe focused. There are way too many general all-purpose instances in the fedi and precious few that have a constitution (in effect), whereby the instance is subject matter focused in some way.

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