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June 5

Did companies like Comcast/RCN lose a lot of customers to T-mobile?

I'm in USA, I took my laptop to stores like Target, Dunkin Donuts, Taco Bell, and Loyola University, and they were all using T-mobile for Wi-Fi. But yet, T-mobile started wireless Internet in 2020, so Xfinity must have lost a lot of customers to T-mobile, I'm wondering how/why that came about. 170.76.231.162 (talk) 21:01, 5 June 2023 (UTC).

T-Mobile purchased Sprint in 2020. Sprint was a major provider for wired internet services, even if they were not the customer-facing company. For example, the T1 line for a company I worked with in 1995 was leased from an internet service provider, but the actual line was owned and operated by Sprint. By 2020, Sprint had a large market in both wired and wireless telecommunications. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 22:26, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Oh, so I should change my question, did Comcast and such lose a lot of companies to Sprint? Or maybe Sprint bought some telecom companies. I recall in the 2000s, there was 2 main ISPs, Comcast and another. And earlier there were some small 1s like Earthlink and AOL. 170.76.231.162 (talk) 16:58, 6 June 2023 (UTC).

Switching encoding systems in a browser

I'm so old, I remember when seriously malformed web pages were commonplace and browsers had helpful menus. Now web pages with mistaken declarations of encoding system seem to be a lot less common (good!) and browsers helpfully (?) tend to hide options (if they have them at all). This page is a surviving atrocity: the W3C validator reports "The character encoding specified in the HTTP header (utf-8) is different from the value in the <meta> element (euc-jp)"; the page appears to be in euc-jp (and has dozens of mistakes even with this). A decade or so ago, I'd have looked in the menu of IceWeasel or Opera or whatever, and switched the encoding system from "auto" to "euc-jp" just for this one page. In today's wonderful Firefox or Chromium, what does one do and where does one do it? -- Hoary (talk) 23:40, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

There are ways to manually fix this in Developer tools but I would just use a simple extension like this one. PalauanLibertarian^🗣️ 23:47, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, User:PalauanLibertarian! -- Hoary (talk) 08:55, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Firefox offers a "Repair Text Encoding" choice in its View menu.  --Lambiam 09:11, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Lambiam, I was about to say nope, it doesn't even have a view menu, let alone this item -- but while it does indeed have no view menu, it turns out to have, shall we say, an unborn "repair text encoding" menu item. I've assisted in its birth. Works well! Thank you. -- Hoary (talk) 11:34, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

It worked for me on the surviving atrocity linked to above.  --Lambiam 11:43, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

It did for me too. -- Hoary (talk) 11:57, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

June 6

iPod earbuds question

Dear Wikipedians:

See below photos of my iPod earbuds plug and earpieces. I notice the plug has three bands, which indicates that the earbuds are suppose to come with microphone capability (i.e. earbud supposed to be a headset). However, the earpieces don't look anything like microphone enabled, there is no extra "cylinder" on the wire itself somewhere downstream from one of the earpieces, as is typically the case with earbud-form-factor headsets. More importantly, when I plug in the iPod earbuds into my smartphone, when calls come in, I'm able to hear the other party, but the other party cannot hear me, further attesting to the fact that iPod does NOT have a microphone, yet my smartphone perceives it to be a headset (I've also plugged in "two-banded" earbuds into my smartphone, and able to receive calls normally, the other party can hear me perfectly, in this case the phone knows the earbuds doesn't have microphone and so is still using the phone's own built-in microphone).

Any insights from you regarding this seeming mismatch is much appreciated.

iPod earbuds plug.

iPod earbuds earpieces.

L33th4x0r (talk) 23:16, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

It's a stereo plug. Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:19, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

It is a TRRS plug, which (according to our article) for Apple should have left,right,ground,microphone, but apparently the microphone band isn't used in your plug. Possibly a manufacturing decision, where all buds have the same plug, both with microphone and without. Is it an Apple brand earbud or a third-party one? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rmvandijk (talk • contribs) 13:46, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

It is an Apple brand earbud. It came with my iPod. L33th4x0r (talk) 14:58, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

These are not the Apple earbuds, they are the EarPods. Apple indeed shipped these with iPods in a variant without the mic and remote, even though you could use iPods WITH mic and remote at that time if you bought the mainline EarPods. I've never really understood why Apple didn't use TRS connectors on these things as this does indeed cause the problem you describe. My suspicion is that because the iPods did accept TRRS, the connector just fits better/more secure and it was cheaper to source. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:13, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you so much @TheDJ for all your help! This is incredibly useful! You've found the fandom page for EarPods which is incredible! I have bookmarked it.

So in other words, the EarPods are only meant to be used with iPod and not with any other devices. L33th4x0r (talk) 14:59, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

More exactly, Apple had a variant of EarPods which were only ever shipped with iPods, and don't work on other devices that expect a microphone. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:09, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

@TheDJ Oh and by the way, I checked out the fandom page, I'm 100% positive there is NO control box/segment on my EarPods. It's just wires all the way down from the end of the EarPods themselves to the plug. L33th4x0r (talk) 15:01, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

I'll be honest... I had these and at some point had to just throw them away. I kept accidentally bringing these with me when I got an iPhone and every time my calls wouldn't work :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:11, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Yep. I get your point loud and clear. I will be putting these EarPods back into the original iPod packaging clear plastic box where they came out of. (I've long lost my iPod unfortunately). L33th4x0r (talk) 14:21, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

June 9

In an SSD, what's the physical route between the controller and the bit

In a HDD, there's a needle to read/write bits. The disk moves and the needle can reach any point of the disk.

In SSD memory type, how does the controller reach all bits? Are there cables? I imagine the memory block as a 3d matrix, with bit in the middle. Since there are no moving parts, some bits have to be behind others and not on the surface. Can someone link to a graphical explanation of this? Bumptump (talk) 21:56, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Very simplistically, you can arrange the bits in a rectangular matrix, with a bit address (i,j) being selected by the line through the i-th row together with the line through the j-th column. When both lines are high, AND gates will select only bit (i,j).  --Lambiam 09:56, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

For more detail, see Flash_memory#Principles_of_operation RudolfRed (talk) 19:13, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

That section is mainly about how the content of a selected cell is read and written in various technologies. It hardly addresses the actual question, how a cell is selected among all these cells. The text states, "the desired group is selected (in the same way that a single transistor is selected from a NOR array)", but for most readers this is not a helpful explanation.  --Lambiam 22:36, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

June 12

"Flippy disks"

Hi nerds. I'm trying to understand the scope of the phrase "flippy disk" (a pun on "floppy", meaning that the disk can be flipped around and inserted two ways, so you have side A and B, like a cassette tape).

• Wikipedia's Floppy disk variants says that a flippy is "a double-sided 5 1⁄4-inch floppy disk", and I'm familiar with that (I used these two-sided disks with a BBC Micro). But it doesn't mention any other sizes.
• Meanwhile, Wiktionary [1] says it's "an 8-inch or 5.25-inch floppy diskette having storage capacity on both sides". I'm slightly too young to have ever seen an 8-inch floppy disk. Is it true that they could be two-sided?
• Finally: neither Wikipedia nor Wiktionary mentions the 3" disk (yes, I mean 3", not 3.5"), as used by the ZX Spectrum +3 and the Amstrad CPC. These were definitely two-sided, but I never actually heard them called "flippy disks".

So: which media does the term "flippy disk" actually refer to? Equinox ◑ 05:19, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

5 1/4 disks. See Double-sided disk. Goes back to about 1984. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1984/03/12/punching-holes-in-disks-a-risky-business-that-saves-money/b2a8f655-c99e-451b-bc22-d74c90610745/ 41.23.55.195 (talk) 07:52, 12 June 2023 (UTC)