Plane WiFi is a modern technological marvel and you’re lucky to be able to have it at all.
Not so long ago sat phones were the domain of the super rich, because they were paying several dollars per minute. Then it was down to 10 dollars for two hours of multiplexed satellite access. And now apparently it’s down to where advertising will work. That’s amazing.
Any plane internet I’ve used has been spotty and terribly slow, but then again, I haven’t bought it in years because of previous experiences. I can stand to be without it for 2.5 hours.
Was this 4k video from an arbitrary source, like a random YouTube video? Or from United’s website?
I haven’t flown outside is Southwest in a while, but they have a bunch of licensed video content that is hosted locally on the plane. And therefore cheap.
No, it’s mostly ViaSat (like in OP’s picture) now. Gogo never upgraded their infra to handle more traffic and kinda fell out of relevance. Planes with ViaSat will have large oval satellite domes on top that talk up to space.
It’s illegal to use your cell phone’s cell modem on a plane, because of an FCC rule, not an FAA rule. The cells in the cell network are designed for traffic on the ground. At cruising altitude, your modem can see way too many cells at once.
And they all interrupt the “in flight entertainment” to read a VERY long and slowly delivered advertisement for their proprietary credit card (and in flight entertainment that you have to supply device for, so you end up with smaller screen, unstable connection, battery drain and watched at a painful viewing angle typically)
If the ad is short and subsidizes free wifi, I ain’t mad. But if the ad is unreasonably long, or if I have to keep watching ads every x minutes to use WiFi, it becomes a problem. Not sure what the case is here, but it should be spelled out on the screen so we know what we’re getting ourselves into.
This comment reminds me that one time I came across an hour and a half long ad on YouTube that turned out to be a full episode of some show and something else. It was crazy to see one that long after skipping a couple ads
Can I just say how shitty UPS is with pick ups? Every time I have to RMA something through Dell’s support they would schedule a delivery of the replacement part and a pick up of the defective one through UPS, right? Not once did UPS actually show up to pick up the parts.
Even when I manually schedule a pick up with them they just don’t show up; they sent an confirmation email saying that they did, but the part is still where I placed it for pick up. And when I email UPS to tell them they just repeat what the confirmation email said.
What’s a long time? I literally scheduled a pickup last year for a pre-paid label and it was free. Anyway, another commenter seemed to say that it’s the shipper’s choice whether they cover the home pickup or not.
Jetblue’s wifi is pretty decent. Not sure what technology they’re using but it’s quite a bit faster than some of the other airlines that make you pay for it.
I flew Delta last year and got their free WiFi when I signed up for an account with them. Think it was for a loyalty program for every flight I flew with them and one of the perks was free WiFi.
I used it for streaming from my Plex server at home and watched 1984 and some other movies on my phone on the flight and don’t remember encountering any buffering or other issues the whole time. Was pleasantly surprised and grateful for that so I didn’t have to use their movie selection.
Though I do have to say they had a pretty good free selection to choose from. I remember even TV shows which I thought was weird like The Sopranos was on there. I just preferred choosing from my own library and continuing where I left off on my server.
That part is the worst. I am sick and tired of websites breaking the back button! When I click back it’s because I wanted to see the thing that was there before. If I wanted it to just refresh from scratch I would reload the page instead!
It’s not just YouTube, by the way. Even Lemmy does that shit too!
YouTube had a solution not too long ago, when you hovered on a thumbnail it would show a little button that queues up the video on a temporary playlist while you keep browsing. But for whatever reason they hid that in a menu.
That’s not really the issue. The issue is that it doesn’t give you a proper URL with enough information to uniquely identify the set of results it loaded for you, so if you reload the page it re-runs the query and you get a new set of results instead of the same set you had before. That fundamentally breaks how the Internet is supposed to work: any particular URL should always go to the same resource.
The fact that Youtube also does lazy-loading infinite scroll bullshit makes it even harder to show examples about, so I’ll switch to Lemmy now. Take this URL, for example:
(That’s from navigating to page 2 of my feed, which is set to “all” and “top 6 hours”.)
If I go to that URL now, and then I go to it again, say, six hours from now, it ought to still show the same list of posts. But it doesn’t. Instead, it re-runs the query and shows me the new results from six hours in the future, which is an entirely different result set. That’s not what I want! I want to be able to keep navigating back and forth through the old result set until I explicitly ask for a new one e.g. by clicking on the instance logo or choosing a new search from the [posts|comments], [subsribed|local|all], and [sort type list] controls.
Just generally speaking, I think of this as “concreteness”.
Software should seek to mimic real spaces, in the sense that one step back takes you to the place you were one step ago.
One pattern that breaks this in my opinion is when a menu appears as soon as you scroll up. It’s just a minor inconvenience, but 95% of the time I scroll up on an article, it’s because I want to re-read a line of text that just disappeared under the top of my screen. This menu reappear crap means I have to scroll up like three inches to get something that’s only a quarter inch under the upper edge.
I think it’s a matter of mental health to have software that faithfully mimics real world causality.
It’s all very vague in my head, but I would love to articulate this fully into a design spec.
It’s kind of like Google’s Material Design spec in its idea, but it’s about the effects of navigation rather than just how UI elements behave.
It kind of relates to the concept of a State Function in math and science.
It would not fix it. I also want to be able to do things like send the URL to someone else and have confidence that it would load the same content for them, too.
You can’t store that info in a link without it being monstrous.
Sure you can, if your backend is designed reasonably.
How? You put a timestamp (or equivalent) in the URL and filter the search to only operate on the records that existed at that time. Assuming your search algorithm is deterministic, it should find the same results.
I agree with your point, but our algorithms are not deterministic and I doubt they ever will be again. Perhaps they could use a set of tags to create a deterministic result for a certain “genre” of results.
I have yet to get any other response than this template. Having scam ads is intentional. As long as the scammers pay for ads, everything is going as intended for Google
It sucks but I like this over what target and walmart do. If you wanna use their wifi now you MUST create an account on their website and use that to login to their wifi.
Is there a way to capture these pages and report them to uBlock filter authors once online? I’d like to add a filter (or better, userscript that just enables and “clicks” the “continue” button) for my country’s rail company’s Wi-Fi captive portal but the JavaScript is obfuscated or compiled from another language so I have no idea what anything does, and of course the element classes are all randomized.
Can confirm that on Android with Firefox mobile + ublock origin the ads wouldn’t load and you were able to skip quite fast. (Not agreeing with the ads being displayed at all, that’s just a greedy move)
I am talking about the cdwifi.cz captive portal with its 30-second video ad. I cannot just disable large media because then the “Continue” button never gets enabled.
I once had a flight in two legs where the first leg was operated by a well known established airline for an okay ish price and the second leg was operated by a “sister” airline that did shorter ultra low cost flights. The first flight had infotainment screens and a few other minor comforts that are standard for economy flights these days and make it just slightly more bearable, whereas the 2nd flight had no screens, no food without paying separately and just made as uncomfortable as possible on purpose.
During the first flight, you could use their crappy as screens on the back of the chair in front or connect to their local network with your own device, which was free and didn’t involve any shenanigans like ads or accounts. I made use of the service which worked by entering a URL printed on the back of the chair in front. On the second leg, there was no screens and no apparent mention of an onboard entertainment offering through your own devices but there was some sort of QR code which I assume was supposed to take you to a payment portal or something but which didn’t even work. It was a different URL to the first flight.
I still had my tab open from the first flight though, and when I accidentally opened that tab on the second flight, I got access to the seemingly hidden entertainment service with no payment or logins or anything. Seems that sometimes it’s just a question of knowing the magic URL.
mildlyinfuriating
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