You sure about that? Look up Visible, Mint Mobile, Total Wireless, US Mobile, Tello... Same carrier networks, same quality of service. You can even pay a bit extra for prioritized data and other fancy features. You can get basic unlimited plans for $15-30 and premium plans in the $30-50 range vs $100+ at the big carriers. The only difference is that you aren't paying for your "free" phone.
In this case you’ve switched providers, though. Might be a good idea but doesn’t say anything about whether, e.g., ATT will lower your price if you bring your own phone.
I’ve read that these virtual networks also get lower prioritization so you can get low bandwidth when the higher tier users are active. Not sure how accurate that is.
Broadband Map tracks priority levels for the big three US carriers' plans and the MVNOs they support. I paid $225 promo pricing for one year of Visible+ Pro with unlimited priority Verizon data and all taxes and fees included ($18.75/mo), so I can pay full price for a flagship phone and end up ahead of any carrier phone deal.
That’s the whole point of buying your phone unlocked: to allow competition between carriers. Growing up in Europe we had very cheap prepaid plans but you still paid more for out of network than in-network, so lots of budget conscious people had two or more prepaid sims and swapped between them. No monthly bill and you add money to whichever number is low. It helped that receiving calls or sms was free, so you could ring someone and have them call you back if you were a bit low on funds.
Man thinking back, I probably got away with less than 2 dollars a month back in 2006-2010 era.
And if you don’t use a lot of data, at least US Mobile has a by the gig plan. My family has three phones on it for a total $30 per month. Those months that we go over, it automatically charges $2 for each extra GB, with data pooled between the lines.
It is easy to switch between Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile as well. This was helpful for me as all three of the networks normally have one bar or less at my house. T-mobile WiFi calling works more reliably than Verizon.
HN apparently can't fathom that people pay for Verizon because the service is good. I get Verizon free through work and sorry it's noticeably faster than Visible. The discount plans aren't actually the same but cheaper. If you were going to be a Verizon customer anyway then the free phone is actually free. You don't get a discount for BYOD and the service is the same price whether you take the phone or not.
Doesn't this depend on the application. For example electron applications dgaf about this system, render to a bitmap, and then look terrible as a result.
I was just thinking about this on my 60 mile FSD driver I just finished. Basically inevitable that I would shortly go HN or reddit and read how FSD doesn't work.
FSD is here, it wasn't 3 or 4 years ago when I first bought a Tesla, but today it's incredible.
The Raspberry Pi GPU has one of the better open source GPU drivers as far as SBCs go. It's limited in performance but its definitely being used for rendering.
> The new Trump-class battleships will replace the Navy's previous plans to develop a new class of destroyer, the DDG(X). However, the sea service intends to incorporate the capabilities it had planned to employ on that platform into the new Trump-class ships.
I think there needs to be more awareness on how dire the navies situation is. Most Americans assume the 100s of Billions per year to the USN keeps us at some unparalleled level, but that doesn't seem likely to hold true.
The usn has consistently failed to procure any new surface ships other than upgrades to existing designs at scale this century.
In the early 2000’s, that didn't matter so much, but the loss of institutional knowledge, capability and manufacturing capacity is now at the point that it seems unlikely to be fixed without a significant amount of public interest and a huge amount of investment, neither of which seem likely without some crisis, at which point it will likely be too late.
The US navy is in freefall. The best we can do is build a 40 year old destroyer hull and an aircraft carrier class that we plan to be building for literally 100 years. Shipyards can't build anything. Every design is mismanaged so poorly and leached on by traitorous defense contractors so badly that we get essentially nothing but the bill.
I think they pretty clearly meant 'practical best' rather than 'theoretical best'. Theoretically we could be so much better, which is why everyone is so grumpy about U.S. shipbuilding.
For 'practical best' you'd normally point people to examples of warships the U.S. actually can build without much drama, but if you try this with the Navy you're basically left with, what, the last LPD class?
10 years ago you'd call the Virginia SSNs a success, but even those have now run into construction delays due to various issues, even as the Navy needs their #1 priority (Columbia-class SSBN, also delayed) to succeed to decommission the Ohios on time.
> think they pretty clearly meant 'practical best' rather than 'theoretical best’
I guess I question this, too. This “battleship” a cartoon drawn for the President. It might damage our fighting ability if built. But it’s not reflective of our practical best.
There is a broader, genuine criticism of American warship building. But this battleship has as much to do with that as do rubber ducks.
Read the original comment they made again. They weren't talking about the proposed battleship at all, but about broader issues the U.S. Navy is already experiencing trying to build the already-approved designs.
> It might damage our fighting ability if built. But it’s not reflective of our practical best.
Indeed, it is beyond our current practical best, even if we assume the cartoon would ever be built. Which is, I suspect, what elicited the comment in the first place.
Because this and further politicization just makes the decline even worse. This just caused the cancellation of the DDG(X), which I'm sure would have been its own boondoggle in time.
The DDG(X) was the destroyer the US navy wanted to build no? I thought it was a nice concept on what a modern destroyer should do m, what was your issue with it (and it's cancelled now? For sure?)
> The new Trump-class battleships will replace the Navy's previous plans to develop a new class of destroyer, the DDG(X). However, the sea service intends to incorporate the capabilities it had planned to employ on that platform into the new Trump-class ships.
Because US Navy procurement has been a disaster for over two decades now?
Just Zumwalt and LCS alone are like $50 billion burned up for nothing.
The Navy's issues with procurement go all the way back to the retiring of the Oliver Hazard Perry class without a suitable replacement in the pipeline.
Hulls last a really long time and the relevance of a large navy has changed. Keeping existing hulls up to date seems like a much better use of funds, no?
The hulls on many older US Navy warships are literally cracking. They can be repaired at great expense but at this point it's more cost effective to scrap the old hulls and build new.
It was originally sold as 2.8ghz but never actually could hit 2.8ghz. after some complaints on the forums they reduced the advertised frequency to 2.6ghz.
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