Category: General Tech Info

In recent years AT&T and Verizon, the nation’s two largest home Internet providers have eliminated their affordable offerings for slow speed internet, except at the very slowest levels. Each company now charges essentially identical monthly prices – $63-$65 a month after first year discounts have ended – for home wired connections at almost any speed up to 100/100 Mbps fiber service.

This policy of upward “tier flattening” raises the cost of Internet access for urban and rural AT&T and Verizon customers who only have access to the oldest, slowest legacy infrastructure, like DSL or worse.

Affordability is the greatest barrier to increased home broadband. In the United States, broadband is becoming faster for some households and more expensive for others.

Denser communities often get newer tech for connecting faster, and are able to choose from more providers.  Thus ISP’s must innovate or lose customers to better competition.  This leaves small communities reliant on cellular or satellite connections for the home, which can be expensive, have data limits, and be very slow at times.

Vote with your wallet, and choose a company if at all possible that cares more about service than shareholders.  Buy from a smaller, local ISP, or help others by sharing this article.

Siefer, A. (2018, July 31). White Paper – Tier Flattening. Retrieved August 5, 2018, from https://www.digitalinclusion.org/blog/2018/07/31/tier-flattening/

Epic Games has changed the game of mobile gaming by announcing it’s not going through the official Google Play Store to distribute it’s popular game Fortnite

On the surface, it seems like purely monetary decision.  But it’s more about end user experience and product control.

As a trade-off, Epic Games won’t be able to rely on the built-in features of Google Play for things like receiving payments or parental controls. These are problems that also exist in the PC version of the game, but Epic Games seems to address them well.

“First of all, no payments are possible unless you define a payment method for your Fortnite account,” Tim Sweeney explained. “Then we support one-time payments so that a permanent payment method isn’t remembered for the account. We’ll be working on more features along these lines over the coming months, applicable to all platforms where Epic accepts payments directly.”

Just remember that tech isn’t perfect, and dev work and features take time.  Computer professionals aren’t God and don’t have all the answers instantly.  It will be interesting to see how Fortnite develops on mobile.

Kuchera, B. (2018, August 06). Fortnite on Android: Epic’s Tim Sweeney discusses clones, payment systems and timing. Retrieved August 6, 2018, from https://www.polygon.com/fortnite/2018/8/6/17655888/fortnite-android-google-play-store-epic-games

1. Before June 23rd, 1969, software and hardware were sold together.  The operating system, the computer, and the programs were all bundled.
2. IBM decided to, “un-bundle” so that way they could generate revenues from their software, and not just complete systems sales.
3. This led to the rise of third party developers, whose software had lower production costs and thus higher margins.
4. Needless to say, IBM isn’t the biggest computing firm anymore, and not as much of a household name as Apple or Microsoft.
5. Un-bundling allows Bendy Computers to exist and make software for sale.

Modern computers work using the parallel computing style, where a single task or process is broken down a bit before it’s worked on.  A process like explorer.exe is broken into instructions done in functional units.  Several partially completed instructions are worked on at a time, and merged in an assembly line fashion into a single data stream, aka a process.  Until the mid 2000’s this was only seen in supercomputers and business grade mainframe type machines, but the IBM Stretch in 1962 is when pipeline computing took parallel computing to the next level, and lead to chips from the intel Core 2 series in the mid 2000’s, to modern single die intel i9 with 18 cores and 36 threads.

1. TCP verifies all datagrams.
2. TCP has acknowledgments.
3. TCP has more overhead.
4. TCP is less error prone, but less efficient.

1. UDP has a simple checksum at the end.
2. UDP has no acknowledgments.
3. UDP has almost no overhead.
4. UDP is error prone, but has less latency.

• TCP and UDP are transport layer protocols.
• TCP and UDP both do datagram packetizing.
• IP is the network layer protocol responsible for routing TCP and UDP traffic.

Facebook announced this week that it would introduce time management tools for it’s iOS and Android apps.  These tools will be built into a special dashboard for the Facebook and Instagram mobile apps, allowing users to track and self impose limits and reminders for healthy social media usage.

These tools are not mandatory, and limits are set by individual users.  Facebook will have charts in both apps accessible from settings to allow users to see their use over time and shut off push notifications so they can help themselves take a break.

There’s no denying that video games are one of the most popular and profitable forms of software in modern history.  Even as sales slump for hardware bulwarks like Nintendo, their games remain a fixture in our culture, and people love open ended adventures like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto 5.

It’s important to know how to assert yourself and your rights in the tech world, and seeing as video games are tech, we thought we’d cover that.

Many games use the internet for interactivity with other players, game saving functions, and for enhanced cloud computing to deliver the experiences you crave on a limited system.  Microsoft uses the Azure cloud platform for many games to render complex graphics for both the Xbox 360 and Xbox One Consoles.  Microsoft also uses Azure to host the servers, friends lists, and voice chat systems for the Xbox Live Service.  However, and rightfully so, Microsoft charges users monthly subscriber fees to offset the cost of running this.

Unlike a desktop system wherein you pay once for the games and never pay dues, we here at bendy computers do not recommend people to buy video game consoles, as the hardware maker locks you into an ecosystem that over time is costly and hard to escape from.  Instead, consider a multipurpose, home or office powerhouse from us, and pay once for your software to ensure you can use it forever and save yourself some money.

It’s no secret most people love Verizon in the US of A.  It’s red like the flag and their blood.  Through numerous scandals, mergers, acquisitions, and privacy concerns, Verizon remains number one in terms of subscribers at over 150 Million for Q4 2017.

Verizon Wireless knowingly and willfully handed over private subscriber data including call metadata to the NSA, as revealed by Edward Snowden 2013 as part of the then classified PRISM and XKeyscore Programs.  This violated the peoples reasonable expectation of privacy on a telephone call, and violated thier faith that such a massive company would protect their data as it traveled over the Internet using their wireless and wire-line offerings.

Don’t Buy VPN services from a company that sold you out to the US Government only 5 years ago, buy it from somewhere else with some bitcoins.  You wouldn’t ask this guy to be a security guard at the town McDonald’s, so please separate your wireless provider and VPN provider.  It’s a conflict of interest and referred to as a  “Defense in Depth Strategy“.     

Google announced an update to it’s developer policies for the Google Play Store, Mainly targeting the following types of apps, some of which have been targeted unjustly or rightfully so.  The choice should be yours as a consumer to make, so we’ll just present the facts to you now.

1. Cryptocurrency Miners.
2. Apps selling firearms and accessories.
3. Apps that aim to trick children into downloading adult-themed apps.
4. Apps built using automated tools or wizard services, or based on templates.
5. Other apps as Google sees fit.

These apps are can be defined as malware, but some smaller developers use automated tools to make android apps, and now must distribute their .apk files via other means.