Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 May 22

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May 22

iPhone - how does one use it?

I'm considering buying an iPhone, but I want more information about one before deciding whether to do this. How does it compare to a mobile phone, and in particular, is there a service to which one must subscribe to make phone calls with it? Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 03:36, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Freeknowledgecreator, the country in which you live and use the phone will make a difference here. Elizium23 (talk) 05:24, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Freeknowledgecreator, you'll probably want to watch videos of an iPhone being operated on YouTube to get a sense of what you can use it for. If what you're using is (as it sounds like) an old mobile phone with keypad, you'll probably want to upgrade to a contract plan with mobile data and you'll need to get your phone provider to send you a nano SIM card that will fit in a modern iPhone. Blythwood (talk) 05:26, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

I'm in New Zealand. I don't actually use a mobile phone, I just have a better idea of what a mobile phone is than what an iPhone is. Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 07:45, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Well, iPhones are a subset of the class "mobile phones". Due to a service called "WiFi Calling", mobile service is not a must, but WiFi Calling does not work in all areas. Most normal people subscribe to a mobile phone service, and as Blythwood says, that involves obtaining a SIM card, your passport to the mobile network.

YMMV, but in these United States, iPhones usually come locked to a particular carrier, for instance AT&T. In fact most first-timers will want to go to the mobile carrier to purchase a phone at the same time they purchase a service plan. These very expensive phones are often amortized over a 12-month plan.

Learning to use a mobile phone is much like learning to use any other network-connected computer. There is a touch screen and a different OS. Your local library or senior's center may offer beginning classes if you need help; mobile phones do not really come with instruction manuals, but there is plenty of help on the 'net if you know where to look. Elizium23 (talk) 13:39, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

New phones these days in the U.S. are only locked if you buy them from a carrier or you buy a locked phone from a reseller (e.g. Best Buy). You can buy unlocked iPhones directly from Apple or other resellers. And of course you can buy phones used, and many will be unlocked now because the carriers have standard unlocking policies now for recent phone models. See phone unlocking. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 01:29, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

The bottom line is, how much use does one get out of an iphone if one doesn't care to subscribe to some service? Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 06:50, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

If you do not want phone service then I say there is no point in having a phone. You could use the phone on WiFi wherever it is available and it would be a fairly serviceable handheld computer, but this would not buy you anything beyond having a good tablet (such as an iPad). I didn't want phone service for a long time and so I purchased a tablet that didn't have a WWAN interface and I was happy as a clam, going on and offline with the free WiFi.

So the bottom line is, if you don't want phone service, then a phone is not for you. Elizium23 (talk) 06:54, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Can't say I entirely agree. While things have changed a bit with the increasing size of phones, on phones still tend to be smaller than tablets. It's quite difficult to get a tablet that will fit easily in your pocket, or that you can use with one hand comfortably. (While quite a few phones can't comfortably be used with one hand anymore especially when you have small hands, there are still lots of options.) Further, the Android tablet market is frankly not very good, even more so in the 7" space. What tablets exist are fairly low end, with crappy cameras etc, yet even low end equivalently prices phones are not necessarily worse other than being smaller.

And frankly, most "millenials" nowadays probably barely use phone provider phone calls and SMS. (Calls and chat means Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, Zoom, Facetime & Apple Messaging not using SMS, etc.) So the phone call and SMS component isn't that important. (Although the calling may still be important and not all tablets may be well designed for calls without a headset.) They probably do use the mobile network, but we'll we get to that later.

In other words, while sure in theory there's no point having the mobile network portion if you're not going to have a "phone service" (which could be a data only SIM), in reality in a lot of cases, you cannot easily get equivalent devices at the same price-feature-performance-size point in tablets as you can in phones. Therefore there are a lot of cases where phone may be the best bet even if you only want to use wifi. (Anecdotally, I've heard reports before the lockdown of it being hardly uncommon for poorer students in Manukau etc to be doing their home work on their phones using Wifi in public libraries etc. I suspect most of these have basic phone service and SMS for emergency usage but I don't think it's the only reason why they have phones rather than tablets.) The question becomes whether this will be useful.

IMO in NZ, a lot of the time, not really. First do note that what what free Wifi exists is often spotty, with highly limited data. (E.g. the Wifi provided by Foodstuffs for Pak'n'save and New World only allows 45MB and 45 minutes up to twice a day, and at least they have Wifi, unlike Countdown. In one local mall, they have a Facebook login option but then still blocked Facebook from their captive portal before login. And that mall blocks Google Play and other Google service and other random stuff causing a lot of annoyance plus coverage tends to be spotty. At least chain fast food outlets often aren't too bad for Wifi nowadays.)

Maybe if you only want to use your phone at home and/or at work or school, Wifi will be enough but otherwise, I can't recommend it for anything except very occasional, if I have it good, if not doesn't matter usage. (Although by no means do I scoff at home usage. Even before lockdowns, I suspect a very large percentage of smart phone usage was at homes e.g. in bed and on couches.) You can downloads podcasts or videos or ebooks or whatever somewhere you have data and then use it offline of course. And any apps which don't need data including games and the camera can be used. Whatever you decide you then have to ask yourself what price-feature-performance-size works well for that. Maybe it will be a phone. Maybe it will be a tablet. Maybe it will be neither (i.e. you realise there's no point).

BTW, no one has ever locked high end phones, including iPhones in NZ. Only very cheap phones which are partly subsidised by the carrier are locked. Even then, it's only $30 to unlock, or you can keep it for ~9 months and unlock it. [1] [2] [3] [4]. (AFAIK, even for Spark and their Skinny brand, despite the wording of their website, it doesn't matter if you had service for any of those 9 months provided you bought it 9 months old. At most, all they do is check when it was first connected to their network as they probably don't know when it was purchased per se, other than looking at receipts. I think most phones with such a lock come with SIMs, so all you need to do is put the SIM in when you first buy it.)

Also the NZ market is still fairly prepaid dominant [5] and I suspect that is misleading if you're just looking at what individual consumers choose since some of those postpaid connections are probably plans that are paid at least in part, by the employer. I would hardly be surprised if even most iPhone users on on prepaid especially if you only count those who's plan isn't at least partly paid by their employer. That said, as that source also mentions, a lot of people on prepaid probably also subscribe to a monthly (or weekly or fortnightly or four weekly) plan now so prepaid doesn't really mean no subscription (but it does mean no real contract).

Nil Einne (talk) 11:40, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

First, I'm assuming you aren't John Key's or Damien Grant's child or otherwise don't have access to significant funds. Anyway Apple fan boys are probably going to disagree, but unless you're getting the phone free or at very low cost as a used phone, it's IMO a mistake to choose an iPhone if you have no idea what an iPhone is or can do. If all you want is a phone meaning something for calls and maybe SMS, I'm not sure if you really have to change from what you're using now if that works for you. Unless you have highly specialised needs like a rugged device, I definitely don't think you want to be spending more than say $100 and that's at the high end, if all you want is phone calls and SMS.

OTOH, if you might actually want to use the "smart" features (which are mostly nothing to do with "phone") that's a little different. But I'll still suggest you start with something cheaper which will undoubtedly be Android. I'm not sure whether you want to go quite as low as one of those $50 or less phones, as those may be painful enough to use that they'll turn you off smart phones for ever but it depends. You probably should investigate what you actually plan to use the phone for and how much it's worth to you to try. As I said above, if you don't intend to have some sort of data plan, your usage of the device will likely be mostly limited to home and work or school (I'm including tertiary institutes with that), except for any stuff you downloaded offline, apps which don't need data and the camera, so factor that into your plans.

Nil Einne (talk) 11:40, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Trying to give a brief answer: smartphones are just portable computers. If you don't care about cell service, you might as well get a tablet or laptop instead. An iPad is basically a bigger iPhone without traditional "phone service"; ditto for Android tablets. Note that you can make most phone calls through a VoIP service if you want. Also in the U.S. you can get a cell plan for around $15-20/month if you don't need "unlimited" cell data and you don't necessarily need maximum coverage/reliability or other fancy things. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 22:33, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Delete DNS cache?

CCleaner has an option to clean DNS cache; is there any reason not to? 2606:A000:1126:28D:A014:BEEF:E9A9:17B2 (talk) 07:50, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

You have linked to "caching name server" but CCleaner has no effect on the upstream DNS servers, only on your Windows resolver cache.

You might find some temporary RAM savings by cleaning your resolver cache, you might not. The RAM savings will be offset by the need for your resolver to hit the network again and resolve the names your system is using on a regular basis, whether those names are a result of your web browsing, or background processes that access the network on your behalf.

If your network access profile is that your system accesses many sites on an ongoing basis, then it would be a net negative to clean the cache. If you have just accessed a large number of sites and have stopped using them entirely, and you need to be parsimonious with RAM, then you might clean your cache. Elizium23 (talk) 13:45, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

ipconfig /flushdns will clean your DNS cache without installing a big old third-party application. Elizium23 (talk) 13:47, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for the info. [OP]:107.15.157.44 (talk) 19:09, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

These answers are correct, dns caches don't take up much memory and save on network latency. The interesting phenomenon here is how CCleaner recommends things that do not benefit you at all. Is this setting enabled by default? --TZubiri (talk) 07:20, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

No. [OP]:2606:A000:1126:28D:95AA:34CE:C3B:D9EB (talk) 20:15, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

No benefit at all? There are two situations where clearing the DNS cache has a benefit. The first is DNS hijacking, DNS leaks or good old fashioned buggy software DNS cache corruption. The second is when you are at risk of someone with physical access to your PC running forensics. --Guy Macon (talk) 07:52, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

As a security measure, clearing the dns cache would not only be insufficient, but it would be off topic for CCleaner, the program's purpose is to improve performance, that's what their users seek, their users are not expected to be trained in identifying attack vectors or dealing with them, they can't address DNS Hijacking or DNS leaking because they don't know what it is. The type of users that know what it is would use the command line to flush it.

Regarding corruption that might affect the system, typical windows users will deal with any critical usability issues by restarting their system, I don't think that CCleaner is used as a pre-reboot problem solving mechanism to deal with issues that might reside in volatile memory, rather it intends to address issues that persist between boots. If that were the case, the user would have to choose some kind of soft-reboot or quick clean option that groups all volatile data, in no case would a CCleaner user be required or interested in finding out exactly what state reset fixed their network problem, so I don't see an individual option for DNS Cache flushing being useful on a tool like CCleaner, no.

What's more likely is that CCleaner's main strategy for improving system performance is removing stuff, that DNS flushing was experimentally implemented because it's like removing stuff, without necessarily understanding its implications, and that finally it was disabled after testing or receiving pushback from more knowledgeable analysts. Instead of removing the feature, it was left as an option, because otherwise the developer would have felt they wasted their time, and because they incorrectly felt that giving their users a choice they don't understand would be what they needed--TZubiri (talk) 10:00, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

Please reconcile your claim that "CCleaner's purpose is to improve performance, that's what their users seek" with the first two sentences at [ https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner ]: "CCleaner is the number-one tool for cleaning your PC. It protects your privacy and makes your computer faster and more secure!".

Also, do you have a source for your claim that Windows clears the DNS cache on a reboot? One would think that [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11] would tell you to reboot rather than offering solutions such as ipconfig /flushdns.

Regarding your claim that CCleaner "incorrectly felt that giving their users a choice they don't understand would be what they needed", how do you explain the existence of the CCleaner help page at What is my cache and why does it need clearing?]

There are legitimate criticisms about the way CCleaner does some things, but offering the option of clearing the DNS cache isn't one of them. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:19, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

One thing I learned from wikipedia is not overly relying on primary sources. And another more recent one is not relying on google.

It's certainly interesting that ccleaner chooses to market itself as privacy protecting, but I still contend that performance has been CCleaner's main selling point and reason for its success. I might be wrong about dns clearing on reboot on windows, if you have a windows machine you can try ipconfig /displaydns on startup to confirm or deny it. Regarding the blog page, it looks like content designed to rank higher in search engines, that is, content aimed at potential users of ccleaner rather than existing users. It doesn't mention dns caches, just caches in general, lending credence to my theory that they implemented the feature just because it cleans something.

I'll be on the lookout for secondary sources on the subject of CCleaner or, more generally, maintenance tools designed for non-technical users. The external reviews look like good subjects, otherwise they tend to rely on security incidents, which, while condemning, might not yield a balanced view on the subject, after all 2 incidents in 15 years is a fair track record.--TZubiri (talk) 02:35, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Opera

On Linux, My opera browser shows nothing in the web history and all my cookies for Wikipedia edit summaries are gone... --Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 15:54, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Thegooduser, how is the integrity of your home directory? (You can find out Opera's directories by navigating to "opera:about") Elizium23 (talk) 18:57, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Elizium23 I think it may be corrupted, it can't even check for updates, also it causes problems with my Wikipedia account, I have asked Oshwah about this, I don't click 'keep me logged in" after 12 hours, logs me out (which is fine), however when I click "log in" it logs me back in without me putting the password, and no passwords can be found in Opera... --Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 20:11, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Is it true that pentium 3 faster than pentium 4?

I love old computers, so Is it true that pentium 3 faster than pentium 4? Ram nareshji (talk) 19:02, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Ram nareshji, More information. Intel re-architected the Pentium 4 and therefore some of its earlier iterations were not as fast as the P III. Elizium23 (talk) 19:08, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

So answer is false to my question? Ram nareshji (talk) 19:10, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

No, it is true in some limited cases. Elizium23 (talk) 19:12, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

What limited cases are you referring to? User:Elizium23 Ram nareshji (talk) 19:14, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Well, in the blog I linked to above, it played out as false as he took benchmarks. But he relates the anecdotal stories as widespread. I do not know a reliable source for this. Elizium23 (talk) 19:20, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

I am getting the impression that Ram nareshji isn't accepting the answers he is getting. The blog Elizium23 linked to was quite clear: "Its actually not that uncommon for a new CPU architecture to be outdone by the last models of the previous generation." Reading that would have answered the question "What limited cases are you referring to?"

There is a verbal game known as "Why don't you – yes but". This game begins when a person states a problem, and someone responds with a suggestions on how to solve it. The game player responds with "yes, but..." and proceeds to either find issue with the solutions or ask for clarification when the answer was perfectly clear . The game player gains sympathy from others in their inadequacy to solve the problem. The problem-solvers get the opportunity to show off their knowledge and problem solving ability.

The recommended response to "Why don't you – yes but" is to give a good answer to the original question (others may need the answer and look up your responses even years later) but to limit the time and effort you put into answering the inevitable followup questions. --Guy Macon (talk) 00:56, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

The claims you sometimes see that the Pentium III was faster than the Pentium 4 are extremely misleading. The Pentium 4 was purposely designed to do less per megahertz so that they could push the clock higher. If you test the early 4s at the same clock speed as the IIIs that were shipping at the time, the III is faster. If you test the 4s with clocks that were faster than any III -- which were available early on -- the 4, having a higher clock speed, was somewhat faster. But that's testing the last and fastest III against an early 4. Test against the newest, fastest 4 and the 4 is much faster. --Guy Macon (talk) 00:56, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

User:Guy Macon wikipedia has no feature to mark a question answered. So I can't able to accept the answers I have been getting. Ram nareshji (talk) 05:12, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

 Answered --Guy Macon (talk) 07:25, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

What about

Resolved

? --76.71.5.208 (talk) 08:32, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

Pentium III Tualatin vs Pentium 4 Willamette 1.4 GHz Battle

"In this video we are comparing the Intel Pentium III Tualatin 1.4 GHz against the Intel Pentium 4 Willamette 1.4 GHz. Which processor is faster clock for clock?"

--Guy Macon (talk) 16:10, 24 May 2020 (UTC)