This is one of those ingenious inventions that make you ask: "Where have you been all of my life".
Perfect for coffee shops, or when the router's in a room that you can't access without waking anyone up.
Of course in an ideal world, wireless routers would be smart enough to reset themselves, without having to add another $60 to their price. But we are only in 2016.
No, in an ideal world companies would stop making cheap, untested consumer shit that degrades after a few weeks uptime (looking at you, TP-Link). Luckily products unlike these exist, but not many might know about them, so this is a completely unnecessary product (hilariously overpriced as well) profitting from the ignorance of end users...
I second both the observation about TP-Link and the existence of products that have no market in an ideal world. And TP-link really cannot have excuse as OpenWRT on their hardware is more stable, so by producing custom software they wasting money.
The halting problem doesn't say that you can never prove that any given program won't ever halt, just that some programs (written in a Turing-complete language) are undecidable. You can write a program which can be proven will or won't ever halt.
But the typical solution to this particular problem is to correctly employ a watchdog[1] that will restart your program if it halts. In fact, this wifi-monitoring plug is serving as a watchdog itself.
Comments
This is one of those ingenious inventions that make you ask: "Where have you been all of my life". Perfect for coffee shops, or when the router's in a room that you can't access without waking anyone up.
Of course in an ideal world, wireless routers would be smart enough to reset themselves, without having to add another $60 to their price. But we are only in 2016.
No, in an ideal world companies would stop making cheap, untested consumer shit that degrades after a few weeks uptime (looking at you, TP-Link). Luckily products unlike these exist, but not many might know about them, so this is a completely unnecessary product (hilariously overpriced as well) profitting from the ignorance of end users...
I second both the observation about TP-Link and the existence of products that have no market in an ideal world. And TP-link really cannot have excuse as OpenWRT on their hardware is more stable, so by producing custom software they wasting money.
Isn't this just an example of the halting problem? As in, you can't prove that a program won't ever halt.
The halting problem doesn't say that you can never prove that any given program won't ever halt, just that some programs (written in a Turing-complete language) are undecidable. You can write a program which can be proven will or won't ever halt.
But the typical solution to this particular problem is to correctly employ a watchdog[1] that will restart your program if it halts. In fact, this wifi-monitoring plug is serving as a watchdog itself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchdog_timer
For many programs it's easy to decide whether they halt or not.
Not really, the HP is about writing a program which automatically proves halting/not-halting for every possible program you feed into it.
Even decent brands need a reset every so often.