Kindle Fire and Nook Upgrades Kill Root Access

jfruhlinger writes "The Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble Nook tablets are similar enough and close enough together in price that they ought to be fighting market share and one-upping each other in terms of features they offer users. But the latest OS upgrades to both gadgets claims to be an 'upgrade' while actually taking functionality away: both remove the ability to root the device." A more balanced way of looking at it is that the updates fix known local privilege escalation vulnerabilities. This might be more of an issue for people wanting to hack on the Nook Tablet: its bootloader is confirmed locked, but reports lean toward the Kindle Fire having an unlocked bootloader letting anyone flash their own software without needing to gain root first.

Comments

Good

[A12m0v]

Root access was a security risk. I'm glad Amazon fixed that.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't come with root access, so they aren't fixing a security risk. They are just removing the ability for some people to voluntarily accept the risk.

Re:Good

[SJHillman]

Sort of like being able to open the hood on your car is a security risk.

Re:Good

[X0563511]

It is. Most cars have the hood release inside the (presumably) locked cabin... and are hooked up to an alarm system.

I agree with your sentiment; I just could not resist shooting at your analogy!

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, seriously. When you have a security flaw that allows root privilege escalation you don't just decide not to fix that because the homebrewer's were using it as a convenient way to get access to the machine. If this was on an (open) desktop platform, such a flaw wouldn't really be tolerated for long.

It's like when people are upset that an exploit in a game was fixed that people were using to win / get free stuf / etc, yet they don't get upset when a bug is fixed that was actually preventing them from completing a game.

Re:Good

[SJHillman]

But in this analogy, you'd be allowed inside the cabin because it's the expected and normal usage of the car - you don't generally change/upgrade things from within the cabin beyond those the manufacturer/dealer approves (IE: swapping out a radio is pretty simple on most cars and doesn't usually void warranties). To "lock the cabin" of a tablet would be like the update changing the password/PIN and not letting the user in at all.

Re:Good

[tepples]

Then let's roll with the analogy: why don't more Android devices have a legitimate hood release of sorts?

Re:Good

[betterunixthanunix]

If this was on an (open) desktop platform, such a flaw wouldn't really be tolerated for long.

Which is why the user should simply be given root access to begin with. Instead of having to use privilege escalation attacks, users should just be able to hit a button or flip a switch to enable root access for themselves. Quick, easy, and perhaps voiding the warranty (but I think anyone who wants root access is willing to have no warranty).

Why is this so hard?

Re:Good

[Pi1grim]

Yeah, let's weld the bugger shut, so that nobody, including the imaginary bad guy can get in. And if you need to change the oil then just buy a new and upgraded car, that will come with brand new oil.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

bu..but........My t-shirt says "I void warranties".....how can I void warranties if THEY DONT LET ME?!?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

(but I think anyone who wants root access is willing to have no warranty)

I'd be willing to waive warranty on the software, but I'd still want to have warranty on the hardware (which cannot be damaged by rooting the device). But I guess you'd lose the complete warranty.

Re:Good

[rufty_tufty]

Welcome to the real world, the property you own isn't yours.
You're not buying a product any more you're buying a service. You can't lend others your books (look in the copyright notice at the front if you doubt me) You can't

It is not your music, it is licensed from those who own it.
Oh you're a band and think you own your music? Nope, it belongs to your record label.
Oh you're not signed to a record label? Since 7 notes is enough to copyright a riff then that gives you just over 5000 original works of music so there is no original works anymore. You cannot produce your own works of art anymore.

Okay maybe you have an idea for a cool new machine, nope that's almost certainly covered by someone else's vague patent. Your ideas aren't yours.

Okay what about your house, I bet it's mortgaged so the bank owns it.
Oh, you own your house outright, fine but who enforces it? When someone tries to take it from you it's a government giving you a licence to live there as long as you pay property taxes.

Actually you know what I started writing this as a parody post and now I'm not sure anymore, exactly what do we own anyway? What has anyone ever owned? Did those 200 years ago have more property rights than we currently have?
Moving forwards should we have more property rights? Should I be allowed to sell you a device that is designed to break, or at least rely on updates to keep doing the same job? Machinery has always worn out, selling with a contract that requires a service contract has always been legal (AFAIK) so why are we annoyed about this now?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why is this so hard?"

If Android is actually open, go make that.

Re:Good

[HideyoshiJP]

I don't always applaud Google, but when I do, it's for a Slashdot post. This is one thing I liked about the Chromebooks - the ability to flip a switch on the bottom to unlock the bootloader.

Re:Good

[paiute]

What has anyone ever owned? Did those 200 years ago have more property rights than we currently have?

Check with the Massachusett. See how that worked out for them.

Re:Good

[mlts]

Bingo. One can just look at the Nexus line of devices and the "fastboot oem unlock" command and the warning given as the right way to go about doing this. This is enough of a hurdle to keep Joe Sixpack from doing it so he can see the dancing bunnies, but allows people who are willing to trash their device (and not bother calling hardware support) to do what they feel free to.

Re:Good

[Andy Dodd]

Actually, a privilege escalation exploit IS a security risk.

The unlocked bootloader means that on the Fire, this is at most a small speedbump in the process of modifying a device. However this prevents malware from gaining privilege escalation. (Most of the easiest Android rooting techniques like psneuter and rageagainstthecage relied on exploits that could and WERE also used by malware such as Droid Dream.)

Re:Good

[atisss]

It's advertised as "Manufacturer will have the lock to hood, and come at night time to change the oil if it's necessary". But that rarely happens.

Re:Good

[Viol8]

And how would this magic malware manage to reflash the boot loader in the first place since it requires a hard reset and a 2nd device plugged into the USB port to do it?

Re:Good

[Almandine]

For that analogy, it would be like forcing to driver to use only the dealer to change their oil. The dealers would love that. In reality, this reminds me of the "Right To Repair" law being proposed in Massachusetts.

Re:Good

[d4fseeker]

In this case simply because Amazon wants you to buy their stuff.
Remember, Amazon makes no profit on the Fire -some even claim it comes at a loss-, they're a company and not your local welfare!

If you expect your tablet to be rootable then you must be prepared to pay somewhat more for a device that the manufacturer makes money on...

Re:Good

[Almandine]

I think of it as removing the ability to unlock the hood from inside the cabin. You'll still be able to enter the cabin and operate the car (use the device). You can even get a new radio (downloadable approved apps) but opening the hood to add a turbocharger is forbidden as it can significantly change the performance of the car.

Re:Good

[nedlohs]

That's the point.

That isn't what was removed. What was removed was a security flaw that let a non-root app running on the device get root priveledges.

Re:Good

[KhabaLox]

You can't lend others your books (look in the copyright notice at the front if you doubt me)

"No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher."

"transmitted by any means.... mechanical"

How do I get it home from the store? Did Amazon violate the copyright when they shipped it to me?

Re:Good

[Dog-Cow]

You mean "running over", not shooting.

This is a car analogy.

Re:Good

[jellomizer]

The issue is if someone opens the hood in their car and says replaces their oil with anti-freeze or does something stupid, the automotive industry is mature enough to tell the user that what they did was wrong and will cost them an arm and a leg to get it fixed. And the end user will not get too much sympathy on the internet for doing such a stupid thing. However for these consumer devices if someone who really doesn't know what they are doing roots their device then does something stupid, they will post and state how bad their product is and there will be a bunch of supporters ready to jump to support him in his quest to say how bad the product is because he did something that messed up the device that he couldn't fix. The information is passed on to other people and over time they forgot all about the rooting business and it will sound like the product is just an insecure junk that randomly breaks.

The PC's and Laptop's were able to mature before the internet where anyone who complained or in the right enough will get noticed. So we are able to get PC and Laptops that we can do advanced stuff with... The new products are ultra secured not really because the company doesn't want people to be creative with their product, but because their market stance is so thin right now that bad PR from a small sets of idiots will kill their business. And the fact right now it is hip and cool to hate those evil money grubbing corporations, who are trying to innovate and make some cool new products, that bad news and problems spread like wild fire, and anyone who tries to support the company sounds like one of those apologizers or sell offs.

Re:Good

[Dog-Cow]

Because the manufacturers don't want them to. Sheesh, this isn't hard.

If you want a $10 Android tablet with root access and an open bootloader, build it yourself.

Re:Good

[X0563511]

I'd like to think innocent shortages of clues. Emphasis on like.

Re:Good

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Do the pundits who claim this have access to the actual contracts? Do they know what Amazon is actually paying? as opposed to prices advertised on some website?

Re:Good

[BagOBones]

Voil8s point was the the exploit was not a remote one and required local physical access.

The difference between lets say the on the iPhone jailbreakme (high risk remote website remote exploit) and redsnow (difficult local direct access exploit).

However once rooted and code signing is dissabled you are right nedlohs the devices are less secure.

Re:Good

[tepples]

Oh, you own your house outright, fine but who enforces it?

That's the problem for any form of property. As John Philpot Curran (not Jefferson, as commonly thought) pointed out, the price of liberty "is eternal vigilance."

Should I be allowed to sell you a device that is designed to break, or at least rely on updates to keep doing the same job?

As long as you make this clear in advance. The problem comes when advertising does not mention restrictions on a device or buries them in a page of legalese. For example, where on a video game console's box does the manufacturer mention the restrictions on who qualifies to develop games for the platform?

Re:Good

[cusco]

Once I've bought the thing it's no longer "their stuff", it's now MY stuff and I should be able to do what I want with it. If they agree to provide support for a certain time period as part of the purchase contract I would expect that the support will **NOT** break MY tablet. If it does (and isn't simply a mistake or incompetence) then they're not keeping their part of the deal.

For the obligatory car analogy . . . If GM sells you a car and throws in a year of free oil changes and tune ups, would you be a bit annoyed if during one of the oil changes they also installed a governor that prevented you from driving faster than 50 kph? I would be.

Re:Good

[HungryMonkey]

I would guess the answer is in your own post:

" without written permission from the publisher."

Amazon undoubtedly has a contract with the publisher allowing the sale and distribution of said sale.

Re:Good

[Nanosphere]

Americans don't own anything anymore because Americans don't *make* anything anymore.

Re:Good

[Tsingi]

Boats have cabins, cars have interiors.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

are you sure physical access is required? rageagainstthecage was said to be USB-only for months, until someone discovered that ADB could be exploited via the local terminal. nobody had thought to check the stock ROM for an ADB-client binary.

Re:Good

[Tsingi]

Regarding your sig, which you could expound on...

Muslims are rewriting history to conceal the truth.

The Jews are doing that as well.

Re:Good

[Moryath]

And yet if the car companies removed your hood release and required a special key or tool only available at the dealerships, you'd be screaming bloody murder and so would the mechanic's unions with good reason - in fact, several times there were class action lawsuits against GM, Ford, and Toyota due to their refusal to sell the appropriate adapters and codebooks necessary to troubleshoot or reset "check engine lights" and computer warnings to the 3rd-party mechanic shops.

Imagine if the car companies wanted to take away your RIGHT to have your car fitted out with a turbocharger, or an aftermarket performance chip, or a better flywheel, or any number of other changes.

Now why is it that people don't scream bloody murder when they have a computing device in their hand, personal property they purchase, and they're told "but you don't have admin rights to change anything so there"???

Re:Good

[Moryath]

And yet if the car companies removed your hood release and required a special key or tool only available at the dealerships, you'd be screaming bloody murder and so would the mechanic's unions with good reason - in fact, several times there were class action lawsuits against GM, Ford, and Toyota due to their refusal to sell the appropriate adapters and codebooks necessary to troubleshoot or reset "check engine lights" and computer warnings to the 3rd-party mechanic shops.

Imagine if the car companies wanted to take away your RIGHT to have your car fitted out with a turbocharger, or an aftermarket performance chip, or a better flywheel, or any number of other changes.

Now why is it that people don't scream bloody murder when they have a computing device in their hand, personal property they purchase, and they're told "but you don't have admin rights to change anything so there"???

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

OEM unlock == bootloader unlocking != root access.

Kindle Fire: unlocked bootloader, no (legitimate) root login.
Nook Tablet: locked bootloader, no root login.
Droid x2: locked bootloader, no root login.
Nexus (S): unlockable bootloader, no root login.
Android/AOSP: no (stock-programmed) root login.

Re:Good

[angel'o'sphere]

How do I get it home from the store? Did Amazon violate the copyright when they shipped it to me?

Erm, did you read, what you copy/pasted?

without written permission from the publisher."

I would assume Amazon has that written permission ... or?

Re:Good

[JesseMcDonald]

No, the answer is that copyright doesn't grant all the privileges the publishers are claiming, at least in the USA. In particular, the Doctrine of First Sale pretty much says that you can legally do whatever you want with your copy once they've sold it to you (aside from using it to make more copies). That includes not only obvious things like transportation, but also lending—both free/personal loans and commercial rental.

Rental companies and retailers often do have special agreements with the publishers, but that's because the publishers are offering them a better deal, not because they need the agreement simply to resell or rent out the physical books/DVDs/etc.

Digital media falls into a rather gray area, which is how the publishers like it. They take advantage of the ephemeral nature of digital goods to undermine the First Sale doctrine, while simultaneously claiming that the content has been fixed in a tangible medium in order to gain copyright privileges over it. It should be one or the other, but they leverage the confusion to get their way on both counts.

Re:Good

[Adaeniel]

We make weapons.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anon because of mods. I love rooting as much as the next Cyanogen user, but in fairness severely overclocking a processor can lead to hardware damage.

Re:Good

[Anomalyst]

Boats have cabins, cars have interiors.

It's a ship not a boat.

Re:Good

[ifrag]

If GM sells you a car and throws in a year of free oil changes and tune ups, would you be a bit annoyed if during one of the oil changes they also installed a governor that prevented you from driving faster than 50 kph?

Of course that car will not need another oil change because it's going to be completely destroyed in a cataclysmic road rage accident.

Re:Good

[jeffmeden]

Yeah, let's weld the bugger shut, so that nobody, including the imaginary bad guy can get in. And if you need to change the oil then just buy a new and upgraded car, that will come with brand new oil.

It's that or you will have droves of flaming fanboys chanting "android cars don't get oil changes in a timely manner even though it doesnt impact performance at all!" and "my iThing gets oil changes every other week whether i like it or not; and yes i like it!"

Why we can't just leave the device details up to the manufacturers and pick our devices based on the features and benefits they offer is beyond me. Some people just love to drown in minutia, personally I would rather buy something that works, return it if it doesn't, and buy another/newer one if it makes me happy.

Re:Good

[adisakp]

Root access was a security risk. I'm glad Amazon fixed that.

If it's Windoze, an unfixed privilege escalation exploit leads to Slashdotters calling Microsoft out as a shoddy company. When Amazon fixes the same type of security issue, they are accused of crushing homebrew development. Let's face it... security bugs should be fixed.

Homebrew is only related in that it's using security flaws to root the device. If Amazon wants to support homebrew, they should do it in a way that doesn't compromise the current OS. Not leaving security bugs where anyone can take over your device is not the same as trying to quash homebrew -- it's a security upgrade that benefits 99.999% of the platform owners and security-exploit-based-homebrew is merely collateral damage.

Re:Good

[toriver]

Sure, as long as you accept that if it stops working, and you go to complain, they tell you "talk to the hand, then buy a new one."

And if you make too many modifications to your car, and you get in an accident, the insurance company are going to laugh hard at your non-standard and thus uncovered vehicle.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

On the flip side, nobody is telling Amazon they need to sell them for no-profit. In fact, its not that they are selling them for no-profit, but the fact that the device is a loss-leader. I'm not sure how you think the end user is getting a hand out on this, they paid for the device and if they want to run it over with a dump truck, root etc, etc etc, they should be able to, why not, they own it?

Re:Good

[toriver]

But pretending you can own something of God's creation is clearly satanism...

Re:Good

[Pope]

I drain my crankcase every weekend and replace the oil to try out different brands. Doesn't everyone?

Re:Good

[Tsingi]

Boats have cabins, cars have interiors.

It's a ship not a boat.

Which 'it'? A ship is a big boat.

Re:Good

[xigxag]

That's not what mechanical transmission means. It means typing the content of the book out yourself.

Re:Good

[Pope]

Better get working on your ground-up homebrew tablet OS in that case.

Re:Good

[mjr167]

Volvo already thought of that...

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm...why does my car have "cabin filters" that need replaced??

Re:Good

[cayenne8]

Is this change only for the Nook tablet, or does it affect the Nook color too?

Re:Good

[d4fseeker]

The analogy would rather be that they installed a V12 in your 80mile-tops van and you found a secret and not vendor-endorsed method for unlocking
all the horse power in the beast.

The vendor, trying to protect his investment and also concerned for the driver's security closes that particular Chip glitch.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

...and the shocking bit is that this is exactly what GPL3 tried to prevent! ...and people hated it for this specific reason.

Re:Good

[d4fseeker]

It's rather common logic that, if two tablets with strikingly similar hardware sell at a price where one is the double of the other, one of the 2 is not going to make a lot of money off the hardware, at least not compared to the other.
Building such devices is very expensive, only the touchscreen or ARM cpu with it's stacked RAM will cost a lot, let alone the battery.

Re:Good

[yurtinus]

Software really never carries a warranty. If an uninformed user attempts to root their device and leaves it in a state that can't boot - it doesn't matter if the issue is hardware or software. To them, it is a bricked device and they will expect warranty support, hence the blanket "this voids your warranty" statement.

Re:Good

[Bucky24]

Because most people don't look at cars and computers the same way. To the average Joe, a car has an engine that can be seen. They may not really understand how it all works, but they know what an engine does, and probably know the basics of an engine. They can pop open the hood and check to see "yes this engine appears to have all the pieces I can recognize and it sounds good."

In fact popping open the hood is one of the most common things when buying a car. You have to make sure that the salesman isn't ripping you off (interestingly enough, they wouldn't be able to do a lot of the slimy things they do if they couldn't open the hood). Not so with a computing device or a tablet. The "engine", or the CPU, graphics card, ect, is a line on a sales card. The average Joe will see "NVidia 550 GTX" and all they will think is "gee that's a higher number then this other one over here so it must be better" (for the tablet pedantics out there, I have no idea if any tablics come with an Nvidia card, just using it as an example here). If you as a customer went into Best Buy and said "I'd like to look at this Samsung tablet here, can you crack open the case so I can look at the CPU?" likely they'd think you were crazy. Because for the average person, a tablet is what Apple made it to be, a smooth sleek device that has a screen that lets them do things. They have generally no idea HOW it allows them to do these things, they just care that it works. They don't generally care about root access because accessing the "engine" more directly is not something they will ever need to do.

Whereas in a car, the user knows the engine is important and cares about it, and that is why cars are designed with hoods that can open easily.

The companies cater to the market that is interested in buying their products, and the majority of tablet consumers could not care less about root access to their devices.

As someone else said, if you really want a fully rootable Android device, why not build your own?

Re:Good

[Bucky24]

(Slightly off topic) which brand have you found works best?

Re:Good

[Bucky24]

(and yes before someone points this out, I realize Pope wasn't talking about oil)

Re:Good

[Smallpond]

The reason they are preventing you from rooting has nothing to do with whether you do something stupid to the device and post nasty comments on the net. As you point out, nobody cares what you do to a laptop or desktop. The only reason they want to prevent root access is so their content isn't copied. They make all of their money selling books, apps, etc. This is why the Microsoft eBook Reader app failed. No publisher wants to put their content on a PC, they will only put it on a closed device.

Re:Good

[yurtinus]

Because nerd rage is much more embarrassing than it is threatening...

Re:Good

[luther349]

its more like they never included the hood lach to start with.

Re:Good

[yurtinus]

Property rights have always extended as far as you and your societies willingness to protect them. The only thing preventing somebody with a big stick coming and taking what's yours is that you or your society have a bigger stick. As has been mentioned - constant vigilance is the price we must pay for a free society.

Re:Good

[X0563511]

So I got that you read my first statement. You appear to have stopped reading at that point. If you had continued on to read my second statement, you would find that I already agree with you.

Re:Good

[Moryath]

... Actually, if you look, you'll see that this was posted in a different spot as a reply to someone else entirely.

I have NO clue why it's popping up here as well. Looks like Slashdot glitched again, maybe that was the result of the "guru meditation" error I saw when trying to post.

Re:Good

[couchslug]

"Welcome to the real world, the property you own isn't yours."

I don't buy a Kindle or a Nook because they don't offer me the control I demand. That's why I use a notebook instead. No smartphone either. I demand asynchronous communication (to respond at my chosen pace) and I enforce that by essentially requiring email. It works very well.

To buy a product is to endorse its business model.

"Machinery has always worn out, selling with a contract that requires a service contract has always been legal (AFAIK) so why are we annoyed about this now?"

Examples please? As a sometime industrial equipment mech I've not seen one.

Re:Good

[Crookdotter]

You own all the important things in life. Dignity, self respect and honour. Not many people value these ideas anymore.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, check ur math dude, we're not doing factorials here. With 12 notes available on the chromatic scale used to produce your 7 note riffs it would appear your "5000 original works" figure is way off.

Wrong way:
7 * 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 5040

Correct way:
12 * 12 * 12 * 12 * 12 * 12 * 12 = 35,831,808

(And that's ignoring keys! Was that 3rd note a D# or an Eb?? :)

Re:Good

[KhabaLox]

That includes not only obvious things like transportation, but also lending—both free/personal loans and commercial rental.

That's a good point.

You reminded me of a story I read yesterday about how RedBox has a workaround plan in place in case the studios add to the blackout periods when they next renegotiate their contracts. RedBox basically said if the studios shut them out for more than the current 30 days (the studios currently give their titles to Blockbuster 30 days sooner than RedBox), then RedBox will just go buy a bunch of discs wholesale and rent them. They will pay more per disc, but they can cherry pick the good titles, instead of being forced to buy the entire catalogue the studio wants to sell them, and end up still being profitable.

Re:Good

[Pi1grim]

Why change the oil, when you can sell a new car, with new, better oil.

Re:Good

[KhabaLox]

You think every bookstore that mails or delivers books has written agreements with every publisher? Amazon was just an example; the logic applies to anyone who mechanically transmits* a work.

*I think the other two child posts are more to the point. 1) Mechanical Transmission doesn't mean physically shipping/giving/lending (see: libraries). 2) Copyright law is more nuanced than the boilerplate on a book's title page.

Re:Good

[Belial6]

Making the devices so that the OS could be replaced AND that the device could trivially be restored in the event that the replacement OS fails would be simple. The locked down path that device manufactures take makes bricking a device MORE likely than if the device was open.

Re:Good

[Belial6]

It would be trivial to make bricking your device darn near impossible. How many PCs do you see getting bricked by software upgrades? It is almost unheard of.

Re:Good

[ajlitt]

No, it doesn't. Both these devices boot from emmc, and the bootloaders live in partitions writable by root in /dev/block. No hard reset needed.

Re:Good

[blagooly]

A ship carries a boat.

Re:Good

[tomboalogo]

Actually I think the poster thought since his car is 'mechanical' and it has a 'transmission' that the rule applied.

Re:Good

[bws111]

Seriously? Where on the box does it mention that it won't walk your dog, clean your house, or save you from choking? There are an unlimited number of things a product (any product) won't do. There are an extremely limited number of things a product will do. They are listed on the box. If a box for a video game console does not say 'Allows you to develop and play your own games', what reasonable expectation do you have that it will in fact do that?

Re:Good

[BigSes]

Okay what about your house, I bet it's mortgaged so the bank owns it. Oh, you own your house outright, fine but who enforces it? When someone tries to take it from you it's a government giving you a licence to live there as long as you pay property taxes.

Loved the excellent points you brought up. Wanted to add that we shouldn't forget about Eminent Domain when it comes to your home and/or property. The government can come and take it from you anytime, for any reason, as long as you are compensated with the "fair market" value that they decide.

Re:Good

[yurtinus]

I'm not saying it's actually bricked. I'm simply saying that if a user tries to root their device and it goes wrong, quite a few users won't know what to do to fix it. It's not as simple as popping in your Recovery DVD and starting over.

Re:Good

[ceoyoyo]

A cabin on a boat is where you sleep. The cabin of a car (or airplane) is where you sit. The cockpit is where the driver(s) sit.

The word "cabin" has been used to describe the interior space of cars for quite a while.

Re:Good

[Belial6]

There is no good reason that it shouldn't be. It would be trivial for the device manufacturers to build their Android devices with a recovery mode. Sure, it might be a USB flash drive, or microSD card instead of a DVD, but the principle is the same.

Re:Good

[SJHillman]

Then why do shipments come by car and cargo by ships?

Re:Good

[CrimsonAvenger]

This is why the Microsoft eBook Reader app failed. No publisher wants to put their content on a PC, they will only put it on a closed device.

And yet I have a program that allows me to read my eBooks on my desktop.

And my eBook format of choice (the one I use basically 100% of the time), ePub, can be read by any eBook reader I've tried (note that I've not bothered to check the Kindle itself)....

Re:Good

[CastrTroy]

Then why is there a Kindle Application for the PC?

Re:Good

[Tsingi]

shipments can come by any delivery means, except the post office, then it's salvage.

Can't help you with cargo.

Re:Good

[Tsingi]

A cabin on a boat is where you sleep. The cabin of a car (or airplane) is where you sit. The cockpit is where the driver(s) sit.

The word "cabin" has been used to describe the interior space of cars for quite a while.

Where did cockpit originate? Feel free to be imaginative.

Re:Good

[ceoyoyo]

No need: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cockpit

The midshipman's berth on naval ships used to be called the "cockpit," a pit for fighting cocks (roosters). Midshipmen were usually young men, frequently in fierce competition for limited promotions.

Cock as slang for penis probably also originates with cock meaning rooster.

Re:Good

[X0563511]

Wow... that is quite special!

Re:Good

[bws111]

This is a pretty pathetic analogy, and yet dopes still mark it insightful. Amazing.

A car has a hood release for a very simple reason: the manufacturer REQUIRES you to perform regular checks and services under the hood. There are plenty of places in a car where the manufacturer does NOT make it easy to get to (under the dash, for instance), because in normal use (as intended by the manufacturer) there is simply no need to do that. There are other things in a car which require destruction of parts of the car to get to (some body panels, for instance).

As for adding a turbocharger, etc. I looked under the hood of my car, and I did not see some spot marked 'plug-in turbocharger here'. In fact, I don't even see enough room under there to install a turbocharger. However, I assume by your 'right' comment that you mean the manufacturer does not prevent you from installing a turbocharger.

Fair enough. However, I see no statement from the manufacturer that installing a turbocharger is supported in any way. If you install a turbocharger, it is pretty unreasonable to expect that the ECM is going to be able to handle that. It is unreasonable to expect the rest of the engine components and drivetrain to be capable of handling the extra horsepower. It is unreasonable to expect that replacement parts from the manufacturer are still going to fit. It is unreasonable to expect that the fuel economy and emissions characteristics are the same. It is unreasonable to expect the handling and braking characteristics the be able to handle the faster speeds.

And here is the big difference between your car modification and your supposed general computing device modification. When you modify your car, you no longer expect to have what the manufacturer sold you. Sure, the hardware is still yours, but the reliability, performance, etc has been changed, perhaps drastically. But, for some reason, you expect to be able to modify an eReader into a general computing device, but still have it function as the manufacturer intended.

You have just as much RIGHT to modify your Kindle as your car. You can pull any chips and replace them with other ones. You can remove their software and install your own. However, you have absolutely NO right to insist that the Kindle retain it's original function, or that the manufacturer is in any way responsible for making the device capable of doing what you want.

Re:Good

[vux984]

If a box for a video game console does not say 'Allows you to develop and play your own games', what reasonable expectation do you have that it will in fact do that?

You are confusing tho meanings of allow.

There is "allow" as in capability. A gun allows you to shoot bullet at people. It gives you that capability.

There is "allow" as in "permission". Just because you bought a gun, you are still not allowed to shoot people for sport. The law forbids it.

The problem we have with digital era products is one of permission, not one of capability.

If I buy an X, I expect to be allowed (permission) to do whatever I want with it, within the law.

If I want to walk my dog or play video games I design myself with a bag of tinkertoys, I am allowed (permission) to do so. Even though the toy doesn't have that capability, I am still allowed (permission) to do it. And if i can find some way of getting a tinkertoy to walk my dog or play video games I design myself, giving it that capability, that is perfectly fine.

If I want to use the PS3 to walk the dog or play games I develop myself. Again, the capability question is really beside the point. If I can figure a way of making it walk the dog, then I should be able to use it that way. But the PS3 doesn't allow (permission) to develop my own games... since when do I need permission from Sony to use a product I purchased the way I want to use it?

I didn't need permission from tinker toys. What makes the PS3 so special that Sony gets to decide what uses they PERMIT (allow)?

Re:Good

[oreiasecaman]

man it sure sucks to be an yankee, huh?

Re:Good

[bws111]

If you OWN X, you CAN do whatever you want with it, within the law. However, the only thing you OWN is the hardware. Unless you wrote it yourself, you do not OWN software (ever, even if using FOSS).

You are free to modify the PS3 to do anything you want. Change chips, replace firmware, anything at all. What you can not do is modify/use their software without their permission (license).

There is nothing special about the PS3. You can do whatever you want with the part you own (hardware), and Sony can do whatever they want with the part they own (software), including not permitting you to run it.

Re:Good

[tepples]

What you can not do is modify/use their software without their permission

I don't want to use their software; I want to use free software. So how do I add free software to a device with a locked bootloader?

Re:Good

[bws111]

No matter how 'trivial' you perceive it to be, it is still expense. They not only have to provide the hardware and develop the software to support it, they also have to test it. Warranty costs will rise as idiots brick their devices and return them as defective. Support costs will rise as each call takes longer when it includes an attempt at recovery. Customers will get pissed at having to attempt recovery on a broken device.

A friend of mine had a Kindle that failed recently. They called Amazon, and after about 30 seconds had the authorization to return the device, and a replacement had already been shipped. The more complicated you make the device, the harder it is to afford/provide service like that.

Added cost to the manufacturer, no benefit to 99.9% of the users, and zero benefit to the manufacturer are all very good reasons to not provide that kind of function.

Re:Good

[bws111]

The locked bootloader is part of their software. Remove the chip that contains it and replace it with one that does what you want.

Re:Good

[Belial6]

The problem is that you have it backwards. There is greater cost in providing hardware and developing software to try and prevent people from getting root access. Warranty costs would only go down, as there would be no bricking devices. Unlike now where people are trying to get around the expensive attempts to prevent root access. Support costs would go down, as fixing the phone would not even require a phone call. It is ridiculous to think that customers would get pissed at running a recovery to get their phone working again, but not get pissed at having their phone just permanently broken.

Your friend with a Kindle did not have an authorization to return the device after about 30 seconds. It takes longer than that to give them the shipping address. The time it takes to look up the number, dial it, wait for someone to pick up the other end, explain what is wrong, get the authorization number, and supply the shipping address is going to take you closer to a half an hour.

On the other hand, plugging the phone into a USB port on a PC and copying over a file is going to take closer to 10 minutes. For that small percentage of people that attaching to a computer is not possible, they could take it back to the carrier's store and have it fixed, or in a worst case scenero, they could do exactly what your 'friend' did.

"Added cost to the manufacturer, no benefit to 99.9% of the users, and zero benefit to the manufacturer" are all very good reasons to stop spending huge amounts of money and effort in building complex locking systems into the devices and just put in a much simpler recovery mode.

Re:Good

[triffid_98]

several times there were class action lawsuits against GM, Ford, and Toyota due to their refusal to sell the appropriate adapters and codebooks necessary to troubleshoot or reset "check engine lights" and computer warnings to the 3rd-party mechanic shops.

None of those lawsuits seem to have prevented BMW and Mercedes from doing that very same thing. Oh you can still read ODBII codes, but there are plenty of failure/maintenance codes that you need very expensive hardware to read or clear.

Imagine if the car companies wanted to take away your RIGHT to have your car fitted out with a turbocharger, or an aftermarket performance chip, or a better flywheel, or any number of other changes.

I live in California, our state government took those rights away quite some time ago (CARB)

Re:Good

[ogdenk]

Since when does a manufacturer have the right to dictate how I'm going to use something I own? I'm not renting the device, I'll do whatever the hell I want with it whenever the hell I want and if they don't like me removing their crapware/spyware infested, locked-down, useless default Android install they can f**kin kiss my ass. It's mine.

Re:Good

[ogdenk]

Why we can't just leave the device details up to the manufacturers and pick our devices based on the features and benefits they offer is beyond me. Some people just love to drown in minutia, personally I would rather buy something that works, return it if it doesn't, and buy another/newer one if it makes me happy.

For you and all the other morons that want to just play Angry Birds and bitch that the Facebook app sucks, that's a fine philosophy. For us smartphone owners that use our devices for real work beyond e-mail, GPS, and facebook that's unacceptable.... an affordable available device which fills my needs or "makes me happy" as you say no longer exists because of morons like you. I am FORCED to flash a phone and find locking bootloaders to be an underhanded and sleazy tactic with "security" just being a lame justification for making sure you have to throw away your phone in a year or two.

you know... us folks who have had smartphones since before they were a buzzword and before Android even existed? Us folks who can't tolerate lockdown because it prevents us from doing our jobs as effectively. The folks who were actually HAPPIER with the pen-based interface instead of the lame fat-finger touch interfaces. The folks who actually use them as real computing devices rather than entertainment. The industry doesn't care about SERIOUS smartphone users anymore. They want the Angry Birds crowd.

Re:Good

[ogdenk]

Not every weekend but I DO change my own oil and have tried various brands. Found with the age of my engine, 20W40 actually works much better in this climate with less wear and a happier engine. Also have a higher mileage filter with some additives, etc.

So while YOU were trying to be funny.... let's see who's car is actually still running in 5 years. I have NEVER retired a car with less than 250,000 miles on it. And I don't spend more than $500/yr in parts/repairs since most minor-moderate things I take care of myself. Can you say the same?

Re:Good

[yurtinus]

Are we switching sides here? Removing the root lock-out systems is what we want ;)

Most of these devices have a factory reset that at the very least wipes the user-installed stuff. On the Nook it *may* pull a fresh ROM image from somewhere - I honestly don't know for sure. My point here is that botching an attempt to root the device can leave it in a state where you can't do that trivial factory recovery and would need to take more advanced steps like making a bootable SD card and digging up a factory ROM somewhere. The cost to support walking somebody who isn't technically savvy through recovering a device in some unknown state is why rooting the devices usually voids the warranty.

Re:Good

[ogdenk]

Yeah, seriously. When you have a security flaw that allows root privilege escalation you don't just decide not to fix that because the homebrewer's were using it as a convenient way to get access to the machine. If this was on an (open) desktop platform, such a flaw wouldn't really be tolerated for long.

If this was a desktop platform, closed locked bootloaders that only boot one revision of Windows wouldn't be tolerated for long either. Bad argument.

Re:Good

[vux984]

Unless you wrote it yourself, you do not OWN software

I own that copy of it. And copyright doesn't give them any power over what I do with that copy except within a very limited scope relating primarily to distributing additional copies.

If I buy a copy of Lord of the Rings, then I own that copy. I can pee on it. I can cut it into pieces and rearrange the pages. I can white out the word Frodo and put my dogs name in its place. I can cut out the section with tom bomadill and burn it. I can write a sex scene between Gandalf and Sauroman and glue in between chapter 10 and 11. Its my copy. I own it.

I do not need a license to USE or MODIFY the copy I own as described above.

I only need a license to do something copyright restricts. I need a license to sell or even give away copies of what I've done, I need a license before I make a public performances of it or read it out on the radio.

But I don't need a license to do whatever I want to the copy I own within the confines of copyright.

There is nothing special about the PS3. You can do whatever you want with the part you own (hardware), and Sony can do whatever they want with the part they own (software), including not permitting you to run it.

Paraphrase that to a book or a CD., especially that last sentence. Does a book publisher get to tell you you aren't permitted to read it after they've sold you a copy? Does a CD publisher get to tell you that you aren't allowed to play the song after they sold you a copy? Of course not. That would be absurd. You don't need a license to read a purchased book or listen to a purchased CD

Why EXACTLY do you think software is different?
Why EXACTLY do you think you need a license to "run software"?

What makes the string of 0s and 1s that make up "Hello World.exe" so fundamentally different from the string of 0s and 1s that make up "Another Brick in the Wall" that you NEED a LICENSE to use the former but not the latter?

Re:Good

[Belial6]

There are only two reasons a factory reset wouldn't restore a device.

1) The restore was badly coded. Since this involves erasing everything and putting a clean image on the device, that would require some exceptionally bad coding. If they couldn't handle that, there is no way that they should be trying to write code that locks people out of the device.

2) The hardware/software that was designed to prevent people from replacing the OS requires anyone wanting to replace their OS to dig into parts of the device that would not be necessary if the device wasn't locked in the first place.

The point is, devices get bricked because that is what the manufacturers want to have happen. The bios on a PC is it's boot loader. Because the boot loader on a PC doesn't try to block OS installs, people don't go hacking around in it. The same would be true for Android devices if the boot loader wasn't used as a lockout device. If the boot loader works, there is no reason that loading an OS on a phone should be any harder than it is on a PC.

The reason we have people bricking phones and not PCs is because the manufacturers have designed them with self destruction traps.

Re:Good

[angel'o'sphere]

"Mechanical Transmission" is not copying.

So a bookstore does not need a "permission to copy" as it is not copying.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't pick up chicks in a phone.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

The security risk here is pre-loading devices with your account and credit card info with the password disabled and 1-click ordering on.

Then shipping over a million a week with no tracking and no signature required for delivery.

That's what Amazon is still doing.

The root access required additional hardware and was a multi-step process and the main reason people were using it was to get access to the real Android market where you can get security patched versions of the apps instead of the 6 month old versions with known security holes on the Amazon app store.

Let's be completely clear here - Amazon did not invent the tablet (they paid RIM's Chinese sub-contractor to rip off the Blackberry they were building) and they didn't develop Android or the app market either. They took other people's work, removed functionality and put a toll booth on it.

They are parasites and should be treated as such.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

If the modification I make causes a FUNCTIONAL problem of some kind then no, I don't expect the manufacturer to foot the burden of making sure the vehicle continues to function as intended. But I'm pretty sure that we'd all be up in arms if the manufacturer installed a system to detect third party parts and disable them or refuse to operate if they were found. That is essentially what the manufacturers of digital devices are doing (or even more often, the network operators).

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes we should have more property rights. The problem is that people think about the rights they do or should have and not about how government should be restricted. Anyway, that ends my rant.

As far as your last example if you sell a device that is designed to break you are committing fraud since anything sold to perform a task is done so with the understanding that it's purpose is as advertised. This ties into the disclaimer you get with free open source software, the one that goes basically: "since you're not paying for this software we don't have to guarantee that it actually works, so it might not. It will, of course, but we put this here just to avoid lawsuits." It's tied in with the legal concept of a warranty. Of course, I'm not a legal expert and I've been drinking so while all this makes sense to me, it might not to you. Of course you're not paying for this so I don't have to guarantee that it does.

But yes, we should have more property rights, and a state should be able to choose not to levee a property tax (and there should be no federal property tax).

The main thing to remember is that in the United States as it was designed originally the citizens are the sovereigns and we loan some of that sovereignty to our elected officials. This is not quite how things operate these days but 100 years of concerted effort could get us back there again. It's taken that long to get away from it.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Your points seem to try to poke holes in an analogy by arguing a point that nobody is arguing against. You claim people that are stupid enough to mess up their device and still expect their code to work like the manufacturer intended and that should justify companies locking down their products, or something.

The company only has to support their original product line normally. People coding those updates know this, and if they run into discrepancy they can just work to synchronize it again. Coding is much easier than mechanical work. Nothing, absolutely nothing justifies a company working towards preventing you from modifying your own product in this case, it is no danger to anything but their perceived guaranteed cash flow. For example, if people have "too much freedom" to choose their competitor with their own device.

We mod it, we take our chances, no companies should have any right to lock owners out of their own machines. If they make it intentionally hard to modify for cars for any reason other than safety or poor design and if the laws were not insane then fuck them they should be out of business.

I'd hate to live in a world where there are black boxes everywhere and you only have the freedom to use it or not, where you can't develop anything freely because the ideas are all owned, and companies exist that are arrogant and powerful enough to force you to use their devices only how they "envision". If I misread your post because I only skimmed it after your unnecessarily arrogant and ridiculous opening tone then I apologize.

Re:Good

[AmiMoJo]

A car has a hood release for a very simple reason: the manufacturer REQUIRES you to perform regular checks and services under the hood. There are plenty of places in a car where the manufacturer does NOT make it easy to get to (under the dash, for instance), because in normal use (as intended by the manufacturer) there is simply no need to do that. There are other things in a car which require destruction of parts of the car to get to (some body panels, for instance).

So replacing a battery or upgrading sold software with security vulnerabilities is not important maintenance? I'm sure car manufacturers would love to force you to buy a branded battery, branded screen wash, branded air filter, branded bulbs etc, but whenever they try there is justified outrage from customers and 3rd party servicing companies.

The reason the stuff under the dash is hard to access is that modern cars are designed to reduce cabin noise and pack a lot of wiring into a limited space, while keeping the dashboard solid so it doesn't seem cheap and flimsy. If you know where the screws are you can get in there with just a screwdriver on most cars, and the diagnostic port and fuse box are usually easy enough to get at. Again, they would love to charge you to change a fuse or fit a new stereo but people wouldn't put up with it.

When you modify your car, you no longer expect to have what the manufacturer sold you. Sure, the hardware is still yours, but the reliability, performance, etc has been changed, perhaps drastically. But, for some reason, you expect to be able to modify an eReader into a general computing device, but still have it function as the manufacturer intended.

There is a simple solution that is often used in this case: common sense. If you fit a turbocharger and some part of your engine fails the manufacturer isn't going to warranty it, but if a seatbelt release latch gets stuck there was clearly no way it had anything to do with the modification so they will have to honour it.

Most phones allow you to swap a battery, but if that battery overheats and leaks they won't replace the rest of the phone for you. Similarly Google's phones have unlocked bootloaders and you can flash whatever OS you like, they just won't warranty it. There isn't much the OS can do to somehow break the phone in a way that makes it look like hardware failure.

Re:Good

[bws111]

Replacing a battery has zero to do with root access, so I don't know why you even bring it up. The only software 'upgrades' available for the Kindle and Nook come from the manufacturers, and they do fix security issues (such as being able to force privilege escalation). Everything else is a hack, which the manufacturer is under no obligation to support.

If you want a general-purpose, programmable device with replaceable batteries, buy one. If you buy a cheap appliance like an eReader and manage to make it do something else, good for you. But for crying out loud, stop acting like the manufacturers are in any way obligated to support that, either by explicitly allowing it or by not disabling whatever hack you found.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your missing the point. They have restricted the only avenue to access the underlying software to make changes. If they did this update while giving all users the ability to alter the software via another approved method, there would be no issue. The fact that they have restricted all access to your own PURCHASED hardware is the issue.

Re:Good

[tepples]

if you really want a fully rootable Android device, why not build your own?

Who sells a kit to do just that?

Re:Good

[adisakp]

I think your missing the point. They have restricted the only avenue to access the underlying software to make changes. If they did this update while giving all users the ability to alter the software via another approved method, there would be no issue. The fact that they have restricted all access to your own PURCHASED hardware is the issue.

I was under the impression that Kindle Fire did not have an encrypted boot loader and that Amazon has already released the source to the OS.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to think innocent shortages of clues.

There you go. Emphasis on "like" as you requested.

Unfortunately Slashdot can't yet convert a written description of how you'd like your text formatted into actual formatting, so I suggest learning the few HTML tags needed, in this case you'd need <em> and </em>

Re:Good

[X0563511]

I know how HTML works. You'd notice the anchor in my sig...

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I would if I could see your sig, but I haven't got round to making a ./ account so I can't, and I didn't have anything better to do than post that stupid comment.

accessory mode please then I won't need to root it

[craftycoder]

I'm just annoyed that they have not implemented all of Gingerbread. They claim they have Android 2.3.4 on kernel 2.6.37 and yet they don't support the ADK (accessory development kit). It's just a couple of already written classes in the kernel, a framework jar, and a permissions file. It would take an hour to implement and 3 to test. Hook us up Amazon! Then I wouldn't even want to root the thing.

Haha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like some parties are moving towards a walled garden... but but but... it's teh Android!!!onehundredeleven!!!

If you want a rooted tablet...

[cciRRus]

Get those that cheap "shanzai" tablets from China. They come with pretty good hardware and quite a few already have ICS firmware released. Best of all, you need not worry about not being able to root the tablet.

Re:If you want a rooted tablet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, you also don't need to worry about having a functional device with an accurate and decent multitouch screen.

Re:If you want a rooted tablet...

[Microlith]

And then ask the shanzai tablet manufacturers for the source code, and get a "only if you give us $6000" bullshit response.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[tepples]

Anonymous Coward wrote, in a slightly more inflammatory wording:

Neither device [...] has access to the real android market.

Maybe you should [...] go buy a real Android tablet...

Which affordable, certified "real Android tablet" in the 7 to 8 inch range do you recommend instead of a Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet? Or are Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet like game consoles, sold at razor-thin margins or even at a loss to get people onto the manufacturer's store, and that's why they're so much cheaper than Google-certified devices?

Re:accessory mode please then I won't need to root

[X0563511]

That's not what ADK means. ADK is the Android Development Kit.

Mmmm, movies

[SJHillman]

Since the last update to the Nook Color let me watch Netflix (it works really well, although subtitles could be slightly larger) and fixed a few oversights like not being able to read books in landscape mode, I really don't have a reason to root it anymore. It may just be my perception, but overall performance seems to have improved slightly as well. Does anyone know if this affects dual-booting the Nook Color off of a microSD card?

Re:Mmmm, movies

[ajlitt]

It will always attempt to boot from microSD first. The boot order is hardwired on the board.

Re:Mmmm, movies

[DdJ]

This does not impact the Nook Color in any significant way.

Both the Nook Color and Nook Tablet will try to boot off microSD first if they can. That's not part of the OS. However, the Nook Tablet requires a signed kernel to boot, and the Nook Color does not. So, this change results in a significant loss of hackability for the Nook Tablet, since you had to "jailbreak" it in some sense to do anything. It does not result in a significant loss of hackability for the older Nook Color, since you can still just write an unsigned kernel to a microSD card and you're off and running.

Disclaimer: this is my understanding from scouring the xda-dev forums for details and from hacking my own Nook Color. I've confirmed that 1.4.1 on the Nook Color does close the sideloading "hole", and that a 1.4.1 Nook Color will still boot stuff like CM7.1 from microSD card. The rest of it, I have not personally verified myself, but am summarizing my understanding from reading experts talking about it all.

Re:Mmmm, movies

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly the question I was hoping to have answered. For those of us dual booting cyanogen from a microSD (Nook Color) we should be safe from worrying about these updates? ajlitt seems to say "yes", which would be great news.

Re:Mmmm, movies

[CAIMLAS]

That's a real shame. I wonder if this applies to the Nook Simple Touch as well? It's the first e-ink reader I've found that has the physical controls I'd want in an ebook reader (touchscreen of sorts, , and also has a very nice form factor (perfect for "put it anywhrere").

Re:Mmmm, movies

[Anonymous Coward]

"It will always attempt to boot from microSD first. The boot order is hardwired on the board."...

It will attempt to do this, but if it's not a signed boot loader it will fail... So no more Cyanogen Mod, etc on the Nook Tablet. Screw B&N!!!

...then pirate the Gapps

[tepples]

Get those that cheap "shanzai" tablets from China.

Are they certified by Google? If not, then what market do they come with?

They come with pretty good hardware

Does "pretty good hardware" include a capacitive digitizer so that 1. I can run applications that require Android Market, and 2. I don't have to either borrow my DS's stylus or press so hard I feel like I'm running the risk of breaking it?

Re:...then pirate the Gapps

[dmesg0]

Are they certified by Google? If not, then what market do they come with?

Almost all are not, but there are some exceptions, e.g. MIPS-based Ainol Novo 7 is Google certified (running ICS) and costs around 100$

Does "pretty good hardware" include a capacitive digitizer so that 1. I can run applications that require Android Market, and 2. I don't have to either borrow my DS's stylus or press so hard I feel like I'm running the risk of breaking it?

Yes, most 100$+ tablets are using capacitive 5-point multitouch screens. Their resolution is usually quite low though, but it's going to change soon - there are several new 7" tablets with 1024x600 resolution.

Re:...then pirate the Gapps

[Fallingwater]

Are they certified by Google?

Most likely not.

If not, then what market do they come with?

The usual market. It typically doesn't work on the default firmware, but if you flash a romhack (and really, why would one buy a Chinese tablet and not hack it) it works as it would on a normal Google-certified device (not sure if it gets cracked or what).

Does "pretty good hardware" include a capacitive digitizer so that 1. I can run applications that require Android Market, and 2. I don't have to either borrow my DS's stylus or press so hard I feel like I'm running the risk of breaking it?

Yes. Not all of them come with capacitive screens, but many do.

Re:...then pirate the Gapps

[tepples]

Almost all are not

And thus useless for check depositing. Chase Bank's deposit app for Android is exclusive to Android Market.

MIPS-based Ainol Novo 7 is Google certified

So how do I convince the publisher of an application that uses the NDK to offer a MIPS version of the same application? I haven't yet had a chance to try a MIPS tablet for myself, but I'm under the impression that the view of Android Market on such a tablet would be as barren as, say, the AppsLib that comes on eighth-generation Archos devices because most apps using the NDK are exclusive to ARM and thus hidden.

(Aside: Has my "trying to find the best affordable Android tablet" become "whining" yet? Should I stop now?)

Re:...then pirate the Gapps

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Android Apps run in a virtual machine. The backend is invisible to them.

Re:...then pirate the Gapps

[dmesg0]

And thus useless for check depositing. Chase Bank's deposit app for Android is exclusive to Android Market.

A few minutes on slatedroid, half an hour of effort and your favorite Chinese tablet is running the full market. And please don't tell me time is money, your mere presence here proves otherwise.

So how do I convince the publisher of an application that uses the NDK to offer a MIPS version of the same application? I haven't yet had a chance to try a MIPS tablet for myself, but I'm under the impression that the view of Android Market on such a tablet would be as barren as, say, the AppsLib that comes on eighth-generation Archos devices because most apps using the NDK are exclusive to ARM and thus hidden.

I never recommended buying a MIPS tablet, just answered your certification question. Though I guess for basic uses like web browsing, it should be fine.

(Aside: Has my "trying to find the best affordable Android tablet" become "whining" yet? Should I stop now?)

I would say yes. Though it looks to me like you are trying to convince yourself not to grab one of these 100$ tablets. Good luck with that, it's not easy. I failed 3 times :)

Re:...then pirate the Gapps

[tepples]

Most Android Apps run in a virtual machine.

Android apps written exclusively for Android or ported from Java ME are usually written in 100% pure Java. Android apps ported from other platforms will more often use the NDK because as I understand it, the Dalvik virtual machine can't run C++.

Re:...then pirate the Gapps

[DdJ]

A few minutes on slatedroid, half an hour of effort and your favorite Chinese tablet is running the full market.

Alas, not (unarguably) legally.

My only Android device is a Nook Color. Yes, I've got CM7 installed on a microSD card. But have you noticed that CM doesn't come with marketplace? Know why?

Yes, if you install CM on a device that originally came with marketplace, it's pretty well agreed upon that it's legal to back up that copy of marketplace, install CM, and then restore the marketplace. But my Nook Color never came with marketplace.

Some folks argue that if you have another Android device that has the Google apps (including marketplace), it's kosher to back them up from that device and restore them to a device that didn't have it, as long as they're both your devices. I actually do buy that argument. But, I have no other Android devices, so that argument does not apply to me.

There is no legal way for me to install the Google marketplace app on my own Nook Color, rooted or not, CM7 or not. If I'm unwilling to entertain the possibility of piracy, what are my options?

Fortunately, Amazon's Android marketplace is freely downloadable from Amazon's web servers. That lets me get a bunch of software without doing anything that anyone would interpret as piracy, so, when I'm running CyanogenMod, that's where all my apps come from. I simply have no other realistic option.

I do wish Google would say "look, it's okay to install this stuff, here's a spot where you can download it from, go nuts, as long as it's just for your own personal use and you're not repackaging it". I'd do so, and Google (and developers in the marketplace) would start getting some of my money. But as things stand, well, if Google doesn't want my money, okay, that's their call.

Re:...then pirate the Gapps

[dmesg0]

If Google really minded unauthorized Market access, wouldn't they do anything to prevent it? Apparently it doesn't bother them: the same hacks that worked a year ago, still do today. Obviously, they don't want shady manufacturers to pre-install Market on bad hardware and damage Android reputation, but they don't care if experienced users do it at their own risk and know the limitations.

Are you trying to be more catholic than the Pope?

Re:...then pirate the Gapps

[DdJ]

I don't know what you mean by "more catholic than the Pope" here.

Google has never made it clear that they do not mind unauthorized Market access. If they authorized it, I'd install it. But, were you around when the UNISYS patent came out of nowhere and nailed all the GIF users? I'm not going to start using something that I know has intellectual property landmines in it, trusting that the IP-owner is going to be reasonable. Been burned that way before.

They can make it clear that the use is authorized, or I can ignore it and use something else. Not going to risk it.

Follow the money

[MonsterTrimble]

First off, is anyone surprised? As a business, I'm making sure:
1) That people don't try to return the product when they screw it up doing something that the product wasn't intended to do (and it costs me money)
2) That I eliminate a potential attack vector for malware which would lead to decreased sales and increased returns (which costs me money)
3) That people are locked into using my products (which makes me money)

This is all about the money people. This isn't about trying to screw over the 0.1% of people who buy the tablet - It's about maximizing the profits. And let's be realistic here - they will be recracked in short order.

Re:Follow the money

[betterunixthanunix]

That people don't try to return the product when they screw it up doing something that the product wasn't intended to do

It is a computer, not a hammer. Since when do we declare that a computer is "not intended" to do something in software? If people were complaining that their Nook could not solve the Post correspondence problem, you would have a point.

Re:Follow the money

[betterunixthanunix]

Also, I do not mean to come off as rude or angry, but phrases like "the computer is not supposed to be used for this software" are problematic.

Re:Follow the money

[tepples]

That people don't try to return the product when they screw it up doing something that the product wasn't intended to do (and it costs me money)

The proper way to fix this isn't to block all rooting but to provide a working recovery means to reset the operating system to factory state, restore applications from the market, and restore the user's data from automatic backup. Then figure out a way to segregate the user's data so that it doesn't have to be restored as often; the "/sdcard" partition in some Android devices has worked well for this.

That I eliminate a potential attack vector for malware

You can't neutralize malware without first defining malware. This involves enumerating the possible bad things that malicious software can do. Does this list of bad things miss anything?

Re:Follow the money

[Registered Coward v2]

That people don't try to return the product when they screw it up doing something that the product wasn't intended to do

It is a computer, not a hammer. Since when do we declare that a computer is "not intended" to do something in software? If people were complaining that their Nook could not solve the Post correspondence problem, you would have a point.

Neither company advertises there reader as anything but a reader designed to run their software. Just because it was capable of being rooted doesn't mean they have to continue to allow it to be rooted or that they are taking anything away. You are free to buy someone else's product or not upgrade yours and live with the capabilities and limitations of the current setup.

You are still also free to try to root the device or otherwise modify it - but neither company has any obligation to make it easy to do that. It's their product, their choice on what capabilities to include, and you choice wether or not to buy it based on those capabilities. If you buy it for an unadvertised capability then you're on your own if it goes away.

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

(Posting AC because I'm at work...)

It is a computer...

No. It is not. If you want a computer, buy a computer. The Nook and Kindle Fire are consumer devices in the same way that your DVD player or fridge or XBox are consumer devices - the fact that they have computers and might be hackable to do more than the manufacturer intended is irrelevant and does not make them computers. Want a computer? Buy a computer. Don't buy a consumer device and then complain that it's not a computer.

Re:Follow the money

[LWATCDR]

Everything just about is a computer or has a computer in it.
That is where things get fuzzy. Should you have the ability to change the software on all of them. Take cars for example. They have lots of computers. Lots of people will reprogram the ECM but what about the CPU that controls the anitlock brakes?
I am all for the hacking of devices but I can see the manufactures point of view. They made a devices that does xyz and sells it as doing xyz. They never told you that you could root it.
At least the Fire allows third party apps to be side loaded.

Re:Follow the money

[betterunixthanunix]

you're on your own if [the ability to root your computer] goes away.

It did not "go away," it was deliberately disabled by these companies. It is a computer, nothing less, and we have every reason to expect the ability to run any software we want on our computers.

Re:Follow the money

[betterunixthanunix]

Should you have the ability to change the software on all of them

Yes.

Lots of people will reprogram the ECM but what about the CPU that controls the anitlock brakes?

As long as they do not make their vehicle unsafe for the road, why would that be a problem? We require cars to pass inspection for this reason. Why should someone be forbidden from hacking their brakes?

Re:Follow the money

[LWATCDR]

Allow or make it easy?
The point is that Amazon and BN sold these devices as being abile to do certain things. As long as they do those things they are keeping their side of the bargain.

Re:Follow the money

[KhabaLox]

Neither company advertises there reader as anything but a reader designed to run their software.

Slight quibble - I think Amazon positions the Fire as more than just a reader. It's definitely a tablet.

Re:Follow the money

[Dog-Cow]

You are assuming that just because it can be used as a general-purpose computer that it must be. That's just selfishness and greediness talking.

Go build your own tablet, with your own OS or mod of Android, and call it a day.

I don't in any way support usage of the Legal system to stop you from hacking your own hardware, but I take exception to people expecting companies to hand them their pet desires on a silver platter. If you don't like what's being offered, tough shit. Do it yourself.

Re:Follow the money

[Dog-Cow]

and we have every reason to expect the ability to run any software we want on our computers.

Why?

Re:Follow the money

[KhabaLox]

Why should someone be forbidden from hacking their brakes?

Why should a company be forced to make it easy for someone to hack their brakes?

But more to the point, you aren't forbidden from hacking your brakes/tablet. I mean, was a law passed that expressly forbids the hacking of tablets and other hardware you own? Like someone said earlier, this is the company making a decision about their product because of how it affects their bottom line. Amazon isn't selling Fires at a loss so hackers can get a piece of cheap hardware to do whatever they want with it. They are selling it to get people to buy stuff from them.

To put it another way, should Sony, MS or Nintendo be forced to allow other game formats to run on their consoles? No, they use proprietrary formats so that they can extract licensing revenue from game makers. There is no legal or ethical justification to force them to use an open game format. Apple and MS went through this in the PC market (thought there's a lot more going on there). There are open tablets from Asia that you can buy. Go buy one. Don't complain that every single tablet in the world isn't 100% open.

Re:Follow the money

[Dog-Cow]

Do you not live in the US? I have never had my car inspected for safety, despite registering each year of the last 18. Perhaps some states require it, but certainly not all do.

Re:Follow the money

[BasilBrush]

It is a computer, not a hammer. Since when do we declare that a computer is "not intended" to do something in software?

Well at least since console manufacturers started selling consoles at no-profit or even a loss, in order to make profit on game licenses. And the DMCA provides them with legal backing for that model.

Amazon is using the same model. They are supplying a no-profit tablet in order to make money on media consumed.

If you want a truly open device, you should expect to pay more money for it.

Re:Follow the money

[hawguy]

Neither company advertises there reader as anything but a reader designed to run their software.

Slight quibble - I think Amazon positions the Fire as more than just a reader. It's definitely a tablet.

I think they position it as a reader that has access to a wide variety of Amazon content. They don't say it's a general purpose tablet:

kindlefire
Web, movies, apps, games, reading and more

19 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books
Thousands of popular apps and games, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora, and more
Ultra-fast web browsing - Amazon Silk
Free cloud storage for all your Amazon content
Vibrant color touchscreen with extra-wide viewing angle - same as an iPad
Fast, powerful dual-core processor
Favorite children's books, graphic novels, and magazines in rich color

The only time they even mention Android is:

The Kindle Fire is a 7-inch tablet that links seamlessly with Amazon's impressive collection of
digital music, video, magazine, and book services in one easy-to-use package. It boasts a great
Web browser, and its curated Android app store includes most of the big must-have apps
(such as Netflix, Pandora, and Hulu)

and

Additional email apps are available in our Amazon Appstore for Android.

Re:Follow the money

[bws111]

They modified their software so it only does things they want it to. They did not modify the so-called computer. If you want to pretend a Kindle is a general-purpose computer, then treat it like one. Only load your own software and software you trust. You have zero reasonable expectation that the software provided by Amazon (or anyone else) will do or be usable for anything other than what they say.

Re:Follow the money

[hawguy]

That people don't try to return the product when they screw it up doing something that the product wasn't intended to do (and it costs me money)

The proper way to fix this isn't to block all rooting but to provide a working recovery means to reset the operating system to factory state, restore applications from the market, and restore the user's data from automatic backup. Then figure out a way to segregate the user's data so that it doesn't have to be restored as often; the "/sdcard" partition in some Android devices has worked well for this.

If you want to start a company to create a hobbyist tablet that is safe for rooting and experimentation, you should go ahead. But don't expect Amazon (or B&N) to sell a tablet designed to sell their own content while at the same time supporting your desire to run a different operating system on it.

They are selling it at close to the manufacturing cost (or possibly below cost) because they are counting on it to bring in revenue. B&N doesn't want you rooting it and installing the Kindle App, or vice-versa.

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

Only some states require it. North Carolina does require it while South Carolina does not, thus my car is registered in South Carolina so I have one less thing to worry about.

Re:Follow the money

[toriver]

Then don't install the update that removes the option. After all it's your hardware. But Amazon's and B&N's services.

Nothing prevents you from running whatever you want on it, you just need to accept that they have no obligation to make it easy to use it in a different manner than they prefer.

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

B&N doesn't want you rooting it and installing the Kindle App, or vice-versa.

Who gives a shit what they want, you own the hardware, you can do whatever you want with it.

Re:Follow the money

[yurtinus]

Dog-Cow is rewriting history to conceal the truth...

The whole reason this is even up for discussion is that the Nook used to allow fairly easy rooting. Although not advertised, that was a *feature* that was a deciding factor for many people when purchasing a tablet (myself included). The story here isn't that the Nook disallows root access - it's that you could before, but now you can't and a lot of people are not pleased about it.

Barne's and Noble is absolutely within their rights to do this to their products (though whether it is allowed on a "push" upgrade is up for debate by smarter people than myself). That's not why we're talking about it, though. The reason we talk about it is so that B&N knows that we don't like that decision. When a company that builds something you like makes a change that you don't, you don't have to just roll over and accept it. There's nothing wrong with saying "hey, I don't like what you did there." It's all just more feedback they can take into their next updates.

Re:Follow the money

[hawguy]

B&N doesn't want you rooting it and installing the Kindle App, or vice-versa.

Who gives a shit what they want, you own the hardware, you can do whatever you want with it.

Except that what you bought was a Kindle Fire, not an Android Tablet. Amazon is under no obligation to provide you with a general purpose Android Tablet.

If you bought a talking doll, Mattel doesn't have to provide you with any means to open up the baby to alter the voice. You may figure out how to do so by cutting open the doll, but Mattel doesn't have to provide a means to reprogram the voice chip.

If Amazon sold you a Amazon Car, they could use a proprietary gas tank fitting that only works at Amazon gas stations. And they could even design the engine such that it only works with Amazon branded gas. They might sell the car at a discount, in the belief that you'll be buying all of your gas at Amazon so they'll make up the money there.

You bought the car, and while you might be able to figure out how to tear out the engine (which fits in the car like a puzzle) and replace it with a CyanogenMod engine, Amazon doesn't have to sell you the patented tools that you'd need to fit their proprietary fasteners to take the old engine out.

As long as you didn't think you were getting a general purpose car that could use any brand of gas, they didn't do anything wrong. Some customers don't want to be tied to Amazon for their gas, so they'll buy gas elsewhere. Other people are happy with getting the car at a good discount and don't mind having to buy Amazon gas (many are already buying Amazon gas for their expensive iCar, so they figure they may as well get the cheap Amazon car as their second car)

Well actually, I'm not sure the car analogy applies, I think there are laws about dealer lock-in for car maintenance. Maybe replace "car" with "airplane".

Re:Follow the money

[KhabaLox]

From your own quote, they position it as a reader 5th after a vehicle to get "Web, movies, apps, games."

They list movies, TV and music before books.

Then they call it a "7-inch tablet", not a "7-inch reader"

Re:Follow the money

[disbroc]

You and maybe others might not care about what they want to do with this item, and I do understand your view that you own the hardware and do not care what the companies desires are. Well why should the company care what you, a small percentage of users want to do to the hardware? They are going to lock it down to try and protect their revenue streams. If they can not do this or do not have the ability you can expect the prices on these items to rise and then you would be throwing a fit that the price isnt as attractive. If you can get the item at a cheap price you should expect that there is going to be a reason. This is a company, not a charity, they are selling this product at very low margins to try and generate revenue off of other items. If they could not expect to generate revenue off of other items, you are going to have to pay more for the item. Which way would you rather have it?

Re:Follow the money

[hawguy]

From your own quote, they position it as a reader 5th after a vehicle to get "Web, movies, apps, games."

They list movies, TV and music before books.

Then they call it a "7-inch tablet", not a "7-inch reader"

Tablet is a formfactor, not a capability:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer

A tablet computer, or a tablet, is a mobile computer, larger than a mobile phone or personal digital assistant, integrated into a flat touch screen and primarily operated by touching the screen rather than using a physical keyboard. It often uses an onscreen virtual keyboard, a passive stylus pen, or a digital pen.

Note that the definition is not "A tablet is an open-standard mobile computer, allowing the user to run any operating system he chooses".

The iPad is still a tablet even if it's locked down.

Re:Follow the money

[iceaxe]

I really don't think there's a problem with telling companies what we would like for their products to do. Whether they meet those requests or not is up to them, and we, the consumers, will either purchase or not purchase their products in response.

Squeaky wheel gets the grease, and all that jazz, you know?

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

If you do this and you live in NC and spend most of your time in NC it's probably illegal. And you're not doing anybody any favors by actively -avoiding- safety inspections.

Re:Follow the money

[KhabaLox]

Meh... we don't disagree. My original point was that the Fire is not positioned as an eReader, but rather as a tablet. The original Kindle is not a tablet - there is a difference. Tablets, like all computers (mobile or not), can be used to read electronic books. But eReaders cannot (generally - there may be exceptions) watch movies, surf the web, run (a wide variety of 3rd party) apps, etc.

Like a said, it was a very minor quibble with the G...GP.

Re:Follow the money

[betterunixthanunix]

I think perhaps you should take a moment to read the definition of "computer" and then tell me how a Kindle Fire does not meet that definition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

1) I agreed to the now non-existent terms of service. 2) Fuck your attack vector (SEE ABOVE).3)Yes that's the bottom line........Here is the problem: I agreed to take my warranty out in order to OWN my hardware. They did a OTA update VIOLATING that agreement.I think I can get my $200.00 back due to BREACH OF CONTRACT. Its that simple actually.

I don't know how I ended up typing that

[tepples]

1. I can run applications that require Android Market,

I don't know how I ended up typing that and missing it on preview. I meant "1. I can run applications that require multitouch,"

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[poena.dare]

I have a real faux Android tablet called an HPTouchPad. It's sweet!

Had a rooted NC

[Anonymous Coward]

I had my rooted NC for several months.

I went back to factory a couple of weeks ago, before the 1.4.1 upgrade, because it simply works better.

Re:Had a rooted NC

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed 1.4.1 this week and have CM7.1 running on an SD Card. I have to say that I like having both options available, though I'd wish that BN would bump the speed up on the Nook Color when Netflix is running, I run at 1.2GHz with no heat problems at all under CM.

Re:Had a rooted NC

[Anonymous Coward]

I just got tired of having BS phone apps there that couldn't be used, and the greatly reduced battery life.

I'm not worried...

[Anonymous Coward]

The community will have it rooted again in 10 seconds flat.

Get a tablet - not an LCD eReader

[walterbyrd]

If you want an eInk reader, then fine get a dedicated eReader. Otherwise get an Adroid tablet, not an LCD eReader.

A year ago, getting something that you could convert to a decent $250 Android tablet was a BFD. Today, not so much.

There were all kinds of great Black Friday deals: Acer Iconia for $200 and so on. You can still get a Vizio 8 at Costco for $189, or a Lenovo Idiapad A1 at Amazon for $199.

Get a real tablet and you are not vendor-locked. You can read any format you want, without excessive hacking. Plus tablets have way more features, like GPS, and cameras.

Re:Get a tablet - not an LCD eReader

[DavidTC]

I have no idea what the hell the point of 'color' ereaders are.

It's like we live in a world where there are two kinds of vehicles. Everyone either drives a enclosed electric golf cart, which is a good pollution-less short-range cheap vehicle, or a gas-powered car, which is more expensive but has a 300 mile range and is much faster and can carry more.

And then vendors inexplicably start selling cars as 'gas powered golf cars', in the golf cart market. They've crippled these cars so they only have a range of golf cart, although admittedly they can carry more. However, they have all the disadvantages of the cars such as requiring gas stations and polluting, and the price of the crippled cars isn't much less than the price of an actual car. (A price difference that apparently is supposed to be made in the marked up price of accessories.)

I really have to question the market here. The actual market for 'color ereaders' that I see is people who want a cheap tablet.

People who actually want an ereader, as in, a device to read a book on, seem to actually want eInk.

But instead we've decide to have a war where people uncripple their 'golf cart' cars and the manufacturer tries to stop it.

I say this, ironically, as someone who owned a Nook Simple Touch...that I've rooted. (The eInks are much easier to root, apparently. Just need an SD card.) But I didn't do it to make it a tablet, I did it to make it a better ereader.

Re:Get a tablet - not an LCD eReader

[DdJ]

I think you're missing two things:

1) There are people who want a backlit color LCD display even for simple reading. While many people have eyes that are better off staring at e-ink, there are also many people for whom e-ink has problems, for whom looking at a backlit LCD is actually better. (Both I and Charlie Stross happen to be in that set. I recommend everyone try both -- forget propaganda/marketing, you need to figure out what's better for your eyes, under your reading conditions. Trust no one, test it yourself.)

2) There are people, and a lot of them, who want more than an e-reader, but less than a tablet. They want to consume not just B&W text, but color text, and in particular animations.

To elaborate on #2: a slate that can run e-reader software plus colorful animated "Dr. Seuss" books plus Netflix and Hulu is not (necessarily) a full tablet. A full-fledged tablet can do more than just consume content, and some people do just want to consume content (but more content than just books).

Re:Get a tablet - not an LCD eReader

[Crookdotter]

I'd like a colour e-ink reader. Mostly for B/W reading, but the odd comic like the walking dead would be cool. LCD, no, don't want it.

Re:Get a tablet - not an LCD eReader

[ceoyoyo]

Colour books?

Re:Get a tablet - not an LCD eReader

[walterbyrd]

There are people, and a lot of them, who want more than an e-reader, but less than a tablet

Why would you want less than a tablet? The extra features in tablet do you no harm. Why be vendor locked? Why be locked into one format? What good does that do you?

Tablets are faster, cheaper, have far more features, and are no more difficult to use. Why bother with the walled gardens?

Re:Get a tablet - not an LCD eReader

[idontgno]

As far as I can tell, to avoid spending money on "far more features" they'll never use.

There's a convenience factor, too. Walled gardens facilitate media consumption within the walls as much as they inconvenience any activity outside the sanction of the walls.

Stallman-esque freedom isn't very useful for a lot of people. If all they do is consume, a seamless consumption environment is fine.

Re:Get a tablet - not an LCD eReader

[DdJ]

Tablets are faster, cheaper, have far more features, and are no more difficult to use.

Can you send me a pointer to a full tablet that's faster, cheaper, has more features, and is no more difficult to use than a Nook Color, please? I've never seen or heard of one, myself.

Re:Get a tablet - not an LCD eReader

[Anonymous Coward]

You have never purchased a decent art or gaming book have you?

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[Anon-Admin]

I have several FlyTouch pads from China. The new ones are dual touch with 1ghz processors in a 7" format and are running around 80$ including shipping. They are google Android and they will send you the android image. Re-flashing is as easy as putting the image on an sd card and booting the unit with the sd card in it.

Not the greatest in the world but they are very good for around the house network access, book reading, hacking, etc.

Re:Happy Holidays from the Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lurk Moar

Classes in the kernel?

[Viol8]

The linux kernel is written in C, not C++ so how did they manage that?

Re:Classes in the kernel?

[Dog-Cow]

There are lots of classes in the kernel. Learn something about CS before assuming that C can't do classes.

Re:Classes in the kernel?

[Viol8]

C can't do proper OO classes so there are precisely zero in the linux kernel. Sure you can use structs and mangle something together with function pointers to simulate methods and varargs to knock up some hideous facsimile of polymorphism , but good luck with inheritence. As for having various auto constructors/destructors.... yeah well...

Wrt learning CS, I already had a CS degree while you were still dribbling babyfood over your dads 486.

Re:Classes in the kernel?

[Viol8]

C can't do proper OO style classes so there are precisely zero in the linux kernel. Some function pointers to mimic methods and some hideous varags mashup to create a facsimile of polymorphism does not create a proper class. As for inheritence and auto constructors & destructors , good luck!

Wrt to learningCS , I had a CS degree while you were probably still dribbling babyfood over your dads 486 sonny.

Re:Classes in the kernel?

[flyingfsck]

Class is the ability to recognize quality, without consulting the price tag.

Re:Classes in the kernel?

[PaladinAlpha]

I have, for clients, written header libraries for C which create fully polymorphic, inheritable "classes" with automatic (for heap allocation) construction/destruction, with comparable-to-C++ overhead. No varargs required. I redid it ten years later in one file using the Boost preprocessor library. Hell, nowadays anyone could do it with some of the stuff in there. Name mangling is trivial. It's actually kind of amazing.

Anyway, C can do everything almost exactly as well as the computer itself can. (Disclaimer: I much prefer writing code in C++ for money or Haskell for fun.)

Re:Classes in the kernel?

[Viol8]

Sure, you can all sorts of fun and games with the pre processor that just includes huge macros into a program to mimic OO, but that doesn't mean C itself natively supports it. Using that argument you could say C supports functional programming or horn clauses because you could get the preprocessor to #include a load of macros that appear to do it.

Re:Classes in the kernel?

[PaladinAlpha]

Well, yeah, you can say that, because unlike most languages, the preprocessor in C is part of the standard. Talking about using C without the CPP is like talking about using Java without using the JVM -- it's rather missing the point, I think.

Not that preprocessor use and abuse is a great thing, or that really complicated macros are a generally acceptable solution -- but in some circumstances, when they're clearly documented and everyone knows the limitations, they can save thousands of lines of code.

As an academic exercise, though, you can do PP-free polymorphic objects by having a pointer to a virtual function table at the beginning of a struct and re-declaring inherited members. That actually buys you a little over C++ as you have explicit bitcopy semantics. You get code like: myShoe->v[putOnFoot](myShoe, me); which is pretty readable.

Automatic calling of constructors and destructors are responsibilities of allocators; providing custom malloc and free can solve that, although if you really want 0 lines of preprocessor you'd want to pass it a pointer to a constructor when you initialize.

Perfectly possible. Easy, even.

Right to Read

[mounthood]

In-case anyone hasn't read the Richard Stallman story: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

From the authors notes:

One of the ideas in the story was not proposed in reality until 2002. This is the idea that the FBI and Microsoft will keep the root passwords for your personal computers, and not let you have them.

The proponents of this scheme have given it names such as “trusted computing” and “Palladium”. We call it “treacherous computing” ...

The 1997 prediction, proposed in 2002, is reality in 2011. The big surprise is that the implementation isn't a technical DRM/TC scheme, but a fundamental change in corporations retaining ownership and control of items after they've been sold. Who could have predicted that?

Re:Right to Read

[Howard Beale]

Damn, just lost my mod points. Mod parent UP!

Re:Right to Read

[abigsmurf]

That would be prophetic... if it wasn't for the fact that DVD players at that time already had private keys kept away from their owners and that the current generation of games consoles at that time were also locked down.

Trusted Computing? Despite people like him getting hysterical about it, it still remains a feature designed for businesses who can turn it on if they wish to have the added security it provides, not something ever designed for consumer use.

Slow on one prediction, incorrect on another.

Re:Right to Read

[Anonymous Coward]

and there isn't one for "bat-shit insane drivel".

A shame, too, as this would be the mod most applied to your posts.

Re:Right to Read

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're the big stupid-head!

Re:Right to Read

[sunderland56]

The device we are discussing here is a book reader. An appliance. It is not meant as a general purpose computer.

There are CPUs running code in my TV set, my microwave oven, and my coffee maker. I don't have the root password for any of those, but it doesn't particularly bother me.

Re:Right to Read

[Anne Thwacks]

Mod parent +1 sane batshit

Re:Right to Read

[Anne Thwacks]

Please, where can I find how to root my microwave? I really want it to play mp3s when the food is cooked!

Re:Right to Read

[swillden]

The device we are discussing here is a book reader.

Making Stallman's "Right to Read" story particularly appropriate.

Re:Right to Read

[ceoyoyo]

DVD players, cell phones, routers, TVs, calculators. All of these things have had operating systems since the nineties (or earlier) and very few have ever given root access to the end user. Some people get excited about it now because the operating systems are more sophisticated, and are based on OSes that, when installed on a desktop, DO give the user root access.

Ownership after sale? It's silly. None of these devices are sold as offering root access. Sometimes you can get it, by exploiting bugs. Later updates might fix those bugs, but you don't have to install them.

A class in C++ is a fancy name for a struct

[tepples]

It's just a couple of already written classes in the kernel

The linux kernel is written in C, not C++ so how did they manage that?

A class in C++ is a fancy name for a struct. The only difference between the two keywords is whether the first member is public or private, and best practice overrides that anyway. So allow me to rephrase: "It's just a couple of already written structs in the kernel."

In practice, C++ programmers use the keyword struct to denote that a particular class is plain old data, and they use class to denote that a particular struct has virtual methods, such as a non-empty destructor, and thus can't be used in a union or in a C++ module's C API.

Re:A class in C++ is a fancy name for a struct

[Viol8]

Thanks for the heads up but I've done C++ for the last 15 years. A C struct is NOT the same as a C++ struct because it can't inherit and it doesn't have methods , only the option of function pointers, but thanks for playing.

Re:A class in C++ is a fancy name for a struct

[tepples]

A C struct is NOT the same as a C++ struct

I didn't say it was. The first paragraph was about C++ and C++ only. The second paragraph mentioned that people use class to denote such types that use features not in C.

thanks for playing

What exactly is this supposed to mean? Am I on a game show?

Re:A class in C++ is a fancy name for a struct

[Viol8]

"I didn't say it was."

You say the linux kernel has classes in it. It doesn't. A C struct is not and never will be any sort of class. Its a data structure, end of.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[Dog-Cow]

What is the relevance of an affordable, certified "real Android tablet" to the Kindle Fire or the Nook? Just because there isn't a product on the market that satisfies your desire to not pay anything doesn't mean that Amazon and B&N have to satisfy your thriftiness by opening up their tablets.

Re:Happy Holidays from the Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the best trolls I've seen a while. People fall for it every damn time!

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[Tsingi]

What is the relevance of an affordable, certified "real Android tablet" to the Kindle Fire or the Nook? Just because there isn't a product on the market that satisfies your desire to not pay anything doesn't mean that Amazon and B&N have to satisfy your thriftiness by opening up their tablets.

Absolutely right. If B&N and Amazon want to sell you hardware that you don't 'own' in the traditional sense, there is nothing forcing you to buy it.

Eminent Domain

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget about "eminent domain". Government can seize your home for any reason, whenever they please.

Re:Happy Holidays from the Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. The reply almost certainly came from the same A.C. who posted the original comment.

Lockdown is good and necessary

[cdrguru]

There are a number of exposure vectors for stuff like this. Certainly the average user does not want something that they buy/download to gain additional privileges and do unexpected things. Anything that makes that less likely is going to be required.

I believe these devices are WiFi only and do not have a great deal of radio power, but you can believe anything with a cell radio in it is going to be locked down as tightly as necessary to absolutely prevent changing radio parameters. The first hacker that gets into a cell radio and shows the world how they can disrupt cell communications in their corner of the world will prove the need for this kind of lockdown beyond any doubt. But I don't see how this would apply to these devices.

Certainly both devices are sold either at a loss or at a very, very thin margin with the expectation that they will be used to buy stuff from the parent company and mostly the parent company. Overall, Amazon has been quite generous with the Kindle line - supporting the 3G wireless access for web browsing, email reading, etc. Yes, you can download non-Amazon books through the Amazon-supported wireless access. I suspect with the Fire the capabilities are there to access free and paid content outside of Amazon, but the Amazon stuff is easier to get to. I have no idea what sort of capabilities the Nook has, but I am guessing both have NetFlix access just as an example. So the devices aren't really "owned" by their parent but the expectation that there will be future profits affect the price of the devices. Similar devices are normally priced a bit higher - as much as 50%.

I do not think the parent "subsidy" is the reason for the lockdown as to the average consumer they are no more locked down now than before. If you can still pay NetFlix and watch movies on the device, then it isn't locked to only Amazon or B&N content.

I think the only explanation that is reasonable is the absolute very last thing they want is any sort of downloaded software making its way onto one of these devices and taking it over. Anything that prevents that or makes it less likely is going get pushed out to the user community. Anyone criticizing this doesn't understand the risks or the incredible backlash that would follow from an exploit on one of these devices.

Re:Lockdown is good and necessary

[Microlith]

Lockdown is fine, but when the lockdown puts the owner of the device in jail then it's crossing the line.

you can believe anything with a cell radio in it is going to be locked down as tightly as necessary to absolutely prevent changing radio parameters.

Baseband radios tend to be locked down yes. But there's no need for the application processor environment (android, etc.) does not need to be locked down beyond necessary security features. Well, no need beyond pro-corporate BS and control.

The first hacker that gets into a cell radio and shows the world how they can disrupt cell communications in their corner of the world will prove the need for this kind of lockdown beyond any doubt.

Nonsense. Utter and complete (hint: it would have happened by now.)

I do not think the parent "subsidy" is the reason for the lockdown

There's no other reason for such lockdown. People are buying a $200 tool by which Amazon gets expedited access to your wallet.

I think the only explanation that is reasonable is the absolute very last thing they want is any sort of downloaded software making its way onto one of these devices and taking it over.

No, they want you to be stuck in their garden.

Anyone criticizing this doesn't understand the risks or the incredible backlash that would follow from an exploit on one of these devices.

The criticism is the same: They sell crippled devices stuck in a walled garden and give users no legitimate out. And then useful fools come and defend their behavior screaming "omg buy something else" as this BS spreads.

Re:Lockdown is good and necessary

[bws111]

It is your device, you can in fact do anything you want with it. Don't like what Amazon's software does? Fine, don't run their software. Exactly what makes you think anyone is under any obligation to make a piece of software behave how YOU want it to?

Exhaustion

[tepples]

How do I get it home from the store?

Once a copyright owner has authorized the making and distribution of a particular product embodying a copyrighted work or patented invention within the United States, the exclusive distribution right is considered "exhausted", and further distribution of the same product within the United States is not an infringement of copyright. For copyrights, see 17 USC 109; for patents, see Keeler v. Standard Folding Bed Co., 157 U.S. 659, 666–67 (1895). The only exception for copyrighted works is when a for-profit entity lends a phonorecord (copy of a sound recording) or a copy of a computer program, unless the program is for a game console or embedded in an appliance.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dealextreme.com/c/tablets-1409

Any of those should do. I just bought a couple of these myself in preference to the Fire:

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/7-capacitive-screen-android-2-3-tablet-pc-w-dual-camera-wifi-bluetooth-hdmi-tf-1ghz-4gb-107665

If you want to root the device

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why would you upgrade it? I mean, rooting it sort of replaces the normal software with a new bit of it, so therefore you don't need the upgrade and if you want to root it then just don't upgrade it. Problem solved. The rest of us don't care all that much about that "Feature".

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[Microlith]

Can you get the source code for the GPL bits?

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[DrXym]

Which affordable, certified "real Android tablet" in the 7 to 8 inch range do you recommend instead of a Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet? Or are Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet like game consoles, sold at razor-thin margins or even at a loss to get people onto the manufacturer's store, and that's why they're so much cheaper than Google-certified devices?

They're coming. Of course if you're absolutely desperate for a tablet from a brand then $200-250 is probably the best you can hope for right now. But I expect next year the market will be flooded with tablets from $100 up running Ice Cream Sandwich or its successor.

Just compensation

[tepples]

In the United States, a taking under the Fifth Amendment requires just compensation. The government takes my house, and it gives me its fair market value to be put toward a replacement.

Re:Just compensation

[oxdas]

Of course, you don't get to decide what constitutes fair market value.

Re:Just compensation

[tepples]

Some jurisdictions' eminent domain procedures reimburse the property owner for an appraisal.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[nomadic]

You can do whatever you want to them, so yes, you do own in a traditional sense. They're not required to make it easy for you to root.

Refusal to deal

[tepples]

There is no legal or ethical justification to force [Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo] to use an open game format.

If you don't agree with the restrictions on a Nook Tablet, you can always buy an Archos 80 G9 instead. But there are no competing video game console makers that use open formats. So if Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo conspire to forbid a particular game from appearing on any console, why isn't that predatory refusal to deal?

Re:Refusal to deal

[KhabaLox]

You could make an argument that it would be, but that's somewhat of a straw man, isn't it?

If Sony, MS and Nintendo blacklist a game, that doesn't prevent someone from selling an "open" console (like a PC) that the game maker could then publish to. Barriers to entry aren't *that* high.

To root or not to root...

[pebbles061679]

That was the question I went through just a couple days ago. I bought the NC because I could get it cheaper than the Kindle Fire and the reviews for the Fire said it was crap. The ONLY reason I decided to root it was so I could download the Kindle App. I wanted an eReader because I can rent the textbooks I would plan to resell anyway for less than I can find them used and don't have to deal with the hassle of reselling. Amazon rents for way cheaper than B&N and most 3rd parties. I realize locking in is about profits, but I'm not going to pay above a certain price for things either way.

Re:Happy Holidays from the Golden Girls!

[Megane]

It's a classic troll like those from the dawn of internet trolling, alt.religion.kibology circa 1993. Ah, the good old days of cross-posting about "Majel Barrett Shatner" and "the fifth Beable", both to the appropriate newsgroup for the show, and a.r.k for the audience.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[Tsingi]

The point is arguable. If you wish to by disabled hardware, yes it is your right to do so. I suppose it is their right to sell you broken stuff, even if they broke it on purpose.

I'll stick by my point, it is my right not to buy products that the vendor screws up on purpose.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[yurtinus]

Lenovo IdeaPad A1 - 7", webcam + mic, offline GPS, $249. I'm still fighting the urge to replace my first generation Nook Color with one of these...

Pirate Party should start a device business

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is such a great market for rooted devices and it's always a battle with manufacturers and service providers why is there not a manufacturer or service provider who simply sell fully open and rooted devices.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[Entropius]

They're not required to, no. But then I am not required to like it, and I can post on Slashdot saying "I don't like it, and I'm not going to buy one, and you shouldn't too."

Just because they're not legally prohibited from trying to prevent people from rooting their devices doesn't mean that people can't publically condemn them for it.

That's not the claim or logic.

[Fujisawa Sensei]

That's not the claim that's made:

Remember, Amazon makes no profit on the Fire -some even claim it comes at a loss-

And I say this is only speculation based on advertized prices, and not the contracted rates Amazon gets.

Also the none of the NT, NC, or Fire are double the price of any other hardware.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[nomadic]

I was taking issue with a ownership definition that I thought was incorrect, not saying someone should not be able to criticize certain design decisions.

Re: Car Analogy

[sunderland56]

Much better car analogy: some car manufacturer comes out with a model where, if you hit the driver's door with your hand in the right place, the door unlocks. Lots of people buy the car and enjoy it, since you don't need to carry the keys around with you. Then the car manufacturer fixes the fault, and many people cry foul. Everyone misses the point that it is a generally bad idea to allow criminals to trivially get in to your car, and that locks are a *good* thing.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[nomadic]

My point is simply you still "own" it in the traditional sense. You can strip it down to the molecular level, incinerate it, use it as a cutting board, etc.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[JStyle]

Galaxy Tab 7.7 and 8.9 are legit, certified "real Android tablets". Not as affordable, but great devices.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[Anon-Admin]

Last time I re-flashed one of them, they sent me a link to download the image and it was everything. Including the source. But I have not done that in about a year.

Re:Happy Holidays from the Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

U2

Nobody does that

[tepples]

If Sony, MS and Nintendo blacklist a game, that doesn't prevent someone from selling an "open" console (like a PC)

Other than the fact that gamers have a mental set against connecting a PC to a TV. (Others agree: 1 2 3 4 5) How should the developer of a video game convince people to overcome such a mental set and connect a PC to the TV to play a game?

Re:Nobody does that

[KhabaLox]

Make it the size of a PS3, ship it in molded plastic, pre-install a simple Linux based OS with a fixed menu GUI and call it a console.

The PS3 and XBox360 are, essentially, PCs. Before Sony changed it, you could install OtherOS on the PS3, right?

A rose by any other name....

Don't trust reviews written by morons

[yelvington]

I bought the NC because I could get it cheaper than the Kindle Fire and the reviews for the Fire said it was crap.

You made a mistake relying on bad reviews written by morons. I've looked at a lot of them. They're mostly immature Apple fanbois trashing the competition and/or ignorant "tech journalists" who are cutting and pasting other peoples' reviews. 90% of what you see on tech blogs is pure plagiarism with a lame excuse link buried at the bottom.

The truth is that the Kindle Fire is a really pleasant device, a great bargain, well-supported by Amazon (three OS updates so far) and with the 6.2.1 OS, quite snappy.

I have a Fire, and my daughter has the Nook Color. In terms of performance, responsiveness and usability, the Kindle is head and shoulders above the Color (which is last year's model). A much faster dual-core CPU is the biggest reason, but the display is also much brighter. The Nook Tablet, which is about $50 more, is arguably better hardware, but it's more limited on the media and software side. Both support Netflix. The Fire has more apps and the Amazon music and video, which is important if you are a Prime member but maybe not all that big a deal otherwise. The Fire lacks SD card support and has no microphone like the Nook Tablet.

For books, the Nook Android software is easily obtained and sideloaded on the Kindle Fire without rooting, so you have a choice. I'm not so sure that can be done the other way around.

The Kindle Fire 6.2.1 upgrade wipes and reconfigures the Android /system partition. This is an easy way to do the upgrade, but if you rooted your Fire in order to install the Google app framework, you'll suddenly discover that calendar and contact sync has gone away. Most of the other Google software works without requiring rooting, and it's simple to pull a backup off your Android phone that can be installed on the Kindle Fire.

The culprit here isn't Amazon, but rather Google, which is responsible for making its apps unavailable on the KF platform and for requiring that its application components be installed on the system partition. The only way to make the system partition writeable is to root the device.

There are some parts of the Fire UI that needed some work; the carousel in particular was jerky and not always responsive. That's fixed in 6.2.1. I also see reports that the Kindle Fire doesn't like flaky, crappy wifi routers (and there are a LOT of crap routers out there). I don't know how much of that might be fixed in the upgrade. My routers all work fine.

Where can you buy them?

[Viewsonic]

I see them on ebay, but shipping is ridiculous. Otherwise I see them on Amazon for almost $200.

Re:Where can you buy them?

[smart_ass]

Lots of stuff here:

http://www.uoften.com/

for crazy cheap and free shipping

Re:Where can you buy them?

[Phoghat]

WOT says "Danger Will Robison" red circles all over.I prefer buying from these guys . I've ordered from them and actually got what I've ordered. Really obsequious customer service also

I'm tired the adversarial relationship

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so tired of having an adversarial relationship with my hardware vendor.
First if was Sony with the "OtherOS" crap.
Now Barnes & Noble wants to dictate what I can & can't do with MY hardware.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[starfire83]

I'd argue that it is a vendor's right and responsibility to plug security holes in their products whether it's hardware, software, or both. Simply because plugging that security hole removes future ability to exploit the product in such a way that gives you or someone else root access is a good thing. We really shouldn't be pressing vendors to keep security holes open because you're part of the vast minority that wants to have full root access to the device when, a majority of the time, you don't need or use those root functions. We should be pressing vendors for unlocked/unlockable bootloaders (via fastboot oem unlock for Android devices) that open up access without having to use a security exploit. It should be a feature, not a bug.

Nook Color, current update, SD-card booting

[jim_deane]

I have a NC, and use the boot-from-SD feature to run CyanogenMod7. The original firmware is not rooted (it is unmodified in any way). I updated to the newest Barnes and Noble-skinned OS version in the past week because of the updates you mentioned.

My SD-card still boots up just as it did before, no change. So the update may have changed whether you can root the device itself, I don't know--but it doesn't change the ability to run full-Android from SD card. I'm looking forward to CM9...

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[Phoghat]

Just wait until January for some ice cream sandwiches.

I may not own it but I can return it

[nobaloney]

Immediately after reading these posts I called Barnes & Noble and found out a few things about my Barnes & Noble Tablet.

1. It's true; they're locking it with the upgrade.

2. The lady who told me I could put any android app on it was wrong; I can't.

3. Since I bought it during this year's holiday shopping season I have until after Christmas to return it.

I still have the receipt and all the wrapping. So I'm taking advantage of step 3 above. I'll buy a sub-$100 tablet, load both the Kindle & Nook apps on it, and use it the way God and nature intended :).

Well, not quite, since either can still remove my books if they want, but closer.

Why then, since my membership card doesn't get me anything from Barnes & Noble when I use it for eBooks, don't I switch back to physical books? (There's an article somewhere recently showing eBooks are no longer much cheaper than physical books, and may in some cases be more expensive.)

Only because as I age I find it easier to read backlt text in large type, than I do to read physical books. I'll buy what I want, from whom I want (within the limits of the new duopoly) but I won't bite off my nose to spite my face.

i now await the words

[Anonymous Coward]

"challenge accepted"

Killer app?

[tepples]

Make it the size of a PS3, ship it in molded plastic

In other words, something like an Acer Aspire X1 with a 10-foot-UI media launcher. But one still runs into "I already own a PS3 and a Wii, and I have plenty of games to choose from for them, so I don't need games developed by micro-studios." I don't see how any game with production values typical of indie budgets could be made desirable enough to get the masses to pay $400 for one game. Major-label games have the advantage that the end user is likely to already have the hardware to play it, and therefore each game doesn't have to be a system seller by itself.

Once no HW is compatible with free SW

[tepples]

Once all major CPUs have locked bootloaders on the same die, then what are people supposed to use to run free software? Video game consoles already put a locked bootloader on the CPU die. And given the hullabaloo about the "UEFI secure boot" feature of Windows 8, it appears even PCs are likely to go the same way.

Danger of destroying mechanical parts

[tepples]

But, for some reason, you expect to be able to modify an eReader into a general computing device, but still have it function as the manufacturer intended.

With computing devices, there isn't nearly as much of a danger of permanently destroying mechanical parts. I expect to be able to flip a switch and use all the general-computing-device parts I installed, and then flip it the other way, remove all general-computing-device parts, and send it back to appliance mode. Apparently on the older Nook Color, the switch is as easy as inserting or removing an SD card.

If it can't run apps sold separately at all

[tepples]

If you bought a talking doll, Mattel doesn't have to provide you with any means to open up the baby to alter the voice. You may figure out how to do so by cutting open the doll, but Mattel doesn't have to provide a means to reprogram the voice chip.

There's a difference between a device that can run only the apps that come with it and a device that can run apps sold separately. I'm more willing to accept a locked down computing device, such as the MCU in a microwave oven, if it isn't marketed as supporting apps that are sold separately. As for this analogy, installing apps on a device is roughly equivalent to installing voices on a doll, but talking dolls generally lack the means to install additional voices unless their name is Ruxpin.

Re:accessory mode please then I won't need to root

[craftycoder]

Tell that to Google.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/usb/adk.html

Re:accessory mode please then I won't need to root

[craftycoder]

I think it's hilarious that instead of commenting on the topic you guys chose to argue semantics.

Re:Neither advertise Android as a selling point

[Andtalath]

Lenovo A1.

If I can add apps to the machine

[tepples]

If a box for a video game console does not say 'Allows you to develop and play your own games', what reasonable expectation do you have that it will in fact do that?

If I can add apps to the machine, I expect to be able to add apps to the machine. The box for an Acer Aspire X1 doesn't say 'Allows you to develop and play your own games', yet I can edit and run JavaScript out of the box. Or I could install any sort of game RAD tool (e.g. Clickteam products), I could install Python and Pygame, or I could even install Visual Studio Express (for Windows) or Xcode (for Mac OS X) or whatever syntax-aware editor is the flavor of the week on Linux. I guess an Aspire X1 is just better than a game console.