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  1. Re:Niche market on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    You would be right, given the Samsung specific apps (to replace the default Google apps) they're shipping in their ROM.

  2. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    Now, i get phones "free" as a perk at work and can run anything I want for $0. Why? Because I'm head nerd and get to evaluate stuff.

    tried the android world with a HTC one. Did not like. Android was worse for me due to the bugs I found in the stock ROM, the battery life, the scaling problems with a number of apps, the carrier crapware and the number of buttons on the bottom of the screen making it more awkward to hold and access all of the buttons with my thumb without shuffling the phone.

    I'm sure you can fix a bunch of that with a custom unsupported rom, but the thing is with iOS i don't have to. the handset still didn't feel as nice to hold as my 3g,3gs and 4s have either. I returned it and went back to my 4s (which i'll be swapping out for a 5s shortly).

  3. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    Slower CPU, slower GPU. Software is subjective, but I've tried android and did not like. NFC = pointless (IMHO), screen res = irrelevant because high enough is high enough. So you're left with wireless charging and the camera. There apple has the advantage is if you are combining your iphone with the rest of the apple ecosystem - the ipad, appletv and mac - you get awesome sync across all your devices, a consistent interface and quality hardware on all of the devices. I've tried dealing with both Apple and Google customer support. Apple was fairly painless. Google was not.

  4. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    LOL @ 286 protected mode. You know... the mode that was so crippled that all it could be used for was dog slow extended memory to hack around the 640kb barrier, whilst the 68k series had flat memory (starting with 16 megabytes on the 68000) and a heap of general purpose registers.

    The PC succeeded despite a horrific architecture (alleviated with the 386, but it took microsoft about 10 years to catch up and make software to properly utilize it), not due to any sort of technical superiority until apple totally lost their way without steve in the PPC days.

  5. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    On the contrary, for what a kid wants, it's quite possible that an iPod touch will do exactly what they want - games, facebook, etc on Wifi and the parents can rest easy knowing that apple do their best to block porn apps (still got the web though) and the kid isn't going to get burned with phone/data charges on a mobile account.

  6. The PC was also crippled with segmented real-mode memory access and limited to 640kb unless you used EMS which was a terribly slow hack to get around the problem. The 68000 and up had 32 bit architecture and flat memory model - a dream to program for by comparison.

  7. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    Uh.... when the Mac came out, the standard display on the PC was CGA or worse. With no digital audio, no multi-tasking and no actual software GUI worth shit.

  8. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 2

    No hard drive was far and away the bulk of the amiga market. Hard drives were exceedingly rare until near the end.

  9. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    Uh... no. By 1993-1994 you could buy PPC macs and the typical mac was a 68030. The typical volume selling amiga was still running a 68000. Yes, the A3000 and A4000 did exist but they were rarer than rockinghorse shit.

  10. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 2

    The Amiga was great in 1987. Due to the custom chip design being so tightly bound to the 68000 running at 7mhz, they got stuck on the same spec for way too long. Upgrading the system and maintaining compatibility was too hard and expensive. Doing most stuff in software with loosely coupled add-on chips/boards when required through a layer of software abstraction, the apple/PC way proved to be far more flexible - just throw more CPU at the problem, and cheaper to upgrade as CPU power improved.

  11. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    Guess who didn't sell any machines to speak of with anything bigger than a 68000? Hint: It wasn't apple. And I say this as a former amiga nut. C= were trapped by the cost of redesigning their custom hardware. Apple did what woz always did - reduced chip count to the minimum and did it all in software. It's far more flexible that way.

  12. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    You mean like they've done with the iPod, iPad, iPhone and continued to do with the Mac? Looks like it has sure hurt them!

  13. Re:Remember the old adage... on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    They noticed that an open source platform, with it's hundreds/thousands of contributers is going to move and adapt much more quickly than whatever team they can afford to pay.

    What, you mean like Linux does?

  14. Re: If you can't be the best on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    And more people buy kia than mercedes or BMW blahblahblah...

  15. Re:They are still damn overpriced on Apple 27-inch iMac With Intel's Haswell Inside Tested · · Score: 1

    Also - don't believe DKMS will fix my problem, as source changes were required to the driver to make it work with 3.8. No source changes required from 3.8.x to 3.8.y yet, but its only a matter of time, as the kernel has no driver ABI.

  16. Re:They are still damn overpriced on Apple 27-inch iMac With Intel's Haswell Inside Tested · · Score: 1

    "I.e., because there is no driver ABI, there is no guarantee that a security update I do today will not break my WIFI in a way that I can not fix (without rolling back to a known-insecure kernel for example) without writing code myself."

  17. Re:They are still damn overpriced on Apple 27-inch iMac With Intel's Haswell Inside Tested · · Score: 1

    Or maybe he just runs a very limited or old set of hardware. Yes there's a lot of self inflicted time-sink in Linux and I've been there, done that and got the t-shirt. That's not what I'm talking about. Driver support continues to be a problem. "Just buy compatible hardware!" I hear you say. Well, there's no reliable HCL - meaning you need to spend time (hence, time sink) browsing on-line or reading the source and obtaining chipset specs for potential hardware to determine compatibility.

    And even then, there's a decent chance you end up in my situation - the WIFI adapter I just bought which had Linux support listed on the box only shipped with driver source for kernel 2.6, has not been main-lined and no official patches exist for newer versions.

    I needed to obtain patches from some random guy on a forum on the internet (which could be a Trojan for all I know - learning kernel driver development and reading the source to check would be another time-sink), and every time my distribution does a kernel upgrade, the driver needs to be recompiled and will potentially also break if the kernel changes sufficiently to break the driver source.

    I.e., because there is no driver ABI, there is no guarantee that a security update I do today will break my WIFI in a way that I can not fix (without rolling back to a known-insecure kernel for example) without writing code myself.

  18. Re:Fuck You on OS X 10.9 Mavericks Review · · Score: 1

    SATA controller crashing the OS is a little different to a USB peripheral which by nature should be able to handle hot insertion/removal and is low performance. I'll also note that this adapter works perfectly fine in both OS X and Linux.

  19. Re:They are still damn overpriced on Apple 27-inch iMac With Intel's Haswell Inside Tested · · Score: 1

    Pretty much. She's an ex of 12 months. And yes, this is the exact reason that I've started buying macs for my personal machines. OS X generally does not need any particular maintenance. And if you DO somehow fuck it up, reinstalling OS X is entirely painless. Boot from USB/DVD/WIFI (depending on what your machine has available as boot media), select to install and by default it keeps your files. If you want to wipe it clean, restoring from time machine is painless.

    No driver issues, no license keys, no product activation. No need to compile drivers from source. It just works.

  20. Re:Good. on Drive With Google Glass: Get a Ticket · · Score: 1

    And further to the above - you might think you're driving just fine while on the phone. In reality, I can spot people who are on their phone from 100+ feet away, without needing to look through windows, etc. purely based on the attitude of the car on the road, general road positioning and reaction to traffic. You may think you can drive on the phone. You can.... very poorly. And just like someone who is driving with a BAC of 0.08 or more - you don't realise just how poorly you are doing at it.

  21. Re:Good. on Drive With Google Glass: Get a Ticket · · Score: 1

    Having been riding motorcycles on the road for 7 years and seeing the dumb shit oblivious people do in cars while on their phone, i'll go with option 1 - hands free calls are unacceptably dangerous. The fact that they are legal in some places is more to do with politics than actual merit. And see my comment above regarding other people in the car. You are less impaired as your brain isn't trying to reconstruct visual representations of the person based on audio only. Plus they will STFU if things look hairy. Most of the time.

  22. Re:Might be legal on Drive With Google Glass: Get a Ticket · · Score: 1

    (A) The equipment has an interlock device that, when the motor vehicle is driven, disables the equipment for all uses except as a visual display as described in paragraphs (1) to (4), inclusive.

    (B) The equipment is designed, operated, and configured in a manner that prevents the driver of the motor vehicle from viewing the television broadcast or video signal while operating the vehicle in a safe and reasonable manner.

    (6) A mobile digital terminal that is fitted with an opaque covering that does not allow the driver to view any part of the display while driving, even though the terminal may be operating, installed in a vehicle that is owned or operated by any of the following:

    I believe that given the device does all of those functions and has NO lockout functionality, she'd be boned if she took it to court. The spirit of that legislation is clearly that the driver should not be distracted by any of those devices, and there must be lockout to prevent this occurring. Glass has none.

  23. Re:Good. on Drive With Google Glass: Get a Ticket · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not the vision impairment that is the problem, as demonstrated by comparisons of hands-free calls vs. people holding the phone and talking. They both registered similar impairment to BAC of 0.08.

    The issue is what the person is focused on with their mind.

    It's different to talking to someone sitting next to you as your brain has to work harder to judge response, etc. when the person is not there for you to see. Also, most passengers there in person have sense to STFU if traffic looks like it is going to be a problem.

    TLDR: we don't need (more) asshats checking twitter while on the road. The fact that it is a HUD is likely to be little different to doing the same thing on a mobile phone. Unless the device locks out all non-driving relevant functionality while driving, its use should be prohibited just like any other mobile internet device.

  24. Re:Impaired Driving Abilities? on Drive With Google Glass: Get a Ticket · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Military HUDs only display information to improve situational awareness. Not facebook, twitter or wikipedia.

  25. Re:Smash on Apple 27-inch iMac With Intel's Haswell Inside Tested · · Score: 1

    I bought a PCIe WIFI adapter that listed Linux on the box. This isn't about whether or not i CAN fix it. It's refuting the assertion that drivers are not a problem on Linux any more. That assertion is total bollocks.