My optimistic side hopes this will eventually lead to a resurgence of independent ISPs.
That's quite a hefty level of optimism you've got there. If you were going to start Forresto Online, and become an ISP, you'd have all kinds of state and local opposition as you tried to lay your fiber cables down or staple them to the poles...but let's hand wave that train wreck away. With the big guys already implementing the six strike rule, anyone new on the radar would be a very easy target - especially since your arrival was heralded by the metric ton of paperwork that had to be filled out to lay your fiber.
From there, you have issues with both inertia, and the kind of people who have none. Let's face it: most people who sign up for cable/phone/internet bundles from Comcast are likely locked into annual contracts and are unlikely to move shortly after Forresto Online is available. A handful who are *that* disgusted with them will, but the majority will probably wait it out and see how bad it will get...typically that will be just long enough for Comcast to entice them with rates that are $5/month less than yours, $10/month less if they sign up for two years. The customers who won't fall for it are likely the ones who will be running uTorrent 24/7. Those who run it exclusively for Linux distros will simply be pounding your network, those who aren't, well, they'll be on the radar of the kinds of people who will try to sell you on adding the six strike policy to your list of services, lest they of course attempt to hold you liable for all the pirated content that's flowing through your pipes. You then decide between either listening to them, or going to bat for what you believe is right, but can't afford to do because your customers are relatively few compared to the titans against whom you're competing, and you've been spending most of your money trying to keep the packets flowing as the numbers continue to rise.
I'm all for independent ISPs. I just think that this is the worst possible climate to do it in.
They begin with" I never asked for a data plan when I bought my LG flip phone."...part of the data plan is used to offset the higher level of support required with smartphones, and unfortunately only about 10% of Iphone users actually no how to use them, and the rest need hand holding...Now these people want no data but want support in connecting via wifi to check their email, facebook, use company vpns, play words with friends, and all the neato things they can do. They want support for it, but without paying the toll....for that type of device to be used on the network, he would recquire a data plan, and as such one was added. He is free to go back to his old phone.
The correct response to this situation is, "We are more than happy to assist you with problems that your LG flip phone experiences. We can continue to give you voice and text messaging service on the iPhone you're presently using, but we cannot provide any assistance with its operation without a data plan added. If you'd like to add a data plan, I'd be more than delighted to assist you with the problems you're having with your handset".
I understand that support costs money, and that having a "support only" contract or a 'pay-per-incident' is only going to make your job even harder as half of the time will be spent arguing with customers who believe that they are entitled to free support. However, an iPhone can send and receive calls just as effectively as the basic phones in the absence of a data plan, and I don't think that automatically adding a data plan to a monthly fee of a customer who has decided to forgo both support and data service, with no ability to opt out of either, is the kind of customer policy that should be defended. He may technically be free to go back to his old phone, but that doesn't mean that it's possible - if his phone breaks and he's six months out on his contract, even another dumbphone costs $150 or more. To someone who's going to feel the squeeze of $20 a month for data service, that's a lot of money to ask him to cough up at once.
Yes, people - especially nontechnical people - are going to expect that data service and quality technical support both come out of thin air and are magically free, and I do certainly concede that this is not accurate, practical, sustainable, or fair to AT&T. That doesn't justify the fact that there is no "sudo rm --data-plan --phone-support" command for someone who genuinely wants neither. By the way, T-Mobile will let you have any service level you want as long as you either bring the phone with you to T-Mobile, or buy the phone outright instead of doing a carrier subsidy, so somehow, a carrier with a lot less money is able to do what these customers want and keep the towers running.
I love your business plan: Make everything free and spend millions on it with no returns. You should set up a Kickstarter page immediately. I know you'll do well!
Isn't that exactly what Google did with Android? And now they rule the game?
It looks as if his business skills are more aligned with reality than yours.
No, it's not what Google did with Android. Google has enough money in the bank to do stuff "because they feel like it", and see if it could be successful. They weren't banking on Android's success, and they'd continue to be making billions if WebOS was in second place. When you can start from *that* starting line, it's much easier to make it to second place.
From there, it was a timing issue - Apple was the phone that everybody wanted, but at least in America, many of them were either locked into multi-year contracts with their present carrier, or were loyal to them - many frequent domestic travelers swear by Verizon, because for all the Big Red does to royally screw them over, they frequently are the only carrier to have towers in obscure places, and for all of CDMA's faults, it did a much better job of routing calls through multiple towers (thus reducing the number of dropped calls) than the EDGE flavors of GSM. Resultantly, those who didn't want to give up their carrier were prime candidates for the Motorola Droid* when Verizon released it - the billion dollar marketing campaign Verizon did to launch the handset and its then-more-powerful interface didn't hurt the cause either, and neither did the generally-well-liked Google logo. Android took advantage of the fact that Apple and AT&T had an exclusivity contract and a limited feature base to springboard it to popularity. HTC and Samsung stepped up the game, and that's the nutshell version of how Android got the timing right.
UbuntuPhone, Windows Phone, BB10, and UnknownPhone all share similar problems. Windows Phone has a pile of money behind it, but Microsoft has to care if it succeeds and it suffers from a brand with a stigma - I swear if it was green themed and called the "X Phone" it'd have double its present market share. BB10 has some money behind it, but BlackBerry desperately needs it to succeed and it too has a bit of a brand issue ("Who makes the battery inside a Blackberry when they made on which you can't pull it out? Energizer - the alkaline battery will long outlast your system uptime!"). UbuntuPhone has some pocket change behind it, but not a well known brand. UnknownPhone has to start from the ground up with everything. None of these brands have the winning formula of "we don't care if we succeed", "we have a mountain of cash behind us that continues to grow", "we are well liked by our existing customers", "we're affordable", and "people are being held back from getting the phone they really want, so we'll be the fallback until we have enough buzz behind us".
No, that's not what it means at all. It means they'll be able to better tailor their store to profit off of you. Generally, that's not a good thing for you.
Actually, I'm completely in favor of having stores know what I want. Here's the kicker - I'll *tell* them, straight out! It's cheaper and infinitely more effective than this whole tracking thing. For example:
Best Buy: I like what you did with getting rid of rebates. It was about the only thing of late you've done that I am happy about. If you would like to tailor your store to my ideal shopping experience, here's what you need to do: 1.) Pick a SINGLE soundtrack to your store. The dull roar of an arcade does not entice me to shop, it entices me to leave early. 2.) I am a mobile DJ, so stock a few top 40 tracks in vinyl format, please. If that's not possible, then please at least stock more than eight EDM albums in CD format. 3.) Every manual of every TV, Blu-Ray player, stereo receiver, and small appliance has a "specifications" page (or two) in the back of its owner's manual. Please have photocopies of these available if the salesperson doesn't know if a product has a specific feature. 4.) Internal components, please. You might not be able to beat Microcenter on part selection, but why can't I buy cases, processors, motherboards, or SATA controllers in-store? 5.) I understand the need to sell me a warranty on a laptop, so by all means do so. However, don't sell it to me based on fear that the unit will break, sell it to me because having a warranty means Best Buy will offer me additional value, like having a specialized "warranty rep" who will argue with HP for me in order to get the part I need. Set up an appointment for me to bring in both my old laptop and my new one so I can migrate my documents and settings.If the only reason for me to pay for a warranty is to protect against my own negligence, then either I am too careless to own a laptop, or I have no reason to believe that the laptops you sell are designed to handle everyday use. 6.) On the heels of #5, I don't like being badgered for the upsell. 7.) You've got a metric ton of TVs. Have weekly or monthly LAN/console parties after hours, I'd sign up and pay $15 to spend a few hours gaming with my friends on a TV I can't afford to own. 8.) Software on plastic disc isn't dead yet, but it will be if all you sell is Office and Norton.
Hollister: 1.) Turn the music down. Seriously, it's just too loud, and that's coming from my friends that are in their teens and early 20's. 2.) The amount of cologne in the air is sickening. I never thought I'd have to ask for breathable air. 3.) I understand that the lights are intentionally focused on the merchandise instead of the floor. It doesn't mean I like feeling my way around the store. 4.) I don't mind logos. I do mind logos visible from low earth orbit. Subtlety on T-shirts and similar would be nice.
I'm too tired to type more, but I'd be MORE than happy to help these marketers obtain exact information about what I want. The problem is that they never ask, or they ask in the most obnoxious ways possible. I want processors, not tampons, and I want someone to sell them to me.
Making your own web interface for file management? somewhat challenging. Finding a canned one that doesn't utterly suck? Well, that's what Sourceforge is for =)
As far as getting it to run on something, your best bet is to either try XAMPP, or better yet (if you've got the RAM for it and enough hard disk space), grab a copy of VirtualBox and head over to TurnKeyLinux.org, where they've got pre-configured LAMP stacks with plenty of browser based applications, including Ajaxplorer, which you can have up and running, perfectly configured, in twenty minutes or less =).
> Easy to throw a web interface? I had installed Apache and looked at the kilometer long configuration file and was horrified. I
That's much like whining about the size of a Windows application's registry hive.
You must also be frightened by any fully featured modern video transcoder.
No, there's a smidge of difference.
The overwhelming majority of Windows applications can be configured using a series of dialog boxes, typically either in the "tools->options" or "edit->preferences" menu. These applications may incidentally store the results of those dialog boxes in a registry hive (or in an ini file in the %appdata% folder or similar), but it's infrequently the only way to make such changes. With Apache, they don't give you a tabbed, categorized dialog box in which to manipulate the options. Similarly, someone who "installed Apache...and was horrified" is probably not well-versed in working with HTTP server software, and thus, editing the Apache config file is going to be a mountain of guesswork as to what you'd really want in the first place. On top of that, there's the "you can usually fidget around to get Apache to do what you want it to do, but be really really careful because the easiest way to get it to work is also usually the most hackable, so if it works right with your instinct, you'll probably have to go back and change it later once you do end up getting it to work".
As for video transcoding, unless you're a masochist who prefers using FFMpeg on a command line instead of the myriad GUI options, video transcoding CAN be as easy as "choose your source video, pick the general format you want it to end up in or the type of device you want it to go on, and click 'transcode'". In those cases, most of the advanced options are optional, and the defaults are generally close to what you want unless you know specifically that you need a particular non-default option somewhere. This is different than trying to get a web server up and running, especially since there's no security consideration to the video transcode.
At $300 and being from Russia, one would assume that they wouldn't just release it as a DRM-free application...which raises the question whether they add DRM to it, and how they're going to protect it, especially if they've got the means of decrypting all of these high-security encryption mechanisms.
I'm wondering if there isn't an alternative business model here - a bounty for encrypted laptops, decrypting the data internally, and using that data for ransom. I'm pretty sure it'd work much better than selling licenses at $300 a pop.
When Microsoft "won" the browser wars, Netscape's software quality wasn't too hot, and there was no Firefox or Chrome. It took some time, but IE isn't the de facto standard it once was. Also, no one has yelled at Apple for bundling Safari with OSX, or Canonical for bundling Firefox.
When MS took its stab at the media player market, it was indeed trying to win based on 'bundled default'...but really the only thing it did was cost Winamp/MusicMatch/Realplayer some download stats. At the time, there *wasn't* a standard media player on Windows. Microsoft never really 'won' that battle, Apple did...and for what it's worth, Windows Media Player rips to MP3 now, and has since WMP10, I believe. Bonus points: they lost to Quicktime, and later Flash, for in-browser video streaming, too.
Microsoft is trying to make the App Store model work for Windows 8, but any success they have in this regard will undoubtedly be in spite of the Windows 8 store, not because of it. MS seems to be under some delusion that people want tablet apps EVERYWHERE. I was actually in the Microsoft store the other day, talking to several of the staff members there, asking for *one* app that took advantage of a reasonably-powerful GPU. Not a single one could give me a title of an app that would make my Nvidia GeForce 460M kick up the fan speed beyond its idle RPM rate. Sure, this is just fine for people who are perfectly happy playing "Cut the Rope" on their Intel integrated video chipset, but Valve's millions of users tell me that there are at least a handful who put a modicum of stress on their machines. If Microsoft doesn't cater to these users, then sure, you'll get sales from the handful of Surface users and Office 2013 sales, but Microsoft's success won't come from ignoring the strengths of the desktop computer and treating everything with i7's and dual Xeons like a Surface tablet.
If nothing else, it behooves them to keep the antitrust lawyers at bay. If bundling IE was enough to get them a monopoly conviction, preventing Valve - a company with plenty of cash in the bank - from selling their software on their platform would be an open-and-shut case that they can't afford to lose.
In my experience, it's more version number bragging contests than anything else. The only apps that don't run on every version of Android I've used since 2.2...
I don't think that means as much as you think it does. Let me use web development as an analogy here. Until recently, there was a huge amount of pressure for web developers to support Internet Explorer 6. It was released in 2001, it's got lousy support for modern standards, and it's buggy as hell. Web developers loathe supporting it but are backed into a corner because so many people still used it (until recently, thankfully). No savvy people used it out of preference, only the people stuck with it.
Now take a look at what you're saying. Yes, it may be the case that most apps still run on 2.2. But that's not because savvy users like 2.2 and it doesn't mean that developers don't want to drop support for 2.2. It's just the inertia of people who are slow to upgrade are holding back everybody else.
Personally, I've owned several Android phones, and I've always wanted to upgrade for solid reasons. Quality control is generally very poor for Android, and newer versions are often necessary for bug fixes. My last Android phone is stuck on 2.3 despite Sony's commitments to upgrade it to 4.0, and it's useless to me because it's got a SIP bug that stops people phoning me when the phone has been idle for longer than ten minutes. That's not "bragging rights", unless you think an operational phone is something to brag about.
There's two things to address here. First, the comparison to IE6 is somewhat apt, and somewhat not. See, IE6 had some serious problems that are inherent within its nature. The one I most famously remember is that it didn't do transparent PNGs, but I know that its CSS handling was terrible, ActiveX was its own therapist-requiring nightmare, and we won't even get into its memory management issues. Comparing that with a genuinely usable release of Android raises questions in that regard. Are developers literally unable to add features to their apps in order to retain compatibility with Gingerbread? Or are they feature complete and just require a little extra QA testing? There are no doubt plenty of apps that fall into both camps, but the ultimate question is whether apps that fit in the first category are in sufficient quantity to prevent better application developments on the platform as a whole.
Regarding your issue with SIP calling specifically, I don't know if CSipSimple will be of any assistance. That said, I question that example specifically because I know that I've had SIP calling working on both GB and ICS (possibly Froyo as well, IDR), whether on Cyanogenmod or an official ROM. If the issue is with your phone specifically, then Sony's additions (and/or subtractions) to the firmware likely caused the problem at hand. If that's the case, then the solution here is for Sony to get their act together. We are talking Sony here, and there's no guarantee that the issue won't persist even if they do give you an OTA update to ICS/JB. Therefore, one could equally argue that a working 2.3 release would solve this issue just as well as a 4.0 upgrade.
Everyone complains about how fragmented Android is, but literally every OS that's ever had more than one version will have that.
Version numbers are not the fragmentation that people are talking about. It's more to do with device capabilities and vendor customisations. If you develop for iOS, you only have to deal with three aspect ratios and three display densities. On Android, there's a multitude of both to deal with. If you develop for iOS, you only have to support one variant of the operating system. On Android, there are several major ones. Even if you are talking about version numbers, iOS is far more consolidated than Android in terms of reach, because the people who actually use apps tend to upgrade v
Because whenever new versions of iOS come out, they quickly become the most popular release of the OS. That is not true with Android, because the carriers and OEMs either drag their feet or flat out refuse to upgrade their software. As a result, Google and third-parties want to move forward, but old versions of operating systems are preventing them from moving forward. Apple does not have this problem.
That may be the case, but that still doesn't answer the question of "so what?". So Apple users tend to install the iOS updates when available while Android users don't/can't. The question being posed here is "what advantage to the end users is there to staying on the bleeding edge?" "Because Apple users do it" is a bit of a shallow answer to that question.
People on tech forums always complain about how fragmented Android is. "ZoMg iM sTuCk On TiArAmAsU!!!!!111 WhEn WiLl i GeT wHiTe ChOcOlAtE MoChA??? WAAAAHHHHHhhh!!!!!1111 $MY_CARRIER iS tEh SuXoRz!!!"
In my experience, it's more version number bragging contests than anything else. The only apps that don't run on every version of Android I've used since 2.2 (now a three year old release that counts for less than 3% of devices combined with all of those below it) are LBE Privacy Guard (doesn't run on Jelly Bean but runs on anything else; XDA-Devs has a translation of the Chinese variant that works fine), 4EXT Recovery (which is more hardware specific than OS specific since it's actually a recovery environment), and a few power widgets since ICS and up don't allow widgets to directly toggle GPS and the baseband. Everything else, from Amazon daily free apps (usually games) to Netflix, to media players, to Root Explorer...it all works flawlessly on every Android device I've owned. Yes, Jellybean gives us Google Now and pseudo-Swype. Yes, ICS gave us a somewhat different UI (I prefer the vertically scrolling app drawer myself...and yes I know about the third party launcher apps; that's not the point) and MTP instead of USB Mass Storage (another change I somewhat-understand but can't stand). If your hardware supports NFC, ICS can also utilize that, although its utility is still in the "because I can" / "the iPhone doesn't have it" stage. Beyond those changes, I have to Wikipedia the rest.
Really, the bigger differences tend to follow the OEMs. I personally really like HTC Sense, though I know plenty of people (especially here) disagree with me. Touchwiz doesn't completely suck like Motoblur does, and the bone-stock nexus/cyanogen UI seems a bit too minimalist for me. For end users, the differences in those skins is going to be a bigger change than between different android versions, especially since, once again, they all run the same apps.
Everyone complains about how fragmented Android is, but literally every OS that's ever had more than one version will have that. Windows? XP/Vista/7/8, to say nothing about the asymptotic number of 2000/9x users clinging to their 15 year old desktops that still work perfectly and refuse to die. No one complains that Windows is fragmented. OSX? Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard/Lion/Mountain Lion all exist, all happily running Final Cut Pro, Logic, Photoshop, and iLife. Linux? There's an extensive SVG-formatted family tree of flavors over on Wiki, all doing something. iOS? Perhaps the closest to a unified platform, but there are still plenty of 3GS devices and older-gen iPod Touch units running iOS 5.x (including every first-gen iPad), 4.x, and likely still a handful on 3.x.
No matter what you compare Android to, you'll be comparing it to something with plenty of fragmentation of its own. Fragmentation has never stopped a computing platform from adoption, and just because there is a version of $WHATEVER_OS newer than yours doesn't instantly prevent all the existing applications from running unless the OS maker royally messes with stuff or involves a completely different flavor of hardware or something equally drastic. So why is it that Androidland always has their knickers in a twist over the fact that their hardware isn't running THE LATEST version? If it was really that big of a deal, most phones have fairly simple rooting instructions over at xda-devs or sdx-devs.
Mobile OS updates were RARE before the iPhone; I remember my HTC Dash getting exactly one (official) update. Desktop Windows never gave free updates, and neither did OSX - that was always something the Linux community prided itself on, but the Linux community isn't attempting to perpetuate a business model.
I'll conclude with posing the question again: Why does Android get the 'fragmented' label as a derogatory stigma and a 'problem' in need of 'solving', when literally every operating system ever can also wear that badge just as well and no one cares?
I know, it's anonymous coward and all...but I had an interesting issue along this vein...
Two weeks ago, a client called us saying she got some FBI scareware that also tapped into her webcam. I went to investigate. No FBI scareware when I tried it, but I did see security essentials find stuff, and take some time to remove each item...during which it invariably found more.
So, I tried the usual tools - Fixboot/Fixmbr, Combofix, TDSSKiller, ADWMBR, Malwarebytes, and my trusty ESET NOD32 recovery disc. None of that seemed to stop it. So I tried a repair XP install. I learned that the 'repair' install doesn't do nearly as much as I'd like it to, but whatevs, it was gone. ESET said it was clean, TDSSKiller said it was clean, Combofix said it was clean, and MBAM said it was clean. Security Essentials wouldn't shut up.
I googled a bit and found out that this client had caught one of the strains from the xpaj family. It does EVERYTHING - MBR rewrite, device driver, etc. Seriously among the nastiest virus infections I've ever come across. Further googling revealed that Kaspersky had an explicitly dedicated removal tool just for xpaj. it took about half an hour to run, and found literally thousands of files infected with it. It must have been file headers or something because they were all ultimately cleaned...but this thing fooled EVERYONE but Security Essentials.
Now granted MSE didn't completely take care of the issue, and clearly it also didn't stop it from running amuck...but it did find something nothing else I tried did...so I'm not thoroughly convinced that writing it off wholesale isn't entirely warranted either.
The rest of it was almost credible, but Nero ffs? No way you are serious. You are rejecting linux because it doesnt run the crappiest package of binaries on the planet natively? Great, stick with windows, get what you deserve.
Full disclosure: I'm a part of the Nero Beta/MVP program, but not on the payroll, and Nero isn't providing any incentives for me to write this. Hopefully affinity for software titles and companies can exist for non-Linux/OSS without getting criticized for it...
Nero the crappiest package of binaries? It has its faults (and don't get me started on Kwik Media), but that implies it's worse than Symantec Antivirus...
Nero 9 royally sucked, 8 and 10 were okay. 11 and 12 were huge if you used their video editing package, but most of that was templates. While I know that there are people who have had problems with the product, I personally have found the package to be extremely stable - and one of the things I do is to head over to the Nero Facebook page and try to provide troubleshooting steps to users that need them.
Nero Video is no Adobe Premiere/Final Cut/Avid, but that's not the target demographic. The Premiere Elements/PowerDirector/iMovie crowd is. In that arena, Nero is competitively priced and has the lowest system requirements on the market.
Nero Recode is quite possibly the fastest GUI transcoder I've used. In my tests, I transcoded Xvid files and DVDs faster in Recode than I did in Handbrake or SUPER. Perhaps the command line edition of x264 would have been faster in raw transcode times, but having to properly write out all the parameters in a command would likely make up the difference, at least for me.
I personally hate Kwik Media, as it generally takes the iTunes presentation method that I can't stand to begin with. However, I do give it credit for seamlessly scaling, transcoding, and transferring videos to my Android phone and tablet with a single drag-and-drop, and being correct in its resolution settings every time.
As DRM is a fun issue around here, let's consider Nero's - it only exists around the parts that Nero sublicenses (DVD/Dolby decoders, Blu-Ray decoder, MPEG-2 encoder), not around Nero's own code. Obviously not ideal, but it's either fulfill that sort of contractual obligation or releasing a suite without it...which at this point isn't terribly feasible when marketing to end users who are choosing between Nero, Cyberlink, and Roxio.
Finally, if you are having issues with your copy of Nero, please e-mail me, and I'll do what I can to either help, or get you in contact with some higher-tier people who can. I've met and interacted with the customer support department of Nero personally, and they are all wonderful people who take a genuine interest in providing help and support to people who need it.
DarkTable looked pretty close to Lightroom for me; Corel's $60 AfterShot Pro looks similarly well spec'd (and uses a third of the hard disk space) and runs on Windows, OSX, and most Linux distros. Don't know if those will help.
For me, the bigger problem is the tracking that goes along with the ads. If no advertising did tracking, I probably wouldn't bother to block them.
I've actually been pretty happy with ad-block for Opera, in that I can block tracking cookies and such without actually blocking ad serving. That I feel is a fair compromise.
How do I know it works? Well, as a single, male,virgin, Christian with a buck or two to his name (not much more though), getting an ad for safeabortions.com is about the furthest possible thing from a targeted advertisement I could think of. No seriously, I actually got an ad for that today.
Oh, I live in the UK and was unaware of a third candidate. I thought the US was a two party only system?
I recall at least five presidential candidates on my ballot when I voted, plus a write-in area where you could write the name of any US citizen* you wanted (which is what I did).
The fact of the matter is that you have to go back to 1874 to find a president who wasn't either a democrat or a republican. My numbers are shady and even looking it up on Wikipedia is tricky, but I'm unaware of a situation in which a candidate who won even a single state's electoral votes that wasn't endorsed by either one of those two political parties. Thus, it's considered a "two party system" in that, for presidential elections, you've got roughly the same chances of winning the presidential election as a candidate that isn't either democrat or republican as you are to have your bad day of having your winning lottery ticket destroyed by a meteor being turned around by a group of RIAA executives deciding to donate all their lawsuit money to charity after buying you a Delorean that actually flies.
Smaller offices are a bit different; there are a handful of congressmen in the House of Representatives (and possibly a senator or two) that are of the 'Independent' party. State, county, and local officials that frequently require only a few hundred votes to win are also more likely to be independent or some more obscure party. "Working families", "constitution", and "green" were all on the ballot this year, though typically for "district court judge" or "town treasurer" or something equally obscure, or a rehash of a candidate already running either on the democratic or republican platforms.
The Sense dialer dials when I tap a number, and gives me a menu when I long-press it. Samsung's dialer requires several more taps to dial a number from the recent list
Samsung: Slide left to dial, slide right to send a text. Alternatively click one and raise to your ear to dial.
Didn't know about the sliding; I'll have to try that.
The Sense e-mail clients is one of the few that has CONSISTENTLY worked well with Exchange. Frequently, my phone gets push e-mail before my desktop Outlook client, and has since the first iterations of Android with Sense, even when stock Android had stability issues with it.
Never had issues with the stock email client, maybe your exchange server is fucked?
My Exchange server is fine, thanks for asking =). Android's native Exchange support got a LOT better with the FroYo update; 2.1 and earlier had lots of known issues with Exchange. Sense's E-Mail client was stable and effective even when Android's native stock Exchange stack wasn't. While more a historical point than a presently applicable one, I'm simply saying that HTC got that right when Google got it wrong. Besides, my personal taste is in favor of the Sense mail client, though both are definitely usable at this point. Finally, I admittedly don't know how well stock Android natively handles multiple Exchange accounts on different servers; I've had better luck using third party clients like Touchdown than either stock Android or Sense.
The Weather clock is one of the most often imitated looks - Fancy Widgets, Beautiful Widgets, and HD Widgets all have variants of it, and it seems to do a fine job at balancing between needlessly refreshing and being out of date.
Don't care for it myself, Samsung has something similar, billions of clones on the market, hardly a reason to buy an HTC.
I'm not saying that I'd purchase a phone or not based on a not-to-difficult-to-acquire widget...but clearly there's a good idea if everyone is cloning it, and the idea goes back to TouchFLO3D on Windows Mobile 6.1.
The Ring unlock is one of the handiest ways to jump right to a specific function...the 'reverse ring' is becoming standard in a lot of ICS/JB ROMs, and admittedly it's not the most intuitive things to pick up at the very first glance, but I've yet to see an unlocker I prefer.
Samsung puts icons at the bottom of the lock screen that you can drag to access functions, and they are configurable.
Not if you have a grid password, it doesn't. Sense gives you a ring and functions regardless...and they're configurable, too.
HTC Sync is a lot more stable than Samsung Kies
I don't think anyone uses either of them. Calendar syncs with Google/Exchange, sync media by dragging files or just sync with Picasa/Facebook or whatever.
Touchwiz does not differ from stock Android much, being mainly a light weight skin and some optional apps you can easily ignore. Sense just makes your phone slow.
There is indeed a market for this kind of functionality if Markspace can sell The Missing Sync and can keep the lights on. I'm not the only one of my friends that is starting to have a concern about how much data Google has on me, and Hosted Exchange is relatively expensive when compared to desktop applications that already exist. The data caps on low-tier data plans make it worthwhile to use a USB cable when convenient to do so, and the transfers are still generally faster than any kind of untethered connection...besides, a USB cable charges your phone during the sync, instead of using the battery at an increased rate. I think that both manufacturers could do well to flesh out their desktop applications more, namely enabling more streamlined iTunes syncing, batch backup/restore of downloaded applications, and texti
HTC isn't bad but at this point Sense is working against them.
Okay, can someone PLEASE explain this to me? Genuine question here - it seems to be the obligatory follow-up to any mention of HTC. I don't really get this...
--The Sense dialer dials when I tap a number, and gives me a menu when I long-press it. Samsung's dialer requires several more taps to dial a number from the recent list and doesn't have as many nice filters and groupings. --The Sense e-mail clients is one of the few that has CONSISTENTLY worked well with Exchange. Frequently, my phone gets push e-mail before my desktop Outlook client, and has since the first iterations of Android with Sense, even when stock Android had stability issues with it. --The Weather clock is one of the most often imitated looks - Fancy Widgets, Beautiful Widgets, and HD Widgets all have variants of it, and it seems to do a fine job at balancing between needlessly refreshing and being out of date. --The Ring unlock is one of the handiest ways to jump right to a specific function...the 'reverse ring' is becoming standard in a lot of ICS/JB ROMs, and admittedly it's not the most intuitive things to pick up at the very first glance, but I've yet to see an unlocker I prefer. --HTC Sync is a lot more stable than Samsung Kies, and a lot less expensive than The Missing Sync, making it a great way of transferring contacts and calendars over a USB cable (a feature Android proper annoyingly leaves to be desired).
Now don't get me wrong, 'Location' is a bit annoying, and their variant of 'Find My Phone' just kills your battery in no time flat, and I know that the faint of RAM and CPU cycles can have issues with the latest releases of Sense. Even so, my two-year-old Incredible can run it on Gingerbread* just fine. Yes, low-end phones are going to take exception to its additional RAM requirements, and there's of course no accounting for taste, and I completely understand that many here will prefer stock Android simply because it's what they like, and I'm not trying to convince those who fit that group otherwise. However, is it really THAT much worse in the eyes of THAT many people that it's what's caused the decline of HTC?
Personally, I went with a GS3 over a One X more due to the lack of a removable battery and MicroSD slot. My HD2 is still my secondary phone due to the fact that it runs WM6.5, WP7.8, and every version of Android ever released, making it a phone more mod friendly than basically anything Samsung's ever put out...though admittedly I do feel bad for users still stuck on WinMo 6.5 and still have a bit of time left before their contract expires.
Therefore, I reiterate: Why so much hatred for Sense that it makes Touchwiz the more desirable overlay?
*Yes, I know Gingerbread is old...but that's the latest official release for the handset, and even though there are ICS and JB ROMs for the hardware, I've found that even the sense-free, odexed, optimized versions are still heavy enough to keep the hardware from running as smooth as GB, plus I don't really see the appeal of the newer releases anyway.
The idea that your vote doesnt count if your candidate doesnt win is stupid, and undermines the system.
Agreed.
Part of the point of a democracy is to have you involved (consent of the governed)
With you here, too.
and part is that if there enough of you who dont like the system you will eventually cause change.
...And this is where we start to peel apart. If we did a pure popular vote system, I'd be with you here, too. But the fact of the matter is that New York's 29 electoral votes have gone to the democratic candidate with a nearly 60% majority each time, and there's nothing regarding President Obama's recent actions (he's still quite popular around here), or Mitt Romney's overall package, that would lead me to believe that the people here in New York are going to surprise anyone this election. Now if President Obama prevented FEMA from doing any work in Queens, Staten Island, or Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or ignored the situation wholesale as hundreds of thousands of people still don't have heat or power and mass transit still isn't working and getting gasoline is now an evening's project, or took a piss on Ground Zero...THEN there might be a snowball's chance in hell that those electoral votes aren't his. As it stands right now though, Neither presidential candidate is making an attempt to campaign in my state because they know what I know - voting for anyone except President Obama in New York State is either a matter of principle or a fool's errand, depending on your point of view. Indeed, I'll be at the polls after work, casting my vote as is my civic duty. However, we're not a swing state, and President Obama didn't shoot himself in the foot over these past two weeks. I wouldn't bet a counterfeit wooden nickel in favor of Mitt Romney or a third party candidate taking New York. It's not a matter of "If my candidate doesn't win then it's pointless to vote". It's a matter of "there are 538 votes that ultimately decide the president, 29 of them are from my state, and those 29 votes are all but guaranteed not to contribute to another candidate winning, regardless of where my personal vote goes."
Next time you feel like railing against the government, consider that you are part of the problem.
Guess again, and take a look at the final numbers of the New York State popular vote. Until hundreds of thousands of other people change their mind (or move from New York to Texas), it's a single band-aid in a war zone.
I live in New York. President Obama is going to get our electoral votes no matter which lever I pull in the booth, so if someone wants to pay me $100 to flip a particular switch, I'll gladly accept their money and pull whichever lever they ask of me - it boils down to literally whether I want $100 or not.
As for pressure on a poll in a church, I'd assume that any non-personal venue that is stated to be a place where votes can be submitted fall under the 100-foot rule, enforcement could be incentive-based - you get 10% of the fine if you submit a photo of a designated polling place where there are Obama/Romney signs. Now if you're voting on your personal iPhone in Times Square, well then I'd assume it'd be your own damn fault for flipping the virtual lever there.
Finally, there are four basic ways for politicians to receive money to run their campaigns: 1.) lots of people with a little money pay for it. 2.) small numbers of people with a lot of money pay for it. 3.) the person running pays their own way. 4.) the government pays for everyone's campaign.
No matter who pays for a campaign, people will complain: 1.) Anyone who's going to put money towards a campaign is not going to put it towards a candidate they're not already voting for. It basically becomes an informal poll, plus it then turns campaigns into "we need your vote AND your money!". Begging for my vote is already painful enough, the amount of $100-or-less donations it'd require for a candidate to earn enough to run a useful campaign for anything larger than MAYBE a House representative is so high that if you've seen a commercial for them, they've likely already won, and then you have the kind of people who would give money to a politician buying them. 2.) We call these small numbers of people either "The One Percent", "Corporations", "Billionaires", "Billionaires in the One Percent who own Corporations", or some loose variant of that. Effectively, it only becomes feasible to participate in government if you've already got the money to avoid any legislation you don't like anyway. 3.) If a person can afford a campaign out of their own checking account, they're clearly both independently wealthy and bored enough to want a part time job behind a desk pushing paper, and are willing to gamble tens of millions of their own dollars to do it. On the bright side, they don't have much of anyone to answer to, so you won't find megacorps pulling strings to get their votes. Conversely, whatever megacorps they own or have significant ties to will likely be favored, as will bills that facilitate them keeping their own money. 4.) Having the government give a set limit to every candidate seems like the fairest system, but even that has significant drawbacks. If the government gives, say, $100,000 to every aspiring senator, I'd be an 'aspiring senator' and run a bum campaign just to get my hands on the money. How do you filter that? Limit to five candidates? Who chooses them? The political parties? Which three minor parties get candidates? Would it not then be jockeying for the grants that is where the race is fought? Do you make the losing candidates pay the money back? Well then you won't have any candidates who don't have $100,000 in the bank running for office, and if they have that kind of cash to blow, then could already fit in category #3 and not waste taxpayer dollars in the process. Meanwhile, you then have the existing representatives deciding whether the amount goes up or down each year, and then there's reverse manipulation of that. ABC wants the Red candidate to win, his TV spots cost $100, while the Blue candidate has to cough up $5,000 for the same spot. NBC wants the Blue candidate, and the reverse is also true. Oh, they have to charge market value and prove it? Okay...ABC gives the Red candidate the best ad slot during Dancing with the Stars, while the Blue candidate can only get the Tuesday 1:33AM ad spot.
Honestly, I've wondered if Slashdot has the right idea - everyone is a part of the voting process, each hav
In fact, I predict a disaster that will have me looking for another entertainment hub.
...And the entertainment hub that you're looking for is called Plex. Based on how you describe your usage of iTunes, Plex may fit the bill. However, its suitability for you depends on two major questions: 1.) How willing you are to jailbreak your Apple TV - or replace it with one of these. 2.) How much DRM'd video content you've got tying you to the Apple ecosystem.
They've got iOS,Android, and desktop apps, and they work more beautifully than I can possibly describe.
Slashdot Mirror
My optimistic side hopes this will eventually lead to a resurgence of independent ISPs.
That's quite a hefty level of optimism you've got there. If you were going to start Forresto Online, and become an ISP, you'd have all kinds of state and local opposition as you tried to lay your fiber cables down or staple them to the poles...but let's hand wave that train wreck away. With the big guys already implementing the six strike rule, anyone new on the radar would be a very easy target - especially since your arrival was heralded by the metric ton of paperwork that had to be filled out to lay your fiber.
From there, you have issues with both inertia, and the kind of people who have none. Let's face it: most people who sign up for cable/phone/internet bundles from Comcast are likely locked into annual contracts and are unlikely to move shortly after Forresto Online is available. A handful who are *that* disgusted with them will, but the majority will probably wait it out and see how bad it will get...typically that will be just long enough for Comcast to entice them with rates that are $5/month less than yours, $10/month less if they sign up for two years. The customers who won't fall for it are likely the ones who will be running uTorrent 24/7. Those who run it exclusively for Linux distros will simply be pounding your network, those who aren't, well, they'll be on the radar of the kinds of people who will try to sell you on adding the six strike policy to your list of services, lest they of course attempt to hold you liable for all the pirated content that's flowing through your pipes. You then decide between either listening to them, or going to bat for what you believe is right, but can't afford to do because your customers are relatively few compared to the titans against whom you're competing, and you've been spending most of your money trying to keep the packets flowing as the numbers continue to rise.
I'm all for independent ISPs. I just think that this is the worst possible climate to do it in.
"I have altered the details of our arrangement, pray I do not alter it any further."
Hmm, now who said that?
The guy who built the Death Star. It explains AT&T's logo...the blue color was just to alleviate a trademark dispute.
They begin with" I never asked for a data plan when I bought my LG flip phone." ...part of the data plan is used to offset the higher level of support required with smartphones, and unfortunately only about 10% of Iphone users actually no how to use them, and the rest need hand holding...Now these people want no data but want support in connecting via wifi to check their email, facebook, use company vpns, play words with friends, and all the neato things they can do. They want support for it, but without paying the toll....for that type of device to be used on the network, he would recquire a data plan, and as such one was added. He is free to go back to his old phone.
The correct response to this situation is, "We are more than happy to assist you with problems that your LG flip phone experiences. We can continue to give you voice and text messaging service on the iPhone you're presently using, but we cannot provide any assistance with its operation without a data plan added. If you'd like to add a data plan, I'd be more than delighted to assist you with the problems you're having with your handset".
I understand that support costs money, and that having a "support only" contract or a 'pay-per-incident' is only going to make your job even harder as half of the time will be spent arguing with customers who believe that they are entitled to free support. However, an iPhone can send and receive calls just as effectively as the basic phones in the absence of a data plan, and I don't think that automatically adding a data plan to a monthly fee of a customer who has decided to forgo both support and data service, with no ability to opt out of either, is the kind of customer policy that should be defended. He may technically be free to go back to his old phone, but that doesn't mean that it's possible - if his phone breaks and he's six months out on his contract, even another dumbphone costs $150 or more. To someone who's going to feel the squeeze of $20 a month for data service, that's a lot of money to ask him to cough up at once.
Yes, people - especially nontechnical people - are going to expect that data service and quality technical support both come out of thin air and are magically free, and I do certainly concede that this is not accurate, practical, sustainable, or fair to AT&T. That doesn't justify the fact that there is no "sudo rm --data-plan --phone-support" command for someone who genuinely wants neither. By the way, T-Mobile will let you have any service level you want as long as you either bring the phone with you to T-Mobile, or buy the phone outright instead of doing a carrier subsidy, so somehow, a carrier with a lot less money is able to do what these customers want and keep the towers running.
$0.42 per play is not a bad price ...
The summary says ".. or an average of 0.42 cent a play ..." (like under half a penny), not $0.42.
Sounds like someone has never heard of Verizon Math.
I love your business plan: Make everything free and spend millions on it with no returns. You should set up a Kickstarter page immediately. I know you'll do well!
Isn't that exactly what Google did with Android? And now they rule the game?
It looks as if his business skills are more aligned with reality than yours.
No, it's not what Google did with Android. Google has enough money in the bank to do stuff "because they feel like it", and see if it could be successful. They weren't banking on Android's success, and they'd continue to be making billions if WebOS was in second place. When you can start from *that* starting line, it's much easier to make it to second place.
From there, it was a timing issue - Apple was the phone that everybody wanted, but at least in America, many of them were either locked into multi-year contracts with their present carrier, or were loyal to them - many frequent domestic travelers swear by Verizon, because for all the Big Red does to royally screw them over, they frequently are the only carrier to have towers in obscure places, and for all of CDMA's faults, it did a much better job of routing calls through multiple towers (thus reducing the number of dropped calls) than the EDGE flavors of GSM. Resultantly, those who didn't want to give up their carrier were prime candidates for the Motorola Droid* when Verizon released it - the billion dollar marketing campaign Verizon did to launch the handset and its then-more-powerful interface didn't hurt the cause either, and neither did the generally-well-liked Google logo. Android took advantage of the fact that Apple and AT&T had an exclusivity contract and a limited feature base to springboard it to popularity. HTC and Samsung stepped up the game, and that's the nutshell version of how Android got the timing right.
UbuntuPhone, Windows Phone, BB10, and UnknownPhone all share similar problems. Windows Phone has a pile of money behind it, but Microsoft has to care if it succeeds and it suffers from a brand with a stigma - I swear if it was green themed and called the "X Phone" it'd have double its present market share. BB10 has some money behind it, but BlackBerry desperately needs it to succeed and it too has a bit of a brand issue ("Who makes the battery inside a Blackberry when they made on which you can't pull it out? Energizer - the alkaline battery will long outlast your system uptime!"). UbuntuPhone has some pocket change behind it, but not a well known brand. UnknownPhone has to start from the ground up with everything. None of these brands have the winning formula of "we don't care if we succeed", "we have a mountain of cash behind us that continues to grow", "we are well liked by our existing customers", "we're affordable", and "people are being held back from getting the phone they really want, so we'll be the fallback until we have enough buzz behind us".
That, however, will not stay that way forever.
No, that's not what it means at all. It means they'll be able to better tailor their store to profit off of you. Generally, that's not a good thing for you.
Actually, I'm completely in favor of having stores know what I want. Here's the kicker - I'll *tell* them, straight out! It's cheaper and infinitely more effective than this whole tracking thing. For example:
Best Buy:
I like what you did with getting rid of rebates. It was about the only thing of late you've done that I am happy about. If you would like to tailor your store to my ideal shopping experience, here's what you need to do:
1.) Pick a SINGLE soundtrack to your store. The dull roar of an arcade does not entice me to shop, it entices me to leave early.
2.) I am a mobile DJ, so stock a few top 40 tracks in vinyl format, please. If that's not possible, then please at least stock more than eight EDM albums in CD format.
3.) Every manual of every TV, Blu-Ray player, stereo receiver, and small appliance has a "specifications" page (or two) in the back of its owner's manual. Please have photocopies of these available if the salesperson doesn't know if a product has a specific feature.
4.) Internal components, please. You might not be able to beat Microcenter on part selection, but why can't I buy cases, processors, motherboards, or SATA controllers in-store?
5.) I understand the need to sell me a warranty on a laptop, so by all means do so. However, don't sell it to me based on fear that the unit will break, sell it to me because having a warranty means Best Buy will offer me additional value, like having a specialized "warranty rep" who will argue with HP for me in order to get the part I need. Set up an appointment for me to bring in both my old laptop and my new one so I can migrate my documents and settings.If the only reason for me to pay for a warranty is to protect against my own negligence, then either I am too careless to own a laptop, or I have no reason to believe that the laptops you sell are designed to handle everyday use.
6.) On the heels of #5, I don't like being badgered for the upsell.
7.) You've got a metric ton of TVs. Have weekly or monthly LAN/console parties after hours, I'd sign up and pay $15 to spend a few hours gaming with my friends on a TV I can't afford to own.
8.) Software on plastic disc isn't dead yet, but it will be if all you sell is Office and Norton.
Hollister:
1.) Turn the music down. Seriously, it's just too loud, and that's coming from my friends that are in their teens and early 20's.
2.) The amount of cologne in the air is sickening. I never thought I'd have to ask for breathable air.
3.) I understand that the lights are intentionally focused on the merchandise instead of the floor. It doesn't mean I like feeling my way around the store.
4.) I don't mind logos. I do mind logos visible from low earth orbit. Subtlety on T-shirts and similar would be nice.
I'm too tired to type more, but I'd be MORE than happy to help these marketers obtain exact information about what I want. The problem is that they never ask, or they ask in the most obnoxious ways possible. I want processors, not tampons, and I want someone to sell them to me.
Making your own web interface for file management? somewhat challenging. Finding a canned one that doesn't utterly suck? Well, that's what Sourceforge is for =)
Ajaxplorer:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ajaxplorer/?source=directory
Simple to use browser app, and there are iOS and Android apps that do a great job.
Extplorer:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/extplorer/?source=recommended
Better support for larger quantities of files and browsing using a traditional tree/file pane, but slightly more complicated UI due to the smaller, more nebulous buttons.
As far as getting it to run on something, your best bet is to either try XAMPP, or better yet (if you've got the RAM for it and enough hard disk space), grab a copy of VirtualBox and head over to TurnKeyLinux.org, where they've got pre-configured LAMP stacks with plenty of browser based applications, including Ajaxplorer, which you can have up and running, perfectly configured, in twenty minutes or less =).
> Easy to throw a web interface? I had installed Apache and looked at the kilometer long configuration file and was horrified. I
That's much like whining about the size of a Windows application's registry hive.
You must also be frightened by any fully featured modern video transcoder.
No, there's a smidge of difference.
The overwhelming majority of Windows applications can be configured using a series of dialog boxes, typically either in the "tools->options" or "edit->preferences" menu. These applications may incidentally store the results of those dialog boxes in a registry hive (or in an ini file in the %appdata% folder or similar), but it's infrequently the only way to make such changes. With Apache, they don't give you a tabbed, categorized dialog box in which to manipulate the options. Similarly, someone who "installed Apache...and was horrified" is probably not well-versed in working with HTTP server software, and thus, editing the Apache config file is going to be a mountain of guesswork as to what you'd really want in the first place. On top of that, there's the "you can usually fidget around to get Apache to do what you want it to do, but be really really careful because the easiest way to get it to work is also usually the most hackable, so if it works right with your instinct, you'll probably have to go back and change it later once you do end up getting it to work".
As for video transcoding, unless you're a masochist who prefers using FFMpeg on a command line instead of the myriad GUI options, video transcoding CAN be as easy as "choose your source video, pick the general format you want it to end up in or the type of device you want it to go on, and click 'transcode'". In those cases, most of the advanced options are optional, and the defaults are generally close to what you want unless you know specifically that you need a particular non-default option somewhere. This is different than trying to get a web server up and running, especially since there's no security consideration to the video transcode.
At $300 and being from Russia, one would assume that they wouldn't just release it as a DRM-free application...which raises the question whether they add DRM to it, and how they're going to protect it, especially if they've got the means of decrypting all of these high-security encryption mechanisms.
I'm wondering if there isn't an alternative business model here - a bounty for encrypted laptops, decrypting the data internally, and using that data for ransom. I'm pretty sure it'd work much better than selling licenses at $300 a pop.
When Microsoft "won" the browser wars, Netscape's software quality wasn't too hot, and there was no Firefox or Chrome. It took some time, but IE isn't the de facto standard it once was. Also, no one has yelled at Apple for bundling Safari with OSX, or Canonical for bundling Firefox.
When MS took its stab at the media player market, it was indeed trying to win based on 'bundled default'...but really the only thing it did was cost Winamp/MusicMatch/Realplayer some download stats. At the time, there *wasn't* a standard media player on Windows. Microsoft never really 'won' that battle, Apple did...and for what it's worth, Windows Media Player rips to MP3 now, and has since WMP10, I believe. Bonus points: they lost to Quicktime, and later Flash, for in-browser video streaming, too.
Microsoft is trying to make the App Store model work for Windows 8, but any success they have in this regard will undoubtedly be in spite of the Windows 8 store, not because of it. MS seems to be under some delusion that people want tablet apps EVERYWHERE. I was actually in the Microsoft store the other day, talking to several of the staff members there, asking for *one* app that took advantage of a reasonably-powerful GPU. Not a single one could give me a title of an app that would make my Nvidia GeForce 460M kick up the fan speed beyond its idle RPM rate. Sure, this is just fine for people who are perfectly happy playing "Cut the Rope" on their Intel integrated video chipset, but Valve's millions of users tell me that there are at least a handful who put a modicum of stress on their machines. If Microsoft doesn't cater to these users, then sure, you'll get sales from the handful of Surface users and Office 2013 sales, but Microsoft's success won't come from ignoring the strengths of the desktop computer and treating everything with i7's and dual Xeons like a Surface tablet.
If nothing else, it behooves them to keep the antitrust lawyers at bay. If bundling IE was enough to get them a monopoly conviction, preventing Valve - a company with plenty of cash in the bank - from selling their software on their platform would be an open-and-shut case that they can't afford to lose.
I don't think that means as much as you think it does. Let me use web development as an analogy here. Until recently, there was a huge amount of pressure for web developers to support Internet Explorer 6. It was released in 2001, it's got lousy support for modern standards, and it's buggy as hell. Web developers loathe supporting it but are backed into a corner because so many people still used it (until recently, thankfully). No savvy people used it out of preference, only the people stuck with it.
Now take a look at what you're saying. Yes, it may be the case that most apps still run on 2.2. But that's not because savvy users like 2.2 and it doesn't mean that developers don't want to drop support for 2.2. It's just the inertia of people who are slow to upgrade are holding back everybody else.
Personally, I've owned several Android phones, and I've always wanted to upgrade for solid reasons. Quality control is generally very poor for Android, and newer versions are often necessary for bug fixes. My last Android phone is stuck on 2.3 despite Sony's commitments to upgrade it to 4.0, and it's useless to me because it's got a SIP bug that stops people phoning me when the phone has been idle for longer than ten minutes. That's not "bragging rights", unless you think an operational phone is something to brag about.
There's two things to address here. First, the comparison to IE6 is somewhat apt, and somewhat not. See, IE6 had some serious problems that are inherent within its nature. The one I most famously remember is that it didn't do transparent PNGs, but I know that its CSS handling was terrible, ActiveX was its own therapist-requiring nightmare, and we won't even get into its memory management issues. Comparing that with a genuinely usable release of Android raises questions in that regard. Are developers literally unable to add features to their apps in order to retain compatibility with Gingerbread? Or are they feature complete and just require a little extra QA testing? There are no doubt plenty of apps that fall into both camps, but the ultimate question is whether apps that fit in the first category are in sufficient quantity to prevent better application developments on the platform as a whole.
Regarding your issue with SIP calling specifically, I don't know if CSipSimple will be of any assistance. That said, I question that example specifically because I know that I've had SIP calling working on both GB and ICS (possibly Froyo as well, IDR), whether on Cyanogenmod or an official ROM. If the issue is with your phone specifically, then Sony's additions (and/or subtractions) to the firmware likely caused the problem at hand. If that's the case, then the solution here is for Sony to get their act together. We are talking Sony here, and there's no guarantee that the issue won't persist even if they do give you an OTA update to ICS/JB. Therefore, one could equally argue that a working 2.3 release would solve this issue just as well as a 4.0 upgrade.
Version numbers are not the fragmentation that people are talking about. It's more to do with device capabilities and vendor customisations. If you develop for iOS, you only have to deal with three aspect ratios and three display densities. On Android, there's a multitude of both to deal with. If you develop for iOS, you only have to support one variant of the operating system. On Android, there are several major ones. Even if you are talking about version numbers, iOS is far more consolidated than Android in terms of reach, because the people who actually use apps tend to upgrade v
Because whenever new versions of iOS come out, they quickly become the most popular release of the OS. That is not true with Android, because the carriers and OEMs either drag their feet or flat out refuse to upgrade their software. As a result, Google and third-parties want to move forward, but old versions of operating systems are preventing them from moving forward. Apple does not have this problem.
That may be the case, but that still doesn't answer the question of "so what?". So Apple users tend to install the iOS updates when available while Android users don't/can't. The question being posed here is "what advantage to the end users is there to staying on the bleeding edge?" "Because Apple users do it" is a bit of a shallow answer to that question.
People on tech forums always complain about how fragmented Android is. "ZoMg iM sTuCk On TiArAmAsU!!!!!111 WhEn WiLl i GeT wHiTe ChOcOlAtE MoChA??? WAAAAHHHHHhhh!!!!!1111 $MY_CARRIER iS tEh SuXoRz!!!"
In my experience, it's more version number bragging contests than anything else. The only apps that don't run on every version of Android I've used since 2.2 (now a three year old release that counts for less than 3% of devices combined with all of those below it) are LBE Privacy Guard (doesn't run on Jelly Bean but runs on anything else; XDA-Devs has a translation of the Chinese variant that works fine), 4EXT Recovery (which is more hardware specific than OS specific since it's actually a recovery environment), and a few power widgets since ICS and up don't allow widgets to directly toggle GPS and the baseband. Everything else, from Amazon daily free apps (usually games) to Netflix, to media players, to Root Explorer...it all works flawlessly on every Android device I've owned.
Yes, Jellybean gives us Google Now and pseudo-Swype. Yes, ICS gave us a somewhat different UI (I prefer the vertically scrolling app drawer myself...and yes I know about the third party launcher apps; that's not the point) and MTP instead of USB Mass Storage (another change I somewhat-understand but can't stand). If your hardware supports NFC, ICS can also utilize that, although its utility is still in the "because I can" / "the iPhone doesn't have it" stage. Beyond those changes, I have to Wikipedia the rest.
Really, the bigger differences tend to follow the OEMs. I personally really like HTC Sense, though I know plenty of people (especially here) disagree with me. Touchwiz doesn't completely suck like Motoblur does, and the bone-stock nexus/cyanogen UI seems a bit too minimalist for me. For end users, the differences in those skins is going to be a bigger change than between different android versions, especially since, once again, they all run the same apps.
Everyone complains about how fragmented Android is, but literally every OS that's ever had more than one version will have that. Windows? XP/Vista/7/8, to say nothing about the asymptotic number of 2000/9x users clinging to their 15 year old desktops that still work perfectly and refuse to die. No one complains that Windows is fragmented. OSX? Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard/Lion/Mountain Lion all exist, all happily running Final Cut Pro, Logic, Photoshop, and iLife. Linux? There's an extensive SVG-formatted family tree of flavors over on Wiki, all doing something. iOS? Perhaps the closest to a unified platform, but there are still plenty of 3GS devices and older-gen iPod Touch units running iOS 5.x (including every first-gen iPad), 4.x, and likely still a handful on 3.x.
No matter what you compare Android to, you'll be comparing it to something with plenty of fragmentation of its own. Fragmentation has never stopped a computing platform from adoption, and just because there is a version of $WHATEVER_OS newer than yours doesn't instantly prevent all the existing applications from running unless the OS maker royally messes with stuff or involves a completely different flavor of hardware or something equally drastic. So why is it that Androidland always has their knickers in a twist over the fact that their hardware isn't running THE LATEST version? If it was really that big of a deal, most phones have fairly simple rooting instructions over at xda-devs or sdx-devs.
Mobile OS updates were RARE before the iPhone; I remember my HTC Dash getting exactly one (official) update. Desktop Windows never gave free updates, and neither did OSX - that was always something the Linux community prided itself on, but the Linux community isn't attempting to perpetuate a business model.
I'll conclude with posing the question again: Why does Android get the 'fragmented' label as a derogatory stigma and a 'problem' in need of 'solving', when literally every operating system ever can also wear that badge just as well and no one cares?
I know, it's anonymous coward and all...but I had an interesting issue along this vein...
Two weeks ago, a client called us saying she got some FBI scareware that also tapped into her webcam. I went to investigate. No FBI scareware when I tried it, but I did see security essentials find stuff, and take some time to remove each item...during which it invariably found more.
So, I tried the usual tools - Fixboot/Fixmbr, Combofix, TDSSKiller, ADWMBR, Malwarebytes, and my trusty ESET NOD32 recovery disc. None of that seemed to stop it. So I tried a repair XP install. I learned that the 'repair' install doesn't do nearly as much as I'd like it to, but whatevs, it was gone. ESET said it was clean, TDSSKiller said it was clean, Combofix said it was clean, and MBAM said it was clean. Security Essentials wouldn't shut up.
I googled a bit and found out that this client had caught one of the strains from the xpaj family. It does EVERYTHING - MBR rewrite, device driver, etc. Seriously among the nastiest virus infections I've ever come across. Further googling revealed that Kaspersky had an explicitly dedicated removal tool just for xpaj. it took about half an hour to run, and found literally thousands of files infected with it. It must have been file headers or something because they were all ultimately cleaned...but this thing fooled EVERYONE but Security Essentials.
Now granted MSE didn't completely take care of the issue, and clearly it also didn't stop it from running amuck...but it did find something nothing else I tried did...so I'm not thoroughly convinced that writing it off wholesale isn't entirely warranted either.
What possible "enforcement" can be levied against China for this?
"Respect our copyrights or we'll borrow less money!"
The rest of it was almost credible, but Nero ffs? No way you are serious. You are rejecting linux because it doesnt run the crappiest package of binaries on the planet natively? Great, stick with windows, get what you deserve.
Full disclosure: I'm a part of the Nero Beta/MVP program, but not on the payroll, and Nero isn't providing any incentives for me to write this. Hopefully affinity for software titles and companies can exist for non-Linux/OSS without getting criticized for it...
Nero the crappiest package of binaries? It has its faults (and don't get me started on Kwik Media), but that implies it's worse than Symantec Antivirus...
Nero 9 royally sucked, 8 and 10 were okay. 11 and 12 were huge if you used their video editing package, but most of that was templates. While I know that there are people who have had problems with the product, I personally have found the package to be extremely stable - and one of the things I do is to head over to the Nero Facebook page and try to provide troubleshooting steps to users that need them.
Nero Video is no Adobe Premiere/Final Cut/Avid, but that's not the target demographic. The Premiere Elements/PowerDirector/iMovie crowd is. In that arena, Nero is competitively priced and has the lowest system requirements on the market.
Nero Recode is quite possibly the fastest GUI transcoder I've used. In my tests, I transcoded Xvid files and DVDs faster in Recode than I did in Handbrake or SUPER. Perhaps the command line edition of x264 would have been faster in raw transcode times, but having to properly write out all the parameters in a command would likely make up the difference, at least for me.
I personally hate Kwik Media, as it generally takes the iTunes presentation method that I can't stand to begin with. However, I do give it credit for seamlessly scaling, transcoding, and transferring videos to my Android phone and tablet with a single drag-and-drop, and being correct in its resolution settings every time.
As DRM is a fun issue around here, let's consider Nero's - it only exists around the parts that Nero sublicenses (DVD/Dolby decoders, Blu-Ray decoder, MPEG-2 encoder), not around Nero's own code. Obviously not ideal, but it's either fulfill that sort of contractual obligation or releasing a suite without it...which at this point isn't terribly feasible when marketing to end users who are choosing between Nero, Cyberlink, and Roxio.
Finally, if you are having issues with your copy of Nero, please e-mail me, and I'll do what I can to either help, or get you in contact with some higher-tier people who can. I've met and interacted with the customer support department of Nero personally, and they are all wonderful people who take a genuine interest in providing help and support to people who need it.
DarkTable looked pretty close to Lightroom for me; Corel's $60 AfterShot Pro looks similarly well spec'd (and uses a third of the hard disk space) and runs on Windows, OSX, and most Linux distros. Don't know if those will help.
For me, the bigger problem is the tracking that goes along with the ads. If no advertising did tracking, I probably wouldn't bother to block them.
I've actually been pretty happy with ad-block for Opera, in that I can block tracking cookies and such without actually blocking ad serving. That I feel is a fair compromise.
How do I know it works? Well, as a single, male,virgin, Christian with a buck or two to his name (not much more though), getting an ad for safeabortions.com is about the furthest possible thing from a targeted advertisement I could think of. No seriously, I actually got an ad for that today.
Oh, I live in the UK and was unaware of a third candidate. I thought the US was a two party only system?
I recall at least five presidential candidates on my ballot when I voted, plus a write-in area where you could write the name of any US citizen* you wanted (which is what I did).
The fact of the matter is that you have to go back to 1874 to find a president who wasn't either a democrat or a republican. My numbers are shady and even looking it up on Wikipedia is tricky, but I'm unaware of a situation in which a candidate who won even a single state's electoral votes that wasn't endorsed by either one of those two political parties. Thus, it's considered a "two party system" in that, for presidential elections, you've got roughly the same chances of winning the presidential election as a candidate that isn't either democrat or republican as you are to have your bad day of having your winning lottery ticket destroyed by a meteor being turned around by a group of RIAA executives deciding to donate all their lawsuit money to charity after buying you a Delorean that actually flies.
Smaller offices are a bit different; there are a handful of congressmen in the House of Representatives (and possibly a senator or two) that are of the 'Independent' party. State, county, and local officials that frequently require only a few hundred votes to win are also more likely to be independent or some more obscure party. "Working families", "constitution", and "green" were all on the ballot this year, though typically for "district court judge" or "town treasurer" or something equally obscure, or a rehash of a candidate already running either on the democratic or republican platforms.
Hope that helps clear things up! =)
The Sense dialer dials when I tap a number, and gives me a menu when I long-press it. Samsung's dialer requires several more taps to dial a number from the recent list
Samsung: Slide left to dial, slide right to send a text. Alternatively click one and raise to your ear to dial.
Didn't know about the sliding; I'll have to try that.
The Sense e-mail clients is one of the few that has CONSISTENTLY worked well with Exchange. Frequently, my phone gets push e-mail before my desktop Outlook client, and has since the first iterations of Android with Sense, even when stock Android had stability issues with it.
Never had issues with the stock email client, maybe your exchange server is fucked?
My Exchange server is fine, thanks for asking =). Android's native Exchange support got a LOT better with the FroYo update; 2.1 and earlier had lots of known issues with Exchange. Sense's E-Mail client was stable and effective even when Android's native stock Exchange stack wasn't. While more a historical point than a presently applicable one, I'm simply saying that HTC got that right when Google got it wrong. Besides, my personal taste is in favor of the Sense mail client, though both are definitely usable at this point. Finally, I admittedly don't know how well stock Android natively handles multiple Exchange accounts on different servers; I've had better luck using third party clients like Touchdown than either stock Android or Sense.
The Weather clock is one of the most often imitated looks - Fancy Widgets, Beautiful Widgets, and HD Widgets all have variants of it, and it seems to do a fine job at balancing between needlessly refreshing and being out of date.
Don't care for it myself, Samsung has something similar, billions of clones on the market, hardly a reason to buy an HTC.
I'm not saying that I'd purchase a phone or not based on a not-to-difficult-to-acquire widget...but clearly there's a good idea if everyone is cloning it, and the idea goes back to TouchFLO3D on Windows Mobile 6.1.
The Ring unlock is one of the handiest ways to jump right to a specific function...the 'reverse ring' is becoming standard in a lot of ICS/JB ROMs, and admittedly it's not the most intuitive things to pick up at the very first glance, but I've yet to see an unlocker I prefer.
Samsung puts icons at the bottom of the lock screen that you can drag to access functions, and they are configurable.
Not if you have a grid password, it doesn't. Sense gives you a ring and functions regardless...and they're configurable, too.
HTC Sync is a lot more stable than Samsung Kies
I don't think anyone uses either of them. Calendar syncs with Google/Exchange, sync media by dragging files or just sync with Picasa/Facebook or whatever.
Touchwiz does not differ from stock Android much, being mainly a light weight skin and some optional apps you can easily ignore. Sense just makes your phone slow.
There is indeed a market for this kind of functionality if Markspace can sell The Missing Sync and can keep the lights on. I'm not the only one of my friends that is starting to have a concern about how much data Google has on me, and Hosted Exchange is relatively expensive when compared to desktop applications that already exist. The data caps on low-tier data plans make it worthwhile to use a USB cable when convenient to do so, and the transfers are still generally faster than any kind of untethered connection...besides, a USB cable charges your phone during the sync, instead of using the battery at an increased rate. I think that both manufacturers could do well to flesh out their desktop applications more, namely enabling more streamlined iTunes syncing, batch backup/restore of downloaded applications, and texti
HTC isn't bad but at this point Sense is working against them.
Okay, can someone PLEASE explain this to me? Genuine question here - it seems to be the obligatory follow-up to any mention of HTC. I don't really get this...
--The Sense dialer dials when I tap a number, and gives me a menu when I long-press it. Samsung's dialer requires several more taps to dial a number from the recent list and doesn't have as many nice filters and groupings.
--The Sense e-mail clients is one of the few that has CONSISTENTLY worked well with Exchange. Frequently, my phone gets push e-mail before my desktop Outlook client, and has since the first iterations of Android with Sense, even when stock Android had stability issues with it.
--The Weather clock is one of the most often imitated looks - Fancy Widgets, Beautiful Widgets, and HD Widgets all have variants of it, and it seems to do a fine job at balancing between needlessly refreshing and being out of date.
--The Ring unlock is one of the handiest ways to jump right to a specific function...the 'reverse ring' is becoming standard in a lot of ICS/JB ROMs, and admittedly it's not the most intuitive things to pick up at the very first glance, but I've yet to see an unlocker I prefer.
--HTC Sync is a lot more stable than Samsung Kies, and a lot less expensive than The Missing Sync, making it a great way of transferring contacts and calendars over a USB cable (a feature Android proper annoyingly leaves to be desired).
Now don't get me wrong, 'Location' is a bit annoying, and their variant of 'Find My Phone' just kills your battery in no time flat, and I know that the faint of RAM and CPU cycles can have issues with the latest releases of Sense. Even so, my two-year-old Incredible can run it on Gingerbread* just fine. Yes, low-end phones are going to take exception to its additional RAM requirements, and there's of course no accounting for taste, and I completely understand that many here will prefer stock Android simply because it's what they like, and I'm not trying to convince those who fit that group otherwise. However, is it really THAT much worse in the eyes of THAT many people that it's what's caused the decline of HTC?
Personally, I went with a GS3 over a One X more due to the lack of a removable battery and MicroSD slot. My HD2 is still my secondary phone due to the fact that it runs WM6.5, WP7.8, and every version of Android ever released, making it a phone more mod friendly than basically anything Samsung's ever put out...though admittedly I do feel bad for users still stuck on WinMo 6.5 and still have a bit of time left before their contract expires.
Therefore, I reiterate: Why so much hatred for Sense that it makes Touchwiz the more desirable overlay?
*Yes, I know Gingerbread is old...but that's the latest official release for the handset, and even though there are ICS and JB ROMs for the hardware, I've found that even the sense-free, odexed, optimized versions are still heavy enough to keep the hardware from running as smooth as GB, plus I don't really see the appeal of the newer releases anyway.
The idea that your vote doesnt count if your candidate doesnt win is stupid, and undermines the system.
Agreed.
Part of the point of a democracy is to have you involved (consent of the governed)
With you here, too.
and part is that if there enough of you who dont like the system you will eventually cause change.
...And this is where we start to peel apart. If we did a pure popular vote system, I'd be with you here, too. But the fact of the matter is that New York's 29 electoral votes have gone to the democratic candidate with a nearly 60% majority each time, and there's nothing regarding President Obama's recent actions (he's still quite popular around here), or Mitt Romney's overall package, that would lead me to believe that the people here in New York are going to surprise anyone this election. Now if President Obama prevented FEMA from doing any work in Queens, Staten Island, or Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or ignored the situation wholesale as hundreds of thousands of people still don't have heat or power and mass transit still isn't working and getting gasoline is now an evening's project, or took a piss on Ground Zero...THEN there might be a snowball's chance in hell that those electoral votes aren't his. As it stands right now though, Neither presidential candidate is making an attempt to campaign in my state because they know what I know - voting for anyone except President Obama in New York State is either a matter of principle or a fool's errand, depending on your point of view. Indeed, I'll be at the polls after work, casting my vote as is my civic duty. However, we're not a swing state, and President Obama didn't shoot himself in the foot over these past two weeks. I wouldn't bet a counterfeit wooden nickel in favor of Mitt Romney or a third party candidate taking New York. It's not a matter of "If my candidate doesn't win then it's pointless to vote". It's a matter of "there are 538 votes that ultimately decide the president, 29 of them are from my state, and those 29 votes are all but guaranteed not to contribute to another candidate winning, regardless of where my personal vote goes."
Next time you feel like railing against the government, consider that you are part of the problem.
Guess again, and take a look at the final numbers of the New York State popular vote. Until hundreds of thousands of other people change their mind (or move from New York to Texas), it's a single band-aid in a war zone.
I live in New York. President Obama is going to get our electoral votes no matter which lever I pull in the booth, so if someone wants to pay me $100 to flip a particular switch, I'll gladly accept their money and pull whichever lever they ask of me - it boils down to literally whether I want $100 or not.
As for pressure on a poll in a church, I'd assume that any non-personal venue that is stated to be a place where votes can be submitted fall under the 100-foot rule, enforcement could be incentive-based - you get 10% of the fine if you submit a photo of a designated polling place where there are Obama/Romney signs. Now if you're voting on your personal iPhone in Times Square, well then I'd assume it'd be your own damn fault for flipping the virtual lever there.
Finally, there are four basic ways for politicians to receive money to run their campaigns:
1.) lots of people with a little money pay for it.
2.) small numbers of people with a lot of money pay for it.
3.) the person running pays their own way.
4.) the government pays for everyone's campaign.
No matter who pays for a campaign, people will complain:
1.) Anyone who's going to put money towards a campaign is not going to put it towards a candidate they're not already voting for. It basically becomes an informal poll, plus it then turns campaigns into "we need your vote AND your money!". Begging for my vote is already painful enough, the amount of $100-or-less donations it'd require for a candidate to earn enough to run a useful campaign for anything larger than MAYBE a House representative is so high that if you've seen a commercial for them, they've likely already won, and then you have the kind of people who would give money to a politician buying them.
2.) We call these small numbers of people either "The One Percent", "Corporations", "Billionaires", "Billionaires in the One Percent who own Corporations", or some loose variant of that. Effectively, it only becomes feasible to participate in government if you've already got the money to avoid any legislation you don't like anyway.
3.) If a person can afford a campaign out of their own checking account, they're clearly both independently wealthy and bored enough to want a part time job behind a desk pushing paper, and are willing to gamble tens of millions of their own dollars to do it. On the bright side, they don't have much of anyone to answer to, so you won't find megacorps pulling strings to get their votes. Conversely, whatever megacorps they own or have significant ties to will likely be favored, as will bills that facilitate them keeping their own money.
4.) Having the government give a set limit to every candidate seems like the fairest system, but even that has significant drawbacks. If the government gives, say, $100,000 to every aspiring senator, I'd be an 'aspiring senator' and run a bum campaign just to get my hands on the money. How do you filter that? Limit to five candidates? Who chooses them? The political parties? Which three minor parties get candidates? Would it not then be jockeying for the grants that is where the race is fought? Do you make the losing candidates pay the money back? Well then you won't have any candidates who don't have $100,000 in the bank running for office, and if they have that kind of cash to blow, then could already fit in category #3 and not waste taxpayer dollars in the process. Meanwhile, you then have the existing representatives deciding whether the amount goes up or down each year, and then there's reverse manipulation of that. ABC wants the Red candidate to win, his TV spots cost $100, while the Blue candidate has to cough up $5,000 for the same spot. NBC wants the Blue candidate, and the reverse is also true. Oh, they have to charge market value and prove it? Okay...ABC gives the Red candidate the best ad slot during Dancing with the Stars, while the Blue candidate can only get the Tuesday 1:33AM ad spot.
Honestly, I've wondered if Slashdot has the right idea - everyone is a part of the voting process, each hav
LBE Privacy Guard. Still free, and still allows denial of permissions to apps on a rooted phone.
In fact, I predict a disaster that will have me looking for another entertainment hub.
...And the entertainment hub that you're looking for is called Plex. Based on how you describe your usage of iTunes, Plex may fit the bill. However, its suitability for you depends on two major questions:
1.) How willing you are to jailbreak your Apple TV - or replace it with one of these.
2.) How much DRM'd video content you've got tying you to the Apple ecosystem.
They've got iOS,Android, and desktop apps, and they work more beautifully than I can possibly describe.