My HTC Sensation seems to have great build quality; it's survived a long time with not-so-gentle handling. The problem I have isn't the hardware, it's the shitty software.
Yeah, I'd like to have one with the same features, but I wouldn't mind if it's twice as thick as an iPhone, if that means I get better performance and more battery life. And being able to install any OS is important too; then there would be community-supported OSes available.
>I'm a geek, too, and I just want a phone that can browse and make phone calls.
Yeah, that'd be nice too, but (stock) Android is so unreliable it can't even do that very well. Almost every time I load the web browser on my phone, it crashes. On the second or third try, it'll work for a while. For many other tasks, it just hangs for 10-20 seconds with a blank screen before proceeding.
The whole reason I want an open-source phone is so I can remove all the crapware that the regular vendor-built Android software stack contains, and which is causing all these problems, not just so I can fiddle with it pointlessly. It's the same reason my wife's laptop runs Linux Mint: it "just works" and rarely has any kinds of problems, unlike Windows which it used to run.
Did you miss this line? "I don't need a phone that tries to sell me stuff."
Besides, you're not paying to be sold stuff, you're paying for a phone and the other functionality that comes with that. But the shopping stuff is an add-on that spoils the utility of the device IMO.
Still, I wonder how good the hardware is. If the phone is being subsidized by Amazon, and if CyanogenMod can make a new firmware for it (which doesn't have any shopping stuff or other crapware), then it might be worth it. Of course, Amazon probably wouldn't like that too much.
Anyway, I can only hope the deal falls through for some reason. The state of telecom in this country is simply horrible, and another merger will only make it worse.
You do realize that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are currently inhabited, don't you? In fact, they were inhabited shortly after the bombs there exploded.
Nuclear weapons are not designed to render areas uninhabitable. They're designed to make a gigantic explosion, and that's it. Making the area uninhabitable, sorta like the Romans did with Carthage, is not one of the design goals.
Was he really democratically elected? Or was it a sham election, like the one in Florida in 2000, or worse the elections where Saddam Hussein won with 99% of the vote?
From what I can tell, most "democratic elections" are just shams. To be fair, the US isn't really that bad in the voting booth, it's just that the process whereby the candidates are selected is a complete sham and farce. Other countries are worse. Only the western European countries seem to have a really good handle on democratic elections.
My enthusiasm is dead not because of the tech, but because of all the handcuffs that come with today's devices.
This stupid Amazon phone, for instance, only works on the AT&T network. WTF? AT&T is probably the worst of the bunch. That alone disqualifies it for me. The bit about it spamming me with Amazon ads doesn't help. I don't need a phone that tries to sell me stuff.
Other Android phones aren't much better; they're closed-source and don't get updates for more than a few months after they're released. CyanogenMod may be a good alternative here, but you have to select your phone carefully here since only a few select phones have good CM support.
Apple phones are the epitome of lock-in. And Windows phones are, well, Windows phones.
What I want is a well-made Android phone that runs CyanogenMod, has an easily-replaced battery and SD card, and works on T-mobile (at least until they get consumed by some shitty company like Verizon).
So you need to buy a Google-branded phone to get good support, and all the other Android vendors such? So why bother letting other vendors make Android phones at all?
Face it, Google has done a terrible job with Android because it failed to anticipate the other vendors would do such a poor job supporting their products, and that this would reflect on Android as a whole.
Also, there was no such thing as a Nexus when I got my phone.
Um, no, I'm speaking from experience. Phones aren't supported by the mfgrs or carriers after 6-12 months. Just try asking your carrier when you're going to get an update to the latest version of Android for your 2 or 3-year-old phone. They'll tell you to buy a new one.
At least Apple seems to support their devices for a decent amount of time, if you can stomach the insane amount of control and vendor lock-in that Apple exercises.
Or, perhaps, there are simply fewer women seeking positions in tech firms for whatever reason?
Perhaps women are being guided away from technical pursuits at an early age by the gender stereotypes of their parents and teachers. Perhaps they have freely chosen to do other things.
Or how about this:
Maybe women have looked at these careers, and decided they didn't want a job where they were expected to work 80 hours a week and to not have any kind of family or social life, and they didn't want a job where they'd be surrounded by "brogrammers". Maybe they instead gravitated to better professions such as law or medicine, where there's actually really good stability, unlike the tech sector.
You're mostly right about Google's OS, but you left out some important stuff, like the fact that it crashes all the time, that it takes 30 seconds to start up the Maps app, that Google Maps crashes every time you go back to the home screen, etc. Considering how rock-solid reliable Linux is these days, it's utterly shameful how UNreliable and crashy Android is.
You're exactly right about Apple's OS.
But Windows? That thing (the desktop version, I'm still using 7 in my corporate job here) still isn't very reliable in my experience, plus it has a lot of the same vendor lock-in. The mobile version has the most horrid UI I've ever seen.
Actually, the theft thing probably isn't much of a problem here. This is a rather affluent area and there doesn't seem to be much crime at all (strangely, we're not that far from Newark, which of course has one of the highest murder rates in the nation. Odd how crime can be so well confined to certain places.). Too bad they can't spend some of these enormous property taxes on building some proper bike lanes so people can get around better and safer that way. There's even an abandoned century-old railroad near my house that goes to one of the nearby towns with a train station; it would be perfect for converting into a rail trail.
They are efficient, if there's very high ridership and all the people are going to the same place. They work pretty well in NYC, for instance (they're called "subways"), because the layout of the densest part of the city is long and narrow, and the population density is very high, so the ridership is high, and alternate modes of transport aren't needed as much.
The problem is that most of America isn't much like that, so trains don't work very well. I live not far from NYC, and there's heavy-rail commuter trains nearby that would take me to Manhattan. However, that "additional means of transportation" is a big problem, not on the Manhattan side, but here where I live. The nearest train station is "only" 2 miles away, but how do I get there? I could drive, but then where do I park? The parking garage there has reserved spaces and it costs a fortune to get a monthly pass (like double my car payment). Walking is just too far if I had to commute every day. I could take a bus, but now between the bus and the train the transit time gets really high, and you can't count on the bus to be on time, and when it's late, you'll miss the train and that'll add another 30 minutes to your commute. Of course, (if I had a job there, which I don't) I could just move into Manhattan, but the cost of living there is outrageous.
Sorry, but no. Even the blue states like New York and New Jersey are chock-full of corruption, with extremely high costs of living and very poor standards of living to match. It's actually cheaper to live in Brussels than in NYC, for instance, but in Belgium there's excellent and very affordable healthcare, unlike anyplace in the US. And the crime rate in NYC (or anyplace in the US) is much, much higher than in the northern or western European countries.
Kicking out the shitty southern states isn't going to fix these problems. The US is just fundamentally broken.
I entirely agree that such distractions should not be allowed. However, is this really a problem? Admittedly, I've only been using Google Maps so far, but there's no ads on that. If it isn't actually a problem, then I don't think any regulation is needed.
Why should you have to waste time and energy pulling over, potentially creating a dangerous situation, just so your passenger can enter a new destination on the GPS? Are people really this stupid?
Why not? The western European nations enjoy a significantly better standard of living than the US, so they're obviously doing something right. Their main problem seems to have been including some southern and eastern European nations like Greece with crappy economies into their union.
From some numbers I've seen, trains are not very efficient for short or medium-distance commuting. If you're worried about energy efficiency, you're actually better off with a car than with light rail or heavy rail, according to some sources.
Here's a table on Wikipedia which gives numbers with rail (both kinds) edging out cars, but with buses doing far, far worse.
This seems an oversimplification. If you quadrupled the unemployment rate in France, I'm sure you'd see an increase in crime.
Would they? They have a totally different culture, plus they have better social support systems. I don't think they're in danger of having the kind of ghettos that we have in Detroit any time soon.
The civil rights and gay rights movements didn't start with law, they started with grassroots.
Those aren't prohibitions, they're exactly the opposite. People wanted something to be legal, and socially accepted, which previously wasn't. Gun restrictions are the opposite of this: anti-gun people want to take something that's legal and somewhat socially accepted (depending highly on region and locality), and make it illegal. The Temperance Movement tried that back in the 20s, and it didn't work out too well: people didn't suddenly say "oh darn, alcohol is illegal, so I better not drink any!" You can't change culture with a law. And even with civil rights and gay rights, there too they didn't start with passing laws, they started with grassroots movements to change the culture. It took a while for cultural shifts to occur. Not that long, mind you; only a few decades ago all the gays were still "in the closet" in most places, and these days it's pretty well accepted outside of very conservative circles, but the shift has been well within a lifetime. Another thing that's changed a lot in the past few decades is smoking (in the USA); when I was young, restaurants all allowed smoking, it was legal everywhere, and was common indoors (like in offices). Now it's not. This wasn't done with a big blanket ban, it was a slow change.
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My HTC Sensation seems to have great build quality; it's survived a long time with not-so-gentle handling. The problem I have isn't the hardware, it's the shitty software.
Yeah, I'd like to have one with the same features, but I wouldn't mind if it's twice as thick as an iPhone, if that means I get better performance and more battery life. And being able to install any OS is important too; then there would be community-supported OSes available.
My HTC got one update a few months after I got the phone. After that, nothing. So no, it CAN'T be updated, since my mfgr and carrier don't bother to.
>I'm a geek, too, and I just want a phone that can browse and make phone calls.
Yeah, that'd be nice too, but (stock) Android is so unreliable it can't even do that very well. Almost every time I load the web browser on my phone, it crashes. On the second or third try, it'll work for a while. For many other tasks, it just hangs for 10-20 seconds with a blank screen before proceeding.
The whole reason I want an open-source phone is so I can remove all the crapware that the regular vendor-built Android software stack contains, and which is causing all these problems, not just so I can fiddle with it pointlessly. It's the same reason my wife's laptop runs Linux Mint: it "just works" and rarely has any kinds of problems, unlike Windows which it used to run.
Did you miss this line? "I don't need a phone that tries to sell me stuff."
Besides, you're not paying to be sold stuff, you're paying for a phone and the other functionality that comes with that. But the shopping stuff is an add-on that spoils the utility of the device IMO.
Still, I wonder how good the hardware is. If the phone is being subsidized by Amazon, and if CyanogenMod can make a new firmware for it (which doesn't have any shopping stuff or other crapware), then it might be worth it. Of course, Amazon probably wouldn't like that too much.
Thanks, I'll check it out. I'd like to just keep my HTC Sensation 4G, but it doesn't seem to be that well supported by CM.
Oh right, that's what I was thinking of.
Anyway, I can only hope the deal falls through for some reason. The state of telecom in this country is simply horrible, and another merger will only make it worse.
That's the proper American spelling of the word, just like the proper American spelling of "America" is "'Murica".
You do realize that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are currently inhabited, don't you? In fact, they were inhabited shortly after the bombs there exploded.
Nuclear weapons are not designed to render areas uninhabitable. They're designed to make a gigantic explosion, and that's it. Making the area uninhabitable, sorta like the Romans did with Carthage, is not one of the design goals.
Was he really democratically elected? Or was it a sham election, like the one in Florida in 2000, or worse the elections where Saddam Hussein won with 99% of the vote?
From what I can tell, most "democratic elections" are just shams. To be fair, the US isn't really that bad in the voting booth, it's just that the process whereby the candidates are selected is a complete sham and farce. Other countries are worse. Only the western European countries seem to have a really good handle on democratic elections.
My enthusiasm is dead not because of the tech, but because of all the handcuffs that come with today's devices.
This stupid Amazon phone, for instance, only works on the AT&T network. WTF? AT&T is probably the worst of the bunch. That alone disqualifies it for me. The bit about it spamming me with Amazon ads doesn't help. I don't need a phone that tries to sell me stuff.
Other Android phones aren't much better; they're closed-source and don't get updates for more than a few months after they're released. CyanogenMod may be a good alternative here, but you have to select your phone carefully here since only a few select phones have good CM support.
Apple phones are the epitome of lock-in. And Windows phones are, well, Windows phones.
What I want is a well-made Android phone that runs CyanogenMod, has an easily-replaced battery and SD card, and works on T-mobile (at least until they get consumed by some shitty company like Verizon).
So you need to buy a Google-branded phone to get good support, and all the other Android vendors such? So why bother letting other vendors make Android phones at all?
Face it, Google has done a terrible job with Android because it failed to anticipate the other vendors would do such a poor job supporting their products, and that this would reflect on Android as a whole.
Also, there was no such thing as a Nexus when I got my phone.
Um, no, I'm speaking from experience. Phones aren't supported by the mfgrs or carriers after 6-12 months. Just try asking your carrier when you're going to get an update to the latest version of Android for your 2 or 3-year-old phone. They'll tell you to buy a new one.
At least Apple seems to support their devices for a decent amount of time, if you can stomach the insane amount of control and vendor lock-in that Apple exercises.
Or, perhaps, there are simply fewer women seeking positions in tech firms for whatever reason?
Perhaps women are being guided away from technical pursuits at an early age by the gender stereotypes of their parents and teachers. Perhaps they have freely chosen to do other things.
Or how about this:
Maybe women have looked at these careers, and decided they didn't want a job where they were expected to work 80 hours a week and to not have any kind of family or social life, and they didn't want a job where they'd be surrounded by "brogrammers". Maybe they instead gravitated to better professions such as law or medicine, where there's actually really good stability, unlike the tech sector.
Oh yeah, I forgot to add about Android: it can't ever be updated. After 6 months, your device is obsolete and unsupported. Great job, Google.
How about none of the above?
You're mostly right about Google's OS, but you left out some important stuff, like the fact that it crashes all the time, that it takes 30 seconds to start up the Maps app, that Google Maps crashes every time you go back to the home screen, etc. Considering how rock-solid reliable Linux is these days, it's utterly shameful how UNreliable and crashy Android is.
You're exactly right about Apple's OS.
But Windows? That thing (the desktop version, I'm still using 7 in my corporate job here) still isn't very reliable in my experience, plus it has a lot of the same vendor lock-in. The mobile version has the most horrid UI I've ever seen.
Actually, the theft thing probably isn't much of a problem here. This is a rather affluent area and there doesn't seem to be much crime at all (strangely, we're not that far from Newark, which of course has one of the highest murder rates in the nation. Odd how crime can be so well confined to certain places.). Too bad they can't spend some of these enormous property taxes on building some proper bike lanes so people can get around better and safer that way. There's even an abandoned century-old railroad near my house that goes to one of the nearby towns with a train station; it would be perfect for converting into a rail trail.
There's no bike lanes, the streets are narrow, and people drive fast. Riding a bike around here would be suicide.
They are efficient, if there's very high ridership and all the people are going to the same place. They work pretty well in NYC, for instance (they're called "subways"), because the layout of the densest part of the city is long and narrow, and the population density is very high, so the ridership is high, and alternate modes of transport aren't needed as much.
The problem is that most of America isn't much like that, so trains don't work very well. I live not far from NYC, and there's heavy-rail commuter trains nearby that would take me to Manhattan. However, that "additional means of transportation" is a big problem, not on the Manhattan side, but here where I live. The nearest train station is "only" 2 miles away, but how do I get there? I could drive, but then where do I park? The parking garage there has reserved spaces and it costs a fortune to get a monthly pass (like double my car payment). Walking is just too far if I had to commute every day. I could take a bus, but now between the bus and the train the transit time gets really high, and you can't count on the bus to be on time, and when it's late, you'll miss the train and that'll add another 30 minutes to your commute. Of course, (if I had a job there, which I don't) I could just move into Manhattan, but the cost of living there is outrageous.
Sorry, but no. Even the blue states like New York and New Jersey are chock-full of corruption, with extremely high costs of living and very poor standards of living to match. It's actually cheaper to live in Brussels than in NYC, for instance, but in Belgium there's excellent and very affordable healthcare, unlike anyplace in the US. And the crime rate in NYC (or anyplace in the US) is much, much higher than in the northern or western European countries.
Kicking out the shitty southern states isn't going to fix these problems. The US is just fundamentally broken.
I entirely agree that such distractions should not be allowed. However, is this really a problem? Admittedly, I've only been using Google Maps so far, but there's no ads on that. If it isn't actually a problem, then I don't think any regulation is needed.
Why should you have to waste time and energy pulling over, potentially creating a dangerous situation, just so your passenger can enter a new destination on the GPS? Are people really this stupid?
Why not? The western European nations enjoy a significantly better standard of living than the US, so they're obviously doing something right. Their main problem seems to have been including some southern and eastern European nations like Greece with crappy economies into their union.
From some numbers I've seen, trains are not very efficient for short or medium-distance commuting. If you're worried about energy efficiency, you're actually better off with a car than with light rail or heavy rail, according to some sources.
Here's a table on Wikipedia which gives numbers with rail (both kinds) edging out cars, but with buses doing far, far worse.
This seems an oversimplification. If you quadrupled the unemployment rate in France, I'm sure you'd see an increase in crime.
Would they? They have a totally different culture, plus they have better social support systems. I don't think they're in danger of having the kind of ghettos that we have in Detroit any time soon.
The civil rights and gay rights movements didn't start with law, they started with grassroots.
Those aren't prohibitions, they're exactly the opposite. People wanted something to be legal, and socially accepted, which previously wasn't. Gun restrictions are the opposite of this: anti-gun people want to take something that's legal and somewhat socially accepted (depending highly on region and locality), and make it illegal. The Temperance Movement tried that back in the 20s, and it didn't work out too well: people didn't suddenly say "oh darn, alcohol is illegal, so I better not drink any!" You can't change culture with a law. And even with civil rights and gay rights, there too they didn't start with passing laws, they started with grassroots movements to change the culture. It took a while for cultural shifts to occur. Not that long, mind you; only a few decades ago all the gays were still "in the closet" in most places, and these days it's pretty well accepted outside of very conservative circles, but the shift has been well within a lifetime. Another thing that's changed a lot in the past few decades is smoking (in the USA); when I was young, restaurants all allowed smoking, it was legal everywhere, and was common indoors (like in offices). Now it's not. This wasn't done with a big blanket ban, it was a slow change.