I've run out of storage on virtually every Android device I've owned. The last two devices I've bought supported the newer Android feature whereby your SD card is fused with your local storage, and that works very well, and contrary to Google's own complaints about the idea, doesn't appear to have any noticeable performance issues.
I think expandable storage is the way to go. To be honest, I'd like to see phones actually have multiple SD card slots.
What empowers the people of the UK to get their rights returned if they have to do it by force?
Only a shared belief in the legitimacy of the current government. Actually, it's pretty much the same thing as the US. Despite all the claims that the Second somehow acts as a barrier to tyranny, it's questionable whether it really does. State governments have been tyrannical to various minorities (largely black people) in the US over the last few centuries, and black people being armed hasn't made a blind bit of difference.
If guns protect against tyranny, then why is that happening? Why do we not see true equality without regard to race etc throughout the US? Could it be that guns don't mean jack shit in practice?
(This is not to imply I'm opposed to the 2nd Amendment, but the notion it's there to protect democracy is hard to take, it could even be argued it undermines it.)
while (it seems at least from across the Atlantic) that you can't swing a dead cat in London without hitting firebrand Muslim clerics openly calling for the destruction of the west.
Actually it only seems that way if you watch Fox News or subscribe to Infowars. Seriously, the rest of the country (you don't even have to get British people to comment) think you guys have gone batshit insane with your "EUROPE NOW UNDER SHARIA" polemics you guys post everywhere.
Get out of your bubble and, you know, read something that isn't from an organization that trades on stoking up racial-etc resentments.
Britain has Muslims in it. It is not anything close to majority Muslim. There are no "No Go" areas. It's as British as it always was. You can still buy a pint, read The Sun, and yell "Wanker!" at the local constabulary without being arrested.
A signal isn't important if you can't make out what anyone's saying. I prefer a quality network to Verizon's.
And the coverage argument is pretty much dead. Anyone who claims T-Mobile doesn't have coverage rivaling Verizon hasn't used it recently. It's very, very, rare I see no bars, and if I do, it's usually because I'm somewhere where nobody else seems to get coverage either.
but it requires an incredibly complex hardware to run.
Not really, no. We typically run it on complex hardware, but you don't even need a CPU if you were to build an implementation from scratch. It's an undergrad electronics project, if you're into that kind of thing.
I'm not trying to be mean, but Musk has said a lot of things that have turned out to be hype. Pretty much every claim he's made about the Hyperloop hasn't worked out, and it hasn't even been built yet. It'd be nice to see some experienced aerospace engineers weigh in on this proposal - but, of course, that means waiting for them to do so, which doesn't fit the "Musk just said something! We must tell everyone!" hype loop the media gets itself into...
Linux is a kernel. If you want a GNU phone, say a GNU phone. If you want a Ubuntu Phone, say you want a Ubuntu phone.
Language does matter. Telling us you want "Linux" really literally tells us nothing, not simply because we're pedants over here at Slashdot and know Android has a Linux kernel, but also because when people use Linux the way you're using, to refer to the kernel plus some of the userland, you're not really giving us clues as to what exactly you're incorporating into that userland.
Both Sprint and Verizon are deprecating their cdmaOne/cdma2000 networks in favor of GSM version 4, aka LTE. Anyone producing phones for either carrier these days has to provide LTE functionality. So this isn't a problem.
This is technically true. It's also irrelevant: Cable companies started out as ways to make it easier to obtain TV stations that were difficult to get via an antenna, and it remains the base that the lowest tier on offer from cable companies are, essentially, the broadcast channels and a few self-funded channels like HSN.
If you look at the actual product, what they're offering is a base price of $18 (which only includes antenna channels and self funded), plus packages you can add to that of channels you might actually want. Most people would probably end up paying somewhere between Sling TV (about $45 for a full set of channels) and what they'd pay for a normal cable subscription (quite a bit more than $45.)
So the price structure is the same as regular cable. It's just a little cheaper.
The service includes a virtual DVR. And you can use it with a Roku. You can use two devices simultaneously.
It doesn't seem to be bad or overpriced from what I'm looking at.
When Dyson first came out with their bagless vacuums, in the early 1990s, in the UK and nowhere else, the concept was completely revolutionary (NPI) - at least, from a consumer point of view. It was immediately copied by most vacuum makers and by the time Dyson started selling in the US, bagless vacuums were pretty much the default and Dyson's sole distinguishing point seemed to be that they were more expensive.
It certainly was true that middle class households used to show them off in the UK in the 1990s. I don't know if that's true today.
Anyway... that history might explain the odd mix you get of (intelligent) people who swear by Dyson and absolutely are convinced they're the best vacuums ever made, who will also tell you Bose is crap and wouldn't buy an Mac if you paid for it for them, and people who look at them funny and say "But... my Hoover Windtunnel pretty much outperforms it."
It's a company running on an initially high and deserved reputation for quality and innovation, but it's not necessarily producing anything that radical today. High quality, yeah. Innovative? Questionable.
Replacing a fully functional product that a company probably spent a lot of money hiring people to implement and integrate with the company network with another product just seems moronic.
They're just copying Google's business model. Google Talk/Hangouts/Duo/Messages...
FWIW, Skype for Business probably had nothing to do with Skype from what I can figure out - it seems to be pretty much Lync with a revamped chat window. The code bases for Lync and Skype for Business probably overlap about 90%, compared to about 0% for Skype and Skype for Business.
Gratuitous insults and dehumanizing other people because they disagree with your far-left political opinions.
For those at the back, DNS-and-BIND is claiming that support for diversity and equal rights constitutes political opinions to his "far left".
That's probably true, unfortunately.
To the wider point, at this stage I don't think there's anything to be gained by coddling far right opponents of equality and diversity. They're shitheads. They're not going to be convinced by well meaning lefties arguing that, hey, it's OK to show a Star Trek TV series that's set in a future where not every captain is a rugged white male because racism is bad, mmm-kay, and society will eventually evolve past that.
It is a shame the majority of Slashdot posters seem to have more in common with the Richard Spencers and Donald Trumps of this world than the MLKs and Gandhis, but that's how things are right now. We can only hope that changes.
You can get a DRM-free digital copy by plugging a $50 ATSC widget and an antenna into your computer, and running a DVR program. It's some kind of free streaming service CBS is legally obliged to operate, called "Television".
There are two possible counter arguments to the "Fewer competitors = less competition" argument.
The first is that both Sprint and T-Mobile are silo'd, in the public consciousness, with "Cheap and poor quality", in comparison to their other two competitors. The reputation is unfair: T-Mobile is superb right now, and Verizon has always been overrated, concentrating on technical metrics studied in surveys while running a network that ignores critical usability features like call quality and user friendliness.
A merger would make it much easier for T-Mobile to knock down that final block in the public perception about its network. It can point out that it now has the combined coverage of both networks, matching or exceeding their competitors, and has plenty of low frequency spectrum to deal with indoor coverage issues. It would be able to argue that it is higher quality than both AT&T and Verizon on every metric.
The second counter argument is that Sprint is failing. Badly. It's not been profitable in decades. It is being propped up by investor after investor in the hope that one of the big 3 will buy it out. Sprint is going to die, one way or another, and if it doesn't merge with T-Mobile the likely result is that it'll just go bankrupt and the assets will end up split across the big three anyway.
There's a bigger picture here, and while yes, more competitors should equal more competition, two weak competitors in a four player market might not work as well as one strong competitor taking their place against the other two.
You're rural and you can't get broadband you say? Next you'll tell me that there's no Chinese Restaurants within walking distance, and you have to drive 30 minutes just to go to a movie theater.
Maybe the problem is that people are being encouraged to live in the middle of nowhere, where it's prohibitively expensive to provide service at the same level as could be offered in a city. I wonder how many people who live rurally actually need to live there, for their job; and how many of those people actually need high data broadband.
The biggest f---up the US has done in the last 70-80 years is the run down of the cities, forcing people out of them. It's pushed the cost of living through the roof, and made it very, very, expensive to provide high quality infrastructure to most of the population. Perhaps if cities had been allowed to grow organically, there'd be fewer people in your position. The FCC didn't fail you, they're between a rock and a hard place: demand high quality broadband everywhere, and it'd soon become unaffordable for much of the population. Rather, Americans were failed by poor city planners, promoted into high policy-making positions in State and Federal governments.
OS X does rather more than NeXTStep. Two other differences:
1. Almost entirely rewritten user interface, which uses compositing to produce a 3D UI on a 32 bit high resolution screen, rather than 16 shades of gray on a 1120 by 832 screen.
2. On that note, a difference in philosophy, with NeXTStep trying to be as fast and responsive as possible, while Mac OS X tries to uses animation and visual cues, some of which taking seconds to complete, to help the user understand what's going on.
Is this good? Well, I never liked the latter (just pop up the damned window, it doesn't have slide into view!), but most people disagree with me.
It's unlikely Sprint would be in control afterwards. Sprint needs "saving", T-Mobile is outrageously successful right now. It's Sprint who are pushing various entities, T-Mobile included, to marge with them.
When T-Mobile bought MetroPCS they phased out cdmaOne/cdma2000 over a period of two years. Like Sprint, MetroPCS was a combined LTE/cdmaOne/cdma2000 network.
In all probability, T-Mobile will do the same thing with Sprint, perhaps over a slightly longer period of time. This would leave Verizon as the sole operator of a network still running Qualcomm's standards, and increase pressure on them to turn it off, moving all their customers to exclusively LTE (the latest generation GSM standard.)
So, other than breaking up Qualcomm, this merger will bring about your wish.
Sprint is phasing out cdmaOne/cdma2000 in favor of LTE, which is the latest generation GSM standard. Many Sprint customers already have phones compatible with T-Mobile's network. T-Mobile went through a similar process with MetroPCS a few years ago, and took the decision to just drop the cdma* bullshit, giving everyone two years to upgrade their phones.
While Sprint is bigger than T-Mobile, expect the same policy, perhaps over a slightly longer period to make the phone upgrades more organic and less of a hit.
Verizon's MARKETING of their technology is good. Their technology is awful. They're the only network I consistently have to ask everyone to repeat themselves three times or more if they call me. It's like listening to someone speaking through a garden hose that someone else is jumping on over and over again.
They've learned the secret to getting people to say they have a really good network is:
1. Marketing, marketing, marketing.
2. Maximize coverage, at the expense of everything else.
3. Focus on call drops and other unlikely events that tend to get used as objective metrics.
Do those three, and you can get away with anything, to the point your network is virtually unusable in practice. Why? Because if the objective metrics say it's good, people will rarely even realize the more difficult to measure but more critical attributes of a phone service are infinitely better with all the others. Even Sprint.
One less competitor. Both are occupying the same space (unfortunately) as budget operator with a poor (largely undeserved, in T-Mo's case) reputation for quality of network. T-Mobile gets the Sprint customers.
They could use the additional spectrum to go overboard on their bandwidth (unlimited LTE speed tethering! Data de-prioritization threshold of 500G! Go nuts! Get rid of Comcast!) I guess. Mind you, the problem there would more likely be the physical cables going to each tower. So I don't see that happening.
As a consumer, this might be a good thing, it might not. It might position T-Mo to challenge Verizon and AT&T more effectively as an equal. But they might also see the opportunity to raise prices.
Does this article contradict the notion that it's no worse than coffee? Slashdot loves posting "Scientists find out coffee is awesome!" article from time to time, but a quick Google shows that coffee is a mixed bag, with some benefits, and some risks.
Slashdot Mirror
I've run out of storage on virtually every Android device I've owned. The last two devices I've bought supported the newer Android feature whereby your SD card is fused with your local storage, and that works very well, and contrary to Google's own complaints about the idea, doesn't appear to have any noticeable performance issues.
I think expandable storage is the way to go. To be honest, I'd like to see phones actually have multiple SD card slots.
Only a shared belief in the legitimacy of the current government. Actually, it's pretty much the same thing as the US. Despite all the claims that the Second somehow acts as a barrier to tyranny, it's questionable whether it really does. State governments have been tyrannical to various minorities (largely black people) in the US over the last few centuries, and black people being armed hasn't made a blind bit of difference.
If guns protect against tyranny, then why is that happening? Why do we not see true equality without regard to race etc throughout the US? Could it be that guns don't mean jack shit in practice?
(This is not to imply I'm opposed to the 2nd Amendment, but the notion it's there to protect democracy is hard to take, it could even be argued it undermines it.)
Actually it only seems that way if you watch Fox News or subscribe to Infowars. Seriously, the rest of the country (you don't even have to get British people to comment) think you guys have gone batshit insane with your "EUROPE NOW UNDER SHARIA" polemics you guys post everywhere.
Get out of your bubble and, you know, read something that isn't from an organization that trades on stoking up racial-etc resentments.
Britain has Muslims in it. It is not anything close to majority Muslim. There are no "No Go" areas. It's as British as it always was. You can still buy a pint, read The Sun, and yell "Wanker!" at the local constabulary without being arrested.
I'm not sure I agree that murdering 59 Country Music fans is a practical or effective way of gaining more rights.
A signal isn't important if you can't make out what anyone's saying. I prefer a quality network to Verizon's.
And the coverage argument is pretty much dead. Anyone who claims T-Mobile doesn't have coverage rivaling Verizon hasn't used it recently. It's very, very, rare I see no bars, and if I do, it's usually because I'm somewhere where nobody else seems to get coverage either.
Not really, no. We typically run it on complex hardware, but you don't even need a CPU if you were to build an implementation from scratch. It's an undergrad electronics project, if you're into that kind of thing.
I'm not trying to be mean, but Musk has said a lot of things that have turned out to be hype. Pretty much every claim he's made about the Hyperloop hasn't worked out, and it hasn't even been built yet. It'd be nice to see some experienced aerospace engineers weigh in on this proposal - but, of course, that means waiting for them to do so, which doesn't fit the "Musk just said something! We must tell everyone!" hype loop the media gets itself into...
Linux is a kernel. If you want a GNU phone, say a GNU phone. If you want a Ubuntu Phone, say you want a Ubuntu phone.
Language does matter. Telling us you want "Linux" really literally tells us nothing, not simply because we're pedants over here at Slashdot and know Android has a Linux kernel, but also because when people use Linux the way you're using, to refer to the kernel plus some of the userland, you're not really giving us clues as to what exactly you're incorporating into that userland.
Both Sprint and Verizon are deprecating their cdmaOne/cdma2000 networks in favor of GSM version 4, aka LTE. Anyone producing phones for either carrier these days has to provide LTE functionality. So this isn't a problem.
This is technically true. It's also irrelevant: Cable companies started out as ways to make it easier to obtain TV stations that were difficult to get via an antenna, and it remains the base that the lowest tier on offer from cable companies are, essentially, the broadcast channels and a few self-funded channels like HSN.
If you look at the actual product, what they're offering is a base price of $18 (which only includes antenna channels and self funded), plus packages you can add to that of channels you might actually want. Most people would probably end up paying somewhere between Sling TV (about $45 for a full set of channels) and what they'd pay for a normal cable subscription (quite a bit more than $45.)
So the price structure is the same as regular cable. It's just a little cheaper.
The service includes a virtual DVR. And you can use it with a Roku. You can use two devices simultaneously.
It doesn't seem to be bad or overpriced from what I'm looking at.
What's that in Libraries of Congress?
When Dyson first came out with their bagless vacuums, in the early 1990s, in the UK and nowhere else, the concept was completely revolutionary (NPI) - at least, from a consumer point of view. It was immediately copied by most vacuum makers and by the time Dyson started selling in the US, bagless vacuums were pretty much the default and Dyson's sole distinguishing point seemed to be that they were more expensive.
It certainly was true that middle class households used to show them off in the UK in the 1990s. I don't know if that's true today.
Anyway... that history might explain the odd mix you get of (intelligent) people who swear by Dyson and absolutely are convinced they're the best vacuums ever made, who will also tell you Bose is crap and wouldn't buy an Mac if you paid for it for them, and people who look at them funny and say "But... my Hoover Windtunnel pretty much outperforms it."
It's a company running on an initially high and deserved reputation for quality and innovation, but it's not necessarily producing anything that radical today. High quality, yeah. Innovative? Questionable.
That's... what I just said. You'd have saved yourself some time if you read to the end of the paragraph!
They're just copying Google's business model. Google Talk/Hangouts/Duo/Messages...
FWIW, Skype for Business probably had nothing to do with Skype from what I can figure out - it seems to be pretty much Lync with a revamped chat window. The code bases for Lync and Skype for Business probably overlap about 90%, compared to about 0% for Skype and Skype for Business.
For those at the back, DNS-and-BIND is claiming that support for diversity and equal rights constitutes political opinions to his "far left".
That's probably true, unfortunately.
To the wider point, at this stage I don't think there's anything to be gained by coddling far right opponents of equality and diversity. They're shitheads. They're not going to be convinced by well meaning lefties arguing that, hey, it's OK to show a Star Trek TV series that's set in a future where not every captain is a rugged white male because racism is bad, mmm-kay, and society will eventually evolve past that.
It is a shame the majority of Slashdot posters seem to have more in common with the Richard Spencers and Donald Trumps of this world than the MLKs and Gandhis, but that's how things are right now. We can only hope that changes.
You can get a DRM-free digital copy by plugging a $50 ATSC widget and an antenna into your computer, and running a DVR program. It's some kind of free streaming service CBS is legally obliged to operate, called "Television".
There are two possible counter arguments to the "Fewer competitors = less competition" argument.
The first is that both Sprint and T-Mobile are silo'd, in the public consciousness, with "Cheap and poor quality", in comparison to their other two competitors. The reputation is unfair: T-Mobile is superb right now, and Verizon has always been overrated, concentrating on technical metrics studied in surveys while running a network that ignores critical usability features like call quality and user friendliness.
A merger would make it much easier for T-Mobile to knock down that final block in the public perception about its network. It can point out that it now has the combined coverage of both networks, matching or exceeding their competitors, and has plenty of low frequency spectrum to deal with indoor coverage issues. It would be able to argue that it is higher quality than both AT&T and Verizon on every metric.
The second counter argument is that Sprint is failing. Badly. It's not been profitable in decades. It is being propped up by investor after investor in the hope that one of the big 3 will buy it out. Sprint is going to die, one way or another, and if it doesn't merge with T-Mobile the likely result is that it'll just go bankrupt and the assets will end up split across the big three anyway.
There's a bigger picture here, and while yes, more competitors should equal more competition, two weak competitors in a four player market might not work as well as one strong competitor taking their place against the other two.
You're rural and you can't get broadband you say? Next you'll tell me that there's no Chinese Restaurants within walking distance, and you have to drive 30 minutes just to go to a movie theater.
Maybe the problem is that people are being encouraged to live in the middle of nowhere, where it's prohibitively expensive to provide service at the same level as could be offered in a city. I wonder how many people who live rurally actually need to live there, for their job; and how many of those people actually need high data broadband.
The biggest f---up the US has done in the last 70-80 years is the run down of the cities, forcing people out of them. It's pushed the cost of living through the roof, and made it very, very, expensive to provide high quality infrastructure to most of the population. Perhaps if cities had been allowed to grow organically, there'd be fewer people in your position. The FCC didn't fail you, they're between a rock and a hard place: demand high quality broadband everywhere, and it'd soon become unaffordable for much of the population. Rather, Americans were failed by poor city planners, promoted into high policy-making positions in State and Federal governments.
OS X does rather more than NeXTStep. Two other differences:
1. Almost entirely rewritten user interface, which uses compositing to produce a 3D UI on a 32 bit high resolution screen, rather than 16 shades of gray on a 1120 by 832 screen.
2. On that note, a difference in philosophy, with NeXTStep trying to be as fast and responsive as possible, while Mac OS X tries to uses animation and visual cues, some of which taking seconds to complete, to help the user understand what's going on.
Is this good? Well, I never liked the latter (just pop up the damned window, it doesn't have slide into view!), but most people disagree with me.
It's unlikely Sprint would be in control afterwards. Sprint needs "saving", T-Mobile is outrageously successful right now. It's Sprint who are pushing various entities, T-Mobile included, to marge with them.
When T-Mobile bought MetroPCS they phased out cdmaOne/cdma2000 over a period of two years. Like Sprint, MetroPCS was a combined LTE/cdmaOne/cdma2000 network.
In all probability, T-Mobile will do the same thing with Sprint, perhaps over a slightly longer period of time. This would leave Verizon as the sole operator of a network still running Qualcomm's standards, and increase pressure on them to turn it off, moving all their customers to exclusively LTE (the latest generation GSM standard.)
So, other than breaking up Qualcomm, this merger will bring about your wish.
Sprint is phasing out cdmaOne/cdma2000 in favor of LTE, which is the latest generation GSM standard. Many Sprint customers already have phones compatible with T-Mobile's network. T-Mobile went through a similar process with MetroPCS a few years ago, and took the decision to just drop the cdma* bullshit, giving everyone two years to upgrade their phones.
While Sprint is bigger than T-Mobile, expect the same policy, perhaps over a slightly longer period to make the phone upgrades more organic and less of a hit.
Verizon's MARKETING of their technology is good. Their technology is awful. They're the only network I consistently have to ask everyone to repeat themselves three times or more if they call me. It's like listening to someone speaking through a garden hose that someone else is jumping on over and over again.
They've learned the secret to getting people to say they have a really good network is:
1. Marketing, marketing, marketing.
2. Maximize coverage, at the expense of everything else.
3. Focus on call drops and other unlikely events that tend to get used as objective metrics.
Do those three, and you can get away with anything, to the point your network is virtually unusable in practice. Why? Because if the objective metrics say it's good, people will rarely even realize the more difficult to measure but more critical attributes of a phone service are infinitely better with all the others. Even Sprint.
One less competitor. Both are occupying the same space (unfortunately) as budget operator with a poor (largely undeserved, in T-Mo's case) reputation for quality of network. T-Mobile gets the Sprint customers.
They could use the additional spectrum to go overboard on their bandwidth (unlimited LTE speed tethering! Data de-prioritization threshold of 500G! Go nuts! Get rid of Comcast!) I guess. Mind you, the problem there would more likely be the physical cables going to each tower. So I don't see that happening.
As a consumer, this might be a good thing, it might not. It might position T-Mo to challenge Verizon and AT&T more effectively as an equal. But they might also see the opportunity to raise prices.
Does this article contradict the notion that it's no worse than coffee? Slashdot loves posting "Scientists find out coffee is awesome!" article from time to time, but a quick Google shows that coffee is a mixed bag, with some benefits, and some risks.