Also, when you reach a certain OS limit on a particular hardware, Apple leaves you alone. One downside of that, however - I had an old iPod Touch, whose apps were no longer supported, since it peaked at iOS 4.3. No way can one retrieve those from the app store. It would be nice if the App store recognized a device, and automatically configured itself to only pick software that's supported on that device, so that one isn't left high & dry on a device that's otherwise working perfectly well.
The main reason to not allow upgrades is when a particular computer (I'm including phones & tablets here as well) has limited storage, or other limits that would make an upgraded OS very unresponsive or poor performer. Otherwise, if one gets something w/ adequate resources, it should be upgradable for the foreseeable future.
People who are systemd allergic should do what many have done, and just move completely to one of the BSDs. There's no telling the viability of Devuan, and the ones that haven't gone systemd are more likely just behind the curve. What's the guarantee that Gentoo or Slackware won't go systemd after a certain kernel rev?
For what networkBoy was suggesting, it seems that the Chromebook is partially there: what they need to do is stop restricting it to low end configurations, and offer mid range & high end laptops as well, w/ adequate memory & storage. In other words, don't give us anemic laptops that just allow us to upload stuff to Google Drive: offer us a range of laptops, like say, a laptop w/ 4GB of RAM and 256GB SSD that one can use to store one's personal data. Cloud backup should be an option, not mandatory.
PC OEMs, or what's left of them, should do this. Yeah, keep offering your standard Wintel laptops, but offer lines that have ChromeOS as well. Here, they'd even have an option of using ARM CPUs, which could help in the costs & compatibility w/ Android apps department. That way, people who have to have Windows can have it, but people who either want a stable long term OS or who wanna avoid Windows at all costs have a range of price options, other than having to go all out Mac. On Apple's end, they might wanna consider introducing Macs based on their own CPUs, which would help them in terms of making up for the erosion in iPad sales.
Aside from the pricing and bang-for-buck, Apple does have its act together. While your usage wasn't exactly clear, it would seem that a Mac Pro would cover just about anything if you're looking for a professional workstation. Their issues have been how long it's taken to upgrade to the latest version of an i5 or i7 or Xeon. But if you want to avoid being on that OS treadmill, where you are forced to upgrade your computer b'cos Microsoft can't support the one that's currently working for you, then the price of a Mac will be well worth it.
While I have a Windows 10 laptop for anything that must have Windows 10, I have largely moved to TrueOS/PC-BSD where it's just emails & internet browsing involved (hope to get PlayOnBSD and Steam on it), and my Android tablet w/ specific apps from different credit cards & so on to manage those online payments & transactions. So if there's a lot of typing involved, I use the laptop, but otherwise, a tablet works well for me. By the time Microsoft switches to a subscription based OS, I would hopefully have eliminated any need to run Windows.
> force everyone on to the same version of your OS
> start dropping support for older hardware without iterating the version number
You could have prevented this.
https://debian.org/
Uh, Stallman doesn't endorse Debian. He endorses something called 'Libre Linux', where any 'binary blobs' get removed. Wonder how usable such a thing would be, sans drivers that are excluded just b'cos they may be close sourced.
Mob mods, granted, but AC is right & GP AC wrong. Several Windows versions - Windows 2000, XP, 7 have been perfectly good, while ones like 98, ME, Vista have been pretty bad. But that cycle has been broken - 8 AND 10 have been pretty bad, and they've stopped changing version numbers, making things worse. 'Your computer will run Windows 10 but not Windows 10 Creator Edition'. Sounds like no big deal: I'm not a creator.
How? The original concern was that these airports/airlines were doing an inadequate job in screening potentially explodable materials, and so had this put in place. If someone flying from Riyadh to Dulles decided to change airlines & airports at, say, Brussels, wouldn't the Belgians already be managing that differently?
Interesting how one is for the 10th Amendment in this case, but against it in others.
That said, I do think that Congress shouldn't be mandating things like this, that are better left to the states. Since the GOP normally supports sending things down, one wonders who greased their hands so that they would go ahead & do this. Particularly since a quick adaption of self driving cars would result in massive unemployment of truckers & drivers.
On the Tatar claims, wrong! The Tatars were conquerors of that territory in the Middle Ages, and were ousted by the Tsarist Russians. And w/ good reason: aside from being vassals of the Ottoman Turks, they also conducted several invasions of Russia, including burning down Moscow on one occasion. Crimea became a part of Tsarist Russia in 1783. Prior to that, it was first part of the Russian/Byzantine empires, and later, the Golden Horde. The Crimean Tatar Khanate started in 1441.
Russia moved in not b'cos of the ouster of Yanukovich, but b'cos Kyiv had just passed a law making Ukrainian the sole official language. Russia decided that it needed to preserve the rights of the ethnic Russians, and so invaded Crimea and held a referandum. One can argue about its legitimacy, but those were the events in question. Besides, when the Soviet Union came apart, there was an agreement b/w Kyiv & Moscow on the ownership in Sevastopol and the Crimea, and that agreement was broken after Yanukovich was ousted. That was what provoked the Russian occupation.
Ukraine keeping its nukes wouldn't have done a thing for it: the controls remained in Moscow. It wasn't like the Ukrainians & Kazakhs - the 2 republics aside from Russia that had nukes - were gonna get the codes and own the ones in their territory. That's why Leonid Kravchuk wanted those nukes gone - not b'cos he was a pacifist, but b'cos there were weapons in his country that were not in his contol
I suspect solar power couldn't provide the power needed to pull all that weight, which is why they've dedicated it to the lights, ACs and display systems inside the trains. It's a start - may not be 100% solar, but even something like 30% is good.
Good point. In Lollipop, Google took the control of the OS out of the phone makers or carriers, and back in-house. I have a Verizon Ellipsis 10 w/ 16GB internal storage & 128GB external storage. I can't upgrade the tablet to Marshmallow, which would allow me to swap the logical internal & external drives, so that I have adequate storage for everything, no matter what.
These fully electrical controls are a disaster. Recently, my car wouldn't start due to a battery issue, so I had to call roadside assistance. He had trouble jumpstarting it too, so he towed it to the nearest repair shop where they did have a charger capable of jumpstarting it. While my car was down, I could not remove my key from the ignition - after all, the battery was low! I couldn't open or lock the car doors using the remote, b'cos those were powered by the battery as well! The 2017 version of the car - a Subaru Crosstrek - is now totally keyless.
One thing that tow guy told me, while we were towing my car, was his torrid experience in fixing someone's Prius just the previous day: since the hood can't be popped mechanically (in my car, thankfully, it still can), it was a major headache for him to draw the connectors to the battery of that Prius. That's the thing w/ these all electronic cars: once the battery is down, they are hosed. He also told me that he & others in his profession refuse to handle Teslas, and that Tesla provides their own roadside service due to this issue. Nothing more glorious than having a single point of failure that makes it impossible to fix what's wrong w/ a car.
My contract had expired some months back, so no, I didn't need to pay anything for leaving. Just started a new 2 year contract w/ a monthly payment on the phone.
I've never bothered about Galaxies: my Android phone is a Moto X. It does have a poor battery life, but is otherwise fine. Also have a Lumia 550, which is great value for money, if one ignores the store & apps diversity
Wireless charging - don't need it. Whenever I'm not using something, it's plugged in & being charged. Some have said that that shortens the battery life, but no: these things have internal software/circuitry to disable charging once the charge level is above a certain threshold. Similarly, battery life of this thing is fine. Pixel density - the 7 has a 12 megapixel camera, and iPad 4 mini has an 8 megapixel camera - both good enough. 802.11ac is good enough - not seen too much w/ 802.11j, and phone calls are easy enough.
I did kick myself in 2014 for getting the 5s just weeks before the 6 debuted. Had I bought the 6, I may not have upgraded to the 7, depending on how much storage I had. I was mindful that that was one of the stumbling blocks that might force me to upgrade, but now, I don't see a need even in the distant future (unless the phone just dies
Routers have typically behaved like this: only the admin password is masked while logging in, but when one is in the Password page, one gets to type - and see - the password that's set. I've never understood why. What you are describing is if one goes to the preferences page of the browser - where one can check the passwords if one has forgotten (happened w/ me many times)
I quite agree. Like I got a new iPad Mini 4, and one thing I noticed - the Rotate lock/unlock button (which is also usable for something else, I forget what) is gone: it was there in the iPad Mini 1. Instead, I had to experimentally discover that one has to swap up to get the lock button (next to the disturb crescent) and select it accordingly
Also, my iPod Nano has a touch screen, and some very basic functionality. However, couldn't they have included iTunes there, instead of forcing us to sync w/ iTunes on my laptop, which is a pain? On this thing, I can't add songs or alter a playlist w/o connecting it to my laptop. Really annoying!
If you don't associate your credit card(s) w/ Apple Pay or NFC, it is automatically disabled. Like my new iPad Mini 4 has Apple Pay as well, but I haven't associated that w/ my cards, as I did my phone, since I don't use the former that way.
Water damage where? In the rain? Dropping it in a drink? Same thing can be said for any of Apple's other toys - the iPads, the iPods, yet none of those have gone jackless as yet. In fact, for the iPod nano 7th gen, if one has one of those Beat or bluetooth headphones or speakers, can't use those things!
Headphone jacks are so quaint. I suppose you still have manual windows in your car. Or are you more of a horse and buggy man?
Excepting that most state of the art headphones have that 3.5mm jack. Similarly, if one wants to connect the iPhone 7 to an otherwise perfectly good non-Bluetooth speaker (another quaint relic, I suppose), one would have to use the dongle along w/ the aux connector. If headphone jacks are so quaint, why did Apple leave it alone on the iPad Mini 4, as well as all their iPods? In fact, on the iPod nano, it's next to impossible to connect that to anything via bluetooth: I connect it in my car via USB to the iPod player in the navigation system
Apple needs to figure out its overall strategy, instead of forcing people to use lightning connectors on one thing and headphone jacks on others.
That was the only major change in Apple's history - when they went from a System 7 based OS that was at par w/ Windows 3.1 as far as multitasking went - cooperative, but not preemptive. Apple took forever on Copeland before pulling the plug on it, acquiring NEXT and replacing a completely proprietary OS w/ a Posix compliant OS.
NeXTstep had nothing in common w/ System 7, since the companies were different, as was the hardware (despite being Mot 68k as well). NEXT made a computer from scratch dedicated to RAD, and had no mission to be compatible w/ Mac applications in any way, since their target market was the enterprise. When NEXT got acquired by Apple, they re-designed the UI somewhat from NEXTSTEP to get OS X, which remained consistent until Apple decided to make it look more like iOS, due to the popularity of the latter.
That, and also, going from having a separate button on the iPad Mini 1 to getting rid of it on the iPad Mini 4, and making one swipe up to discover where that is. Very intuitive! NOT!!!
As is well known, Intel's toughest competition ain't AMD: it's Intel's own, previous CPUs, which w/ multiple cores, is still more than adequate for anything thrown at it. Very different from the 90s where every MHz bump resulted in a major performance improvement. Same for Microsoft: Windows 7 was good enough, and people have had to be dragged kicking & screaming to 8 & 10.
Previously, I had an iPhone 5s and an iPad mini, both w/ 16GB storage. I just upgraded both over the last few months to iPhone 7 and iPad mini 4, both w/ 128GB of storage primarily b'cos I had hit the limit on those. But I don't anticipate getting even close to 128GB on these 2 new toys. While iPhone 7 gave me Apple Pay, which 5s didn't have, there is nothing missing in the iPhone 7 that I'll want in iPhone 8. If anything, the loss of the home button will be a bummer: I like the fingerprint detection way of logging in, buying things and authentication. Essentially, what stops me from buying future Apple toys is that these new ones of mine are good enough for the foreseeable future. I do see myself buying a Macbook sometime just to avoid getting into an annual Windows subscription.
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Also, when you reach a certain OS limit on a particular hardware, Apple leaves you alone. One downside of that, however - I had an old iPod Touch, whose apps were no longer supported, since it peaked at iOS 4.3. No way can one retrieve those from the app store. It would be nice if the App store recognized a device, and automatically configured itself to only pick software that's supported on that device, so that one isn't left high & dry on a device that's otherwise working perfectly well.
The main reason to not allow upgrades is when a particular computer (I'm including phones & tablets here as well) has limited storage, or other limits that would make an upgraded OS very unresponsive or poor performer. Otherwise, if one gets something w/ adequate resources, it should be upgradable for the foreseeable future.
People who are systemd allergic should do what many have done, and just move completely to one of the BSDs. There's no telling the viability of Devuan, and the ones that haven't gone systemd are more likely just behind the curve. What's the guarantee that Gentoo or Slackware won't go systemd after a certain kernel rev?
KDE is overkill. For Windows to Linux, one might as well go w/ something like Razor-qt or LX/QT. If one is using a BSD, Lumina would be a great option
For what networkBoy was suggesting, it seems that the Chromebook is partially there: what they need to do is stop restricting it to low end configurations, and offer mid range & high end laptops as well, w/ adequate memory & storage. In other words, don't give us anemic laptops that just allow us to upload stuff to Google Drive: offer us a range of laptops, like say, a laptop w/ 4GB of RAM and 256GB SSD that one can use to store one's personal data. Cloud backup should be an option, not mandatory.
PC OEMs, or what's left of them, should do this. Yeah, keep offering your standard Wintel laptops, but offer lines that have ChromeOS as well. Here, they'd even have an option of using ARM CPUs, which could help in the costs & compatibility w/ Android apps department. That way, people who have to have Windows can have it, but people who either want a stable long term OS or who wanna avoid Windows at all costs have a range of price options, other than having to go all out Mac. On Apple's end, they might wanna consider introducing Macs based on their own CPUs, which would help them in terms of making up for the erosion in iPad sales.
Aside from the pricing and bang-for-buck, Apple does have its act together. While your usage wasn't exactly clear, it would seem that a Mac Pro would cover just about anything if you're looking for a professional workstation. Their issues have been how long it's taken to upgrade to the latest version of an i5 or i7 or Xeon. But if you want to avoid being on that OS treadmill, where you are forced to upgrade your computer b'cos Microsoft can't support the one that's currently working for you, then the price of a Mac will be well worth it.
While I have a Windows 10 laptop for anything that must have Windows 10, I have largely moved to TrueOS/PC-BSD where it's just emails & internet browsing involved (hope to get PlayOnBSD and Steam on it), and my Android tablet w/ specific apps from different credit cards & so on to manage those online payments & transactions. So if there's a lot of typing involved, I use the laptop, but otherwise, a tablet works well for me. By the time Microsoft switches to a subscription based OS, I would hopefully have eliminated any need to run Windows.
> force everyone on to the same version of your OS > start dropping support for older hardware without iterating the version number
You could have prevented this.
https://debian.org/
Uh, Stallman doesn't endorse Debian. He endorses something called 'Libre Linux', where any 'binary blobs' get removed. Wonder how usable such a thing would be, sans drivers that are excluded just b'cos they may be close sourced.
Mob mods, granted, but AC is right & GP AC wrong. Several Windows versions - Windows 2000, XP, 7 have been perfectly good, while ones like 98, ME, Vista have been pretty bad. But that cycle has been broken - 8 AND 10 have been pretty bad, and they've stopped changing version numbers, making things worse. 'Your computer will run Windows 10 but not Windows 10 Creator Edition'. Sounds like no big deal: I'm not a creator.
Actually, if the hardware is that old, does it have those backdoors? I doubt that Atoms have room for an extra backdoor CPU in them
How? The original concern was that these airports/airlines were doing an inadequate job in screening potentially explodable materials, and so had this put in place. If someone flying from Riyadh to Dulles decided to change airlines & airports at, say, Brussels, wouldn't the Belgians already be managing that differently?
Interesting how one is for the 10th Amendment in this case, but against it in others.
That said, I do think that Congress shouldn't be mandating things like this, that are better left to the states. Since the GOP normally supports sending things down, one wonders who greased their hands so that they would go ahead & do this. Particularly since a quick adaption of self driving cars would result in massive unemployment of truckers & drivers.
On the Tatar claims, wrong! The Tatars were conquerors of that territory in the Middle Ages, and were ousted by the Tsarist Russians. And w/ good reason: aside from being vassals of the Ottoman Turks, they also conducted several invasions of Russia, including burning down Moscow on one occasion. Crimea became a part of Tsarist Russia in 1783. Prior to that, it was first part of the Russian/Byzantine empires, and later, the Golden Horde. The Crimean Tatar Khanate started in 1441.
Russia moved in not b'cos of the ouster of Yanukovich, but b'cos Kyiv had just passed a law making Ukrainian the sole official language. Russia decided that it needed to preserve the rights of the ethnic Russians, and so invaded Crimea and held a referandum. One can argue about its legitimacy, but those were the events in question. Besides, when the Soviet Union came apart, there was an agreement b/w Kyiv & Moscow on the ownership in Sevastopol and the Crimea, and that agreement was broken after Yanukovich was ousted. That was what provoked the Russian occupation.
Ukraine keeping its nukes wouldn't have done a thing for it: the controls remained in Moscow. It wasn't like the Ukrainians & Kazakhs - the 2 republics aside from Russia that had nukes - were gonna get the codes and own the ones in their territory. That's why Leonid Kravchuk wanted those nukes gone - not b'cos he was a pacifist, but b'cos there were weapons in his country that were not in his contol
I suspect solar power couldn't provide the power needed to pull all that weight, which is why they've dedicated it to the lights, ACs and display systems inside the trains. It's a start - may not be 100% solar, but even something like 30% is good.
Good point. In Lollipop, Google took the control of the OS out of the phone makers or carriers, and back in-house. I have a Verizon Ellipsis 10 w/ 16GB internal storage & 128GB external storage. I can't upgrade the tablet to Marshmallow, which would allow me to swap the logical internal & external drives, so that I have adequate storage for everything, no matter what.
These fully electrical controls are a disaster. Recently, my car wouldn't start due to a battery issue, so I had to call roadside assistance. He had trouble jumpstarting it too, so he towed it to the nearest repair shop where they did have a charger capable of jumpstarting it. While my car was down, I could not remove my key from the ignition - after all, the battery was low! I couldn't open or lock the car doors using the remote, b'cos those were powered by the battery as well! The 2017 version of the car - a Subaru Crosstrek - is now totally keyless.
One thing that tow guy told me, while we were towing my car, was his torrid experience in fixing someone's Prius just the previous day: since the hood can't be popped mechanically (in my car, thankfully, it still can), it was a major headache for him to draw the connectors to the battery of that Prius. That's the thing w/ these all electronic cars: once the battery is down, they are hosed. He also told me that he & others in his profession refuse to handle Teslas, and that Tesla provides their own roadside service due to this issue. Nothing more glorious than having a single point of failure that makes it impossible to fix what's wrong w/ a car.
My contract had expired some months back, so no, I didn't need to pay anything for leaving. Just started a new 2 year contract w/ a monthly payment on the phone.
I've never bothered about Galaxies: my Android phone is a Moto X. It does have a poor battery life, but is otherwise fine. Also have a Lumia 550, which is great value for money, if one ignores the store & apps diversity
Wireless charging - don't need it. Whenever I'm not using something, it's plugged in & being charged. Some have said that that shortens the battery life, but no: these things have internal software/circuitry to disable charging once the charge level is above a certain threshold. Similarly, battery life of this thing is fine. Pixel density - the 7 has a 12 megapixel camera, and iPad 4 mini has an 8 megapixel camera - both good enough. 802.11ac is good enough - not seen too much w/ 802.11j, and phone calls are easy enough.
I did kick myself in 2014 for getting the 5s just weeks before the 6 debuted. Had I bought the 6, I may not have upgraded to the 7, depending on how much storage I had. I was mindful that that was one of the stumbling blocks that might force me to upgrade, but now, I don't see a need even in the distant future (unless the phone just dies
Routers have typically behaved like this: only the admin password is masked while logging in, but when one is in the Password page, one gets to type - and see - the password that's set. I've never understood why. What you are describing is if one goes to the preferences page of the browser - where one can check the passwords if one has forgotten (happened w/ me many times)
I quite agree. Like I got a new iPad Mini 4, and one thing I noticed - the Rotate lock/unlock button (which is also usable for something else, I forget what) is gone: it was there in the iPad Mini 1. Instead, I had to experimentally discover that one has to swap up to get the lock button (next to the disturb crescent) and select it accordingly
Also, my iPod Nano has a touch screen, and some very basic functionality. However, couldn't they have included iTunes there, instead of forcing us to sync w/ iTunes on my laptop, which is a pain? On this thing, I can't add songs or alter a playlist w/o connecting it to my laptop. Really annoying!
If you don't associate your credit card(s) w/ Apple Pay or NFC, it is automatically disabled. Like my new iPad Mini 4 has Apple Pay as well, but I haven't associated that w/ my cards, as I did my phone, since I don't use the former that way.
Water damage where? In the rain? Dropping it in a drink? Same thing can be said for any of Apple's other toys - the iPads, the iPods, yet none of those have gone jackless as yet. In fact, for the iPod nano 7th gen, if one has one of those Beat or bluetooth headphones or speakers, can't use those things!
Headphone jacks are so quaint. I suppose you still have manual windows in your car. Or are you more of a horse and buggy man?
Excepting that most state of the art headphones have that 3.5mm jack. Similarly, if one wants to connect the iPhone 7 to an otherwise perfectly good non-Bluetooth speaker (another quaint relic, I suppose), one would have to use the dongle along w/ the aux connector. If headphone jacks are so quaint, why did Apple leave it alone on the iPad Mini 4, as well as all their iPods? In fact, on the iPod nano, it's next to impossible to connect that to anything via bluetooth: I connect it in my car via USB to the iPod player in the navigation system
Apple needs to figure out its overall strategy, instead of forcing people to use lightning connectors on one thing and headphone jacks on others.
That was the only major change in Apple's history - when they went from a System 7 based OS that was at par w/ Windows 3.1 as far as multitasking went - cooperative, but not preemptive. Apple took forever on Copeland before pulling the plug on it, acquiring NEXT and replacing a completely proprietary OS w/ a Posix compliant OS.
NeXTstep had nothing in common w/ System 7, since the companies were different, as was the hardware (despite being Mot 68k as well). NEXT made a computer from scratch dedicated to RAD, and had no mission to be compatible w/ Mac applications in any way, since their target market was the enterprise. When NEXT got acquired by Apple, they re-designed the UI somewhat from NEXTSTEP to get OS X, which remained consistent until Apple decided to make it look more like iOS, due to the popularity of the latter.
That, and also, going from having a separate button on the iPad Mini 1 to getting rid of it on the iPad Mini 4, and making one swipe up to discover where that is. Very intuitive! NOT!!!
As is well known, Intel's toughest competition ain't AMD: it's Intel's own, previous CPUs, which w/ multiple cores, is still more than adequate for anything thrown at it. Very different from the 90s where every MHz bump resulted in a major performance improvement. Same for Microsoft: Windows 7 was good enough, and people have had to be dragged kicking & screaming to 8 & 10.
Previously, I had an iPhone 5s and an iPad mini, both w/ 16GB storage. I just upgraded both over the last few months to iPhone 7 and iPad mini 4, both w/ 128GB of storage primarily b'cos I had hit the limit on those. But I don't anticipate getting even close to 128GB on these 2 new toys. While iPhone 7 gave me Apple Pay, which 5s didn't have, there is nothing missing in the iPhone 7 that I'll want in iPhone 8. If anything, the loss of the home button will be a bummer: I like the fingerprint detection way of logging in, buying things and authentication. Essentially, what stops me from buying future Apple toys is that these new ones of mine are good enough for the foreseeable future. I do see myself buying a Macbook sometime just to avoid getting into an annual Windows subscription.