There was a short period where they really wanted all the manufacturers to drop SD support and recommended it. There was a bit of a revolt and Google quietly backed off. I was against this recommendation.
Now that they're actually putting enough storage in a phone - I have a 128 GB Pixel. I'm okay with not having an SD card because my music will fit directly on the phone with enough room to still have the rest of the phone. There was no reason bigger storage couldn't have happened earlier, the chips were there well before the phones were.
So you tell me I'm doing it wrong then tell me the right way to do it is to keep doing what I'm doing? Making rules for what can and can't be done with the AppData directory?
With or without AppLocker a business friendly application should have the option to install to the system - which is what I as an administrator with a fleet of computers under my control prefer - it's easier to manage with the K1000 system - or as a user app in case I decide to play it loose in that department. Firefox works that way, Chrome works that way, I have seen video games that ask me if I want to install for just my account or the whole system.
Making something AppData only smells horribly of sneakiness and subterfuge meant to take advantage of ignorant system managers, all the way from a family computer up to less informed enterprise admins.
Oh, I've done it. I did it on my M8. Every time I had wanted to use USB I would have to go into developer options and enable USB for data access. If I unplugged my M8 even momentarily I would have to re-enable USB access in the developer options regardless of what software I had installed. I'm sure I could have gotten some other firmware for it where this was no longer the case, but running the Google Play Edition ROM kept me from wanting to do that.
BTW - as you can see from the fact I called out KDE connect I do use Linux.
I found using KDE connect to be more reliable than USB since the underlying OS fought using USB so viciously even when it was enabled I would have file transfers stall out and need to be resumed later whereas I could do a file transfers of 16 GB - my music collection - in one go with KDE Connect.
Yes, sometimes I do miss the simplicity of putting my original EVO with WiMax on my system as a straight up USB drive, or the ability I had with my EVO 4G LTE to boot up into Clockwork Mod or whichever one I was running at the time and make my entire phone a big USB device out-of-OS, but being able to load it up as a reliable network share on my desktop that's just about as reliable as the SFTP connections I have to other systems on my network make the USB cable almost a trivial concern.
I believe if you were to do a serious study of comparing Hillary voters to Trump voters you would see a pattern of dogs/no pets to Trump versus cats to Hillary/Stein. I don't think the break-out would be phenomenal, but I do think you would see a pattern, 60/40 or so. I leave Johnson out of this because this time around he lost his rudder and nobody could tell where he belong on the alignment charts unlike his previous run.
Even though I no longer user i-Devices as someone in I.T. I works with lots of users who use them religiously.
I still recommend users of iDevices open iTunes occasionally and sync if for nothing more than backup purposes. I know most of it syncs to iCloud or whatever now, but the solid backup on your own system still seems to be the best way to restore user data when an iPhone falls into an iCrapper full of iPeed and must be replaced.
Even Android has basically done away with this over the years, then Google fought a war on SD Cards and semi-lost, but had a victory in the way they encrypt them. I believe in Androids case it's to arm-twist people into using and paying for Google Music.
I have found KDE Connect to be a reasonable and useful replacement for using the phone as a USB device. I can do more than 90% of what I used to do while using it as a USB device, and the fact I'm using a Google phone makes the other 10% not matter, now that I no longer have carrier/manufacturer bloat to forcibly remove.
As for the iPhone - not being able to do this sort of thing is a lot of why I abandoned the platform when my 3G gave out.
As far as I'm concerned they never left the game, only lost popularity. I'm running a pile-driver core chip on my stuff at home and it doesn't get saturated on my day to day stuff and is quite speedy on my heavy duty stuff as well. I'm not by modern definition a gamer so I'm not pushing it as hard as I can with Windows on the latest AAA titles, but I do use Linux and 3D games - my limitations seem to revolve around my out of date GeForce 750 Ti.
I just built a pile-driver core machine for work, it's being used for video editing - the editor originally wanted a Mac but we talked him into a custom Windows machine instead since Adobe actually caters to the Windows side more considering their war with Apple. He's exceedingly happy - in fact he's asked us to remove his older Mac from his desk he likes the Windows/AMD combo we built him so well.
I'm still a fan of the AMD/Nvida combo, from the old ATI Rage IIc almost always having issues in laptops in the late 90's, to my first Radeon literally smoking after playing Alice for about an hour and half, to the conference room machine where I now work having to run on an older version of the Radeon driver if I want sound over HDMI to work I've never been able to bring myself around to liking ATI/Radeon/AMD graphics with the exception of saying they did great in the Wii and GameCube.
My Playstation 3, Wii, and BluRay player all have a client that works. I'm trying to consolidate down to one system.
Literally all it would take to have a "client" that worked would be for them to code their website in such a way that I could navigate with arrow keys.....
I always thought businesses that have customers in waiting should have secondary services to soak a few extra bucks off of them and to make their time less wasted. When I was in League City they built a Carwash and Grill. The idea was to eat steak and drink while you were getting a car wash, what I considered genius, but they never actually opened the grill while I still lived there, just the bar. So drive there, get drunk drive home. I had an issue with this, but went there anyways for one beer and then soda.
I always thought tire shops and what have you should have at minimum WiFi in the lobby. Most don't and usually have a TV pinned on something horrible. I think mixing up barber shops with lube and tire shops would be a great idea
If I were opening up a coffee shop (which I've considered) I would absolutely target spaces next door to tire, lube, brake, carwash, and any other place I could think of that would have people pinned in place without their vehicles. I tend to walk somewhere to eat when waiting for anything like that and will pick a place that has something within a reasonable/safe walking distance.
That's interesting, wish I was a better coder, I would consider seeing if I could use some of that interface code to make a Kodi compatible Netflix plugin.
DropBox is banned in our organization for this and other reasons. Turns out it's more insecure than it gets credit for, Slashdot has covered that a few times and I know people who've personally been able to prove data was leaking from there. I no longer have anything in my personal Dropbox account.
If they had a test button I could have tested that out for myself. I'm okay with an in-browser app - as long as it isn't Silverlight or something else OS limited.
Unless you use Java, HTML5 or some other cross platform framework.
Or make an all-dependencies included package, which can be done on Linux just like it's done on Mac OS. The NIX package manager is supposed to address this sort of thing.
When you get into the Linux world as long as your software is written properly there's a lot less supporting that has to be done, the users tend to be more advanced or are working under someone who is. As long as the stuff isn't written poorly or focused on one distro only (really - why do companies release RPM's to appease Linux people? RedHat? Really?) it should be smooth sailing.
I logged into the machine with the same domain admin account I used to run the installer. I went to Add/Remove programs - I got a message that I didn't have the rights to uninstall it. I am an administrator of both the local machine and the domain.
I browsed into the AppData directory (which I don't expect the average user who has admin to their own stuff to understand) I found an uninstaller and I ran it. That worked. I then manually deleted the directories that were left.
This has a ways to go before I accept it as good corporate software. It's most certainly not a good software citizen.
There's no reasonable excuse not to support Linux on something like this.
Release two versions - first and up front release a Nix style package, which for all intents and purposes can be compared to a Mac.dmg file with all dependencies included. Or more accurately an APK for a desktop since they already support a version of Linux by having an Android version. With a Mac, Android, and iOS version out there already the work is done - can you say easy port?
Then for the braver types and for the distro makers release a tar.gz file with the crap in it. It doesn't matter if you release the source code or not, though of course I would prefer they did. If you make a straight up binary version someone is going to make an RPM of it and someone else is going to make a.deb - consider the work done. The nice thing about the open-source community, they'll do the work for you for free if you don't actively stop them. Look at the way nVidia drivers are handled and the way Oracle Java has distro side packages that are dedicated to downloading and installing the binaries in a way that is both easy and compliant with overbearing restrictions.
I logged in as my test domain user - his name is Norm L. User. I right-clicked the installer exe - no there wasn't an MSI even in this day and age - and chose "Run as Administrator" which is exactly what I'm going to have to do for one off user installs.
Without asking it installed directly into my administrator accounts AppData directory.
STRIKE 3!!!!
This program is crap from a corporate perspective.
Looks like there isn't a test meeting to join. Pretty much all the other guys have a test meeting. I want to see if I have to do an install of anything just to join, which is the most important thing to me. My company works with many others, we have standardized on a product, but that doesn't mean I don't have to consider every other product out there since we work with so many other companies and they all want to do their own thing. You've probably gathered GoTo Meeting with its absolute demand to run in a randomized AppData directory folder and the zero backwards compatibility between versions is a thorn in my side.
I don't know if there's a strike from a joining perspective or not since there is no obvious test meeting.
Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS versions listed. No Linux or Java option, in the day of Raspberry Pi's everywhere and an increase of LInux powered devices, including those from Amazon they didn't bother with a Linux version.
I don't know for a fact that it runs in AppData, but the fact we lock it down to keep crypto lockers from running and the fact GoTo Meeting throws a screaming fit demanding it be not locked down AND it runs from randomized directories to prevent us from making an allowance tells me that Amazon is likely to be just as big of a pain in the ass.
I hope Amazon has learned some good practice about writing programs that can be installed as a system program OR be installed as a user program like Chrome, not as a user program or nothing like the Amazon music player (or Goto Meeting, or Spotify).
Phoenix is a nice big grid with lots of normal "surface road" traffic, at least it was in the 90's when I lived there. I found there was so much traffic that turning left was more trouble than it was worth so I would make multiple rights around the block to get where I needed most of the time, it was faster.
Then I left for Houston - where if you see a road in one part of town and you see the road in another part of town in a straight line with the other place you saw it there's a pretty good chance it doesn't connect in the middle and and attempt at going around the block is likely to send you on a 10 mile journey of zigzagging roads in a neighborhoods with no marked way out.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a short period where they really wanted all the manufacturers to drop SD support and recommended it. There was a bit of a revolt and Google quietly backed off. I was against this recommendation.
Now that they're actually putting enough storage in a phone - I have a 128 GB Pixel. I'm okay with not having an SD card because my music will fit directly on the phone with enough room to still have the rest of the phone. There was no reason bigger storage couldn't have happened earlier, the chips were there well before the phones were.
So you tell me I'm doing it wrong then tell me the right way to do it is to keep doing what I'm doing? Making rules for what can and can't be done with the AppData directory?
With or without AppLocker a business friendly application should have the option to install to the system - which is what I as an administrator with a fleet of computers under my control prefer - it's easier to manage with the K1000 system - or as a user app in case I decide to play it loose in that department. Firefox works that way, Chrome works that way, I have seen video games that ask me if I want to install for just my account or the whole system.
Making something AppData only smells horribly of sneakiness and subterfuge meant to take advantage of ignorant system managers, all the way from a family computer up to less informed enterprise admins.
Oh, I've done it. I did it on my M8. Every time I had wanted to use USB I would have to go into developer options and enable USB for data access. If I unplugged my M8 even momentarily I would have to re-enable USB access in the developer options regardless of what software I had installed. I'm sure I could have gotten some other firmware for it where this was no longer the case, but running the Google Play Edition ROM kept me from wanting to do that.
BTW - as you can see from the fact I called out KDE connect I do use Linux.
I found using KDE connect to be more reliable than USB since the underlying OS fought using USB so viciously even when it was enabled I would have file transfers stall out and need to be resumed later whereas I could do a file transfers of 16 GB - my music collection - in one go with KDE Connect.
Yes, sometimes I do miss the simplicity of putting my original EVO with WiMax on my system as a straight up USB drive, or the ability I had with my EVO 4G LTE to boot up into Clockwork Mod or whichever one I was running at the time and make my entire phone a big USB device out-of-OS, but being able to load it up as a reliable network share on my desktop that's just about as reliable as the SFTP connections I have to other systems on my network make the USB cable almost a trivial concern.
If you were to do a serious study I think you would find a decreased likelihood in voting for Trump in cat ownership, statistically.
I say this simply because there's already been serious studies that match cat owners to the left wing and dog owners to the right. Even though Trump is arguably more of an old-school Democrat than a core Republican the voters are what we're talking about, and without a doubt Trump was elected by the more conservative of those of any alignment than the progressive.
I believe if you were to do a serious study of comparing Hillary voters to Trump voters you would see a pattern of dogs/no pets to Trump versus cats to Hillary/Stein. I don't think the break-out would be phenomenal, but I do think you would see a pattern, 60/40 or so. I leave Johnson out of this because this time around he lost his rudder and nobody could tell where he belong on the alignment charts unlike his previous run.
Even though I no longer user i-Devices as someone in I.T. I works with lots of users who use them religiously.
I still recommend users of iDevices open iTunes occasionally and sync if for nothing more than backup purposes. I know most of it syncs to iCloud or whatever now, but the solid backup on your own system still seems to be the best way to restore user data when an iPhone falls into an iCrapper full of iPeed and must be replaced.
Even Android has basically done away with this over the years, then Google fought a war on SD Cards and semi-lost, but had a victory in the way they encrypt them. I believe in Androids case it's to arm-twist people into using and paying for Google Music.
I have found KDE Connect to be a reasonable and useful replacement for using the phone as a USB device. I can do more than 90% of what I used to do while using it as a USB device, and the fact I'm using a Google phone makes the other 10% not matter, now that I no longer have carrier/manufacturer bloat to forcibly remove.
As for the iPhone - not being able to do this sort of thing is a lot of why I abandoned the platform when my 3G gave out.
As far as I'm concerned they never left the game, only lost popularity. I'm running a pile-driver core chip on my stuff at home and it doesn't get saturated on my day to day stuff and is quite speedy on my heavy duty stuff as well. I'm not by modern definition a gamer so I'm not pushing it as hard as I can with Windows on the latest AAA titles, but I do use Linux and 3D games - my limitations seem to revolve around my out of date GeForce 750 Ti.
I just built a pile-driver core machine for work, it's being used for video editing - the editor originally wanted a Mac but we talked him into a custom Windows machine instead since Adobe actually caters to the Windows side more considering their war with Apple. He's exceedingly happy - in fact he's asked us to remove his older Mac from his desk he likes the Windows/AMD combo we built him so well.
I'm still a fan of the AMD/Nvida combo, from the old ATI Rage IIc almost always having issues in laptops in the late 90's, to my first Radeon literally smoking after playing Alice for about an hour and half, to the conference room machine where I now work having to run on an older version of the Radeon driver if I want sound over HDMI to work I've never been able to bring myself around to liking ATI/Radeon/AMD graphics with the exception of saying they did great in the Wii and GameCube.
My Playstation 3, Wii, and BluRay player all have a client that works. I'm trying to consolidate down to one system.
Literally all it would take to have a "client" that worked would be for them to code their website in such a way that I could navigate with arrow keys.....
I think it's a great idea.
I always thought businesses that have customers in waiting should have secondary services to soak a few extra bucks off of them and to make their time less wasted. When I was in League City they built a Carwash and Grill. The idea was to eat steak and drink while you were getting a car wash, what I considered genius, but they never actually opened the grill while I still lived there, just the bar. So drive there, get drunk drive home. I had an issue with this, but went there anyways for one beer and then soda.
I always thought tire shops and what have you should have at minimum WiFi in the lobby. Most don't and usually have a TV pinned on something horrible. I think mixing up barber shops with lube and tire shops would be a great idea
If I were opening up a coffee shop (which I've considered) I would absolutely target spaces next door to tire, lube, brake, carwash, and any other place I could think of that would have people pinned in place without their vehicles. I tend to walk somewhere to eat when waiting for anything like that and will pick a place that has something within a reasonable/safe walking distance.
That's interesting, wish I was a better coder, I would consider seeing if I could use some of that interface code to make a Kodi compatible Netflix plugin.
Wow - this is some pretty cool stuff and I commend Netflix for doing it, but really? Netflix?
The Handspring Treo?
Once again the latest iPhone introduces revolutionary new ideas Android has had for years.
Knowing my shit is why users running crap from there is banned. Per user programs aren't supposed to exist in a controlled corporate environment.
DropBox is banned in our organization for this and other reasons. Turns out it's more insecure than it gets credit for, Slashdot has covered that a few times and I know people who've personally been able to prove data was leaking from there. I no longer have anything in my personal Dropbox account.
If they had a test button I could have tested that out for myself. I'm okay with an in-browser app - as long as it isn't Silverlight or something else OS limited.
Unless you use Java, HTML5 or some other cross platform framework.
Or make an all-dependencies included package, which can be done on Linux just like it's done on Mac OS. The NIX package manager is supposed to address this sort of thing.
When you get into the Linux world as long as your software is written properly there's a lot less supporting that has to be done, the users tend to be more advanced or are working under someone who is. As long as the stuff isn't written poorly or focused on one distro only (really - why do companies release RPM's to appease Linux people? RedHat? Really?) it should be smooth sailing.
Just when I thought it couldn't get much worse:
I logged into the machine with the same domain admin account I used to run the installer. I went to Add/Remove programs - I got a message that I didn't have the rights to uninstall it. I am an administrator of both the local machine and the domain.
I browsed into the AppData directory (which I don't expect the average user who has admin to their own stuff to understand) I found an uninstaller and I ran it. That worked. I then manually deleted the directories that were left.
This has a ways to go before I accept it as good corporate software. It's most certainly not a good software citizen.
There's no reasonable excuse not to support Linux on something like this.
Release two versions - first and up front release a Nix style package, which for all intents and purposes can be compared to a Mac .dmg file with all dependencies included. Or more accurately an APK for a desktop since they already support a version of Linux by having an Android version. With a Mac, Android, and iOS version out there already the work is done - can you say easy port?
Then for the braver types and for the distro makers release a tar.gz file with the crap in it. It doesn't matter if you release the source code or not, though of course I would prefer they did. If you make a straight up binary version someone is going to make an RPM of it and someone else is going to make a .deb - consider the work done. The nice thing about the open-source community, they'll do the work for you for free if you don't actively stop them. Look at the way nVidia drivers are handled and the way Oracle Java has distro side packages that are dedicated to downloading and installing the binaries in a way that is both easy and compliant with overbearing restrictions.
So, I downloaded the client.
I logged in as my test domain user - his name is Norm L. User. I right-clicked the installer exe - no there wasn't an MSI even in this day and age - and chose "Run as Administrator" which is exactly what I'm going to have to do for one off user installs.
Without asking it installed directly into my administrator accounts AppData directory.
STRIKE 3!!!!
This program is crap from a corporate perspective.
Looks like there isn't a test meeting to join. Pretty much all the other guys have a test meeting. I want to see if I have to do an install of anything just to join, which is the most important thing to me. My company works with many others, we have standardized on a product, but that doesn't mean I don't have to consider every other product out there since we work with so many other companies and they all want to do their own thing. You've probably gathered GoTo Meeting with its absolute demand to run in a randomized AppData directory folder and the zero backwards compatibility between versions is a thorn in my side.
I don't know if there's a strike from a joining perspective or not since there is no obvious test meeting.
Ball 1
Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS versions listed. No Linux or Java option, in the day of Raspberry Pi's everywhere and an increase of LInux powered devices, including those from Amazon they didn't bother with a Linux version.
Strike 2
Looked closer. Haven't installed it but it requires a download.
STRIKE 1
I don't know for a fact that it runs in AppData, but the fact we lock it down to keep crypto lockers from running and the fact GoTo Meeting throws a screaming fit demanding it be not locked down AND it runs from randomized directories to prevent us from making an allowance tells me that Amazon is likely to be just as big of a pain in the ass.
I hope Amazon has learned some good practice about writing programs that can be installed as a system program OR be installed as a user program like Chrome, not as a user program or nothing like the Amazon music player (or Goto Meeting, or Spotify).
Phoenix is a nice big grid with lots of normal "surface road" traffic, at least it was in the 90's when I lived there. I found there was so much traffic that turning left was more trouble than it was worth so I would make multiple rights around the block to get where I needed most of the time, it was faster.
Then I left for Houston - where if you see a road in one part of town and you see the road in another part of town in a straight line with the other place you saw it there's a pretty good chance it doesn't connect in the middle and and attempt at going around the block is likely to send you on a 10 mile journey of zigzagging roads in a neighborhoods with no marked way out.