Isn't it bad enough that one of the most common repairs on a $700 phone is a glass replacement? I know most techies won't even try, but the process of delaminating and scraping glass off or of unsealing the chassis to do a Display Assembly swap is obnoxious enough even for people who know what they're doing. I've done it a few times but I wouldn't even touch a Galaxy Edge device; I don't think I could ever get the fit close enough.
Apple is the exact poster child for repair-hostility, but not everyone lives near an Apple Store or has $300 for an authorized repair. I foresee a future where even more people live with cracked screens if only because third-party phone techs won't want to be bothered with the stupid things.
I know Powershell and it has been around for a while now, but it's almost always less mental effort on my part to string together shell commands than to open the Powershell ISE and read up on keywords and object attributes. It's habit, but I'd rather keep the thing I'm used to. I know bash scripting and perl too and I can be productive in perl but it's almost always faster for me just do what I need with bash, so I suppose the analogy is similar.
Is anyone seriously planning on attacking British warships with something besides rafts full of IEDs? What's the likelihood that Brits would be involved in a Naval engagement that didn't also involve the American Navy, a force that is nearly cartoonish compared to every other fleet on the planet? Is there some expectation that they'll be front-line in a shooting war beside an American carrier group?
CSB - I just taught a Kodi class to 50 adults who wanted it bad enough to demand that it be an authorized use of their continuing education funding. I didn't campaign for it and I didn't specially discuss anything more dubious than the Fusion Installer and Kodimaster repos. They can figure out Exodus and Sportsdevil on their own, but they were still glad to get the class.
Alexa is available for all Android devices. Prime Subscribers already get unlimited Photo Storage and ridiculously cheap ($50/year) truly unlimited Cloud storage accounts.
Sure, you're trading your privacy off to a different internet giant, but if I'm looking for the particular feature set available with a Pixel phone, it seems like I can get them just fine from Amazon's apps and services without having to buy Google's phone in particular.
Likewise, I already know the Pixel doesn't have hardware features I legitimately want to see, like a card reader and a removable battery. I'd rather get the hardware I want and mess around with adb commands to kill the handset/carrier vendor's bloat than deal with hardware that's inadequate to begin with.
This doesn't seem like a compelling option at all and is even less so for trying to create exclusivity in the OS.
Two things that come to my mind are that Miracast is a standard remote display technology that lots of things support, including many Smart TVs and STBs.
The other thing is that I've run across several non-Google platforms that enable some sort of media casting, using an Android Intent (the Share button, basically) to show media on another device and definitely works with Android to Kodi or Plex Clients or from the desktop with a browser plugin. As far as I know, there's no special Google magic in it.
What's so special about Google Cast in any of this?
That would be a step down from an HDX. They only have 2GB RAM and they're 4:3 (2000x1500) instead of 16:9 (2560x1440). The 16:9 thing is nit-picky but since I do more reading than anything else, having something in a more traditional book shape is appreciated.
I have an HDX 8.9. I actually love it for the combination of form factor and performance. It's lacking an SD slot and mine has been heavily modified from its stock software load, but more importantly to me, NO ONE has replacement parts for it, and it's old enough that the battery has deteriorated from a new model. I loved it to death, apparently.
The thing is held together with glue and as I understand it, HDX 8.9s are nightmarish to work on, so I'm just going to have to live with a device that can only manage 4 hours of screen-on time and hope that Amazon eventually gets around to offering an updated model of similar specs.
And that's the problem, because the product line hasn't been refreshed in two years or more. New Fire HDs don't live up to the hardware specs of the HDX. They're the wrong sizes and weights, have lower screen resolutions and slower CPUs. Even as somebody who isn't bothered by having to side-load a significant number of apps to overcome the shortcomings of Amazon's app store, it's a drag.
I have an nVidia Shield (another tablet that is no longer being manufactured) that I also like well enough, but it doesn't quite live up to the screen of the HDX. Samsung's high end tablets typically have gorgeous screens but never, ever get OS updates. Asus and LG make 8"-class devices are likewise not quite satisfactory.
I'm sure Amazon sells a lot more $200 HDs than $400 HDXs but damn, some of us actually do want one.
What other search engine is there? There's Microsoft and Google with deep pockets. Does DuckDuckGo have fat stacks of cash sitting around for some reason? How bad would it be for Mozilla to take Facebook funding? Would we really stand for it if Moz got funding from Baidu or Yandex?
I mean, insofar as we stand for things that the Mozilla foundation does now, which are mostly terrible and stupid.
That is true. I haven't. I don't. I do have Google Voice configured to deliver SMS messages as email (and I whitelist senders to a minimum as well), precisely because I don't want to deal with another, extremely limited messaging tool. I already dislike the idea that I need accounts on six or seven different platforms to communicate with my contacts. Why add another to the list?
Yes, because we need another, even less convenient way to send a message containing some combination of unicode text and binary data from one device to another, like we don't already have Email or a bajillion other IM clients. SMS is lame enough. Fancy, fruit-exclusive SMS is better how, exactly?
Palemoon is a thing that exists. If you're a Windows user, it's clearly the best way forward for those seeking refuge from Mozilla's mismanagement.
I'm not sure what Thunderbird needs. As far as I can tell, it's fine. It's not buggy and all the features I want to use work. Other than security fixes, what more do I want out of a mature mail client?
I don't agree with Steam's terms of service. I paid for the games. They're mine. I should be able to reinstall them at whim, with or without internet access. With or without Valve's involvement. If Valve decides I'm a dick, I should be able to continue playing games, not have my access to them terminated because of their user agreement. I especially dislike the notion that I have to check-in with an online service to play single player, offline titles. All of that is unacceptable. Just because you're willing to compromise on those things doesn't mean that I am or that I should have to.
Because I'd rather support a company whose policies I encourage than give my business to someone who can hold other purchases hostage. When I can play my legally obtained copy of Half-Life 2 without having Steam installed, I'll think about whether or not there's a practical difference. Until then, there definitely is.
On a related note, I won't buy games on Steam (or Origin, same difference), because I don't like its terms of service. I've also felt the sting of losing a beloved MMO to corporate mismanagement and I'm not doing THAT again either. That almost completely shuts me out of PC gaming.
Android games can be coped and played elsewhere, but some titles require either Google or Amazon authentication to operate and thus aren't truly portable either. It's better, in that I don't think Amazon and Google are going anywhere, but I actually had a functional Android game (Xcom: Enemy Within) pulled from my Amazon library so I can't play it any more, which speaks to my wider objection to Steam and Origin as well.
That pretty much leaves me with GoG and handheld systems (ew) for new games. It's just not a good time to be a gamer, IMO.
My feeling is that thing is going to spend a lot of time throttling because of poor thermal design since that's what the i3 and i5 NUCs have done throughout their history, but that thing is a legitimate quad-core machine.
I gave my TV an IP only because it supports Miracast. I can use that feature without agreeing to the TOS for the other Smart features. I've never agreed to LG's terms and conditions and in fact I've never used it for anything but a huge computer monitor and/or Miracast destination. If it wants to report to LG that there's some DLNA servers and a bunch of mobile devices, set top boxes and PCs so be it, 'cause it's not going to have the credentials to access anything important.
Also, to the poster complaining about streaming services not handling classical music well. It is not the streaming services, it is the publishers of your music who are still being the pricks all of the music publishers were some years ago.
Unless you have some evidence to support that, I don't believe that is an accurate statement. My theory is that the schemas in use to underlie music database services are not built to properly accommodate classical music and that developers, while perhaps aware of the issues, are entirely too lazy to fix them.
In other words, they want to treat everything like singles-driven top 40, and when something doesn't match that behavior, it's easier to ignore it than to consider the more expansive view of data that's needed in order to handle it properly.
This has been bothering me for a while, but why do people talk about Spotify like it solves a problem? It might be the genre of music I like, but when I look at what Spotify offers, I don't see how it's superior to Google Play Music (where I can upload 50,000 hourlong tracks and listen on 10 authorized devices, where Spotify only allows 3333 tracks and 3 devices) and see a streaming catalog that with poorly cataloged , mislabeled or missing content.
I like classical music, something that no streaming service handles well, but Google Music is free if you're just uploading stuff you already have. What's Spotify doing to make itself better than that?
Well, not Kodi exactly. Kodi is just a presentation front-end for media playback. Since it's roughly as dubious that you have legally obtained content to play with Kodi (maybe video disc ripping is legal in your location, or you're one of the small number of people recording unencrpyted OTA TV signals) as it is that you're using torrents or NNTP for legal content, this might be a distinction without a difference, but in any case what you probably mean is "Kodi with the Fusion Addons installer and Genesis/IceFilms/AlluC/PopcornTime screen scrapers."
Which isn't quite the same thing. Kodi isn't really the tool that solves the problem. The questionably legal and dubious quality streaming sites you're accessing with Kodi addons are.
That's true, but not enough of the Google Framework runs to make all of Google's apps work. Youtube and most of the Play* apps don't and neither will Hangouts, but Gmail and Google Voice both work fine, for example.
Why is FireOS crippled, exactly? It's AOSP + an Amazon app framework in place of Google's. It does the same stuff. It runs all the same software less a few Google-specific tools that require parts of the Google Framework that can't be installed without root. That means you need a third-party Youtube client (there are lots of them), have to run a browser other than Chrome (Firefox and Dolphin are better options for Android anyway) and most of the Play* apps almost no one uses won't load. Sometimes I have to download an APK from the Play Store and share it from my desktop or off my phone since it's not available on Amazon's App Store, but I also have to install apps from Amazon on Google devices from time to time.
My Fire HDX 8.9 has been a great device. It has a fantastic 2560x1440 display and a CPU that's more than powerful enough, and it weighs just a few grams more than a Nexus 7 or Shield K1. I realize the Amazon launcher isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's still Android and you can still install Nova or Go Launcher if you want, and if you don't, just appreciate the fact that 99% of the FireOS devices you'll encounter will be exactly the same as every other FireOS device, which isn't even true of Samsung or HTC devices released in the same month.
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Isn't it bad enough that one of the most common repairs on a $700 phone is a glass replacement? I know most techies won't even try, but the process of delaminating and scraping glass off or of unsealing the chassis to do a Display Assembly swap is obnoxious enough even for people who know what they're doing. I've done it a few times but I wouldn't even touch a Galaxy Edge device; I don't think I could ever get the fit close enough.
Apple is the exact poster child for repair-hostility, but not everyone lives near an Apple Store or has $300 for an authorized repair. I foresee a future where even more people live with cracked screens if only because third-party phone techs won't want to be bothered with the stupid things.
I know Powershell and it has been around for a while now, but it's almost always less mental effort on my part to string together shell commands than to open the Powershell ISE and read up on keywords and object attributes. It's habit, but I'd rather keep the thing I'm used to. I know bash scripting and perl too and I can be productive in perl but it's almost always faster for me just do what I need with bash, so I suppose the analogy is similar.
Is anyone seriously planning on attacking British warships with something besides rafts full of IEDs? What's the likelihood that Brits would be involved in a Naval engagement that didn't also involve the American Navy, a force that is nearly cartoonish compared to every other fleet on the planet? Is there some expectation that they'll be front-line in a shooting war beside an American carrier group?
CSB - I just taught a Kodi class to 50 adults who wanted it bad enough to demand that it be an authorized use of their continuing education funding. I didn't campaign for it and I didn't specially discuss anything more dubious than the Fusion Installer and Kodimaster repos. They can figure out Exodus and Sportsdevil on their own, but they were still glad to get the class.
Alexa is available for all Android devices.
Prime Subscribers already get unlimited Photo Storage and ridiculously cheap ($50/year) truly unlimited Cloud storage accounts.
Sure, you're trading your privacy off to a different internet giant, but if I'm looking for the particular feature set available with a Pixel phone, it seems like I can get them just fine from Amazon's apps and services without having to buy Google's phone in particular.
Likewise, I already know the Pixel doesn't have hardware features I legitimately want to see, like a card reader and a removable battery. I'd rather get the hardware I want and mess around with adb commands to kill the handset/carrier vendor's bloat than deal with hardware that's inadequate to begin with.
This doesn't seem like a compelling option at all and is even less so for trying to create exclusivity in the OS.
Two things that come to my mind are that Miracast is a standard remote display technology that lots of things support, including many Smart TVs and STBs.
The other thing is that I've run across several non-Google platforms that enable some sort of media casting, using an Android Intent (the Share button, basically) to show media on another device and definitely works with Android to Kodi or Plex Clients or from the desktop with a browser plugin. As far as I know, there's no special Google magic in it.
What's so special about Google Cast in any of this?
That would be a step down from an HDX. They only have 2GB RAM and they're 4:3 (2000x1500) instead of 16:9 (2560x1440). The 16:9 thing is nit-picky but since I do more reading than anything else, having something in a more traditional book shape is appreciated.
I have an HDX 8.9. I actually love it for the combination of form factor and performance. It's lacking an SD slot and mine has been heavily modified from its stock software load, but more importantly to me, NO ONE has replacement parts for it, and it's old enough that the battery has deteriorated from a new model. I loved it to death, apparently.
The thing is held together with glue and as I understand it, HDX 8.9s are nightmarish to work on, so I'm just going to have to live with a device that can only manage 4 hours of screen-on time and hope that Amazon eventually gets around to offering an updated model of similar specs.
And that's the problem, because the product line hasn't been refreshed in two years or more. New Fire HDs don't live up to the hardware specs of the HDX. They're the wrong sizes and weights, have lower screen resolutions and slower CPUs. Even as somebody who isn't bothered by having to side-load a significant number of apps to overcome the shortcomings of Amazon's app store, it's a drag.
I have an nVidia Shield (another tablet that is no longer being manufactured) that I also like well enough, but it doesn't quite live up to the screen of the HDX. Samsung's high end tablets typically have gorgeous screens but never, ever get OS updates. Asus and LG make 8"-class devices are likewise not quite satisfactory.
I'm sure Amazon sells a lot more $200 HDs than $400 HDXs but damn, some of us actually do want one.
What other search engine is there? There's Microsoft and Google with deep pockets. Does DuckDuckGo have fat stacks of cash sitting around for some reason? How bad would it be for Mozilla to take Facebook funding? Would we really stand for it if Moz got funding from Baidu or Yandex?
I mean, insofar as we stand for things that the Mozilla foundation does now, which are mostly terrible and stupid.
So probably Facebook then.
That is true. I haven't. I don't. I do have Google Voice configured to deliver SMS messages as email (and I whitelist senders to a minimum as well), precisely because I don't want to deal with another, extremely limited messaging tool. I already dislike the idea that I need accounts on six or seven different platforms to communicate with my contacts. Why add another to the list?
Yes, because we need another, even less convenient way to send a message containing some combination of unicode text and binary data from one device to another, like we don't already have Email or a bajillion other IM clients. SMS is lame enough. Fancy, fruit-exclusive SMS is better how, exactly?
Is that the IBM employee who was whining about it on Reddit? Instead of, I don't know, an official IBM channel?
Apple has never offered an idevice with removable storage. It didn't abandon the concept. It has actively refused to participate in the first place.
Lightning has been integrated into Thunderbird for some time now.
Palemoon is a thing that exists. If you're a Windows user, it's clearly the best way forward for those seeking refuge from Mozilla's mismanagement.
I'm not sure what Thunderbird needs. As far as I can tell, it's fine. It's not buggy and all the features I want to use work. Other than security fixes, what more do I want out of a mature mail client?
I don't agree with Steam's terms of service. I paid for the games. They're mine. I should be able to reinstall them at whim, with or without internet access. With or without Valve's involvement. If Valve decides I'm a dick, I should be able to continue playing games, not have my access to them terminated because of their user agreement. I especially dislike the notion that I have to check-in with an online service to play single player, offline titles. All of that is unacceptable. Just because you're willing to compromise on those things doesn't mean that I am or that I should have to.
Because I'd rather support a company whose policies I encourage than give my business to someone who can hold other purchases hostage. When I can play my legally obtained copy of Half-Life 2 without having Steam installed, I'll think about whether or not there's a practical difference. Until then, there definitely is.
On a related note, I won't buy games on Steam (or Origin, same difference), because I don't like its terms of service. I've also felt the sting of losing a beloved MMO to corporate mismanagement and I'm not doing THAT again either. That almost completely shuts me out of PC gaming.
Android games can be coped and played elsewhere, but some titles require either Google or Amazon authentication to operate and thus aren't truly portable either. It's better, in that I don't think Amazon and Google are going anywhere, but I actually had a functional Android game (Xcom: Enemy Within) pulled from my Amazon library so I can't play it any more, which speaks to my wider objection to Steam and Origin as well.
That pretty much leaves me with GoG and handheld systems (ew) for new games. It's just not a good time to be a gamer, IMO.
We had a thread about them a month ago, but here you go.
My feeling is that thing is going to spend a lot of time throttling because of poor thermal design since that's what the i3 and i5 NUCs have done throughout their history, but that thing is a legitimate quad-core machine.
I gave my TV an IP only because it supports Miracast. I can use that feature without agreeing to the TOS for the other Smart features. I've never agreed to LG's terms and conditions and in fact I've never used it for anything but a huge computer monitor and/or Miracast destination. If it wants to report to LG that there's some DLNA servers and a bunch of mobile devices, set top boxes and PCs so be it, 'cause it's not going to have the credentials to access anything important.
Also, to the poster complaining about streaming services not handling classical music well. It is not the streaming services, it is the publishers of your music who are still being the pricks all of the music publishers were some years ago.
Unless you have some evidence to support that, I don't believe that is an accurate statement. My theory is that the schemas in use to underlie music database services are not built to properly accommodate classical music and that developers, while perhaps aware of the issues, are entirely too lazy to fix them.
In other words, they want to treat everything like singles-driven top 40, and when something doesn't match that behavior, it's easier to ignore it than to consider the more expansive view of data that's needed in order to handle it properly.
But sure, publishers are assholes.
This has been bothering me for a while, but why do people talk about Spotify like it solves a problem? It might be the genre of music I like, but when I look at what Spotify offers, I don't see how it's superior to Google Play Music (where I can upload 50,000 hourlong tracks and listen on 10 authorized devices, where Spotify only allows 3333 tracks and 3 devices) and see a streaming catalog that with poorly cataloged , mislabeled or missing content.
I like classical music, something that no streaming service handles well, but Google Music is free if you're just uploading stuff you already have. What's Spotify doing to make itself better than that?
Well, not Kodi exactly. Kodi is just a presentation front-end for media playback. Since it's roughly as dubious that you have legally obtained content to play with Kodi (maybe video disc ripping is legal in your location, or you're one of the small number of people recording unencrpyted OTA TV signals) as it is that you're using torrents or NNTP for legal content, this might be a distinction without a difference, but in any case what you probably mean is "Kodi with the Fusion Addons installer and Genesis/IceFilms/AlluC/PopcornTime screen scrapers."
Which isn't quite the same thing. Kodi isn't really the tool that solves the problem. The questionably legal and dubious quality streaming sites you're accessing with Kodi addons are.
That's true, but not enough of the Google Framework runs to make all of Google's apps work. Youtube and most of the Play* apps don't and neither will Hangouts, but Gmail and Google Voice both work fine, for example.
Why is FireOS crippled, exactly? It's AOSP + an Amazon app framework in place of Google's. It does the same stuff. It runs all the same software less a few Google-specific tools that require parts of the Google Framework that can't be installed without root. That means you need a third-party Youtube client (there are lots of them), have to run a browser other than Chrome (Firefox and Dolphin are better options for Android anyway) and most of the Play* apps almost no one uses won't load. Sometimes I have to download an APK from the Play Store and share it from my desktop or off my phone since it's not available on Amazon's App Store, but I also have to install apps from Amazon on Google devices from time to time.
My Fire HDX 8.9 has been a great device. It has a fantastic 2560x1440 display and a CPU that's more than powerful enough, and it weighs just a few grams more than a Nexus 7 or Shield K1. I realize the Amazon launcher isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's still Android and you can still install Nova or Go Launcher if you want, and if you don't, just appreciate the fact that 99% of the FireOS devices you'll encounter will be exactly the same as every other FireOS device, which isn't even true of Samsung or HTC devices released in the same month.
So where's the problem, exactly?