With the entire content of BritBox already paid for by the UK public via the licence fee (BBC) and advertising (ITV), it would be bonkers to launch this in the UK, but apparently that's what they're going to do! *No-one* in the UK would subscribe to this because they'd be paying twice over for the content. It's why I never buy any BBC/ITV/Channel 4 programmes from Google Play because I've paid for them already.
However, if BritBox either had a lot of exclusive content (probably have to be exclusive for 6-12 months before airing on the BBC/ITV) or had the entire back catalogue of the BBC/ITV, then I'd be interested in subscribing as a UK user. As it stands, all it is really is a slightly extended version of the free iPlayer/ITV Hub streaming services, but at a fee close to Netflix. A complete non-starter for UK users, that's for sure.
Glassdoor (and other sites that review businesses) really should have an expiry date - say 5 years - for old reviews. This is because over rhe longer term, management, employees and offices all change enough to invalidate almost all old reviews. I've seen 10-year-old reviews on there where management has completely changed, 90% of staff have been replaced and offices moved multiple times and yet the only review available is the hugely out-of-date one thay doesn't reflect the current company at all.
It seems strange that Drupal with 3.5% market share (globally across both public and private sector) of CMS'es is on the list and yet WordPress, which is the most dominant CMS by far, isn't on the list despite having 59.7% CMS market share (figures from W3Techs).
Maybe the European public sector uses Drupal more than WordPress (I have no specific figures on that), but I seriously doubt it considering the 17:1 worldwide usage disparity. Or is Drupal considered less secure than WordPress and needs more fixes? Again, I doubt that - WordPress is a much bigger target for hackers and has a lot more third-party plugins which vary very widely in quality of code.
I had fond memories of HMV in the 90's/early 2000's before downloads/streaming took over. It was the go-to place to get new CD single releases and the UK prices were amazing back then (99p for 4 tracks - often with 3 non-album new songs - or 99p for 8 remixes of a track).
UK CD singles were such good value that the record industry decided to impose more and more draconian rules to ensure that they'd ultimately die off. Examples included raising the typical prices several times (yes, there were 1-track 3.99 pounds CD singles at the end!), and limiting the number of tracks (so you could end up with *3* discs for a single release e.g. Annie Lennox's "Cold", which could cost 3.99 pounds each - ridiculous).
HMV were never the cheapest, so I used to mainly buy CD albums when they were on sale there. Once Amazon UK started selling CDs and DVDs, the writing really was on the wall for HMV. I've still bought the odd thing (on sale) at HMV Online in the past few years, but Amazon UK has almost entirely replaced HMV in most UK shopper's eyes I suspect.
The pinnacle of 8-bit home computers was actually the BBC Micro, which had a superb OS and BASIC (including a 2-pass 6502 assembler that the C64 could only dream of) and an excellent disk drive system that wasn't slower than tape (hint: the C64 disk system was a complete dog).
There are plenty of BBC Micro emulators out there, but you might find the most convenient one to be on Android: Beebdroid.
Include a PDF pre-installed on the device - if your device's screen isn't good enough to view PDFs, then you've bought the wrong device -)
The PDF should include a URL for downloading the latest version of the PDF. I get annoyed when manufacturers release a new firmware or software update that changes or add features and don't revise the manual to match.
And there's me just having bought the 2-season Blu Ray set for a dirt cheap price. Mind you, while season 1 was excellent, season 2 wasn't nearly so good:-(
The BBC Micro was one of the most expensive 8-bit micros sold in the 80's in the UK (perhaps the TRS-80 and Apple II were the only pricier options, although they're American of course), but it was still the best 8-bit micro ever (IMHO) from a hardware and built-in OS/BASIC point of view. The price meant it never sold in huge numbers (the ZX Spectrum massively outsold it despite being enormously inferior in every single department - it "won" because the cheap price meant more games were developed for it even though many of those games looked and sounded awful due to the severe limitations of the Spectrum).
I'm old enough to have watched all the original shows mentioned here when they first aired and they were reasonably good, though obviously never got into the highly technical stuff (like the built-in 6502 assembler that was just simply great). Of course, I moved onto the Acorn Archimedes later on, which was just as impressive for its time (the first mass market device in the world to use an ARM chip for those not in the know) and equally as relatively expensive as the BBC Micro was, unfortunately (so again, suffered from low sales, despite being a superb machine).
Sadly, the closest the BBC get now to their 80's computer shows is "Click", which is usually buried on the BBC News channel (I don't even bother tuning that in on my TV!) and mostly just airs what you've probably already read/viewed on the Web already. I really miss the live editions of "Tomorrow's World" though - nothing better than getting early demos of new tech with the live possibility of utter failure (which happened regularly, much to the joy of the viewers:-) ).
When work got an Echo to play around with, I came up with exactly this idea - listen to meetings and save them (maybe as audio, but definitely transcribed to text). I was *shocked* to learn that you can't officially do this, because it seems like such an obvious thing for the Echo to do.
Now hackers work out how to do it, only for Amazon to close the exploits and *still* not release this idea as an official Alexa skill. Now that they've added the ability to train and recognise individual voices, a text transcription identifying each speaker as they say something is most definitely possible now. As it stands, our Echo sits around doing nothing because there's basically nothing in a business context it's currently useful for.
TV (on Channel 4 UK at least) and subsequent (UK) press coverage didn't seem to pick up what was arguably a mistake by race control. When a car stops/crashes, race control must decide if it's a dangerous position (this one was - it was on the track!) and if it can be moved quickly (this one couldn't - there was no easy way for marshals to push it through a gap in the circuit barriers - they ended up having to bring a truck with a recovery arm on it onto the track to drag it off).
Race control should have known that where the car had stopped warranted a full safety car, but bizarrely instigated a virtual safety car instead. One lap later, they flashed up "MAJOR INCIDENT" on the TV feed and then switched it to a full safety car (which basically admitted that the original virtual safety car was a mistake). If it had been a full safety car from the start, Hamilton would have won the race because Vettel's pit stop wouldn't have gained him the time he needed (because you can drive as fast as you can until you reach the back of the safety car queue).
You definitely could argue that race control's poor judgement cost Hamilton the win just as much as the software miscalculation.
This is true - even outside of Amazon, you will find CDs are often cheaper than their equivalent downloads (whoever thought 99p was a good price for a single download track is off their rocker). Autorip is useful, but it's almost as easy to run your favourite CD ripper (I use Grip on Linux) to get mp3's off your CD, the latter of which you just nicely file away as a backup.
I usually then upload the MP3s to Google Play Music for free and can then download/cache any of them to any of my Android devices very easily. Bizarrely, Google Play Music will often track-match and switch the download quality to a higher bitrate, which I don't mind.
We got an Amazon Echo at work to see if it's any use for business activities as it stands. First problem was that there's no way to configure a proxy server to gain access to Amazon (and other) remote servers, which is incredibly short-sighted of them.
Second issue is that an "obvious" business use is recording (and preferably transcribing) business meetings, but I was *shocked* that the Echo can't even take a simple voice note and record it for you for later access (never mind transcribing to text, which would be another essential feature).
As everyone has been pointing out here, everything the Echo does seems to go through Amazon's servers, so business confidentiality seems to be a major stumbling block to business acceptance. Heck, I can't even tell if the data goes out encrypted (without sniffing the network traffic) and is always stored encrypted.
For TV shows, I record the season number, episode number, total number of episodes in this season and day of the week (or next season's premiere start date if it's not airing yet) in, shock horror, a text file. It's then a question of finding the next episode online (pick your favourite, ahem, download site that lists TV shows) and incrementing the episode number when you've downloaded it.
For movies and music, I just find "recent downloads" for the media category on my favourite download listing sites (used to use a curated site until recently when it just stopped updating in a broken state too:-( ) and I might use that site or others to download the media.
I'll occasionally go to one of those "what's coming in fall"-type TV show preview sites (tv.com or whatever) to scoop up new TV show premiere dates. I'll also give a shout out to TV Calendar which can be handy for this.
If you're after a good 8" Android tablet, there aren't that many of them around worth looking at nowadays. I liked my LG G Pad 8.3 (the later LG models like the one you got weren't as good), but that had issues with a yellow tinge (fiddling with the RGB settings fixed that). I have a Samsung S 8.4" - very nice, but a bit expensive and no longer sold (don't get the S2/S3 versions - they're awful 4:3).
If you're willing to risk buying from a Chinese site, perhaps the Teclast T8 is something to consider. I have the Teclast T10 (not much more expensive and a better buy than the T8, IMHO) and like it a lot for the money.
I'm sure there's a bunch of reasons that tablet sales have been declining in recent years. Here's some of the ones I can think of:
* A tablet with a decent spec can be pricey (not as mad as the high-end phone market though!). * There's been a move away from widescreen to 4:3 with Android tablets for absolutely no good reason (don't quote the iPad to me - that's got it wrong all these years!). Since a tablet is primarily a media consumption device, the aspect ratio has to be close to common video aspect ratios (so 16:9 and 16:10 are fine, 4:3 most definitely is not). It's put me (and I suspect many others) right off buying recent tablets. * People don't have SIM contracts with tablets as a rule, so they don't need to go into that "replace every 1-2 years" cycle that contracrts tend to suck you into.
I've got a Nexus 7 and 10, but refused to buy the Nexus 9 (too expensive, 4:3). I've got a Samsung S 8.4" and 10.5", but refused to buy *any* of the S2 or S3 variants (again, too expensive, 4:3). Eventually found a 10" tablet released last year that a) was cheap (under $250), b) had decent specs and c) was 16:10. It's the Teclast T10 - had to be bought from a Chinese site, but it's a sweet tablet for the price.
The currently available tablets have pretty well plateaued (if not regressed in some cases!) in terms of specs and prices - it's no wonder people are hanging onto their existing tablets for longer. As for some posters dissing tablets - I *much* prefer to use a 10" tablet screen than one half the diagonal on a phone. Just the onscreen keyboard alone is so much better on a tablet, never mind reading Web sites or watching videos.
I was shocked that neither Amazon Echo nor Google Home can take voice dictation! They've got speech recognition, so surely they should be able to at least convert that to text and have it read back in Alexa/Google's voice later on at a bare minimum (this assumes it can't record audio and play it back later...which would be nice too).
Before you mention EchoScribe, that was a total hack involving an external microphone amongst other kludges (and the website is sneaky not mentioning the kludges up front)!
UK viewers did get to see 6 episodes last year on Channel 4, but episodes 7-10 appear to be exclusive to Amazon Prime Video in the US (Amazon Prime Video in the UK bizarrely only seems to have episodes 5 and 6 and also wants to charge money for them on top of your Prime sub despite those two episodes having aired nationally for "free" in the UK!).
I did find "Electric Dreams" to be quite variable over the 10 episodes (yes, as a UK viewer I had no choice but to source episodes from, ahem, "elsewhere"...and there was a total balls up with the episode numbering of downloads particularly for Autofac - which I thought was one of the better episodes - and "Safe and Sound").
I did think some episodes just ended without tying up the storyline - almost as if they were trying to be a TV pilot or something. Still, a reasonable series overall - it's rare for a UK channel to bother with sci-fi drama, so Channel 4 should be applauded for that, even if they failed to air 40% of the episodes (maybe they'll turn up later this year?).
The IT Crowd was good in its first few seasons when it actually did stuff about, you know, IT. Later seasons were nowhere near as funny as the IT angle almost completely disappeared. By the time they brought it back for the one-off finale, I managed one smile throughout the entire last ever episode (and you've guessed it, it wasn't an IT-related laugh either).
For consistency, it has to be Silicon Valley, which still has hilarious moments in every episode, even after 4 seasons.
Blu are a US company that mostly releases clones of Chinese phones (i.e. keeps the hardware and Anglicises/Blu-brands the software - but there's still "Chinglish" to be found in the UI in a few places!). They seem to exclusively sell on Amazon from what I can see and some models have limited release w.r.t. which countries (i.e. which Amazon country store) you can buy them from. My Blu Vivo 6 was exclusively on Amazon UK, but the "successor" - the Blu Vivo 8 - seems to only be on Amazon US for example.
As you say, they got pulled a few times from Amazon for dodgy data leakage, but they didn't stay off for long (good on Amazon for forcing them to fix things - Blu had no choice because Amazon is their lifeline).
The phones themselves are usually very good value for money, but other than the data thing, the big black mark is that software updates to the OS are few and far between (or try "never" for my 1-year-old Blu Vivo 6). The lack of updates is why, ultimately, I wouldn't recommend them - you may as well go to the Chinese route and find an equivalent or better phone that *does* get updates (I picked the Umidigi Z1).
I've had a Blu Vivo 6 for a fraction over a year now (bought on Black Friday 2016 - its actual release day here in the UK) and there's not been a *single* update for it (not even a minor one). So it's stuck on Android 6.0 and an Android security patch level from way back in September 2016! Looking at Blu's Facebook/Twitter, it's full of people with Blu phones begging for any sort of updates...and getting right royally fobbed off by Blu staff every time ("we're working on it", "it's coming soon"...for a full year?!). It seems Blu just abandon a phone on launch and release its successor 6-12 months later with the updates instead (yep, there's a Blu Vivo 8 with Android 7 available in the US now, but the specs aren't that much better than the Vivo 6).
This annoyed me so much, I've just bought a Umidigi Z1 (more RAM, faster CPU/GPU, Android 7, dual rear cameras, multiple updates this year, costs 50 pounds less) to replace it. A shame really, because the Vivo 6 is actually a nice phone - if it had gone to Android 7 like the Vivo 8 has, I'd have kept it for much longer.
I suspect the Computerworld article author has assumed that a typical Chromebook has the same specs as a tablet and *then* has a (hopefully detachable) keyboard on top of that. I just spent $230 on a 10.1" Android 7 tablet that has 4GB RAM, 64GB of local storage (that's rare for a Chromebook because of its cloud leanings), a 2560x1600 touchscreen (again, very rare for a Chromebook to have that res and not all Chromebooks have touchscreens either) and the usual GPS/accelerometer stuff too. I suspect you're talking *big* money to match those specs with a Chromebook.
Yes, I have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard I can optionally use with the new tablet (which will give a better experience than most Chromebooks' trackpads and keyboards) - it has mini-HDMI too if I wanted to hook it to a bigger screen. The tablet form factor is so much better for media consumption, particularly when you're on the move and don't have anywhere to rest your device on.
It's SATA 3 that sucks *really* hard now - so much so that if anyone reviews a SATA 3 SSD nowadays, they're mostly wasting their time (hint: SATA 3 was saturated by SSDs about 6 years ago). m.2 in its PCIe form is the current choice for those who want speed - my SM961 does over 3,000 Mbytes/sec read for instance.
One alternative to flipping everyone to enabled and having a tickbox you've got to discover to opt out is perhaps some sort of increasingly spaced out nagging? I'm thinking that everyone who isn't sending telemetry gets a nag dialogue that they can delay the re-appearance of in increasing intervals (e.g. for one month after first nag, 3 more months after second nag, 1 year after third nag and finally never nag me again after that).
If they get a load of take-up after nag 1 in the first month, they can use a future Firefox release to adjust the nag intervals or even remove them altogether. This way, it remains opt-in, but with some increasingly-less-frequent nag factor to persuare people to turn on the telemetry collection. I think opt-in has failed because no-one was nagged about it, so they simply didn't change the default settings.
I think you'd have to be quite careful about the wording in the nag dialogue - it would have to be "we need telemetry to improve the performance/reliability/security of future Firefox releases - by turning on telemetry collection, you will help us with this improvement effort and ultimately make Firefox a better browser for you." Users need to see some sort of benefit for giving up their telemetry data - just telling them you want the data isn't enough.
I think the problem here is that while you can easily identify a password field in a form (type=password), it's not so easy to identify other form fields that might contain personal information (you don't have to call the e-mail field "email" for example). Google is probably right at blanket-covering http forms with a warning that that they aren't https.
The warning in Incognito Mode is on a bit less of a justifiable footing though, but it's the next logical step to warning about all http sites regardless of Incognito Mode or if they're forms or not. That latter step, though, would hit billions of pages, but might force a big adoption of https by the remaining http-only holdouts.
A big shout-out to Let's Encrypt here, without whom I suspect this https-only tightening couldn't be been undertaken by any of the major browsers.
It might be news in the US, but Vodafone in the UK have done this for years. They have a "Smart" range - here's one of the cheapest at 49 pounds PAYG (and a 10 pounds top-up I believe).
Slashdot Mirror
With the entire content of BritBox already paid for by the UK public via the licence fee (BBC) and advertising (ITV), it would be bonkers to launch this in the UK, but apparently that's what they're going to do! *No-one* in the UK would subscribe to this because they'd be paying twice over for the content. It's why I never buy any BBC/ITV/Channel 4 programmes from Google Play because I've paid for them already.
However, if BritBox either had a lot of exclusive content (probably have to be exclusive for 6-12 months before airing on the BBC/ITV) or had the entire back catalogue of the BBC/ITV, then I'd be interested in subscribing as a UK user. As it stands, all it is really is a slightly extended version of the free iPlayer/ITV Hub streaming services, but at a fee close to Netflix. A complete non-starter for UK users, that's for sure.
Glassdoor (and other sites that review businesses) really should have an expiry date - say 5 years - for old reviews.
This is because over rhe longer term, management, employees and offices all change enough to invalidate almost all old
reviews. I've seen 10-year-old reviews on there where management has completely changed, 90% of staff have been replaced and offices moved multiple times and yet the only review available is the hugely out-of-date one thay doesn't reflect the current company at all.
It seems strange that Drupal with 3.5% market share (globally across both public and private sector) of CMS'es is on the list and yet WordPress, which is the most dominant CMS by far, isn't on the list despite having 59.7% CMS market share (figures from W3Techs).
Maybe the European public sector uses Drupal more than WordPress (I have no specific figures on that), but I seriously doubt it considering the 17:1 worldwide usage disparity. Or is Drupal considered less secure than WordPress and needs more fixes? Again, I doubt that - WordPress is a much bigger target for hackers and has a lot more third-party plugins which vary very widely in quality of code.
I had fond memories of HMV in the 90's/early 2000's before downloads/streaming took over. It was the go-to place to get new CD single releases and the UK prices were amazing back then (99p for 4 tracks - often with 3 non-album new songs - or 99p for 8 remixes of a track).
UK CD singles were such good value that the record industry decided to impose more and more draconian rules to ensure that they'd ultimately die off. Examples included raising the typical prices several times (yes, there were 1-track 3.99 pounds CD singles at the end!), and limiting the number of tracks (so you could end up with *3* discs for a single release e.g. Annie Lennox's "Cold", which could cost 3.99 pounds each - ridiculous).
HMV were never the cheapest, so I used to mainly buy CD albums when they were on sale there. Once Amazon UK started selling CDs and DVDs, the writing really was on the wall for HMV. I've still bought the odd thing (on sale) at HMV Online in the past few years, but Amazon UK has almost entirely replaced HMV in most UK shopper's eyes I suspect.
The pinnacle of 8-bit home computers was actually the BBC Micro, which had a superb OS and BASIC (including a 2-pass 6502 assembler that the C64 could only dream of) and an excellent disk drive system that wasn't slower than tape (hint: the C64 disk system was a complete dog).
There are plenty of BBC Micro emulators out there, but you might find the most convenient one to be on Android: Beebdroid.
Include a PDF pre-installed on the device - if your device's screen isn't good enough to view PDFs, then you've bought the wrong device -)
The PDF should include a URL for downloading the latest version of the PDF. I get annoyed when manufacturers release a new firmware or software update that changes or add features and don't revise the manual to match.
And there's me just having bought the 2-season Blu Ray set for a dirt cheap price. Mind you, while season 1 was excellent, season 2 wasn't nearly so good :-(
The BBC Micro was one of the most expensive 8-bit micros sold in the 80's in the UK (perhaps the TRS-80 and Apple II were the only pricier options, although they're American of course), but it was still the best 8-bit micro ever (IMHO) from a hardware and built-in OS/BASIC point of view. The price meant it never sold in huge numbers (the ZX Spectrum massively outsold it despite being enormously inferior in every single department - it "won" because the cheap price meant more games were developed for it even though many of those games looked and sounded awful due to the severe limitations of the Spectrum).
I'm old enough to have watched all the original shows mentioned here when they first aired and they were reasonably good, though obviously never got into the highly technical stuff (like the built-in 6502 assembler that was just simply great). Of course, I moved onto the Acorn Archimedes later on, which was just as impressive for its time (the first mass market device in the world to use an ARM chip for those not in the know) and equally as relatively expensive as the BBC Micro was, unfortunately (so again, suffered from low sales, despite being a superb machine).
Sadly, the closest the BBC get now to their 80's computer shows is "Click", which is usually buried on the BBC News channel (I don't even bother tuning that in on my TV!) and mostly just airs what you've probably already read/viewed on the Web already. I really miss the live editions of "Tomorrow's World" though - nothing better than getting early demos of new tech with the live possibility of utter failure (which happened regularly, much to the joy of the viewers :-) ).
When work got an Echo to play around with, I came up with exactly this idea - listen to meetings and save them (maybe as audio, but definitely transcribed to text). I was *shocked* to learn that you can't officially do this, because it seems like such an obvious thing for the Echo to do.
Now hackers work out how to do it, only for Amazon to close the exploits and *still* not release this idea as an official Alexa skill. Now that they've added the ability to train and recognise individual voices, a text transcription identifying each speaker as they say something is most definitely possible now. As it stands, our Echo sits around doing nothing because there's basically nothing in a business context it's currently useful for.
TV (on Channel 4 UK at least) and subsequent (UK) press coverage didn't seem to pick up what was arguably a mistake by race control. When a car stops/crashes, race control must decide if it's a dangerous position (this one was - it was on the track!) and if it can be moved quickly (this one couldn't - there was no easy way for marshals to push it through a gap in the circuit barriers - they ended up having to bring a truck with a recovery arm on it onto the track to drag it off).
Race control should have known that where the car had stopped warranted a full safety car, but bizarrely instigated a virtual safety car instead. One lap later, they flashed up "MAJOR INCIDENT" on the TV feed and then switched it to a full safety car (which basically admitted that the original virtual safety car was a mistake). If it had been a full safety car from the start, Hamilton would have won the race because Vettel's pit stop wouldn't have gained him the time he needed (because you can drive as fast as you can until you reach the back of the safety car queue).
You definitely could argue that race control's poor judgement cost Hamilton the win just as much as the software miscalculation.
This is true - even outside of Amazon, you will find CDs are often cheaper than their equivalent downloads (whoever thought 99p was a good price for a single download track is off their rocker). Autorip is useful, but it's almost as easy to run your favourite CD ripper (I use Grip on Linux) to get mp3's off your CD, the latter of which you just nicely file away as a backup.
I usually then upload the MP3s to Google Play Music for free and can then download/cache any of them to any of my Android devices very easily. Bizarrely, Google Play Music will often track-match and switch the download quality to a higher bitrate, which I don't mind.
We got an Amazon Echo at work to see if it's any use for business activities as it stands. First problem was that there's no way to configure a proxy server to gain access to Amazon (and other) remote servers, which is incredibly short-sighted of them.
Second issue is that an "obvious" business use is recording (and preferably transcribing) business meetings, but I was *shocked* that the Echo can't even take a simple voice note and record it for you for later access (never mind transcribing to text, which would be another essential feature).
As everyone has been pointing out here, everything the Echo does seems to go through Amazon's servers, so business confidentiality seems to be a major stumbling block to business acceptance. Heck, I can't even tell if the data goes out encrypted (without sniffing the network traffic) and is always stored encrypted.
For TV shows, I record the season number, episode number, total number of episodes in this season and day of the week (or next season's premiere start date if it's not airing yet) in, shock horror, a text file. It's then a question of finding the next episode online (pick your favourite, ahem, download site that lists TV shows) and incrementing the episode number when you've downloaded it.
For movies and music, I just find "recent downloads" for the media category on my favourite download listing sites (used to use a curated site until recently when it just stopped updating in a broken state too :-( ) and I might use that site or others to download the media.
I'll occasionally go to one of those "what's coming in fall"-type TV show preview sites (tv.com or whatever) to scoop up new TV show premiere dates. I'll also give a shout out to TV Calendar which can be handy for this.
If you're after a good 8" Android tablet, there aren't that many of them around worth looking at nowadays. I liked my LG G Pad 8.3 (the later LG models like the one you got weren't as good), but that had issues with a yellow tinge (fiddling with the RGB settings fixed that). I have a Samsung S 8.4" - very nice, but a bit expensive and no longer sold (don't get the S2/S3 versions - they're awful 4:3).
If you're willing to risk buying from a Chinese site, perhaps the Teclast T8 is something to consider. I have the Teclast T10 (not much more expensive and a better buy than the T8, IMHO) and like it a lot for the money.
I'm sure there's a bunch of reasons that tablet sales have been declining in recent years. Here's some of the ones I can think of:
* A tablet with a decent spec can be pricey (not as mad as the high-end phone market though!).
* There's been a move away from widescreen to 4:3 with Android tablets for absolutely no good reason (don't quote the iPad to me - that's got it wrong all these years!). Since a tablet is primarily a media consumption device, the aspect ratio has to be close to common video aspect ratios (so 16:9 and 16:10 are fine, 4:3 most definitely is not). It's put me (and I suspect many others) right off buying recent tablets.
* People don't have SIM contracts with tablets as a rule, so they don't need to go into that "replace every 1-2 years" cycle that contracrts tend to suck you into.
I've got a Nexus 7 and 10, but refused to buy the Nexus 9 (too expensive, 4:3). I've got a Samsung S 8.4" and 10.5", but refused to buy *any* of the S2 or S3 variants (again, too expensive, 4:3). Eventually found a 10" tablet released last year that a) was cheap (under $250), b) had decent specs and c) was 16:10. It's the Teclast T10 - had to be bought from a Chinese site, but it's a sweet tablet for the price.
The currently available tablets have pretty well plateaued (if not regressed in some cases!) in terms of specs and prices - it's no wonder people are hanging onto their existing tablets for longer. As for some posters dissing tablets - I *much* prefer to use a 10" tablet screen than one half the diagonal on a phone. Just the onscreen keyboard alone is so much better on a tablet, never mind reading Web sites or watching videos.
I was shocked that neither Amazon Echo nor Google Home can take voice dictation! They've got speech recognition, so surely they should be able to at least convert that to text and have it read back in Alexa/Google's voice later on at a bare minimum (this assumes it can't record audio and play it back later...which would be nice too).
Before you mention EchoScribe, that was a total hack involving an external microphone amongst other kludges (and the website is sneaky not mentioning the kludges up front)!
UK viewers did get to see 6 episodes last year on Channel 4, but episodes 7-10 appear to be exclusive to Amazon Prime Video in the US (Amazon Prime Video in the UK bizarrely only seems to have episodes 5 and 6 and also wants to charge money for them on top of your Prime sub despite those two episodes having aired nationally for "free" in the UK!).
I did find "Electric Dreams" to be quite variable over the 10 episodes (yes, as a UK viewer I had no choice but to source episodes from, ahem, "elsewhere"...and there was a total balls up with the episode numbering of downloads particularly for Autofac - which I thought was one of the better episodes - and "Safe and Sound").
I did think some episodes just ended without tying up the storyline - almost as if they were trying to be a TV pilot or something. Still, a reasonable series overall - it's rare for a UK channel to bother with sci-fi drama, so Channel 4 should be applauded for that, even if they failed to air 40% of the episodes (maybe they'll turn up later this year?).
The IT Crowd was good in its first few seasons when it actually did stuff about, you know, IT. Later seasons were nowhere near as funny as the IT angle almost completely disappeared. By the time they brought it back for the one-off finale, I managed one smile throughout the entire last ever episode (and you've guessed it, it wasn't an IT-related laugh either).
For consistency, it has to be Silicon Valley, which still has hilarious moments in every episode, even after 4 seasons.
Blu are a US company that mostly releases clones of Chinese phones (i.e. keeps the hardware and Anglicises/Blu-brands the software - but there's still "Chinglish" to be found in the UI in a few places!). They seem to exclusively sell on Amazon from what I can see and some models have limited release w.r.t. which countries (i.e. which Amazon country store) you can buy them from. My Blu Vivo 6 was exclusively on Amazon UK, but the "successor" - the Blu Vivo 8 - seems to only be on Amazon US for example.
As you say, they got pulled a few times from Amazon for dodgy data leakage, but they didn't stay off for long (good on Amazon for forcing them to fix things - Blu had no choice because Amazon is their lifeline).
The phones themselves are usually very good value for money, but other than the data thing, the big black mark is that software updates to the OS are few and far between (or try "never" for my 1-year-old Blu Vivo 6). The lack of updates is why, ultimately, I wouldn't recommend them - you may as well go to the Chinese route and find an equivalent or better phone that *does* get updates (I picked the Umidigi Z1).
I've had a Blu Vivo 6 for a fraction over a year now (bought on Black Friday 2016 - its actual release day here in the UK) and there's not been a *single* update for it (not even a minor one). So it's stuck on Android 6.0 and an Android security patch level from way back in September 2016! Looking at Blu's Facebook/Twitter, it's full of people with Blu phones begging for any sort of updates...and getting right royally fobbed off by Blu staff every time ("we're working on it", "it's coming soon"...for a full year?!). It seems Blu just abandon a phone on launch and release its successor 6-12 months later with the updates instead (yep, there's a Blu Vivo 8 with Android 7 available in the US now, but the specs aren't that much better than the Vivo 6).
This annoyed me so much, I've just bought a Umidigi Z1 (more RAM, faster CPU/GPU, Android 7, dual rear cameras, multiple updates this year, costs 50 pounds less) to replace it. A shame really, because the Vivo 6 is actually a nice phone - if it had gone to Android 7 like the Vivo 8 has, I'd have kept it for much longer.
I suspect the Computerworld article author has assumed that a typical Chromebook has the same specs as a tablet and *then* has a (hopefully detachable) keyboard on top of that. I just spent $230 on a 10.1" Android 7 tablet that has 4GB RAM, 64GB of local storage (that's rare for a Chromebook because of its cloud leanings), a 2560x1600 touchscreen (again, very rare for a Chromebook to have that res and not all Chromebooks have touchscreens either) and the usual GPS/accelerometer stuff too. I suspect you're talking *big* money to match those specs with a Chromebook.
Yes, I have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard I can optionally use with the new tablet (which will give a better experience than most Chromebooks' trackpads and keyboards) - it has mini-HDMI too if I wanted to hook it to a bigger screen. The tablet form factor is so much better for media consumption, particularly when you're on the move and don't have anywhere to rest your device on.
It's SATA 3 that sucks *really* hard now - so much so that if anyone reviews a SATA 3 SSD nowadays, they're mostly wasting their time (hint: SATA 3 was saturated by SSDs about 6 years ago). m.2 in its PCIe form is the current choice for those who want speed - my SM961 does over 3,000 Mbytes/sec read for instance.
One alternative to flipping everyone to enabled and having a tickbox you've got to discover to opt out is perhaps some sort of increasingly spaced out nagging? I'm thinking that everyone who isn't sending telemetry gets a nag dialogue that they can delay the re-appearance of in increasing intervals (e.g. for one month after first nag, 3 more months after second nag, 1 year after third nag and finally never nag me again after that).
If they get a load of take-up after nag 1 in the first month, they can use a future Firefox release to adjust the nag intervals or even remove them altogether. This way, it remains opt-in, but with some increasingly-less-frequent nag factor to persuare people to turn on the telemetry collection. I think opt-in has failed because no-one was nagged about it, so they simply didn't change the default settings.
I think you'd have to be quite careful about the wording in the nag dialogue - it would have to be "we need telemetry to improve the performance/reliability/security of future Firefox releases - by turning on telemetry collection, you will help us with this improvement effort and ultimately make Firefox a better browser for you." Users need to see some sort of benefit for giving up their telemetry data - just telling them you want the data isn't enough.
I think the problem here is that while you can easily identify a password field in a form (type=password), it's not so easy to identify other form fields that might contain personal information (you don't have to call the e-mail field "email" for example). Google is probably right at blanket-covering http forms with a warning that that they aren't https.
The warning in Incognito Mode is on a bit less of a justifiable footing though, but it's the next logical step to warning about all http sites regardless of Incognito Mode or if they're forms or not. That latter step, though, would hit billions of pages, but might force a big adoption of https by the remaining http-only holdouts.
A big shout-out to Let's Encrypt here, without whom I suspect this https-only tightening couldn't be been undertaken by any of the major browsers.
It might be news in the US, but Vodafone in the UK have done this for years. They have a "Smart" range - here's one of the cheapest at 49 pounds PAYG (and a 10 pounds top-up I believe).