Not sure when they implemented this, but it never got backported to my phone. The again, I'm still running Android 2.3. My phone was released 6 months for Android 4 came out and I never saw an update. You can blame the manufacturer (LG), but I also blame Google as well. They allowed their name to be engraved on the back of the phone. The current status with Android updates is appauling. I'm getting a new phone soon. Apple is too expensive, and I'll probably get Android. But this time I'm not going high end. I don't expect any updates this time around. Whichever phone I choose it will probably be one that I won't be so expensive that I can replace it in 18-24 months.
I very much agree with this. I know a guy who's trying to build something, and he insists on 3D printing screw threads. It makes much more sense to use a tap and die, but he insists that a 3D printer is good enough to make threads, even though the parts he's printed do not fit well together at all.
The Moto G is exactly the one I had in mind. These phones offer great value for your money. Especially when you consider that a lot of the high end phones like the Samsung Galaxy S6 and iPhone don't even have an SD Card slot. Your $700 phone now just became even more expensive if you want more than the base amount of storage. With the slow or non-existent roll-out of updates on Android phones, buying a new phone ever year is probably a much better plan if you want to stay up to date on the operating system. I agree that the high end phones are somewhat better, but not so much better that they justify such a large price tag.
I really wonder how long people will continue this trend. Currently, I see a lot of people with not a lot of money buying high end phones like the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S# phones. These phones are quite expensive, and the cheaper ones are getting to the point where they are actually quite good. Why spend $700 for a phone when a $200 phone will do everything you need. You could get a new one more than 3 times as often at that price. So if you usually get a new phone every 2 years, then you could get a new phone every 8 months if you went with the cheaper model.
This was a big issue when I was looking at tablets a year or so back. There were a few models with 2560x1440 resolution, but most of the reviews were not great, as games and other graphic intensive activities didn't run smoothly. Meanwhile, the tablets that stuck to 1080p were much smoother when used with the same processor. I imagine a 4K phone would suffer from the same problem. Trying to display so many pixels is going to be taxing on the processor, and draining the battery. On a 5.5 inch screen, nobody is going to notice the difference. Also, as far as I'm aware, Android lacks the functionality to be able to run at a non-native resolution. On a Windows or Linux computer, you could always tell it to run in 1080p (as 4k is exactly 2 times the resolution of 4k), and only render in 4k when it really matters. Android seems to want to render at native resolution all the time.
I agree. I think there although there are lots of people in America without money, there is also quite a few people with ample spending money. A graduate from a good university in a field with good jobs could easily earn $75,000 a year. Let's assume that the person is married to somebody who also went to school and can earn $75,000 a year. Together, they make $150,000 a year. That's a lot of money. Unless you are living in extremely expensive areas like Manhattan or San Francisco (in which case the two people will probably be making $200,000-$300,000 combined), then you should have plenty of money to spend on whatever you want.
Netflix has a couple huge advantages. First, they don't have t worry about censors. They can put whatever they want in the show and Nobody can say a thing. Network TV can't do that. Also they don't have to think about how long an episode is. Obviously they want the episodes to be within a certain range, but they don't have to choreograph the entire episode into exactly 42 minutes so they can fit it into an hour timeslot with all the required commercials. Also, with commercials, most shows write with the expectation of commercials at different points throughout the show. Netflix doesn't have to do that, and helps the shows be a lot better. I find you see HBO and other pay TV shows with content that is just as good, but they can do most of the same stuff Netflix can.
Oh, I agree. Making firearms at home will become very easy. But a 3D printer won't be the tool of choice for doing it. People will be much more likely to use metal lathes and mills to make a firearm out of metal. Sure you "could" do it with a 3D printer and end up with an inferior product, but why would you do so? It seems weird that everyone is focused on 3D printed guns when there are much more dangerous things to worry about.
That being said, even Anonymous FTP requires you to "log in". I'm not sure if Google should be trying to log in, even anonymously to FTP servers. I mean, if they don't other people surely will, but I don't think most people expect that web bots are connection to servers that aren't HTTP/HTTPS. I wouldn't leave an anonymous ftp server open to the internet unless I truly wanted something public, but I really wouldn't expect that well behaving bot would start indexing my FTP server if I left it open.
With a 3D printer, any moron can download a design, and hit the big print button.
Yes, and any moron can blow off his hand the first time he goes to use it. 3D printers are not that easy to use. There are many variables that can affect the quality of the print. Even small variations in room temperature can make a difference in the quality of the print. When you're printing 3D trinkets or a case for a Raspberry Pi, this probably doesn't matter too much. But when you're printing something like a firearm that needs to withstand huge forces, it starts to become very important.
I don't think that plastic will ever be a reasonable material for making a firearm, no matter how good the printer gets. Otherwise we would see somebody making plastic guns using industrial injection molding methods. But all firearms on the market and even those produced in basements are pretty much completely made out of metal. Some use wood or plastic, but usually only in decorative pieces, or the stock of a rifle, and definitely not in the barrel or chamber (pardon my terminology if I'm using words incorrectly). The only really viable means to 3D print a firearm is via something like laser sintering, and even with the patents expiring, the cost of those machines will still be in the 10's of thousands of dollars. If somebody is willing to spend $35,000 to produce guns, then 3D printing is definitely not the most efficient way of doing it. Sure prices will come down, but so will the prices of all the other methods of manufacturing firearms, which means that 3D printing will likely never be the best way to do it. 3D printing is great for one-off prototypes, but once you want something resilient that can last, and that doesn't take huge amount of resources to make, you pretty much have to move to other production methods. That being said, I can definitely see 3D printers being used for some parts of the production, but possibly just for making molds for more traditional methods to be used in the actual production.
3D printers may be getting all the press, but the truth is that mills, CNC machines and many other kinds of manufacturing and prototyping matching are becoming very accessible to the public. A friend of mine recently bought a metal lathe. These things aren't expensive anymore, and can be obtained quite easily. There aren't that many home milled guns, but there also aren't that many 3D printed guns either. The press is simply reporting on it a lot making it seem like it's a bigger problem than it is.
3D printed guns are a long way off from being able to click print and create a functioning, useful firearm. It's much easier to create a makeshift firearm using more traditional tools. 3D printing isn't as easy as people make it seem. Most people 3D printing firearms will probably do it just for fun, and probably aren't looking to hurt anyone. They probably have a better chance of hurting themselves when it blows up after 10 shots. If they want to use it to hurt someone else, there are much easier ways of obtaining a weapon.
Personally, I think that Android works well on a phone, but I just don't understand why anybody would want to use it on a 10 inch tablet. It's completely ridiculous. Only 1 app on the screen at a time. Some manufacturers have made hacks to allow some apps to be displayed side by side, but it doesn't work universally for all apps. The iPad is just as bad. I have a Surface 2 (not pro) and I think Microsoft has the right idea for tablet OS's. The new Surface 3 runs full Windows and costs the same as this thing, and also the same as the iPad. Windows has a lot of functionality that is left out on Android and iOS. Universal network share and OneDrive support in all applications/apps is a huge advantage. Plus, having a full size USB port and that you can hook up just about any USB device to is a big plus. Android and iOS are fine for phones, but I find they really leave something to be desired on a bigger screen.
This thing is going to be a hard sell wit the new Surface 3 that just came out. $499, or $629 for this android tablet is exactly the same price as the Surface 3. Why would I want an Android laptop when I could have a full Windows laptop. The base model comes with 64 GB of storage.
Yeah. Most of the emulators out there use hacks to get them to run smoothly on today's hardware. There's a lot of emulators out there that don't run exactly as the old hardware did. Some emulators like BSNES actually try to run the machine code exactly the same way the old consoles did, while others take short cuts and there fore might only work with the most popular games.
There's even a fair number of N64 emulators that can't play Ocarina of Time properly. There's a part very early in the game where you have to pick a path based on the direction path the song is coming from. Most of the emulators fail at this and just play the song the same no matter which path you go down.
Driving is boring, people don't pay attention to the road, is the solution to make it more boring?
This is always my concern. If the car is semi-autonomous, that means the driver should be ready to take control of the car if something goes wrong. But if the person has their hands off the wheel, and foot off the brake, what are the odds that the person will be able to take control when they need to?
I'm just envisioning the near future, where most days people don't have to touch the controls. People get complacent, and start reading books, watching a movie, or browsing the net while driving, because it's so boring and they never have to do anything anyway. Then once in a while something bad happens, and the person is unable to do anything about it, because they weren't paying attention. Sure you could blame the person, but you could put some blame on the car/manufacturer for giving them a false sense of security.
That or people just don't buy the self driving car, because if I have to pay attention all the time anyway, there's no way I'm paying for the self driving car unless I can actually do something else while driving.
Wouldn't a better solution be to buy the smallest/cheapest phone that supports tethering and use a tablet to do extra computing tasks? That way you can bring your cheap phone anywhere and not have to worry about how much space it takes up, or whether you are going to break/lose it, and then you only have to bring the tablet when you feel you might actually have a need for such a device.
Yeah, just because it doesn't take a single clock cycle, doesn't mean it's not a single instruction. Even a simple multiplication can take 2-4 clock cycles.
Your gas car can fill up in 10 minutes. This is the reason that an electric car needs such a long range to be taken seriously. Personally I think a lot of people would be fine with a car with 100 mile range as a second car, or even as their only car. They could rent a car the 2 or 3 times a year they needed to drive further. I realize there are people who dive hundreds of miles in a single day almost weekly. Electric cars will possibly never solve their problem. But they are a minority.
I think it will be helpful to everybody if they can get.Net code to compile for iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux. It will make cross platform development so much easier. It will probably help out to get more stuff on the Windows App store as well. Just being able to do iOS and Android in the same language will be a huge help to mobile developers. And if it takes minimal effort to also get the app to working on Windows Phone and Windows app store, then I could see a lot of developers switching to doing things this way.
Also, if it isn't important enough that you have to talk to the person right away, then it can probably wait until they come into work the next morning. Sending somebody an email and then expecting them to act on it immediately is just a way of avoiding confrontation. Don't send somebody an email and expect it to be read right away.
This is so true. Especially when you add in the fact that a lot of the good phones tend to be getting bigger as time goes on. It's hard to find a good 4 inch phone nowadays. Are we really expected to carry a 5 inch or even 6 inch phone (See Google Nexus or iPhones for example) with us all the the time? I'm almost at the point where I want to have a small burner phone so that I don't have to take my giant, expensive phone everywhere I go.
I think that while some people may be able to enjoy their commute more, I don't think people will like the excessively long commutes anymore than they already do. I take the bus to work. I still wouldn't want my commute to be 1 hour each way, even though I could watch Netflix, read a book, or play a video game. Sure it's better than the alternative of driving, but I'd still rather just live closer to work and have the free time to do whatever I want.
Also, many insurance companies are already diversified, but I'm sure that auto insurance is a huge part of their business, so I think they would all take a pretty big hit. You'd probably still be required to have liability insurance, fire, theft, but the rates would be lower. In many places insurance is required. I don't really see this changing just because you aren't driving the car. There's still lots of stuff that could happen, and you don't want to be on the hook for damages caused by the car you own.
Parking will be even less of a problem because you will have the option of your car dropping you off at the door to your office, and then driving itself 5 miles away to a place where there's plenty of open spaces.
Exactly. If a course is free, then there's nothing to stop you from signing up. If it's an online sign up, then that makes it even easier. How many people here have visited a ruby/go/dart/coffeescript tutorial page and then failed to learn anything of value about the language. That's more what I would equate dropping out of a free MOOC with. You can't compare a free online course with a university class that students are paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend. Looking at it that way, it's amazing how high the drop-out rate is in universities.
What's also amazing though, is how long some students hold on at university, paying money for years, and never actually getting closer to their goal of getting a degree. I knew a girl in university who was taking psychology. But wait, that's not the worst part. When I was in second year, I took an introduction to psychology course, basically psychology 101, and found out that she was in the class, because she hadn't manage to pass it the previous 3 times she took it.
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Not sure when they implemented this, but it never got backported to my phone. The again, I'm still running Android 2.3. My phone was released 6 months for Android 4 came out and I never saw an update. You can blame the manufacturer (LG), but I also blame Google as well. They allowed their name to be engraved on the back of the phone. The current status with Android updates is appauling. I'm getting a new phone soon. Apple is too expensive, and I'll probably get Android. But this time I'm not going high end. I don't expect any updates this time around. Whichever phone I choose it will probably be one that I won't be so expensive that I can replace it in 18-24 months.
I very much agree with this. I know a guy who's trying to build something, and he insists on 3D printing screw threads. It makes much more sense to use a tap and die, but he insists that a 3D printer is good enough to make threads, even though the parts he's printed do not fit well together at all.
The Moto G is exactly the one I had in mind. These phones offer great value for your money. Especially when you consider that a lot of the high end phones like the Samsung Galaxy S6 and iPhone don't even have an SD Card slot. Your $700 phone now just became even more expensive if you want more than the base amount of storage. With the slow or non-existent roll-out of updates on Android phones, buying a new phone ever year is probably a much better plan if you want to stay up to date on the operating system. I agree that the high end phones are somewhat better, but not so much better that they justify such a large price tag.
I really wonder how long people will continue this trend. Currently, I see a lot of people with not a lot of money buying high end phones like the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S# phones. These phones are quite expensive, and the cheaper ones are getting to the point where they are actually quite good. Why spend $700 for a phone when a $200 phone will do everything you need. You could get a new one more than 3 times as often at that price. So if you usually get a new phone every 2 years, then you could get a new phone every 8 months if you went with the cheaper model.
This was a big issue when I was looking at tablets a year or so back. There were a few models with 2560x1440 resolution, but most of the reviews were not great, as games and other graphic intensive activities didn't run smoothly. Meanwhile, the tablets that stuck to 1080p were much smoother when used with the same processor. I imagine a 4K phone would suffer from the same problem. Trying to display so many pixels is going to be taxing on the processor, and draining the battery. On a 5.5 inch screen, nobody is going to notice the difference. Also, as far as I'm aware, Android lacks the functionality to be able to run at a non-native resolution. On a Windows or Linux computer, you could always tell it to run in 1080p (as 4k is exactly 2 times the resolution of 4k), and only render in 4k when it really matters. Android seems to want to render at native resolution all the time.
I agree. I think there although there are lots of people in America without money, there is also quite a few people with ample spending money. A graduate from a good university in a field with good jobs could easily earn $75,000 a year. Let's assume that the person is married to somebody who also went to school and can earn $75,000 a year. Together, they make $150,000 a year. That's a lot of money. Unless you are living in extremely expensive areas like Manhattan or San Francisco (in which case the two people will probably be making $200,000-$300,000 combined), then you should have plenty of money to spend on whatever you want.
Netflix has a couple huge advantages. First, they don't have t worry about censors. They can put whatever they want in the show and Nobody can say a thing. Network TV can't do that. Also they don't have to think about how long an episode is. Obviously they want the episodes to be within a certain range, but they don't have to choreograph the entire episode into exactly 42 minutes so they can fit it into an hour timeslot with all the required commercials. Also, with commercials, most shows write with the expectation of commercials at different points throughout the show. Netflix doesn't have to do that, and helps the shows be a lot better. I find you see HBO and other pay TV shows with content that is just as good, but they can do most of the same stuff Netflix can.
Oh, I agree. Making firearms at home will become very easy. But a 3D printer won't be the tool of choice for doing it. People will be much more likely to use metal lathes and mills to make a firearm out of metal. Sure you "could" do it with a 3D printer and end up with an inferior product, but why would you do so? It seems weird that everyone is focused on 3D printed guns when there are much more dangerous things to worry about.
That being said, even Anonymous FTP requires you to "log in". I'm not sure if Google should be trying to log in, even anonymously to FTP servers. I mean, if they don't other people surely will, but I don't think most people expect that web bots are connection to servers that aren't HTTP/HTTPS. I wouldn't leave an anonymous ftp server open to the internet unless I truly wanted something public, but I really wouldn't expect that well behaving bot would start indexing my FTP server if I left it open.
Yes, and any moron can blow off his hand the first time he goes to use it. 3D printers are not that easy to use. There are many variables that can affect the quality of the print. Even small variations in room temperature can make a difference in the quality of the print. When you're printing 3D trinkets or a case for a Raspberry Pi, this probably doesn't matter too much. But when you're printing something like a firearm that needs to withstand huge forces, it starts to become very important.
I don't think that plastic will ever be a reasonable material for making a firearm, no matter how good the printer gets. Otherwise we would see somebody making plastic guns using industrial injection molding methods. But all firearms on the market and even those produced in basements are pretty much completely made out of metal. Some use wood or plastic, but usually only in decorative pieces, or the stock of a rifle, and definitely not in the barrel or chamber (pardon my terminology if I'm using words incorrectly). The only really viable means to 3D print a firearm is via something like laser sintering, and even with the patents expiring, the cost of those machines will still be in the 10's of thousands of dollars. If somebody is willing to spend $35,000 to produce guns, then 3D printing is definitely not the most efficient way of doing it. Sure prices will come down, but so will the prices of all the other methods of manufacturing firearms, which means that 3D printing will likely never be the best way to do it. 3D printing is great for one-off prototypes, but once you want something resilient that can last, and that doesn't take huge amount of resources to make, you pretty much have to move to other production methods. That being said, I can definitely see 3D printers being used for some parts of the production, but possibly just for making molds for more traditional methods to be used in the actual production.
3D printers may be getting all the press, but the truth is that mills, CNC machines and many other kinds of manufacturing and prototyping matching are becoming very accessible to the public. A friend of mine recently bought a metal lathe. These things aren't expensive anymore, and can be obtained quite easily. There aren't that many home milled guns, but there also aren't that many 3D printed guns either. The press is simply reporting on it a lot making it seem like it's a bigger problem than it is.
3D printed guns are a long way off from being able to click print and create a functioning, useful firearm. It's much easier to create a makeshift firearm using more traditional tools. 3D printing isn't as easy as people make it seem. Most people 3D printing firearms will probably do it just for fun, and probably aren't looking to hurt anyone. They probably have a better chance of hurting themselves when it blows up after 10 shots. If they want to use it to hurt someone else, there are much easier ways of obtaining a weapon.
Personally, I think that Android works well on a phone, but I just don't understand why anybody would want to use it on a 10 inch tablet. It's completely ridiculous. Only 1 app on the screen at a time. Some manufacturers have made hacks to allow some apps to be displayed side by side, but it doesn't work universally for all apps. The iPad is just as bad. I have a Surface 2 (not pro) and I think Microsoft has the right idea for tablet OS's. The new Surface 3 runs full Windows and costs the same as this thing, and also the same as the iPad. Windows has a lot of functionality that is left out on Android and iOS. Universal network share and OneDrive support in all applications/apps is a huge advantage. Plus, having a full size USB port and that you can hook up just about any USB device to is a big plus. Android and iOS are fine for phones, but I find they really leave something to be desired on a bigger screen.
This thing is going to be a hard sell wit the new Surface 3 that just came out. $499, or $629 for this android tablet is exactly the same price as the Surface 3. Why would I want an Android laptop when I could have a full Windows laptop. The base model comes with 64 GB of storage.
Yeah. Most of the emulators out there use hacks to get them to run smoothly on today's hardware. There's a lot of emulators out there that don't run exactly as the old hardware did. Some emulators like BSNES actually try to run the machine code exactly the same way the old consoles did, while others take short cuts and there fore might only work with the most popular games.
There's even a fair number of N64 emulators that can't play Ocarina of Time properly. There's a part very early in the game where you have to pick a path based on the direction path the song is coming from. Most of the emulators fail at this and just play the song the same no matter which path you go down.
Driving is boring, people don't pay attention to the road, is the solution to make it more boring?
This is always my concern. If the car is semi-autonomous, that means the driver should be ready to take control of the car if something goes wrong. But if the person has their hands off the wheel, and foot off the brake, what are the odds that the person will be able to take control when they need to?
I'm just envisioning the near future, where most days people don't have to touch the controls. People get complacent, and start reading books, watching a movie, or browsing the net while driving, because it's so boring and they never have to do anything anyway. Then once in a while something bad happens, and the person is unable to do anything about it, because they weren't paying attention. Sure you could blame the person, but you could put some blame on the car/manufacturer for giving them a false sense of security.
That or people just don't buy the self driving car, because if I have to pay attention all the time anyway, there's no way I'm paying for the self driving car unless I can actually do something else while driving.
Wouldn't a better solution be to buy the smallest/cheapest phone that supports tethering and use a tablet to do extra computing tasks? That way you can bring your cheap phone anywhere and not have to worry about how much space it takes up, or whether you are going to break/lose it, and then you only have to bring the tablet when you feel you might actually have a need for such a device.
Yeah, just because it doesn't take a single clock cycle, doesn't mean it's not a single instruction. Even a simple multiplication can take 2-4 clock cycles.
Your gas car can fill up in 10 minutes. This is the reason that an electric car needs such a long range to be taken seriously. Personally I think a lot of people would be fine with a car with 100 mile range as a second car, or even as their only car. They could rent a car the 2 or 3 times a year they needed to drive further. I realize there are people who dive hundreds of miles in a single day almost weekly. Electric cars will possibly never solve their problem. But they are a minority.
I think it will be helpful to everybody if they can get .Net code to compile for iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux. It will make cross platform development so much easier. It will probably help out to get more stuff on the Windows App store as well. Just being able to do iOS and Android in the same language will be a huge help to mobile developers. And if it takes minimal effort to also get the app to working on Windows Phone and Windows app store, then I could see a lot of developers switching to doing things this way.
Also, if it isn't important enough that you have to talk to the person right away, then it can probably wait until they come into work the next morning. Sending somebody an email and then expecting them to act on it immediately is just a way of avoiding confrontation. Don't send somebody an email and expect it to be read right away.
This is so true. Especially when you add in the fact that a lot of the good phones tend to be getting bigger as time goes on. It's hard to find a good 4 inch phone nowadays. Are we really expected to carry a 5 inch or even 6 inch phone (See Google Nexus or iPhones for example) with us all the the time? I'm almost at the point where I want to have a small burner phone so that I don't have to take my giant, expensive phone everywhere I go.
I think that while some people may be able to enjoy their commute more, I don't think people will like the excessively long commutes anymore than they already do. I take the bus to work. I still wouldn't want my commute to be 1 hour each way, even though I could watch Netflix, read a book, or play a video game. Sure it's better than the alternative of driving, but I'd still rather just live closer to work and have the free time to do whatever I want.
Also, many insurance companies are already diversified, but I'm sure that auto insurance is a huge part of their business, so I think they would all take a pretty big hit. You'd probably still be required to have liability insurance, fire, theft, but the rates would be lower. In many places insurance is required. I don't really see this changing just because you aren't driving the car. There's still lots of stuff that could happen, and you don't want to be on the hook for damages caused by the car you own.
Parking will be even less of a problem because you will have the option of your car dropping you off at the door to your office, and then driving itself 5 miles away to a place where there's plenty of open spaces.
Exactly. If a course is free, then there's nothing to stop you from signing up. If it's an online sign up, then that makes it even easier. How many people here have visited a ruby/go/dart/coffeescript tutorial page and then failed to learn anything of value about the language. That's more what I would equate dropping out of a free MOOC with. You can't compare a free online course with a university class that students are paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend. Looking at it that way, it's amazing how high the drop-out rate is in universities.
What's also amazing though, is how long some students hold on at university, paying money for years, and never actually getting closer to their goal of getting a degree. I knew a girl in university who was taking psychology. But wait, that's not the worst part. When I was in second year, I took an introduction to psychology course, basically psychology 101, and found out that she was in the class, because she hadn't manage to pass it the previous 3 times she took it.