A wise man once said "assume ignorance not malice".
The only point where I would disagree with anything you said is that we are talking AT&T here. Assuming malice when dealing with AT&T (which is no longer the AT&T of old, but was taken over by the onetime Baby Bell SBC, arguably the worst of lot) is actually a good defensive strategy. Those boys rarely do anything by accident, and shafting customers is a fundamental tenet of their business model.
However, given the amount of random traffic that appears anywhere on the Internet a megabyte either way doesn't sound all that suspicious, statistically meaningless when you get right down to it. What I'd like to see is the exact opposite of what they tested. Track every single byte that is transferred in and out of that phone, and use it heavily. Download big files, watch Youtube constantly, turn all the background sync options on that you can. Do this for several phones, over several months. Then compare the actual transfer to the usage charged: you'll get a much better idea if you're being ripped off in any meaningful way.
Sounds like a Fandroid skinned her knee. The OP was making a point about how supporting open and free, out of principal, wasn't making any money (which is one primary motivation for developing software). I suppose your rage blinded you.
Too bad.
Not really. The OP admits (in his own words) that Apple is "evil", and yet he willing supports them. I give him points for honesty, hypocritical as it might be.
I'm not going to have to walk around with a clunky, crappy, inferior smartphone in my pocket just because of "principals".
You mean "principles", and it's obvious that you haven't many of them. Personally, I don't consider my G2 to be crappy, inferior or clunky. It does exactly what I need, exactly the way I want it to, and neither your opinion or anyone else's will change that fact.
Is the iPhone a "superior" device? Maybe... but even so, I don't like who I would have to thank for it. So no iPhone for me.
If they audit the apps, how is that any different to what Apple is doing?
In principle, maybe not so much. In practice, considering how Google tends to go about matters, it will probably be a hell of a lot more competently handled.
But the reality is, we really don't need another Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboard or Light Saber app.
Cyanogen is a special beast because it is completely AOSP
Not really. If you look at some of the contributions made to Cyanogenmod, you'll see that it's far from pure AOSP. The only "proprietary" components are the binary blobs provided by the phone vendors for radio operation and such, and of course the Google Experience Apps (which you can easily download as a separate package and aren't part of the operating system in any event.)
It's been my universal experience that community hardware ROMs tend to suck, and worse, the community usually isn't honest and upfront about all the problems
You can't make such a sweeping claim. You just can't, with even a semblance of reasonableness. The reality is that community ROMs, just like commercial firmware, are entirely dependent upon the caliber of the people managing and developing them. Some are incredible, some suck, and most are in between. For example, my home network uses a WRT-54G wireless router running the Tomato firmware package... blows the stock firmware completely out of the wanter. Linksys' stuff would die during sustained heavy transfers, and couldn't handle torrents or gaming very well at all. It also had a tendency to just slow down gradually over a couple of weeks until it was rebooted. Since I updated to Tomato, I haven't had to restart the thing ever. It's had over a year of uptime (last time it got rebooted was after a power failure when the UPS ran out.) It's what you would expect from a well-implemented Linux distro, actually, I'm just surprised that Linksys couldn't hack it. Probably don't want to, now that they're part of Cisco: Tomato offers some features that are competitive with much higher-end equipment.
Funny you should pick on Cyanogen in an effort to make your case. Frankly, I've used the stock firmware on a number of Android devices (started with a G1, currently have an HTC Vision, T-Mobile's G2) and I wouldn't go back to the carrier-provided OS if you paid me. I've been through all the major third-party Android ROMs, but always keep coming back to Cyanogen. Yes there are bugs but, you know what? ALL complex software has bugs, and it's been my experience that there are generally more issues with the stock AOSP releases. Furthermore, what I've gained in performance and stability by running Cyanogen is worth the few glitches (and I might add that I haven't experienced any of the issues you reported with 6.1.1, other than the screen sensitivity problem, just lucky I guess.) I've also been able to run a stable overclock from the default 800 Mhz. max to 1 Ghz with no issues whatsoever (it'll run up to 1.5 Ghz with the Pershoot kernel but I don't see any reason to push the hardware for ordinary use: I just wanted to see if I could do it.) In contrast, the stock ROM would reboot itself periodically at 1 Ghz.
I might also point out that when it comes to stock firmware loads, you can wait months before a maintenance release comes out, much less an upgrade. Cyanogen's crowd puts out maintenance releases at far more frequent intervals, so you usually don't have to wait that long for stuff to get fixed, or new features to be implemented. The current delay is, apparently, because the group is focused pretty much on CM 7: I've been playing with the nightly builds (largely busted of course, but they give a good idea of where it's going.) So far, it looks pretty slick. They're getting close to RC1, I think: very much looking forward to the final build.
They are using arrays of lasers to make fringe/interference patterns. This IS "real holography", just very low resolution and framerate.
If it took three GPUs to do that, then I shudder to think how much processor power it would take to render a holotheatric release of Star Wars. I hope there's some room for optimization here.
And if the government decides it is important enough, they can claim the patent from you.
If it even gets that far. All they have to do is classify it, and you're done. They can take it to anyone else they want to have it researched and manufactured, and there's not squat you can do about it, and you can be barred from having anything to do with your own work. Well, that's the way it is in the U.S.: it happened to my father back in the sixties when his company was manufacturing electronics for the Navy: they liked his designs so much that they literally stole them from him (not for security reasons, but so that they could find somebody cheaper to manufacture the equipment after Dad and his people did all the design and testing.) I would presume that most governments would maintain similar ability to commandeer any technology that could be considered of national security interest, and limitless, virtually free energy would certainly come under that heading.
Grandmothers as a good portion of Apple's target demographic? I seriously doubt it.
No, not grandmothers per se, but people that really don't know much about computers, don't want to know much about computers and will never know much about computers... but want to do some things that require a computer.
Terrible ergonomics. Your hand will block the view when using the mouse as it's meant to be used, and so see it you have to take your eyes off the screen. Seems like a bad idea to me.
Me too. Context-sensitivity can be carried to an extreme. This sounds more like yet another Apple fashion statement than anything particularly practical.
There are something like a million downloads of cyanogen mod. Even if that is the same folks downloading each release you are still looking at hundreds of thousands. That is one ROM, not all of them.
I was going to say the same thing. Sooner or later some vendor is going to release a handset with Cyanogenmod on it. Until then, if I can't run my Cyanogen, I'm not buying your handset.
Sadly, cable installers fall under low-voltage code and don't need to be licensed anything in most jurisdictions. That there's an AC box out in the snow, however, crosses the line, likely. Take a phone pic of it and email it to press@qwest.com. A truck ought to roll on that one.
Something tells me that MS and Apple (and especially, Apple) will do all they can to break the plugin's functionality.
Apple might be able to get away with it, but MS will always have that "monopoly" monkey on its back.
I dunno... Youtube is pretty damn popular, and even the legions of Jobs apologists would have a very hard time whitewashing a dick move of that magnitude. Not that Apple wouldn't be inclined to try it, of course, along with some blathering public statement along the lines of "in order to protect the user experience, we have decided to disallow the use of Google's proprietary video formats on our operating system because, as you all know, we are a family-friendly company and Youtube is full of pornography." You laugh, but that's pretty much exactly what Jobs said about Android. And as for Microsoft, well, I doubt they'd bother. At least until they get something as popular as Youtube up and running, and it'll be a while 'til that happens, if ever.
Yes, either the poster doesn't understand what Machiavellien means or they don't understand the situation at hand.
Yes, and if not for extending a program in ways not necessarily intended or endorsed by the software's vendor, why have plug-ins at all? Besides, Microsoft, Apple and the rest are perfectly free to release plug-ins for Chrome that handle their desired formats.
This isn't Machiavellian so much as it is competitive. The stakes are high.
They'll provide WebM plugins for the browsers of the H.264-only league, so in practice, all mayor browsers will have WebM support –one way or the other. Machiavellian move?
As long as cops are not accountable for their actions and prosecutors have immunity we need guns.
I agree. I was surprised a few years ago (a relative of mine was subjected to false arrest due to an error made by another State's DMV, and was rather badly treated by the officers involved) to find that the police in my State were immunized from any consequences of their actions. Yes, I spoke to my attorney about it, I was going to take them to court. What he told me was this: they cannot be sued by a private citizen, even for false arrest. So we have to depend upon the police policing themselves, which is an untenable situation. We obviously cannot depend upon our lawmakers to hold incompetent or criminal police accountable either.
Too many people in this thread have an unreasonable and unreasoning trust of government. Heinlein said it best, "Never trust another man's better nature. He may not have one." Now, having said that, I don't currently own a firearm, for the same reasons you stated. That doesn't mean that I'm willing to just give up the legal right to ever acquire one, just because some people have an irrational fear of a particular class of machine. Yes, guns are dangerous but so are many, many other aspects of our society.
Honestly, I'm under far greater threat of sudden death from the sociopaths I must contend with on the expressway every morning. Stupid bastards: get the cigarettes out of your mouths and the cellphones out of your ears and watch where you're going. It's amazing to me how many people can, on the one hand, rant about the need for gun control (so that they will (ahem) "feel" safer) and on the other hand risk their lives, and the lives of those around them, while they erratically pilot tons of metal and plastic at unsafe speeds, day in day out. Ignorance must truly be bliss, I guess.
Hitler and Stalin fist required a gun registry then they used the registry to confiscate the guns then well you know the rest.
Contrary to popular belief, Hitler actually didn't require a gun registry because he didn't need to do so. If you look at the post-World-War-I period, it was the Weimar Republic that passed a rather modern (by our standards) gun control law, that Hitler's regime simply extended to serve their own agenda. More info here. Here is the lesson that we should take away from that: social controls implemented during times of relative peace can be used against the population during periods of conflict. It's already happening to us now, if we only had the wit to see it. Put it this way: according to our government officials, we are now at "war" on multiple fronts... and the Patriot act is about to be renewed again.
Regardless, I look at the focus on gun control (which I perceive as being all out of proportion to the actual importance of such things) as having roots in two different areas: fear, and social control. Unfortunately, the two are working hand-in-hand to take something away from us that we still need.
I hate to break it to all you gun-control fruitbats out there, but we have not, as a race, changed all that much from Colonial times. We really haven't, and the presumption that the Founder's wisdom no longer applies to us is misguided at best. Use your heads people: if we were so much more civilized now, the supposed "need" for gun control wouldn't even be on the radar. Keep in mind, also, that that need isn't yours: it's that of fearful, uninformed people led by a government who is twisting those fears to its own end.
Apart from a few whackjobs, the whole point of WMDs is using them to threaten people to accomplish other goals - not actually using them.
True... unless, of course, you come up with a viable treatment for your weapon and can prove it works. Then you could place an entire population under a death sentence... with you holding the reprieve.
That would probably buy you a lot of influence to accomplish those other goals.
My brother spent two years in Bulgaria. He met a lot of good folks and had many good things to say about the place, but he wasn't shy about pointing out outright government corruption from top to bottom. Some states in eastern Europe faired better than others when the USSR collapsed, but organized crime is still pretty rampant even in the better-off states.
Well, to be fair he did admit that they have a higher rate of corruption. And organized crime is pretty rampant here in the U.S., for that matter. Well, that's what our public officials tell us when asked about why our prisons are overflowing. Of course, a lot depends upon how you define organized crime.
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A wise man once said "assume ignorance not malice".
The only point where I would disagree with anything you said is that we are talking AT&T here. Assuming malice when dealing with AT&T (which is no longer the AT&T of old, but was taken over by the onetime Baby Bell SBC, arguably the worst of lot) is actually a good defensive strategy. Those boys rarely do anything by accident, and shafting customers is a fundamental tenet of their business model.
However, given the amount of random traffic that appears anywhere on the Internet a megabyte either way doesn't sound all that suspicious, statistically meaningless when you get right down to it. What I'd like to see is the exact opposite of what they tested. Track every single byte that is transferred in and out of that phone, and use it heavily. Download big files, watch Youtube constantly, turn all the background sync options on that you can. Do this for several phones, over several months. Then compare the actual transfer to the usage charged: you'll get a much better idea if you're being ripped off in any meaningful way.
Sounds like a Fandroid skinned her knee. The OP was making a point about how supporting open and free, out of principal, wasn't making any money (which is one primary motivation for developing software). I suppose your rage blinded you.
Too bad.
Not really. The OP admits (in his own words) that Apple is "evil", and yet he willing supports them. I give him points for honesty, hypocritical as it might be.
Thats the cost of a low-end mac every year.
Or a pretty damn nice PC.
I'm not going to have to walk around with a clunky, crappy, inferior smartphone in my pocket just because of "principals".
You mean "principles", and it's obvious that you haven't many of them. Personally, I don't consider my G2 to be crappy, inferior or clunky. It does exactly what I need, exactly the way I want it to, and neither your opinion or anyone else's will change that fact.
... but even so, I don't like who I would have to thank for it. So no iPhone for me.
Is the iPhone a "superior" device? Maybe
If they audit the apps, how is that any different to what Apple is doing?
In principle, maybe not so much. In practice, considering how Google tends to go about matters, it will probably be a hell of a lot more competently handled.
But the reality is, we really don't need another Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboard or Light Saber app.
Cyanogen is a special beast because it is completely AOSP
Not really. If you look at some of the contributions made to Cyanogenmod, you'll see that it's far from pure AOSP. The only "proprietary" components are the binary blobs provided by the phone vendors for radio operation and such, and of course the Google Experience Apps (which you can easily download as a separate package and aren't part of the operating system in any event.)
It's been my universal experience that community hardware ROMs tend to suck, and worse, the community usually isn't honest and upfront about all the problems
You can't make such a sweeping claim. You just can't, with even a semblance of reasonableness. The reality is that community ROMs, just like commercial firmware, are entirely dependent upon the caliber of the people managing and developing them. Some are incredible, some suck, and most are in between. For example, my home network uses a WRT-54G wireless router running the Tomato firmware package ... blows the stock firmware completely out of the wanter. Linksys' stuff would die during sustained heavy transfers, and couldn't handle torrents or gaming very well at all. It also had a tendency to just slow down gradually over a couple of weeks until it was rebooted. Since I updated to Tomato, I haven't had to restart the thing ever. It's had over a year of uptime (last time it got rebooted was after a power failure when the UPS ran out.) It's what you would expect from a well-implemented Linux distro, actually, I'm just surprised that Linksys couldn't hack it. Probably don't want to, now that they're part of Cisco: Tomato offers some features that are competitive with much higher-end equipment.
Funny you should pick on Cyanogen in an effort to make your case. Frankly, I've used the stock firmware on a number of Android devices (started with a G1, currently have an HTC Vision, T-Mobile's G2) and I wouldn't go back to the carrier-provided OS if you paid me. I've been through all the major third-party Android ROMs, but always keep coming back to Cyanogen. Yes there are bugs but, you know what? ALL complex software has bugs, and it's been my experience that there are generally more issues with the stock AOSP releases. Furthermore, what I've gained in performance and stability by running Cyanogen is worth the few glitches (and I might add that I haven't experienced any of the issues you reported with 6.1.1, other than the screen sensitivity problem, just lucky I guess.) I've also been able to run a stable overclock from the default 800 Mhz. max to 1 Ghz with no issues whatsoever (it'll run up to 1.5 Ghz with the Pershoot kernel but I don't see any reason to push the hardware for ordinary use: I just wanted to see if I could do it.) In contrast, the stock ROM would reboot itself periodically at 1 Ghz.
I might also point out that when it comes to stock firmware loads, you can wait months before a maintenance release comes out, much less an upgrade. Cyanogen's crowd puts out maintenance releases at far more frequent intervals, so you usually don't have to wait that long for stuff to get fixed, or new features to be implemented. The current delay is, apparently, because the group is focused pretty much on CM 7: I've been playing with the nightly builds (largely busted of course, but they give a good idea of where it's going.) So far, it looks pretty slick. They're getting close to RC1, I think: very much looking forward to the final build.
They are using arrays of lasers to make fringe/interference patterns. This IS "real holography", just very low resolution and framerate.
If it took three GPUs to do that, then I shudder to think how much processor power it would take to render a holotheatric release of Star Wars. I hope there's some room for optimization here.
And if the government decides it is important enough, they can claim the patent from you.
If it even gets that far. All they have to do is classify it, and you're done. They can take it to anyone else they want to have it researched and manufactured, and there's not squat you can do about it, and you can be barred from having anything to do with your own work. Well, that's the way it is in the U.S.: it happened to my father back in the sixties when his company was manufacturing electronics for the Navy: they liked his designs so much that they literally stole them from him (not for security reasons, but so that they could find somebody cheaper to manufacture the equipment after Dad and his people did all the design and testing.) I would presume that most governments would maintain similar ability to commandeer any technology that could be considered of national security interest, and limitless, virtually free energy would certainly come under that heading.
Oh yeah, well call me when they've built a consumer-scale reactor and are installing them in our electric moon buggies for free.
Call me when all energy everywhere in the universe is free. Until then, BO-RING...
Most of it is there for the taking. We just don't know how to take most of it yet.
Grandmothers as a good portion of Apple's target demographic? I seriously doubt it.
No, not grandmothers per se, but people that really don't know much about computers, don't want to know much about computers and will never know much about computers ... but want to do some things that require a computer.
My grandmother looks at her mouse all the time
And that's a good point ... I think you just described a good portion of Apple's target demographic.
Those of us who just want to make the mouse pointer go where we want it will keep using regular mice.
Terrible ergonomics. Your hand will block the view when using the mouse as it's meant to be used, and so see it you have to take your eyes off the screen. Seems like a bad idea to me.
Me too. Context-sensitivity can be carried to an extreme. This sounds more like yet another Apple fashion statement than anything particularly practical.
China is not the "largest country" but at this time is the country with the largest population.
Yes, and if it's true that ten percent of the Chinese computer-using population is paying Microsoft, that's still a hell of a market.
How do you drink a tasty cigar?
Blender.
There are something like a million downloads of cyanogen mod. Even if that is the same folks downloading each release you are still looking at hundreds of thousands. That is one ROM, not all of them.
I was going to say the same thing. Sooner or later some vendor is going to release a handset with Cyanogenmod on it. Until then, if I can't run my Cyanogen, I'm not buying your handset.
Sadly, cable installers fall under low-voltage code and don't need to be licensed anything in most jurisdictions. That there's an AC box out in the snow, however, crosses the line, likely. Take a phone pic of it and email it to press@qwest.com. A truck ought to roll on that one.
yes, and a few heads too.
Something tells me that MS and Apple (and especially, Apple) will do all they can to break the plugin's functionality.
Apple might be able to get away with it, but MS will always have that "monopoly" monkey on its back.
I dunno ... Youtube is pretty damn popular, and even the legions of Jobs apologists would have a very hard time whitewashing a dick move of that magnitude. Not that Apple wouldn't be inclined to try it, of course, along with some blathering public statement along the lines of "in order to protect the user experience, we have decided to disallow the use of Google's proprietary video formats on our operating system because, as you all know, we are a family-friendly company and Youtube is full of pornography." You laugh, but that's pretty much exactly what Jobs said about Android. And as for Microsoft, well, I doubt they'd bother. At least until they get something as popular as Youtube up and running, and it'll be a while 'til that happens, if ever.
Yes, either the poster doesn't understand what Machiavellien means or they don't understand the situation at hand.
Yes, and if not for extending a program in ways not necessarily intended or endorsed by the software's vendor, why have plug-ins at all? Besides, Microsoft, Apple and the rest are perfectly free to release plug-ins for Chrome that handle their desired formats.
This isn't Machiavellian so much as it is competitive. The stakes are high.
They'll provide WebM plugins for the browsers of the H.264-only league, so in practice, all mayor browsers will have WebM support –one way or the other. Machiavellian move?
No ... it's the reason we have plug-ins.
As David Spade might say, I liked this movie the first time I saw it — when it was called Jurassic Park."
To be fair, though, so long as they stay away from frog DNA they should be fine.
As long as cops are not accountable for their actions and prosecutors have immunity we need guns.
I agree. I was surprised a few years ago (a relative of mine was subjected to false arrest due to an error made by another State's DMV, and was rather badly treated by the officers involved) to find that the police in my State were immunized from any consequences of their actions. Yes, I spoke to my attorney about it, I was going to take them to court. What he told me was this: they cannot be sued by a private citizen, even for false arrest. So we have to depend upon the police policing themselves, which is an untenable situation. We obviously cannot depend upon our lawmakers to hold incompetent or criminal police accountable either.
Too many people in this thread have an unreasonable and unreasoning trust of government. Heinlein said it best, "Never trust another man's better nature. He may not have one." Now, having said that, I don't currently own a firearm, for the same reasons you stated. That doesn't mean that I'm willing to just give up the legal right to ever acquire one, just because some people have an irrational fear of a particular class of machine. Yes, guns are dangerous but so are many, many other aspects of our society.
Honestly, I'm under far greater threat of sudden death from the sociopaths I must contend with on the expressway every morning. Stupid bastards: get the cigarettes out of your mouths and the cellphones out of your ears and watch where you're going. It's amazing to me how many people can, on the one hand, rant about the need for gun control (so that they will (ahem) "feel" safer) and on the other hand risk their lives, and the lives of those around them, while they erratically pilot tons of metal and plastic at unsafe speeds, day in day out. Ignorance must truly be bliss, I guess.
Hitler and Stalin fist required a gun registry then they used the registry to confiscate the guns then well you know the rest.
Contrary to popular belief, Hitler actually didn't require a gun registry because he didn't need to do so. If you look at the post-World-War-I period, it was the Weimar Republic that passed a rather modern (by our standards) gun control law, that Hitler's regime simply extended to serve their own agenda. More info here. Here is the lesson that we should take away from that: social controls implemented during times of relative peace can be used against the population during periods of conflict. It's already happening to us now, if we only had the wit to see it. Put it this way: according to our government officials, we are now at "war" on multiple fronts ... and the Patriot act is about to be renewed again.
Regardless, I look at the focus on gun control (which I perceive as being all out of proportion to the actual importance of such things) as having roots in two different areas: fear, and social control. Unfortunately, the two are working hand-in-hand to take something away from us that we still need.
I hate to break it to all you gun-control fruitbats out there, but we have not, as a race, changed all that much from Colonial times. We really haven't, and the presumption that the Founder's wisdom no longer applies to us is misguided at best. Use your heads people: if we were so much more civilized now, the supposed "need" for gun control wouldn't even be on the radar. Keep in mind, also, that that need isn't yours: it's that of fearful, uninformed people led by a government who is twisting those fears to its own end.
Apart from a few whackjobs, the whole point of WMDs is using them to threaten people to accomplish other goals - not actually using them.
True ... unless, of course, you come up with a viable treatment for your weapon and can prove it works. Then you could place an entire population under a death sentence ... with you holding the reprieve.
That would probably buy you a lot of influence to accomplish those other goals.
The jihadists I am familiar with routinely kidnap people.
Granted it's usually in the Middle East, but I'd imagine they kidnap individuals more often than they "blow them up."
I count myself lucky not to be familiar with any jihadists.
Of course, I feel the same way about anyone that is functionally insane, and for whom the only known treatment is summary execution.
My brother spent two years in Bulgaria. He met a lot of good folks and had many good things to say about the place, but he wasn't shy about pointing out outright government corruption from top to bottom. Some states in eastern Europe faired better than others when the USSR collapsed, but organized crime is still pretty rampant even in the better-off states.
Well, to be fair he did admit that they have a higher rate of corruption. And organized crime is pretty rampant here in the U.S., for that matter. Well, that's what our public officials tell us when asked about why our prisons are overflowing. Of course, a lot depends upon how you define organized crime.