One can usually tell how intellectually honest an Obama detractor is by gauging their opinion on Bush Jr.:-) Just having an "R" or a "D" after one's name doesn't excuse one's actions, even if it's the same "R" or "D" as yours.
The best part about having a corporate Blackberry is that I had transparent access to the company's intranet, through the BB server. I've had a Droid X for almost a year now, and there still isn't a good way to seamlessly connect to intranet and internet. Not long ago I got an email from the Android bug tracker, saying that my request for a proxy setting on a per-connection basis has been incorporated into Android. (This is important in that when I'm connected at work I must proxy, and anywhere else I don't.) The less good news is that it's been fixed in release 3.0, which will probably never be available on my phone.
So, when I gave up my blackberry, I lost convenient access to the company intranet. In a year or so when I get my next phone, if it runs Honeycomb, I'll finally have what the BB had at the turn of the century. Better late than never, I guess.
And yes, I'm well aware that I can fix this if I root my phone. But the phone belongs to the company, not me personally.
> Really, while I am profoundly disappointed in Obama's tenure, I doubt a Republican president would have done anything different. Even Ron Paul would do the same.
To a major extent I can agree with that. As a fiscal conservative, I am profoundly glad that McCain didn't win, because he'd have done the same things as Obama, only with Republican support. I think the damage Obama has done has been minimized in part because of party opposition. (Ideologically, I don't belong to either party, but am currently registered Democrat.)
Ron Paul would have done something different, I believe, but I'm not sure whether that would be a good thing. Some of his views genuinely frighten me.
Cain is interesting. I don't know yet where he is socially, (I tend to be socially liberal) but he may be exactly what we need fiscally, at least for now. We may have to put up with a social conservative in order to have a fiscal conservative in place for a few years until we get the economy back on track.
I have a mental picture, though, of the really smart geek in grade school... you know the one, stays in at recess to draw pictures of soldier robots...
> And before that, most of my dumbphones were manufactured by Samsung as well... no complains. To the uber-off-the-tangent ranter, that's my experience.
We've owned other Samsung phones in the past, and they've been great. The GSM slider my daughter had three years ago took a lot of abuse and continued to work perfectly, and was finally passed on to a friend down on his luck, and to my knowledge is still in use.
But the Galaxy... what a piece of crap phone from what has sadly become a piece of crap company. Daughter is currently on her fifth or sixth, depending on whether you count the one that was dead-in-box at the repair center.
The first one had no GPS. At all. Dead. From that we learned to check GPS in the store (there's an app you can download) to save a trip.
Number 2 had no GPS. I count it because the salescreature absolutely insisted he could make it work, spent 45 minutes fiddling with it, finally turned on wifi assist and called it fixed. I asked to talk to someone else, got them to go back and get us another one.
(GPS was important as we were about to go on vacation in an area we had never been, and it was important to me to know where my daughter was.)
Number 3 worked, but the screen failed weeks later.
Number four orientation sensor died weeks later.
I don't count the next one because it would not boot so the tech at the service center dumped it and went and got another one.
We're currently on what I choose to call number five, and it is malfunctioning in an entirely different way. Daughter doesn't want it fixed, she wants a different new phone. I don't blame her.
Parenthetically, germane to this thread, daughter started using smartphones in middle school. She has owned a 7000 series and three Curves, the last one being an 8900. When the keyboard wore out on that one last year (she's a world class texter) she decided to try Android. And I have to admit, the Galaxy has a beautiful display. It just doesn't work worth a crap. There appears to be two, no, three, issues:
(1) build quality is crap. If you get one that works correctly, treasure it. The rest of us had less pleasant experiences.
(2) Samsung, for whatever reason, takes FOREVER to push out updates. Way beyond what other manufacturers do. And don't tell me it's the carrier -- 2.2 on the Galaxy still wasn't available almost a year after it was pushed out to other Android phones on all carriers. The strategy appeared to be to make you buy another phone to get a more recent version of Android. (2.2 was significant due to flash support) Google "Samsung Galaxy Update Debacle" for more information.
(3) Samsung is even more reluctant than other vendors to admit that there is a problem. It took months to get them to admit that there was a GPS accuracy problem, and then they pushed out a fix that did nothing, and has been ignoring it since. Just what you wanted in a smartphone manufacturer.
And PLEASE, don't take MY word for it. The forums are still online. There was MASSIVE discontent in the Galaxy community. (I say "was" because I suspect most of them have moved on by now.) If you got one that worked, or if you set the bar low enough that GPS being six blocks off to the northeast or "turn it sideways" not working anymore is ok with you, then great. I commend your tranquil approach to life.
And so, this particular "uber off-the-tangent ranter" is not interested in owning another Samsung product of any kind, and I'm not shy about it.
> Considering that the built-in Android Email app does indeed support push from Exchange servers I think you might want to reevaluate that statement...
Ok. Let's see. Reevaluating... Nope, I don't have push email.
I'm tempted to just let that comment hang out there, as a sharp individual should be able to fill in the blanks, but for the sake of communication let's take it a step further. I am not an Exchange admin, nor am I a Blackberry Enterprise Server admin, (I'm not even a Domino admin, although I've had to use Notes in a past life) [1] which puts me in the position of rattling the box and trying to guess what's inside. What I *observe* is that I don't have push email. I turn push on at the Android level and it doesn't happen. Only polling works.
Now, I can theorize that push may be misconfigured at the exchange server, or perhaps we're using an old crufty version of exchange that doesn't support push, or some other reason of which I do not have visibility. All I can tell you is what I can observe from my end. Moreover, I can't seem to communicate what "push email" means to the outsourcing company. I have trouble communicating with them anyway -- English is not their first language, although bizarre, Yoda-like syntax is more than made up for in overbearing cheerfulness.
So yeah, I have revaluated the statement that "I don't have push email" and found it to be correct as expected. Where do we go from here?
[1] I *am* a former Sendmail admin, and still have my beat-up, much dog-eared and bookmarked copy of the Bat Book. So I understand email services in theory, just happen not to have experience running the server on Winders.
Speaking of which, why do corporations persist in trying to spin off their (sometimes only) money making resources? For instance: Years ago I used to work for a utility. (For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter which one.) They had (1) a commodity, and (2) a customer service system. They attempted to spin off their commodity, keeping only the customer service system, because of the perception that becoming "a service company" was somehow a good idea. Fortunately, cooler minds prevailed and as a result they still exist today.
I'd consider Blackberry to be a cloud resource of non-corporate email, and see how that turned out.
The thing about the cloud is, when it fails, you might have legal recourse (or not, depending on how smart your lawyers were during the contract phase) but whether you can take your vendor to task or not, in the meantime you DON'T HAVE EMAIL. I'd argue (and have, unsuccessfully) that corporate email is a critical resource that should remain in-house, and you owe it to the business to have redundant conduits, just like you do with other critical resources, like internet. In our case, email was very reliable until it was outsourced, whereupon it promptly broke and we discovered after the fact that the vendor did not know how to fix it.
As a Galaxy S owner, I'm not planning to buy anything from Samsung ever again for as long as I live. They could give me a Galaxy S II for free and I'd give it back. I want to see them out of business, destitute, crows picking out their eyes, their houses burned to the ground, the wailing of their women and children. I want to see their properties razed and the earth salted so it remains barren and desolate as a warning to others. I want every employee rounded up and branded "don't hire me" on their foreheads. I want the word "Samsung" to be stricken from all records as the curse word it is. I want it to be one of the seven words you can't say on television. (They can take "tits" off the list.)
Other than that, yeah, it looks like an ok phone. They're trying to look too much like an iphone for my taste. I mean, if you want an iphone, buy an iphone. It's like buying a Japanese cruiser because "it's just like a Harley, only cheaper".
(Caveat: I'm just not trendy enough for an iphone. I'm looking at the Droid X2 or the Bionic as my next phone. But. Not. Samsung. I don't care if their vibration mode consistently causes spontaneous orgasm. Not Samsung.)
About two years ago our company had a... let's say... rapid shift in IT personnel. The reason for this is not important to the story. Among the personnel we lost were the three admins who knew how the corporate blackberry server worked.
Three days, three hours, and 26 minutes later, the BB server went down hard and stayed down for a week and a half, while unqualified replacements struggled (not very hard, in my opinion) to restore service. (For the first four days they insisted nothing was wrong, and had all of us cycle through endless repetitions of restoring to factory defaults, reentering corporate account info, and other makework.)
Now, it's not for nothing that it's called a crackberry. Blackberry users (of which I was one) rapidly get addicted to the instantaneous gratification that is well implemented push email, and this is what Blackberry classically has done best. It's what they're known for. And when it fails, well, can you say "wholesale panic"??
Personally, I had an Android corporate phone talking to the Exchange server before the BB server went back online. I don't have push email, it's not as nice, but two factors forced the change: (1) I did not know when, if ever, the Blackberry enterprise server would be back online, and (2) I had no confidence in the new IT folks' ability to keep it up. My confidence was shaken. Blackberry as a platform had taken a huge credibility hit.
Now imagine that, only worldwide. They're dead. The very addiction Blackberry has encouraged over the years is now working against them.
Too bad, they make some nice phones. If our BB server had not had its troubles, I might still be carrying one.
Now the only question is, will they migrate to Android, or iPhone?
Like a lot of things, it depends on what you use it for. The non-technical will migrate to iPhone because they don't have to fiddle with it and iPhone has similar "mindshare", similar recognition amongst fellow executives, as Blackberry. The more technical minded, who have gotten used to replaceable battery and storage and regularly use "mass storage mode", don't really have a choice these days other than Android. Windows 7? It is to laugh.
I'm not going to belabor the point that the spin off wasn't a good idea. The problem now is that they're coming off as indecisive, unsure, rudderless, out of control, pick your metaphor.
Yeah. That's pretty much it. Because the crime of which you are accused doesn't make illegal search and seizure suddenly ok.
Besides, that's somewhat of a bad example, as (a) what's available on the phone isn't much different than what's available from the service provider, after the usual court order process (which would certainly be granted in an injury hit-and-run), and (b) it's already been shown that message time stamps aren't necessarily accurate. A woman was prosecuted not long ago based on a text message that was happening at the estimated time of the accident, but the case fell apart in court due to the uncertainty of text time stamps.
Consider, you go out to the car, text your girlfriend to meet you somewhere, put your phone away, and start the car. Your phone doesn't send the text right away because you have no bars. Six blocks away you get into an accident, but -- drat -- your phone just got bars and sent the text, making it look like you're texting and driving. The cop checks your phone, and the cuffs go on. So sad.
Of course, that could never happen.
Because this is slashdot. We don't have girlfriends.
I'm thinking an app that quickly resets your phone back to factory condition (and blanks the SD card) would be really popular in California about now.
Maybe a gesture followed by a long press, something that isn't obvious, couldn't be done accidentally and is unlikely to be done by your butt. Or, I know, a particular pattern of the volume control up and down arrows. With many phones this could be done without even taking it out of the holster.
Or (this would be really cool) the app would quickly substitutes a list of LEO phone numbers and photos of LEOs in uncompromising positions. (You know they're out there -- it'd just take some looking.) Or... ok, so where was that sex tape of Jerry and Linda again?
So, where did your original stuff go? Well, you do back up your phone, don't you?
Or even easier, a "stunt phone" you keep on your hip, with the real phone stashed in a nonobvious place. It's all the same to Bluetooth.
In other words, this will only entrap the terminally stupid.
I would pay to see the moment when the people who *do* suffer the inequality turn on the rich brats who are hanging on for notoriety and pity sex. That would truly be a youtube classic.
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One can usually tell how intellectually honest an Obama detractor is by gauging their opinion on Bush Jr. :-) Just having an "R" or a "D" after one's name doesn't excuse one's actions, even if it's the same "R" or "D" as yours.
The best part about having a corporate Blackberry is that I had transparent access to the company's intranet, through the BB server. I've had a Droid X for almost a year now, and there still isn't a good way to seamlessly connect to intranet and internet. Not long ago I got an email from the Android bug tracker, saying that my request for a proxy setting on a per-connection basis has been incorporated into Android. (This is important in that when I'm connected at work I must proxy, and anywhere else I don't.) The less good news is that it's been fixed in release 3.0, which will probably never be available on my phone.
So, when I gave up my blackberry, I lost convenient access to the company intranet. In a year or so when I get my next phone, if it runs Honeycomb, I'll finally have what the BB had at the turn of the century. Better late than never, I guess.
And yes, I'm well aware that I can fix this if I root my phone. But the phone belongs to the company, not me personally.
"Stop falling for right-wing propaganda" is a canard.
> What would Romney do?
> Really, while I am profoundly disappointed in Obama's tenure, I doubt a Republican president would have done anything different. Even Ron Paul would do the same.
To a major extent I can agree with that. As a fiscal conservative, I am profoundly glad that McCain didn't win, because he'd have done the same things as Obama, only with Republican support. I think the damage Obama has done has been minimized in part because of party opposition. (Ideologically, I don't belong to either party, but am currently registered Democrat.)
Ron Paul would have done something different, I believe, but I'm not sure whether that would be a good thing. Some of his views genuinely frighten me.
Cain is interesting. I don't know yet where he is socially, (I tend to be socially liberal) but he may be exactly what we need fiscally, at least for now. We may have to put up with a social conservative in order to have a fiscal conservative in place for a few years until we get the economy back on track.
This is all way off topic, of course.
That is absolutely brilliant.
I have a mental picture, though, of the really smart geek in grade school... you know the one, stays in at recess to draw pictures of soldier robots...
> Government officials "scientized" politics. They made decisions that were largely political but cloaked them in the garb of science.'"
One could argue that this has happened often, in many fields. What's new here?
> And before that, most of my dumbphones were manufactured by Samsung as well... no complains. To the uber-off-the-tangent ranter, that's my experience.
We've owned other Samsung phones in the past, and they've been great. The GSM slider my daughter had three years ago took a lot of abuse and continued to work perfectly, and was finally passed on to a friend down on his luck, and to my knowledge is still in use.
But the Galaxy... what a piece of crap phone from what has sadly become a piece of crap company. Daughter is currently on her fifth or sixth, depending on whether you count the one that was dead-in-box at the repair center.
The first one had no GPS. At all. Dead. From that we learned to check GPS in the store (there's an app you can download) to save a trip.
Number 2 had no GPS. I count it because the salescreature absolutely insisted he could make it work, spent 45 minutes fiddling with it, finally turned on wifi assist and called it fixed. I asked to talk to someone else, got them to go back and get us another one.
(GPS was important as we were about to go on vacation in an area we had never been, and it was important to me to know where my daughter was.)
Number 3 worked, but the screen failed weeks later.
Number four orientation sensor died weeks later.
I don't count the next one because it would not boot so the tech at the service center dumped it and went and got another one.
We're currently on what I choose to call number five, and it is malfunctioning in an entirely different way. Daughter doesn't want it fixed, she wants a different new phone. I don't blame her.
Parenthetically, germane to this thread, daughter started using smartphones in middle school. She has owned a 7000 series and three Curves, the last one being an 8900. When the keyboard wore out on that one last year (she's a world class texter) she decided to try Android. And I have to admit, the Galaxy has a beautiful display. It just doesn't work worth a crap. There appears to be two, no, three, issues:
(1) build quality is crap. If you get one that works correctly, treasure it. The rest of us had less pleasant experiences.
(2) Samsung, for whatever reason, takes FOREVER to push out updates. Way beyond what other manufacturers do. And don't tell me it's the carrier -- 2.2 on the Galaxy still wasn't available almost a year after it was pushed out to other Android phones on all carriers. The strategy appeared to be to make you buy another phone to get a more recent version of Android. (2.2 was significant due to flash support) Google "Samsung Galaxy Update Debacle" for more information.
(3) Samsung is even more reluctant than other vendors to admit that there is a problem. It took months to get them to admit that there was a GPS accuracy problem, and then they pushed out a fix that did nothing, and has been ignoring it since. Just what you wanted in a smartphone manufacturer.
And PLEASE, don't take MY word for it. The forums are still online. There was MASSIVE discontent in the Galaxy community. (I say "was" because I suspect most of them have moved on by now.) If you got one that worked, or if you set the bar low enough that GPS being six blocks off to the northeast or "turn it sideways" not working anymore is ok with you, then great. I commend your tranquil approach to life.
And so, this particular "uber off-the-tangent ranter" is not interested in owning another Samsung product of any kind, and I'm not shy about it.
> Considering that the built-in Android Email app does indeed support push from Exchange servers I think you might want to reevaluate that statement...
Ok. Let's see. Reevaluating... Nope, I don't have push email.
I'm tempted to just let that comment hang out there, as a sharp individual should be able to fill in the blanks, but for the sake of communication let's take it a step further. I am not an Exchange admin, nor am I a Blackberry Enterprise Server admin, (I'm not even a Domino admin, although I've had to use Notes in a past life) [1] which puts me in the position of rattling the box and trying to guess what's inside. What I *observe* is that I don't have push email. I turn push on at the Android level and it doesn't happen. Only polling works.
Now, I can theorize that push may be misconfigured at the exchange server, or perhaps we're using an old crufty version of exchange that doesn't support push, or some other reason of which I do not have visibility. All I can tell you is what I can observe from my end. Moreover, I can't seem to communicate what "push email" means to the outsourcing company. I have trouble communicating with them anyway -- English is not their first language, although bizarre, Yoda-like syntax is more than made up for in overbearing cheerfulness.
So yeah, I have revaluated the statement that "I don't have push email" and found it to be correct as expected. Where do we go from here?
[1] I *am* a former Sendmail admin, and still have my beat-up, much dog-eared and bookmarked copy of the Bat Book. So I understand email services in theory, just happen not to have experience running the server on Winders.
Suicidal. That was the other one.
Speaking of which, why do corporations persist in trying to spin off their (sometimes only) money making resources? For instance: Years ago I used to work for a utility. (For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter which one.) They had (1) a commodity, and (2) a customer service system. They attempted to spin off their commodity, keeping only the customer service system, because of the perception that becoming "a service company" was somehow a good idea. Fortunately, cooler minds prevailed and as a result they still exist today.
> In all that ranting, you didn't even touch upon why you hate Samsung so much...
It doesn't matter why. The people who know will nod their heads and the rest probably didn't own a Galaxy S.
I'd consider Blackberry to be a cloud resource of non-corporate email, and see how that turned out.
The thing about the cloud is, when it fails, you might have legal recourse (or not, depending on how smart your lawyers were during the contract phase) but whether you can take your vendor to task or not, in the meantime you DON'T HAVE EMAIL. I'd argue (and have, unsuccessfully) that corporate email is a critical resource that should remain in-house, and you owe it to the business to have redundant conduits, just like you do with other critical resources, like internet. In our case, email was very reliable until it was outsourced, whereupon it promptly broke and we discovered after the fact that the vendor did not know how to fix it.
As a Galaxy S owner, I'm not planning to buy anything from Samsung ever again for as long as I live. They could give me a Galaxy S II for free and I'd give it back. I want to see them out of business, destitute, crows picking out their eyes, their houses burned to the ground, the wailing of their women and children. I want to see their properties razed and the earth salted so it remains barren and desolate as a warning to others. I want every employee rounded up and branded "don't hire me" on their foreheads. I want the word "Samsung" to be stricken from all records as the curse word it is. I want it to be one of the seven words you can't say on television. (They can take "tits" off the list.)
Other than that, yeah, it looks like an ok phone. They're trying to look too much like an iphone for my taste. I mean, if you want an iphone, buy an iphone. It's like buying a Japanese cruiser because "it's just like a Harley, only cheaper".
(Caveat: I'm just not trendy enough for an iphone. I'm looking at the Droid X2 or the Bionic as my next phone. But. Not. Samsung. I don't care if their vibration mode consistently causes spontaneous orgasm. Not Samsung.)
About two years ago our company had a ... let's say ... rapid shift in IT personnel. The reason for this is not important to the story. Among the personnel we lost were the three admins who knew how the corporate blackberry server worked.
Three days, three hours, and 26 minutes later, the BB server went down hard and stayed down for a week and a half, while unqualified replacements struggled (not very hard, in my opinion) to restore service. (For the first four days they insisted nothing was wrong, and had all of us cycle through endless repetitions of restoring to factory defaults, reentering corporate account info, and other makework.)
Now, it's not for nothing that it's called a crackberry. Blackberry users (of which I was one) rapidly get addicted to the instantaneous gratification that is well implemented push email, and this is what Blackberry classically has done best. It's what they're known for. And when it fails, well, can you say "wholesale panic"??
Personally, I had an Android corporate phone talking to the Exchange server before the BB server went back online. I don't have push email, it's not as nice, but two factors forced the change: (1) I did not know when, if ever, the Blackberry enterprise server would be back online, and (2) I had no confidence in the new IT folks' ability to keep it up. My confidence was shaken. Blackberry as a platform had taken a huge credibility hit.
Now imagine that, only worldwide. They're dead. The very addiction Blackberry has encouraged over the years is now working against them.
Too bad, they make some nice phones. If our BB server had not had its troubles, I might still be carrying one.
Now the only question is, will they migrate to Android, or iPhone?
Like a lot of things, it depends on what you use it for. The non-technical will migrate to iPhone because they don't have to fiddle with it and iPhone has similar "mindshare", similar recognition amongst fellow executives, as Blackberry. The more technical minded, who have gotten used to replaceable battery and storage and regularly use "mass storage mode", don't really have a choice these days other than Android. Windows 7? It is to laugh.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
I'm not going to belabor the point that the spin off wasn't a good idea. The problem now is that they're coming off as indecisive, unsure, rudderless, out of control, pick your metaphor.
Yeah... stopped listening at that point. Wake me when some independent and credible source says that IE blocks more malware than Chrome.
Yes.
> Apparently, the modern octopus also does this."
What, eat ichthyosaurs? No wonder you don't see too many of them around anymore.
Yeah, how is that working out for him?
I hear slashdot readers reproduce by cell division.
Yeah, but not with firearms, because California Democrats hate them. I'm thinking.... Frisbees. No... Harpoons? Oh hell no. Um,,,, syringes on sticks?
Yeah. That's pretty much it. Because the crime of which you are accused doesn't make illegal search and seizure suddenly ok.
Besides, that's somewhat of a bad example, as (a) what's available on the phone isn't much different than what's available from the service provider, after the usual court order process (which would certainly be granted in an injury hit-and-run), and (b) it's already been shown that message time stamps aren't necessarily accurate. A woman was prosecuted not long ago based on a text message that was happening at the estimated time of the accident, but the case fell apart in court due to the uncertainty of text time stamps.
Consider, you go out to the car, text your girlfriend to meet you somewhere, put your phone away, and start the car. Your phone doesn't send the text right away because you have no bars. Six blocks away you get into an accident, but -- drat -- your phone just got bars and sent the text, making it look like you're texting and driving. The cop checks your phone, and the cuffs go on. So sad.
Of course, that could never happen.
Because this is slashdot. We don't have girlfriends.
I'm thinking an app that quickly resets your phone back to factory condition (and blanks the SD card) would be really popular in California about now.
Maybe a gesture followed by a long press, something that isn't obvious, couldn't be done accidentally and is unlikely to be done by your butt. Or, I know, a particular pattern of the volume control up and down arrows. With many phones this could be done without even taking it out of the holster.
Or (this would be really cool) the app would quickly substitutes a list of LEO phone numbers and photos of LEOs in uncompromising positions. (You know they're out there -- it'd just take some looking.) Or... ok, so where was that sex tape of Jerry and Linda again?
So, where did your original stuff go? Well, you do back up your phone, don't you?
Or even easier, a "stunt phone" you keep on your hip, with the real phone stashed in a nonobvious place. It's all the same to Bluetooth.
In other words, this will only entrap the terminally stupid.
I'll give you that.
So... remind me... who voted for TARP again?
I would pay to see the moment when the people who *do* suffer the inequality turn on the rich brats who are hanging on for notoriety and pity sex. That would truly be a youtube classic.
The word "some" just doesn't mean what it used to, does it?