Thanks. I had a look and my phone hadn't had a security update for over a year, so it seemed that now was as good a time as any to replace the stock install with something better.
I did an adb backup and copied the contents of the sdcard partition. Unlocking the bootloader deleted everything, which seemed a bit gratuitous, but then the TWRP, LineageOS and pick OpenGApps installs all went fine and I was able to install the privileged version of F-Droid. Not sure if I'll keep the Google stuff - the only app that I use from the Play store is the United Airlines app and it's also in the Amazon store.
Reinstalling all of my apps went mostly smoothly. Unfortunately, adb restore doesn't work from 5.1 to 7.1 because the filesystem layout has changed and it isn't clever enough to move things to their new location. The one slightly stressful moment was when I realised that my BookCatalog data hadn't transferred and my last full backup was from before I moved house and scanned around 600 books. Fortunately, the data was there in the adb backup and I was able to reinstall it manually (this was nontrivial because the instructions for extracting the backup say to use openssl zlib, but zlib isn't in the default openssl build and so I had to compile a new openssl binary to extract it). Having a rooted phone meant that I could just insert the database and settings files in the correct place in/data.
So far, everything is positive. The phone feels a little bit faster (hopefully it will get even faster tomorrow after the AOT compiler has run overnight), the base install is about 2GB smaller, so I have a lot more free space (the Motorola version had a load of apps that I didn't want, but which took up space anyway). The newer version of Android finally supports my old ThinkOutside folding keyboard, which I used to write a lot of articles with my old Nokia 770 - now that it works with my phone and the phone has vim installed, I expect to get a lot more use from it.
I'm now using a our-year old phone with a brand new OS and it's completely adequate for my needs. I'll probably keep it for at least another one - there's no user replaceable battery though, so that's probably the limiting factor. Thanks again - I hate to waste working hardware.
The stuff that everyone wants to use is a combination of a.exe and a load of.dlls. The.exe will be x86. Any bundled.dlls will be x86. The system.dlls (where a lot of apps spend a lot of their processor time, doing things like text layout and rendering, animations, and so on) will all be native. There's a penalty for calling between the two worlds, but only a few dozen instructions.
Unfortunately, it just takes one compromised machine entering your network for that to be an issue. If someone leaves it enabled on their laptop at some open WiFi access point, gets infected, and then connects to your corporate network, then a worm can propagate. Fortunately, there probably aren't enough machines running Samba (macOS switched to Apple's own CIFS implementation since Samba went GPLv3) for it to be easy to propagate (though if someone combined it with the recent Windows SMB vulnerability, then you'd have an interesting worm).
Did you read the link that you titled 'bullshit'? It says people are commuting long distances, this is bad for their general wellbeing, bad for their productivity, and an increasing number are telecommuting as a result. That in no way contradicts what I said, it just adds another reason to avoid jobs that require you to own a car.
Thanks, it looks as if my phone is supported. One thing I didn't get from their web site: do they have an update mechanism that doesn't involve doing a complete reinstall (after the initial install overwriting the vendor-supplied Android, I mean)?
False equivalence, and the fact that you don't understand the difference between capital cost and TCO tells anyone reading your post a great deal about your financial acumen.
This needs moderating up. Anyone who thinks that renting is such a great financial choice needs to think about why rental property is available. Could it be because the rent plus appreciation on the property is worth more than the sum of the maintenance, rental management overhead, and either loan interest or opportunity cost from sinking the money into the building? If this isn't the case, expect either the rental prices to increase until it is or the availability of rented accommodation to plummet. If it is, then you might want to rethink you notion that you're so smart to be making money for someone else.
Selling isn't the only option. When I moved here for a job, I rented out the house I had bought, which helped offset the cost of renting somewhere with much higher property prices.
The problem is the rate of change. If house prices drop significantly, then you have people with negative equity and so they can't easily relocate for a job, can't remortgage (so may be stuck with very bad terms on a variable rate mortgage), and so on. If property prices go up too much, then the income needed to save for a deposit goes up a lot as well. Ideally, house price inflation, retail price index inflation, and wage inflation would all be the same. Unfortunately, each one of these is smaller than the previous one currently and that leaves you with a situation where owning property is more lucrative than working.
There are two issues: Are you saving a sensible amount, will that amount ever amount to the ability to purchase a house. They're related, but they're not the same: there are lots of reasons to have a good safety net other than saving for a house. I'd be very nervous if I only had $1,000 in liquid assets.
I did the calculations a few months ago for a postdoc trying to buy a house here in Cambridge. Assuming that property prices and salaries keep increasing at the rates that they have been for the last few years (not necessarily a given - I actually picked a slightly lower number for house price growth given Brexit) and assuming that you need a 20% deposit for a house, the amount of the deposit will go up by 10-25% (over 10 years) of the gross (pre-tax) salary of a postdoc per year. Even if you save 10% of your gross income (basically impossible with rental prices here) now, you're not actually getting any closer to a house deposit, and next year that 10% will be higher. That's basically unsustainable, but if you don't have savings then you won't be able to buy when the bubble bursts.
easing an expensive car you can show off instead of buying one more practical
buying a new car instead of a used car
replacing a car after using it just 3 years
Or, in many cases, buying a car at all. Before I bought my first house, I looked at the difference in price for somewhere cheaper a bit out of town and then added in the running costs of a car (which I didn't need living in the city) and, counting appreciation and depreciation, came to the conclusion that not buying a car was a better financial bet. I'd done something similar earlier when I was renting: the monthly operating costs of a car were more than the difference in rent between somewhere near the middle of town and somewhere far enough out that I'd need to drive. The last time this came up, someone posted a detailed analysis that someone had done for the US.
Cars cost a lot to maintain, insure, and fuel, and depreciate over their lifetime. The benefits only outweigh the costs if you have a well-paid job out in the countryside.
There's a simple solution to this: choose better friends. If your friends are going to judge you based on the toys that you buy, then they're probably idiots. Kindergarten is about the right time to learn this lesson.
The existing Firefox extensions API gives direct access to things that, in any other modern browser, are in different security domains and completely isolated aside from a set of regularly audited communication channels. You can't retain it with compartmentalisation unless you want all of the extensions to be exploit vectors.
A smartphone is now pretty close to being essential. An expensive one is not. My phone is now over 3 years old (and cost about £100 then) and still does everything I need it to. I'm on a pre-pay contract and typically spend about £1/month on it. I'll probably replace it soon, because it hasn't had security updates for a little while (I don't trust it with any important data, passwords, and so on, but people are increasingly using SMS for two-factor auth so that's starting to be an issue).
I quite often see students with far less disposable income than me spending £600 on a brand-new iPhone and then £10-20/month on a contract for it. This isn't a new phenomenon by any means, but a lot of people seem really bad at doing cost-benefit analyses.
This is how people you fight poverty. Maintain the family unit, help your children to become more successful than yourself.
I'd argue exactly the opposite. Parents are now one of the biggest mortgage lenders in the UK and this has increased wealth inequality: your parents' wealth is now a bigger indicator of whether you'll be able to afford a house than your personal income. If this continues, you'll see a greater divide between those born to well-off parents and those who weren't.
Want to keep Firefox competitive, allow XUL extensions
Compartmentalised rendering or XUL, pick one. If you pick compartmentalisation, people complain that you've broken their plugins. If you pick XUL, people complain that a bug exploited in a one tab allowed an attacker to compromise your entire browser and get at all of the credentials that the browser can access.
and Windows XP,
So, you want an insecure browser running on an insecure (i.e. known vulnerabilities, being exploited in the wild, no patches available) OS?
There are a lot of proposals, but the fully costed ones I've seen for the UK set the UBI rate at about the same as the current tax-free earning allowance. They then raise each of the tax brackets' rates by a few percent, and introduce one extra one for people earning more than £100K/year. The last one I looked at would leave me about £1000/year worse off, but people on minimum wage jobs better off. It would also be likely to bring a lot of people back into part-time work, as they wouldn't face losing unemployment benefits if they worked a little bit (and would be paying tax on that income for every pound that they actually earned, though at a low rate). It seemed like a pretty good deal for me.
So what is the part of for-profit journals that is worth the money that they're paid, if they're not editing and they're not paying reviewers and they're not producing paper versions that anyone cares about?
There's some truth to the grandparent. There are enough papers published now that the ones that I'm most likely to read are ones where someone says 'this was an interesting paper, you should read it', rather than simply reading all of the ones published in relevant journals (on top of the pile of ones that I have to review).
2) Running a journal is a lot of work for no extra pay
If you're doing online-only publication, it's not that much harder than being on the programme committee for a conference (actually, less so, because you don't have such hard deadlines) and academics are expected to do that for the good of the subject and for no extra pay.
- An academic who spent a large chunk of his Christmas holiday reviewing a big pile of papers for an ACM conference.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. I had a look and my phone hadn't had a security update for over a year, so it seemed that now was as good a time as any to replace the stock install with something better.
I did an adb backup and copied the contents of the sdcard partition. Unlocking the bootloader deleted everything, which seemed a bit gratuitous, but then the TWRP, LineageOS and pick OpenGApps installs all went fine and I was able to install the privileged version of F-Droid. Not sure if I'll keep the Google stuff - the only app that I use from the Play store is the United Airlines app and it's also in the Amazon store.
Reinstalling all of my apps went mostly smoothly. Unfortunately, adb restore doesn't work from 5.1 to 7.1 because the filesystem layout has changed and it isn't clever enough to move things to their new location. The one slightly stressful moment was when I realised that my BookCatalog data hadn't transferred and my last full backup was from before I moved house and scanned around 600 books. Fortunately, the data was there in the adb backup and I was able to reinstall it manually (this was nontrivial because the instructions for extracting the backup say to use openssl zlib, but zlib isn't in the default openssl build and so I had to compile a new openssl binary to extract it). Having a rooted phone meant that I could just insert the database and settings files in the correct place in /data.
So far, everything is positive. The phone feels a little bit faster (hopefully it will get even faster tomorrow after the AOT compiler has run overnight), the base install is about 2GB smaller, so I have a lot more free space (the Motorola version had a load of apps that I didn't want, but which took up space anyway). The newer version of Android finally supports my old ThinkOutside folding keyboard, which I used to write a lot of articles with my old Nokia 770 - now that it works with my phone and the phone has vim installed, I expect to get a lot more use from it.
I'm now using a our-year old phone with a brand new OS and it's completely adequate for my needs. I'll probably keep it for at least another one - there's no user replaceable battery though, so that's probably the limiting factor. Thanks again - I hate to waste working hardware.
Maybe you should try a better search engine then?
The stuff that everyone wants to use is a combination of a .exe and a load of .dlls. The .exe will be x86. Any bundled .dlls will be x86. The system .dlls (where a lot of apps spend a lot of their processor time, doing things like text layout and rendering, animations, and so on) will all be native. There's a penalty for calling between the two worlds, but only a few dozen instructions.
$60/month? I don't think I could spend that much on a phone contract here, even if I wanted to. Is that unlimited calls, 4G data and texts?
Unfortunately, it just takes one compromised machine entering your network for that to be an issue. If someone leaves it enabled on their laptop at some open WiFi access point, gets infected, and then connects to your corporate network, then a worm can propagate. Fortunately, there probably aren't enough machines running Samba (macOS switched to Apple's own CIFS implementation since Samba went GPLv3) for it to be easy to propagate (though if someone combined it with the recent Windows SMB vulnerability, then you'd have an interesting worm).
Did you read the link that you titled 'bullshit'? It says people are commuting long distances, this is bad for their general wellbeing, bad for their productivity, and an increasing number are telecommuting as a result. That in no way contradicts what I said, it just adds another reason to avoid jobs that require you to own a car.
Thanks, it looks as if my phone is supported. One thing I didn't get from their web site: do they have an update mechanism that doesn't involve doing a complete reinstall (after the initial install overwriting the vendor-supplied Android, I mean)?
False equivalence, and the fact that you don't understand the difference between capital cost and TCO tells anyone reading your post a great deal about your financial acumen.
This needs moderating up. Anyone who thinks that renting is such a great financial choice needs to think about why rental property is available. Could it be because the rent plus appreciation on the property is worth more than the sum of the maintenance, rental management overhead, and either loan interest or opportunity cost from sinking the money into the building? If this isn't the case, expect either the rental prices to increase until it is or the availability of rented accommodation to plummet. If it is, then you might want to rethink you notion that you're so smart to be making money for someone else.
Selling isn't the only option. When I moved here for a job, I rented out the house I had bought, which helped offset the cost of renting somewhere with much higher property prices.
The problem is the rate of change. If house prices drop significantly, then you have people with negative equity and so they can't easily relocate for a job, can't remortgage (so may be stuck with very bad terms on a variable rate mortgage), and so on. If property prices go up too much, then the income needed to save for a deposit goes up a lot as well. Ideally, house price inflation, retail price index inflation, and wage inflation would all be the same. Unfortunately, each one of these is smaller than the previous one currently and that leaves you with a situation where owning property is more lucrative than working.
There are two issues: Are you saving a sensible amount, will that amount ever amount to the ability to purchase a house. They're related, but they're not the same: there are lots of reasons to have a good safety net other than saving for a house. I'd be very nervous if I only had $1,000 in liquid assets.
I did the calculations a few months ago for a postdoc trying to buy a house here in Cambridge. Assuming that property prices and salaries keep increasing at the rates that they have been for the last few years (not necessarily a given - I actually picked a slightly lower number for house price growth given Brexit) and assuming that you need a 20% deposit for a house, the amount of the deposit will go up by 10-25% (over 10 years) of the gross (pre-tax) salary of a postdoc per year. Even if you save 10% of your gross income (basically impossible with rental prices here) now, you're not actually getting any closer to a house deposit, and next year that 10% will be higher. That's basically unsustainable, but if you don't have savings then you won't be able to buy when the bubble bursts.
easing an expensive car you can show off instead of buying one more practical
buying a new car instead of a used car
replacing a car after using it just 3 years
Or, in many cases, buying a car at all. Before I bought my first house, I looked at the difference in price for somewhere cheaper a bit out of town and then added in the running costs of a car (which I didn't need living in the city) and, counting appreciation and depreciation, came to the conclusion that not buying a car was a better financial bet. I'd done something similar earlier when I was renting: the monthly operating costs of a car were more than the difference in rent between somewhere near the middle of town and somewhere far enough out that I'd need to drive. The last time this came up, someone posted a detailed analysis that someone had done for the US.
Cars cost a lot to maintain, insure, and fuel, and depreciate over their lifetime. The benefits only outweigh the costs if you have a well-paid job out in the countryside.
There's a simple solution to this: choose better friends. If your friends are going to judge you based on the toys that you buy, then they're probably idiots. Kindergarten is about the right time to learn this lesson.
The existing Firefox extensions API gives direct access to things that, in any other modern browser, are in different security domains and completely isolated aside from a set of regularly audited communication channels. You can't retain it with compartmentalisation unless you want all of the extensions to be exploit vectors.
A smartphone is now pretty close to being essential. An expensive one is not. My phone is now over 3 years old (and cost about £100 then) and still does everything I need it to. I'm on a pre-pay contract and typically spend about £1/month on it. I'll probably replace it soon, because it hasn't had security updates for a little while (I don't trust it with any important data, passwords, and so on, but people are increasingly using SMS for two-factor auth so that's starting to be an issue).
I quite often see students with far less disposable income than me spending £600 on a brand-new iPhone and then £10-20/month on a contract for it. This isn't a new phenomenon by any means, but a lot of people seem really bad at doing cost-benefit analyses.
This is how people you fight poverty. Maintain the family unit, help your children to become more successful than yourself.
I'd argue exactly the opposite. Parents are now one of the biggest mortgage lenders in the UK and this has increased wealth inequality: your parents' wealth is now a bigger indicator of whether you'll be able to afford a house than your personal income. If this continues, you'll see a greater divide between those born to well-off parents and those who weren't.
Want to keep Firefox competitive, allow XUL extensions
Compartmentalised rendering or XUL, pick one. If you pick compartmentalisation, people complain that you've broken their plugins. If you pick XUL, people complain that a bug exploited in a one tab allowed an attacker to compromise your entire browser and get at all of the credentials that the browser can access.
and Windows XP,
So, you want an insecure browser running on an insecure (i.e. known vulnerabilities, being exploited in the wild, no patches available) OS?
There are a lot of proposals, but the fully costed ones I've seen for the UK set the UBI rate at about the same as the current tax-free earning allowance. They then raise each of the tax brackets' rates by a few percent, and introduce one extra one for people earning more than £100K/year. The last one I looked at would leave me about £1000/year worse off, but people on minimum wage jobs better off. It would also be likely to bring a lot of people back into part-time work, as they wouldn't face losing unemployment benefits if they worked a little bit (and would be paying tax on that income for every pound that they actually earned, though at a low rate). It seemed like a pretty good deal for me.
So what is the part of for-profit journals that is worth the money that they're paid, if they're not editing and they're not paying reviewers and they're not producing paper versions that anyone cares about?
Oh, you mean the thing that's done, for free, by volunteer academics? Yes, I do that. No, I'm not paid for it.
There already IS benefits
If you're willing to go to the effort of making your typos bold, perhaps you could just fix them instead.
There's some truth to the grandparent. There are enough papers published now that the ones that I'm most likely to read are ones where someone says 'this was an interesting paper, you should read it', rather than simply reading all of the ones published in relevant journals (on top of the pile of ones that I have to review).
You know what else most of the universities on that list have in common? They own publishers, which make money from for-profit journals.
2) Running a journal is a lot of work for no extra pay
If you're doing online-only publication, it's not that much harder than being on the programme committee for a conference (actually, less so, because you don't have such hard deadlines) and academics are expected to do that for the good of the subject and for no extra pay.
- An academic who spent a large chunk of his Christmas holiday reviewing a big pile of papers for an ACM conference.