Don't forget that after abandoning Glass and the Explorers who paid a significant overcharge with the expectation of above-average service and support, Glass was "transitioned" to Fadell.
Look where that got Glass - even more dead than it was when the Explorers program was canned with a device that was LESS functional than it was when it shipped to most users. (KitKat on Glass was a clusterfuck of epic proportions, it destroyed battery life, stability, and performance, and they never got it to perform anywhere close to what it delivered when running ICS. What's worse, the fixes they DID managed to get in over the summer of 2014 to make it suck less all got reverted out for the final software update in September/October 2014 or so, which rendered units near-useless. When delivered, my Glass unit easily got 24 hours of battery life with my typical usage patterns. After the final software update - my unit would usually run out of battery in 8 hours of sitting on a shelf doing absolutely nothing.)
Some other "feature" - obviously he's playing back files that are NOT in a format supported by the client device. In which case - duh it's gonna transcode or you can't play it.
"One aspect of its refreshed strategy is to have two co-presidents, with two distinct strategies for China and the rest of the world."
This should have been the strategy from the beginning. The Chinese domestic market and the global market are vastly different. Cheap unmaintained crap with a glossy UI painted over a broken core does great in China, but Westerners hate it.
Similarly, the "clean" UI preferred by Westerners is hated in Asian countries, especially China.
Moto declined because its customers began seeing evidences of "Chinaficiation" - Lenovo fired Motorola's applications team who knew how to make "value add" additions to Android without falling into the "Touchwiz Trap", and then continued with a rapid-fire string of early EOLs from a manufacturer whose recent successes in the West entirely were due to a reputation of "affordable but not crap with rapid updates".
Yup. This isn't really a valid argument against increasing the minimum wage.
At worst, it merely hastens the inevitable by a few years, but this is going to happen.
This is relevant to the current election cycle for multiple reasons - free trade agreements are a major source of contention, and Trump talks about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US - the problem is, as the recent massive Foxconn layoffs proved, the majority of those jobs are NEVER coming back no matter what you do, unless you enact a New Jersey-style law against automation. (New Jersey requires all gas stations to be full-service, you cannot pump your own gas. One of the reasons for this rather unique law is to create jobs.)
Everything about this story is that it's a hit attempt by someone who got laid off.
1) FORMER employees 2) ANONYMOUS former employees - even though they are no longer employed by the company, they are not willing to identify themselves. It's pretty clear they know they would lose a libel lawsuit if their identity became known.
The Pro version contains the same crap that caused me to uninstall the free version, such as some snake-oil "Performance Optimizer" tool that you can't disable.
At least in my case, the reason I used ES for a LONG time wasn't due to lack of other file browsers - ES had REALLY good built-in LAN support (such as a fully userspace SMB client that did not require the kernel SMB client support to be enabled/existent).
I already hit that threshold 3-4 months ago. It was giving me some popup about some sort of "optimization" routine, which had the options of "OK" or "Hide" - Hide did NOT stop it from running in the background.
Tracfone's devices ARE subsidized. Tracfone are stupid and rely on technological measures (bootloader/SIM-locking) to enforce their subsidies instead of legal measures. This gives the illusion of their phones being unsubsidized to the end customer even though they are, but also creates a significant market for bootloader/SIM-unlock exploits - A friend of mine makes QUITE a bit of money finding exploits in Tracfone's bootloaders and selling those exploits to Asian carriers, who buy the phone, unlock it, and resell it at a significantly increased price (but significantly LESS than what the same manufacturer charges for the carrier to buy it unlocked from the OEM.)
Odd - usually cloudy days are the worst case. (Why? Because there's no angle at which you can rotate the phone to eliminate the specular reflectance from the cloudy sky.)
So it's strange that the OP is having issues in direct sun - in this case it's easy to rotate the phone so you don't see the one superbright specular highlight in the sky. (You will never see a display that is fully readable against a direct-sun specular...)
Many AMOLED displays use a pentile arrangement where you don't have individual red/green/blue pixels per pixel site. Might explain the reduced perceived resolution.
And yeah - in theory AMOLED's far more saturated primaries should be a major advantage, especially when viewing wide-gamut content like Adobe RGB - but if you don't desaturate the display for sRGB content it's going to look bogus.
I wonder if the gamut of most mobile AMOLEDs is wider than DCI P3... not like consumers ever get content in the P3 gamut.
My guess is that it isn't the narrowband issue that's a problem - the issue is that many of the displays are likely not calibrated or colormatched at all, so a display that has a very wide gamut is using fully saturated primaries when displaying colors that are not supposed to be that saturated.
If you displayed sRGB "blue" as a fully saturated blue on an AMOLED display, you'd likely wind up with vastly oversaturated colors. To properly take advantage of the display's gamut, you'd have to calibrate it to only display partially saturated primaries for the sRGB primaries, and only display "full saturation" when the content is from a wider-gamut colorspace like Adobe RGB.
Reality is, it's easier to market an oversaturated display than a "correct" one to most people.
When the digital switchover happened, most TVs in my parents' house were older than I was (1979).
Also, my parents were a classic example of the FCC fucking up when determining "minimum watchable" SNR - LARGE numbers of people in fringe areas were perfectly happy with video that was well below SNRs for analog TV that the FCC considered to be below their definition of "watchable".
Part of it is - Was this violation due to him recording something without permission, or due to him recording something with permission of the musician that fell afoul of very complicated ASCAP/BMI rules on "public" performances because one of the songs turned out to be a cover?
Also, don't forget that the majority of the security "upgrades" that were standardized after 9/11 (such as only ticketed passengers past security) were proven ineffective by 9/11 - the measures were already in place at the particular departure airports!
I read the summary of this, and my thought was - "I'm shocked it took this long to happen" - That said, I am surprised they just went for the entrance hall and not the security lines.
$40 out the door sounds like you had a subsidized phone - this $399 price is the unsubsidized price.
That said, "budget friendly" is a Moto G, $179 for 8GB or $219 for 16GB but with the ability to stick in a 32GB MicroSD for $20 more. Those are the unsubsidized prices.
It appears based on maestroX's post above (which lists Silverpush-using apps) that nearly all of the offending apps on the market are clearly targeted at foreign users - primarily it seems Southeast Asian markets.
Which is consistent with the FTC's letter saying that no USA programming features the broadcast component of this technology.
Seems like this is a preemptive "US advertisers had better not use this" warning.
Also - most of the developers will likely just ignore the FTC due to lack of jurisdiction, as the worst case the FTC could do is have these apps blocked for US users which the developer probably doesn't care about.
For Insignal and Hardkernel's Exynos-based Android projects, their poor software support (vastly outdated software baselines - no excuse for development reference boards to have older software than carrier-approved Android handset releases for the same SoC, software baselines which were vasty different from any shipped product containing SoC, and Hardkernel's distribution of their Android source as a 2GB megatarball with no commit history - I hear they might have finally fixed this but back in 2012 their source was a 2.2GB megatarball) was the reason that nearly all maintainers of AOSP-derivative projects (such as CyanogenMod) for Samsung Exynos-based hardware decided to stop working with Samsung devices in late 2012. They were, simply, a bugridden nightmare.
Even if you regard that third horse as barely in the race (which it is, it's already more of a two-horse race as you point out):
Regarding the question, "is WhatsApp finally reducing the mobile landscape to a three-horse race ?" - No, they aren't. Because that would require it to be more than a three-horse race currently. It isn't. It's barely even more than a two-horse race.
"Even as they released their premium Cyanogen OS ROM for devices with proprietary extensions, the CyanogenMod ROM still stayed 100% open source."
That wasn't their original plan - but they realized after the Focal mess that trying to leverage your CLA to obtain dual-licensing rights to a GPL application that was written by an opensource contributor was a bad idea PR-wise. (Fortunately, their CLA didn't actually legally allow them to do what they wanted, and even if they did, that application was forked into CM directly from github without going through Gerrit and hence the CLA.)
I wouldn't say that until now the Cyngn team are really cool. The core team (who founded Cyngn) at one point went by the name "Team Douche" - and since the founding of Cyngn they've been pretty regularly living up to that name. Cyngn will always tell you that CyanogenMod is separate, but the reality is - All but 1-2 of those who have global +2 rights on the opensource project are employees of Cyngn. This is a fundamental conflict of interest, and it's clear that when it comes to corporate vs. community interests, corporate always takes precedence (see Launchergate)
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Someone should give one of those Dems a VidiU.
Don't forget that after abandoning Glass and the Explorers who paid a significant overcharge with the expectation of above-average service and support, Glass was "transitioned" to Fadell.
Look where that got Glass - even more dead than it was when the Explorers program was canned with a device that was LESS functional than it was when it shipped to most users. (KitKat on Glass was a clusterfuck of epic proportions, it destroyed battery life, stability, and performance, and they never got it to perform anywhere close to what it delivered when running ICS. What's worse, the fixes they DID managed to get in over the summer of 2014 to make it suck less all got reverted out for the final software update in September/October 2014 or so, which rendered units near-useless. When delivered, my Glass unit easily got 24 hours of battery life with my typical usage patterns. After the final software update - my unit would usually run out of battery in 8 hours of sitting on a shelf doing absolutely nothing.)
Some other "feature" - obviously he's playing back files that are NOT in a format supported by the client device. In which case - duh it's gonna transcode or you can't play it.
"One aspect of its refreshed strategy is to have two co-presidents, with two distinct strategies for China and the rest of the world."
This should have been the strategy from the beginning. The Chinese domestic market and the global market are vastly different. Cheap unmaintained crap with a glossy UI painted over a broken core does great in China, but Westerners hate it.
Similarly, the "clean" UI preferred by Westerners is hated in Asian countries, especially China.
Moto declined because its customers began seeing evidences of "Chinaficiation" - Lenovo fired Motorola's applications team who knew how to make "value add" additions to Android without falling into the "Touchwiz Trap", and then continued with a rapid-fire string of early EOLs from a manufacturer whose recent successes in the West entirely were due to a reputation of "affordable but not crap with rapid updates".
Yup. This isn't really a valid argument against increasing the minimum wage.
At worst, it merely hastens the inevitable by a few years, but this is going to happen.
This is relevant to the current election cycle for multiple reasons - free trade agreements are a major source of contention, and Trump talks about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US - the problem is, as the recent massive Foxconn layoffs proved, the majority of those jobs are NEVER coming back no matter what you do, unless you enact a New Jersey-style law against automation. (New Jersey requires all gas stations to be full-service, you cannot pump your own gas. One of the reasons for this rather unique law is to create jobs.)
Everything about this story is that it's a hit attempt by someone who got laid off.
1) FORMER employees
2) ANONYMOUS former employees - even though they are no longer employed by the company, they are not willing to identify themselves. It's pretty clear they know they would lose a libel lawsuit if their identity became known.
I don't think there's any "record" for parking tickets unless they are chronically unpaid.
Also, as the article author states, when these erroneous tickets have been challenged, the city did not fight them.
Of course, there are the people who didn't realize the rule changed and thought they were parking illegally...
There's no way in hell I'm paying for this crap.
The Pro version contains the same crap that caused me to uninstall the free version, such as some snake-oil "Performance Optimizer" tool that you can't disable.
At least in my case, the reason I used ES for a LONG time wasn't due to lack of other file browsers - ES had REALLY good built-in LAN support (such as a fully userspace SMB client that did not require the kernel SMB client support to be enabled/existent).
I already hit that threshold 3-4 months ago. It was giving me some popup about some sort of "optimization" routine, which had the options of "OK" or "Hide" - Hide did NOT stop it from running in the background.
Tracfone's devices ARE subsidized. Tracfone are stupid and rely on technological measures (bootloader/SIM-locking) to enforce their subsidies instead of legal measures. This gives the illusion of their phones being unsubsidized to the end customer even though they are, but also creates a significant market for bootloader/SIM-unlock exploits - A friend of mine makes QUITE a bit of money finding exploits in Tracfone's bootloaders and selling those exploits to Asian carriers, who buy the phone, unlock it, and resell it at a significantly increased price (but significantly LESS than what the same manufacturer charges for the carrier to buy it unlocked from the OEM.)
Odd - usually cloudy days are the worst case. (Why? Because there's no angle at which you can rotate the phone to eliminate the specular reflectance from the cloudy sky.)
So it's strange that the OP is having issues in direct sun - in this case it's easy to rotate the phone so you don't see the one superbright specular highlight in the sky. (You will never see a display that is fully readable against a direct-sun specular...)
Many AMOLED displays use a pentile arrangement where you don't have individual red/green/blue pixels per pixel site. Might explain the reduced perceived resolution.
And yeah - in theory AMOLED's far more saturated primaries should be a major advantage, especially when viewing wide-gamut content like Adobe RGB - but if you don't desaturate the display for sRGB content it's going to look bogus.
I wonder if the gamut of most mobile AMOLEDs is wider than DCI P3... not like consumers ever get content in the P3 gamut.
My guess is that it isn't the narrowband issue that's a problem - the issue is that many of the displays are likely not calibrated or colormatched at all, so a display that has a very wide gamut is using fully saturated primaries when displaying colors that are not supposed to be that saturated.
If you displayed sRGB "blue" as a fully saturated blue on an AMOLED display, you'd likely wind up with vastly oversaturated colors. To properly take advantage of the display's gamut, you'd have to calibrate it to only display partially saturated primaries for the sRGB primaries, and only display "full saturation" when the content is from a wider-gamut colorspace like Adobe RGB.
Reality is, it's easier to market an oversaturated display than a "correct" one to most people.
When the digital switchover happened, most TVs in my parents' house were older than I was (1979).
Also, my parents were a classic example of the FCC fucking up when determining "minimum watchable" SNR - LARGE numbers of people in fringe areas were perfectly happy with video that was well below SNRs for analog TV that the FCC considered to be below their definition of "watchable".
Part of it is - Was this violation due to him recording something without permission, or due to him recording something with permission of the musician that fell afoul of very complicated ASCAP/BMI rules on "public" performances because one of the songs turned out to be a cover?
A lot of it boils down to the rise of heavily asymmetric connectivity combined with "no servers" clauses in many ISP contracts.
That kind of killed the whole distributed nature of things...
Oh yeah, guess who are involved heavily in the last-mile service market? Cable companies.
Also, don't forget that the majority of the security "upgrades" that were standardized after 9/11 (such as only ticketed passengers past security) were proven ineffective by 9/11 - the measures were already in place at the particular departure airports!
I read the summary of this, and my thought was - "I'm shocked it took this long to happen" - That said, I am surprised they just went for the entrance hall and not the security lines.
$40 out the door sounds like you had a subsidized phone - this $399 price is the unsubsidized price.
That said, "budget friendly" is a Moto G, $179 for 8GB or $219 for 16GB but with the ability to stick in a 32GB MicroSD for $20 more. Those are the unsubsidized prices.
oh wait... only $11 more now - http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-...
It appears based on maestroX's post above (which lists Silverpush-using apps) that nearly all of the offending apps on the market are clearly targeted at foreign users - primarily it seems Southeast Asian markets.
Which is consistent with the FTC's letter saying that no USA programming features the broadcast component of this technology.
Seems like this is a preemptive "US advertisers had better not use this" warning.
Also - most of the developers will likely just ignore the FTC due to lack of jurisdiction, as the worst case the FTC could do is have these apps blocked for US users which the developer probably doesn't care about.
Not sure why you got marked as flamebait here.
For Insignal and Hardkernel's Exynos-based Android projects, their poor software support (vastly outdated software baselines - no excuse for development reference boards to have older software than carrier-approved Android handset releases for the same SoC, software baselines which were vasty different from any shipped product containing SoC, and Hardkernel's distribution of their Android source as a 2GB megatarball with no commit history - I hear they might have finally fixed this but back in 2012 their source was a 2.2GB megatarball) was the reason that nearly all maintainers of AOSP-derivative projects (such as CyanogenMod) for Samsung Exynos-based hardware decided to stop working with Samsung devices in late 2012. They were, simply, a bugridden nightmare.
Yeah, that one (Pripyat) became for all purposes a case study in "Reactor operator HOWTO: Making your plant explode intentionally."...
Even if you regard that third horse as barely in the race (which it is, it's already more of a two-horse race as you point out):
Regarding the question, "is WhatsApp finally reducing the mobile landscape to a three-horse race ?" - No, they aren't. Because that would require it to be more than a three-horse race currently. It isn't. It's barely even more than a two-horse race.
"Even as they released their premium Cyanogen OS ROM for devices with proprietary extensions, the CyanogenMod ROM still stayed 100% open source."
That wasn't their original plan - but they realized after the Focal mess that trying to leverage your CLA to obtain dual-licensing rights to a GPL application that was written by an opensource contributor was a bad idea PR-wise. (Fortunately, their CLA didn't actually legally allow them to do what they wanted, and even if they did, that application was forked into CM directly from github without going through Gerrit and hence the CLA.)
I wouldn't say that until now the Cyngn team are really cool. The core team (who founded Cyngn) at one point went by the name "Team Douche" - and since the founding of Cyngn they've been pretty regularly living up to that name. Cyngn will always tell you that CyanogenMod is separate, but the reality is - All but 1-2 of those who have global +2 rights on the opensource project are employees of Cyngn. This is a fundamental conflict of interest, and it's clear that when it comes to corporate vs. community interests, corporate always takes precedence (see Launchergate)