They're "horrible" but they are, sadly, the best now that TI has exited the business.
MTK is notorious for giving their customers C&D letters when they dare to comply with the GPL (Google is cracking down on this with Android One, but I know of at least one non-One device that had its kernel sources C&Ded by MTK.) Rockchip and company are no better Samsung publishes no reference source that matches any production devices (I speak from experience here - back in 2012/2013 I was one of the CyanogenMod co-maintainers for Samsung Exynos4 devices. Every member of the team got sick of dealing with Samsung's crap and lack of documentation, we all switched to Qualcomm) Nvidia was horrible but have improved a lot with the SHIELD family of devices, although I dislike their approach to AOSP support. They have a lot of closed-source binary HALs (just like Samsung) but at least don't hack the interfaces of those HALs in ways that break compatibility with AOSP. Unfortunately this means that if you find an issue with the HAL (such as not supporting AC3 passthrough) there's nothing you can do about it.
Qualcomm is no angel (see the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 factory image messes), but with their CAF reference sources, they're better than anyone else currently in the business about software support.
Yeah. I've only seen CB used very recently - I think I first saw an alert for it in early 2013. At least once, an Amber Alert went out by CB which really freaked a bunch of people out because they'd never seen a CB alert before.
I think you didn't understand what you linked to when you stated, "is apparently present for some fairly popular devices, but not activated in software"
The problem is that since FM is a highly niche feature, there's no standard for FM HALs in Android. This means that those manufacturers that do implement FM do it in their stock firmware in whatever way they want. With one exception (STMicro's implementation used in many Sony devices), they never document this methodology. (STM's HALs were supported in CyanogenMod for a while, but was eventually dropped because while STMicro documented the basic HAL interfaces, there was no opensource reference HAL implementation, and thus the interface only supported older Sony devices with blobs supported by that HAL.)
You'll note that: 1) All of the devices that app supports are older devices. 2) All of the devices that app supports DID support FM in their stock firmwares. The only issue was that if you replaced the stock firmware with an AOSP derivative, you lost FM, because it was a niche feature and no device maintainer had the time to work on it, partly due to the lack of any reference implementation of an STMicro HAL. I speak from experience in this - I was the CyanogenMod maintainer for the original Galaxy Note from Spring 2012 until I left CM in August 2013 - the Note had FM, but all of my time was consumed reverse engineering core functionality and not niche functionality.)
I haven't seen a smartphone with onboard FM hardware in a while. They aren't simply "disabling" it - an FM receiver costs more, requires board real estate, and as you said, has the additional challenge of an antenna.
It's cost for a feature very few people use. FM is deprecated and obsolete - it's been dead in Europe in favor of DAB for years, and in the USA, satellite radio is the go-to for vehicles and streaming is the go-to for anywhere with wired Internet access (the backhaul for wi-fi in 95%+ of cases is wired DSL, cable, or fiber).
The NAB should look at themselves before complaining about others. FM is no longer a desirable feature for most people thanks to Clear Channel abusing every loophole in station ownership rules (There are various rules that are supposed to prevent one company from owning too many stations, among other things to promote a diversity of content.) The end result is that the content of FM stations is utter crap. The last time I drive without XM, on a single 4-hour drive I listened to one song at least three times, I think it was four. There were numerous other repeats. Meanwhile, if I do that drive with my XM subscription, it's rare that I'll hear even a single repeat.
Simply put, if a phone has FM now, I see that as a reason NOT to buy it, because that is paying extra for hardware that I'm NEVER going to use.
They are one and the same. Every person who has a leadership role in the CyanogenMod project is an employee of Cyanogen Inc.
CyanogenMod is trademarked, Cyanogen (in respect to Android operating systems) is trademarked - and Cyanogen Inc. (or Steve Kondik personally, I'm not sure, but he's CTO of Cyngn) is the holder of those trademarks.
Every time Cyngn fucks up PR-wise, CM gets splash damage.
Why? Because for all you want to say Cyanogen Inc. != CyanogenMod - that's not true. Every person who has a leadership role in CyanogenMod and drives the direction of the project is an employee of Cyngn. That's a fundamental conflict of interest that cannot be resolved.
Yeah the MS junk won't be installed into CM just yet - but wait until that "Deep integration" Kirt McMaster keeps talking up starts happening - you're going to see architectural changes happen in CM designed solely to be beneficial to Microsoft.
Yeah. As much as I'd like to be as "massively open" as Replicant is (and the Replicant guys' work was HUGELEY beneficial with some of the nightmares that were Haxxinos, I have had some great conversations with Paul during the days when Teamhacksung was active), the truth is that as long as SoC manufacturers are douchebags (Sadly, Qualcomm is the most open of the viable vendors out there - for all of the bad things they've done for open source, some of which were the final straw that led to JBQ stepping down as AOSP lead, Samsung and MediaTek are FAR worse. I've heard good things about Freescale's ARM i.MX6 chips as far as openness, but their "newest" offering is a quad Cortex-A9...)
Reverse engineering all of that is a MASSIVELY time consuming effort, and it doesn't help that some of the best tools for reducing that time investment are incredibly expensive - Hex-Rays Decompiler for ARM is a few thousand dollars.
The problem is that their actions are always inconsistent with their talk. While they talk an Open OS, their reaction to Google moving more and more components of AOSP into GMS and abandoning the open-source AOSP variants is: Take that list of applications and create their own proprietary versions or license them from someone else: First Focal, and when attempting to use their CLA to obtain dual-licensing rights to Focal failed (due to their CLA fortunately lacking some of the nastiness found in other CLAs like Harmony - not all CLAs are created equal, as Koush learned the hard way with Focal), CameraNext GalleryNext EmailNext aka Boxer Now, Microsoft's suite of proprietary apps, ones which contribute further to the continued dominance of Office by encouraging use of proprietary formats prone to vendor lock-in (Google is, in contrast, pretty good about giving people who want to migrate away their data in open formats - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... )
"He also said that they knew it could run out and that the next version would have more." - Hence Elon's comment back then that the next one should go boom for a different reason. He was right.:)
I live in one of those areas, which is why older vehicles that are still on the road in respectable quantities in Southern states simply don't exist here... Even with decades of improvement in corrosion control/resistance, vehicles in "rust belt" states like New York don't last nearly as long as the same vehicle would in a place like Georgia or the Carolinas.
OnePlus was not the first to contract Cyngn to provide them an OS - they were the second.
Oppo was the first with the N1.
You'll see a trend of Cyngn partners dropping them as Cyngn burns them. Look at the job they did with the N1 - didn't get an official KitKat OTA until after Lollipop became available. (Nightlies don't count since they're unsupported.)
Also, OxygenOS is not an Android "fork" - I would not consider anything that passes Google's CTS and is in fact Google Mobile Services (GMS, aka gapps) certified to be a "fork".
It's Cyngn that's trying to fork Android to create a variant independent from Google.
The only case I know of where an algorithm was actually backdoored was one of the random number generation schemes... The algorithm in question happens to be (IIRC) quite fast.
In other cases (DES I think??? I could be wrong.) the NSA recommended some oddball changes. No one could find a negative consequence of them so they went in - a decade or so later, it turns out that the original implementation of DES DID have a cryptographic flaw and the NSA recommendations fixed that.
Keep in mind there are two parts of the NSA, ones which have in many ways highly conflicting goals: 1) One part is tasked with compromising the information infrastructure of our enemies - these are the ones who keep on making the news these days 2) Another part is tasked with protecting our critical information infrastructure, especially with protecting data sensitive to national security. These are the people who do Type I crypto certification, worked on creating SELinux, etc. These rarely make the news but in general, from our perspective these are the good guys. You can tell that AES-256 is NOT backdoored by the NSA since they allow it to be used to protect classified information (NSA Suite B - you can assume anything in Suite B is solid since the NSA is using it themselves.)
If you look at TFA - yup, this happens multiple times per year. Half the articles on that site are so-and-so flew an Open Skies flight over other so-and-so.
Interestingly, Norway is the reason Denmark is one of the few countries to achieve more than 20-25% grid penetration for wind/solar - Denmark's neighbor to the north has EXCELLENT energy storage facilities due to their geography.
(When the wind is blowing/sun shining, Denmark sells surplus power to Norway. When it isn't, they buy it back. Note that they're usually paying far more than what they sold it for due to supply/demand economics.)
Yup. FYI the hydro facility's output is throttled based on time of day to make the falls look pretty at peak tourism times.
I've seen claims that from 50-75% of the river's flow is diverted to hydro depending on time of day and season (more diversion is allowed in winter when there are fewer tourists) - There is not as much need for a dam thanks to consistent flow and the fact that there's a pretty hefty height difference, although there are dams downstream for large pumped-storage facilities (which provide an alternative to damming the river as far as storage goes) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
"Because of the Hoover dam image" - what the heck do you mean here?
Yes, hydro is not talked about, and yes, the Hoover Dam (along with the various other hydroelectric dams in this country) is a major reason why - Because it has ALREADY BEEN BUILT AND DEPLOYED FOR DECADES AND IT ISN'T MEETING OUR NEEDS.
We simply don't have enough rivers to dam that we haven't ALREADY dammed. The USA's hydro resources are tapped out - and many of them are encountering severe problems due to lack of rainfall lately. Lake Mead, for example, reached its lowest level since the Hoover Dam was built last year.
That was the thing - it had a healthier third-party developer community than anything else that was out there at the time.
Android pretty much stole all of the legacy WM5/6 usersbase I think - very few WM5/6 people I know went to WP7.
In fact quite a few people I knew (including myself) used crazy hacks such as XDAndroid - my first Android device was an AT&T/HTC Tilt 2 (aka Touch Pro 2) - I still have fond memories of that device.:)
Yeah. Lots of people rave about spec e-peen, but the truth is, even older chips are MORE than powerful enough to provide a good experience except for the niche things like hardcore gaming.
Interestingly, for hardcore gaming, NVidia gave up on the phone form factor. The SHIELD Portable's form factor allowed it to have active cooling for the Tegra4, and the SHIELD Tablet has a phase change heat spreader (aka heatpipe) over its CPU - a predecessor to this stuff Fujitsu is working on.
For nearly all smartphone users, more basic chips (like the Snapdragon 400) are more than enough, the problem has been that until the Moto G, low-end chips got match with piss-poor software quality. Moto is the first company to release low-end phones with software that didn't suck.
Slashdot Mirror
"Instead" doesn't apply here... SINCE THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
http://googlewebmastercentral....
Not really. With a few exceptions, circuit boards are thin. Very few manufacturers use 3D techniques (daughterboards, etc.) especially not in mobile.
So "larger circuit board" means "more area but rarely thicker".
"more area at same thickness" means "wider/taller device"
"wider/taller device" means "more room for battery".
They're "horrible" but they are, sadly, the best now that TI has exited the business.
MTK is notorious for giving their customers C&D letters when they dare to comply with the GPL (Google is cracking down on this with Android One, but I know of at least one non-One device that had its kernel sources C&Ded by MTK.)
Rockchip and company are no better
Samsung publishes no reference source that matches any production devices (I speak from experience here - back in 2012/2013 I was one of the CyanogenMod co-maintainers for Samsung Exynos4 devices. Every member of the team got sick of dealing with Samsung's crap and lack of documentation, we all switched to Qualcomm)
Nvidia was horrible but have improved a lot with the SHIELD family of devices, although I dislike their approach to AOSP support. They have a lot of closed-source binary HALs (just like Samsung) but at least don't hack the interfaces of those HALs in ways that break compatibility with AOSP. Unfortunately this means that if you find an issue with the HAL (such as not supporting AC3 passthrough) there's nothing you can do about it.
Qualcomm is no angel (see the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 factory image messes), but with their CAF reference sources, they're better than anyone else currently in the business about software support.
Yeah. I've only seen CB used very recently - I think I first saw an alert for it in early 2013. At least once, an Amber Alert went out by CB which really freaked a bunch of people out because they'd never seen a CB alert before.
I think you didn't understand what you linked to when you stated, "is apparently present for some fairly popular devices, but not activated in software"
The problem is that since FM is a highly niche feature, there's no standard for FM HALs in Android. This means that those manufacturers that do implement FM do it in their stock firmware in whatever way they want. With one exception (STMicro's implementation used in many Sony devices), they never document this methodology. (STM's HALs were supported in CyanogenMod for a while, but was eventually dropped because while STMicro documented the basic HAL interfaces, there was no opensource reference HAL implementation, and thus the interface only supported older Sony devices with blobs supported by that HAL.)
You'll note that:
1) All of the devices that app supports are older devices.
2) All of the devices that app supports DID support FM in their stock firmwares. The only issue was that if you replaced the stock firmware with an AOSP derivative, you lost FM, because it was a niche feature and no device maintainer had the time to work on it, partly due to the lack of any reference implementation of an STMicro HAL. I speak from experience in this - I was the CyanogenMod maintainer for the original Galaxy Note from Spring 2012 until I left CM in August 2013 - the Note had FM, but all of my time was consumed reverse engineering core functionality and not niche functionality.)
I haven't seen a smartphone with onboard FM hardware in a while. They aren't simply "disabling" it - an FM receiver costs more, requires board real estate, and as you said, has the additional challenge of an antenna.
It's cost for a feature very few people use. FM is deprecated and obsolete - it's been dead in Europe in favor of DAB for years, and in the USA, satellite radio is the go-to for vehicles and streaming is the go-to for anywhere with wired Internet access (the backhaul for wi-fi in 95%+ of cases is wired DSL, cable, or fiber).
The NAB should look at themselves before complaining about others. FM is no longer a desirable feature for most people thanks to Clear Channel abusing every loophole in station ownership rules (There are various rules that are supposed to prevent one company from owning too many stations, among other things to promote a diversity of content.) The end result is that the content of FM stations is utter crap. The last time I drive without XM, on a single 4-hour drive I listened to one song at least three times, I think it was four. There were numerous other repeats. Meanwhile, if I do that drive with my XM subscription, it's rare that I'll hear even a single repeat.
Simply put, if a phone has FM now, I see that as a reason NOT to buy it, because that is paying extra for hardware that I'm NEVER going to use.
You seem to have forgotten the announcement that they're working on a device for Blu that will not contain GMS.
They are one and the same. Every person who has a leadership role in the CyanogenMod project is an employee of Cyanogen Inc.
CyanogenMod is trademarked, Cyanogen (in respect to Android operating systems) is trademarked - and Cyanogen Inc. (or Steve Kondik personally, I'm not sure, but he's CTO of Cyngn) is the holder of those trademarks.
Key being "Yet".
Every time Cyngn fucks up PR-wise, CM gets splash damage.
Why? Because for all you want to say Cyanogen Inc. != CyanogenMod - that's not true. Every person who has a leadership role in CyanogenMod and drives the direction of the project is an employee of Cyngn. That's a fundamental conflict of interest that cannot be resolved.
Yeah the MS junk won't be installed into CM just yet - but wait until that "Deep integration" Kirt McMaster keeps talking up starts happening - you're going to see architectural changes happen in CM designed solely to be beneficial to Microsoft.
Yeah. As much as I'd like to be as "massively open" as Replicant is (and the Replicant guys' work was HUGELEY beneficial with some of the nightmares that were Haxxinos, I have had some great conversations with Paul during the days when Teamhacksung was active), the truth is that as long as SoC manufacturers are douchebags (Sadly, Qualcomm is the most open of the viable vendors out there - for all of the bad things they've done for open source, some of which were the final straw that led to JBQ stepping down as AOSP lead, Samsung and MediaTek are FAR worse. I've heard good things about Freescale's ARM i.MX6 chips as far as openness, but their "newest" offering is a quad Cortex-A9...)
Reverse engineering all of that is a MASSIVELY time consuming effort, and it doesn't help that some of the best tools for reducing that time investment are incredibly expensive - Hex-Rays Decompiler for ARM is a few thousand dollars.
WAT?
https://cyngn.com/blog/its-tim... - They constantly talk about how they're all about an "open OS" and "open Android".
The problem is that their actions are always inconsistent with their talk. While they talk an Open OS, their reaction to Google moving more and more components of AOSP into GMS and abandoning the open-source AOSP variants is:
Take that list of applications and create their own proprietary versions or license them from someone else:
First Focal, and when attempting to use their CLA to obtain dual-licensing rights to Focal failed (due to their CLA fortunately lacking some of the nastiness found in other CLAs like Harmony - not all CLAs are created equal, as Koush learned the hard way with Focal), CameraNext
GalleryNext
EmailNext aka Boxer
Now, Microsoft's suite of proprietary apps, ones which contribute further to the continued dominance of Office by encouraging use of proprietary formats prone to vendor lock-in (Google is, in contrast, pretty good about giving people who want to migrate away their data in open formats - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... )
"He also said that they knew it could run out and that the next version would have more." - Hence Elon's comment back then that the next one should go boom for a different reason. He was right. :)
I live in one of those areas, which is why older vehicles that are still on the road in respectable quantities in Southern states simply don't exist here... Even with decades of improvement in corrosion control/resistance, vehicles in "rust belt" states like New York don't last nearly as long as the same vehicle would in a place like Georgia or the Carolinas.
I think their minimum is something like 50-60% - and I'm not sure if there are any throttle levels in between "min" and "max"
"Getting rid of that salt in a way that wouldn't cause catastrophic harm would be no mean feat."
Huh?
http://www.foodiemoment.com/20...
There are large facilities dedicated to simply evaporating seawater to generate salt...
OnePlus was not the first to contract Cyngn to provide them an OS - they were the second.
Oppo was the first with the N1.
You'll see a trend of Cyngn partners dropping them as Cyngn burns them. Look at the job they did with the N1 - didn't get an official KitKat OTA until after Lollipop became available. (Nightlies don't count since they're unsupported.)
Also, OxygenOS is not an Android "fork" - I would not consider anything that passes Google's CTS and is in fact Google Mobile Services (GMS, aka gapps) certified to be a "fork".
It's Cyngn that's trying to fork Android to create a variant independent from Google.
Yeah. Because they only deliver stuff like this in the few tiny areas where they have competition.
This is a response to Google Fiber. Were it not for Google Fiber, this wouldn't exist.
The only case I know of where an algorithm was actually backdoored was one of the random number generation schemes... The algorithm in question happens to be (IIRC) quite fast.
In other cases (DES I think??? I could be wrong.) the NSA recommended some oddball changes. No one could find a negative consequence of them so they went in - a decade or so later, it turns out that the original implementation of DES DID have a cryptographic flaw and the NSA recommendations fixed that.
Keep in mind there are two parts of the NSA, ones which have in many ways highly conflicting goals:
1) One part is tasked with compromising the information infrastructure of our enemies - these are the ones who keep on making the news these days
2) Another part is tasked with protecting our critical information infrastructure, especially with protecting data sensitive to national security. These are the people who do Type I crypto certification, worked on creating SELinux, etc. These rarely make the news but in general, from our perspective these are the good guys. You can tell that AES-256 is NOT backdoored by the NSA since they allow it to be used to protect classified information (NSA Suite B - you can assume anything in Suite B is solid since the NSA is using it themselves.)
If you look at TFA - yup, this happens multiple times per year. Half the articles on that site are so-and-so flew an Open Skies flight over other so-and-so.
Interestingly, Norway is the reason Denmark is one of the few countries to achieve more than 20-25% grid penetration for wind/solar - Denmark's neighbor to the north has EXCELLENT energy storage facilities due to their geography.
(When the wind is blowing/sun shining, Denmark sells surplus power to Norway. When it isn't, they buy it back. Note that they're usually paying far more than what they sold it for due to supply/demand economics.)
Yup. FYI the hydro facility's output is throttled based on time of day to make the falls look pretty at peak tourism times.
I've seen claims that from 50-75% of the river's flow is diverted to hydro depending on time of day and season (more diversion is allowed in winter when there are fewer tourists) - There is not as much need for a dam thanks to consistent flow and the fact that there's a pretty hefty height difference, although there are dams downstream for large pumped-storage facilities (which provide an alternative to damming the river as far as storage goes) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Huh? You're not making any sense.
"Because of the Hoover dam image" - what the heck do you mean here?
Yes, hydro is not talked about, and yes, the Hoover Dam (along with the various other hydroelectric dams in this country) is a major reason why - Because it has ALREADY BEEN BUILT AND DEPLOYED FOR DECADES AND IT ISN'T MEETING OUR NEEDS.
We simply don't have enough rivers to dam that we haven't ALREADY dammed. The USA's hydro resources are tapped out - and many of them are encountering severe problems due to lack of rainfall lately. Lake Mead, for example, reached its lowest level since the Hoover Dam was built last year.
That was the thing - it had a healthier third-party developer community than anything else that was out there at the time.
Android pretty much stole all of the legacy WM5/6 usersbase I think - very few WM5/6 people I know went to WP7.
In fact quite a few people I knew (including myself) used crazy hacks such as XDAndroid - my first Android device was an AT&T/HTC Tilt 2 (aka Touch Pro 2) - I still have fond memories of that device. :)
Yup. It was a piece of shit of a great magnitude, but it was the least shitty thing out there.
Yeah. Lots of people rave about spec e-peen, but the truth is, even older chips are MORE than powerful enough to provide a good experience except for the niche things like hardcore gaming.
Interestingly, for hardcore gaming, NVidia gave up on the phone form factor. The SHIELD Portable's form factor allowed it to have active cooling for the Tegra4, and the SHIELD Tablet has a phase change heat spreader (aka heatpipe) over its CPU - a predecessor to this stuff Fujitsu is working on.
For nearly all smartphone users, more basic chips (like the Snapdragon 400) are more than enough, the problem has been that until the Moto G, low-end chips got match with piss-poor software quality. Moto is the first company to release low-end phones with software that didn't suck.