> There is no reason a tablet or smartphone cannot be connected to a docking station containing a keyboard and large screen, > have a dock at work, a dock at home and use the touchscreen everywhere else...
Rrrrright. Let me know when a best-of-breed ARM can run even half as fast as Intel's best Xeon, and keep running that fast for more than 3 minutes without thermal management kicking in when used in a typical mobile phone or tablet.
An 8 year old 1.6GHz Pentium M would completely spank a shiny new 1.4GHz Exynos, and beat it like the wife of a drunk guy on some cheesy reality TV show involving cops and trailer parks. In real performance, the highest-end Android phone money can buy today is approximately comparable to a 750MHz high-end corporate laptop from 2004.
The rumblings are just beginning, but users over at XDA have slowly been discovering new phones & tablets that really can't run at full speed, all cores & guns blazing, for extended periods of time. Bug reports from users reporting games that radically drop framerates and slow down at somewhat unpredictable intervals after more than a few minutes of punishing the system as hard as the game can push the GPU are commonplace, and the intersection between the two arrives first at XDA when users defeat the phones' speed governors to let them play games at maximum performance only to see the phone hang & crash after just a few minutes. I expect regulators to notice any day now, and the outcome isn't going to be pretty. The last time manufacturers tried selling computers that couldn't run 100% at their advertised speed for extended lengths of time, the FTC smacked them down pretty hard for false advertising. That's part of the reason why many new phones can be trivially overclocked to insane speeds like 1.8GHz or more, as long as active thermal management is left enabled & you're doing things that require short bursts of instant gratification instead of long periods of back-breaking sustained labor. The chips themselves could go faster in a PC-type environment, but nobody is crazy enough to try and sell a phone that needs a fan to cool the CPU & GPU.
Of course, there's no reason why the docking station can't have additional CPUs, and a faster GPU, except then the bus between the CPU and ram becomes an intolerable bottleneck, so you give the docking station its own ram as well. Then you realize that even the most ghetto 1x PCI Express SSD would completely spank the transfer rate you get between the phone's internal flash and the dock, so you add a local SSD and move a cached copy of the operating system to the dock as well. Congratulations, you've just created a laptop that's tethered to a phone & uses it for internet access and as a big, expensive flash drive.
Then, one day, in a restaurant, someone grabs your phone from the table. Or you drop it onto the pavement in a parking lot while trying to get into your car on a rainy day. Or drop it in the toilet while trying to tweet and pee. Or any of the other 200 ways a phone can get destroyed/lost. Thank ${deity}, you had a full backup online. Except if you're going to spool everything to online realtime backup, why do you even have to bother with the phone at all? A real computer could just dispense with the phone, keep itself sync'ed up to your online copies, and dispense with the ceremony of tethering the phone in the first place. And we've come full circle... a phone that lets you access your desktop PC's data on the go, but is really just your fallback access device to use when you don't have your desktop PC around.
Insofar as "proprietary formats" go, pray tell what popular consumer formats you're talking about? The only problems I've ever had using NTFS filesystems or NetBIOS shares with Linux involved Vista Home and an embedded Linux appliance with an old version of Samba that didn't know how to authenticate to it. DRM-protected WMP? OK, maybe... if consumers actually used or cared about it, which they don't... which is why nobody actually uses
Windows might be losing market share to OSX. God only knows whether it's gaining or losing market share compared to desktop Linux this week/month/year, and it doesn't particularly matter because any change is below the margin of error anyway. Windows is not, however, losing market share to Android Phones or iPhones.
In America, at least, 99.9% of the people who own an Android phone or iPhone own at least one desktop PC, laptop, or both IN ADDITION to their phone.
Microsoft lost most of their mobile market share almost OVERNIGHT when they stupidly announced that the HTC HD2 would never run Windows Phone because "it had too many buttons", and just about everyone who owned a phone running Windows Mobile ran straight to Android without passing "Go". THAT is Microsoft's lost market share. Nearly every Android phone and iPhone sold since that time represents a PDA phone sold to somebody who formerly owned a phone that was a half step better than a Jitterbug. People who own an Android phone or iPhone today and do NOT own a PC or laptop probably didn't own a PC or desktop 4 years ago, either. People who owned a desktop PC and a laptop 4 years ago mostly still own a desktop PC, a laptop, and have recently added a tablet (Android or iPad) to the pile, and probably have a best of breed Android phone or iPhone filling the role of "pocket laptop with wireless internet access", just like they did 4 years ago.
If you REALLY want to see lost market share, do your census a month after Windows 8 comes out, and count anybody who yawned and stayed with Windows 7 (or reverted to Windows 7 after being unimpressed by Windows 8) because Windows 8 is ugly, looks like Unity on a bad day, and took away Aero Glass because Microsoft apparently wanted to make extra sure the reaction of everybody with a high end PC would be "yuck, Windows 8 is fugly".
If it's not obvious, I do think that Microsoft has gone batshit crazy and suicidal in its old age. If you look at just about every business and strategic decision they've made since ~2008, they've dropped the ball and bent over backwards to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at every possible opportunity. They've become irrelevant to everyone who used to own a Windows Mobile phone, they've completely pissed off two entire generations of Windows Phone buyers by screwing them out of upgrades and saddling them with a phone that was obsolete roughly 3 months after it came out, they locked them down for reasons nobody can figure out (since they don't actually have any real software that anybody will pay for to generate royalties for Microsoft), they've completely dropped the ball on trying to run an ad network like Google, and now it looks like they've spent the past 3 years brainstorming ways to give people who own Windows 7 a reason to stick with it for the next 10 years.
And it makes me sad. As fashionable as it is around here to bash Microsoft, they've generally been a force for good. If nothing else, they gave us mice with scroll wheels. But lately... (shakes head)... well, the only word I can really think of to describe it is "Schadenfreude". It's almost heresy to say, but they really DO need Bill Gates to come back and save Microsoft from the zombie it's become. Microsoft's current management is like Apple under Scully.
After a major downpour, many roads end up with areas under 3-8" of standing water due to clogged storm drains. Major roads, like nw 87 Avenue north of SR836 in Miami. Or the intersection of Flagler Street &57th Ave. Literally half the major roads between the Turnpike & Palmetto Expressway have at least one noteworthy flood zone. The westbound lanes of nw 58 street used to be submerged for days at a time during the summer until the county finally ripped them up & rebuilt them ~6 years ago (the westbound lanes were originally the whole 2-lane road, then a developer built 2 more lanes almost 4 feet higher ~30 feet away, and the county just left it like that for a decade). Doral (Miami area, directly west of MIA) used to have its roads flood all the time.
West Dade in general has major road flooding problems due to Dade County's stupid policy of making developers build their own substandard & half-assed road segments instead of just biting the bullet, building them right, and paying for them with impact fees. That's why western Dade is a maze of disjointed road segments with half-mile gaps, dead ends at canals, and roads that go from 2 to 6 to 4 to 6 to 2, then veer 50 feet to one side and continue as 2 lanes before widening again. And flood at the slightest hint of rain.
Broward County did the opposite, and most of *its* western roads are top quality. Broward's flooded roads are usually found inside gated communities that can't afford to maintain their own roads properly.
You forgot the fact that in places like South Florida, a SUV or pickup truck can mean the difference between being able to drive home in relative safety during a torrential downpour, vs being stuck wherever you are for several hours. When late-afternoon storms dumping inches of rain are a daily occurrence (esp. July through August), this is a Very Big Deal, and happens on a regular basis.
If you REALLY want to have some fun, try calling any major corporation (Comcast, Sprint, Microsoft, Marriott, whomever) and announcing to the CSR that you're recording the call for training and quality purposes. Assuming they don't hang up on you INSTANTLY, the conversation isn't going to progress beyond "I'm sorry, we can't continue until you stop recording."
Pointing out to them that THEY'RE doing the exact same thing to YOU will get you nowhere. Telling them that you'll discontinue recording when THEY do will get you hung up on. Telling them you'll quit recording when they tell you how to obtain your own copy of their recording later will get you hung up on. Simply put, no corporation will EVER voluntarily or knowingly allow you, a peon, to record your conversation with them, even though they feel perfectly entitled to record their conversation with YOU, and use it against you if it suits them.
There should seriously be a law granting consumers the automatic reciprocal right to silently record any conversation where the other party announces that the call is being recorded & makes it clear that you do NOT have the option of continuing the call unless you agree to let them do it.
> If so, then some northern cities might actually be able to survive,
Er... is there any evidence that ANY city that presently has a population in excess of one million lies within an area that, under any conceivable scenario, might be glaciated beyond the point of aggressive snow removal within the next thousand years?
Remember, humans don't passively accept changes to our environment. We actively change our environment to suit our needs. Some things, like a hurricane, are clearly beyond that ability. Others, like stormwater management, are generally quite manageable. Glaciers "flow", but they aren't like a big, roaring, frozen tsunami. They're generally the result of year after year of snow that falls, remains frozen (possibly melting briefly into water before refreezing), and eventually flows downhill due to accumulated mass. I think it's safe to say that if snow never completely melted, the Edinburgh metro area (just to name one particularly northern and frosty big city) would still be doing snow removal... it would just be doing it year-round, and treating the snow like something that had to be transported away from the area for disposal elsewhere. Instead of scraping surface snow into piles, it would be scooped up into trucks, hauled to melting facilities, dumped, melted, pumped, and poured into the ocean. Ditto for Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities with the slightest risk of glaciation. It the long run it might be a lost cause, but people still have to drive to work tomorrow morning, and they're going to do what they can, as long as they can, to ensure it's possible.
Going a step further, it's reasonable to presume that if advancing glaciers from a nearby mountain were putting a major city (like Berne) in danger, the authorities would treat it the same way they treat snow at risk of causing an avalanche -- they'd break chunks off the advancing edge with explosives long before it got anywhere near a populated area, and remove it like rock debris. Then dump it, melt it, and pump it away.
Long before any big city were in danger of uncontrolled glaciation, its population would have largely abandoned it over the span of a few hundred years for a toastier climate anyway, if only because the endless year-round snow removal and ice-mining would become more expensive than the local tax base could justify.
The truth is, there are millions of people who already live under semi-glacial conditions. Roughly half the suburban and rural population of Alaska, for example. They aren't at daily risk of advancing ice sheets, but they have a more long-lasting problem: permafrost. Permafrost is a problem because the weight of a building causes frozen foundations to melt. The solution? They refrigerate the foundation to ensure it stays frozen. I can't remember the city's name offhand, but I know there's a city in Russia with a population of about a half million that's been under near-glacial conditions since its founding *anyway*. It snows 11-12 months a year.
In areas that would be at risk of glaciation, the biggest hassle to the local population wouldn't be advancing glaciers... it would be the month or two each year when it gets *just* warm enough to melt the standing ice and top inch or two of topsoil, because that's when the local roads would turn to mud, and paved roads built on top of permafrost would have chunks breaking off due to erosion from summer water flow.
Keep in mind that we've had things like large-scale energy production for a grand total of about 200 years, something resembling modern society for about 500, civil engineering for about 4,000 years, and recorded history in some form for about 10,000. Worrying about the fate of northern cities 4,000 years from now should glaciation resume is a bit premature.
Repeat after me: during the last glacial max, people were not running from their lives to escape the advancing glaciers. Many of those glaciers got the way they were because no attempts were ever made to treat them like stormwater runoff, and it's amusingly naive to think glaciation would ever be allowed to occur naturally and without human interference.
Well, let's not go overboard here. The trolleys were ripped up because by the late 1950s, most of the people left riding them were poor, and most voters were annoyed by having to share roads with them. They snarled traffic, caused horrific accidents, and generally added nothing of value to the daily lives of America's growing middle-class majority -- most of whom had long since fled to the suburbs and drove to work in the city. Don't believe me? Look at the subways and elevated rail lines. They might have been left to rot and limp along without funding or proper maintenance into a long sunset, but nobody seriously called for their wholesale demolition and destruction. Not even GM. Why? Unlike trolleys, subways and elevated trains don't screw up traffic, so people who don't use them are still largely indifferent to their continued existence.
If you look at popular light rail lines in America, they're almost NEVER "light rail vehicles sharing right of way with cars". They're "rail lines that can mostly run at grade, and can cross minor streets directly, but tend to go over or under any real road wider than 4 lanes". Building a $5 million dollar bridge over a 2-lane residential street is as stupid as NOT building a $10 million bridge over (or box tunnel under) a busy 6-lane arterial road near a major freeway exit or mall. The problem is, most light rail supporters have ideological motivations that include "punishing drivers and interfering with their travel", which the car-driving majority know about and resent. If they could be pragmatic long enough to pitch light rail as a pragmatic compromise between 100% separate heavy-rail ROW and traffic-interfering trolleys -- able to do both equally well as appropriate, they'd have a lot more success. 50-ton trains have no business sharing streets with cars, except at occasional crossing points where there isn't much traffic to begin with.
This is something transit planners just don't seem to grasp, especially in places like Miami. They view BRT as a perfectly good alternative to mostly grade-separated light rail or outright elevated rail, because they look at it only from the perspective of riders. They don't seem to comprehend that 97% of the people who pay for its construction and maintenance don't actually use it. From the perspective of the driving majority, elevated rail is still kind of useful, because it (hopefully) gets OTHER drivers off the road, and doesn't screw up traffic when it's built and operating. From the perspective of drivers, BRT is actively harmful, because any reduction in traffic is neutralized by the additional gridlock it CAUSES. The South Dade Busway is a perfect example. The day it opened, the travel time between Dadeland and Cutler Ridge (~15 miles) INSTANTLY increased by about 10 minutes, and the delays have only gotten worse. Why? Right turns suddenly became traffic light controlled by lights that were usually red, the amount of traffic able to make left turns (and cross the Busway) on a green arrow was reduced to about half the original volume at the original light timings (read: red lights got a LOT longer in all directions), and worst of all... the decision to give green-light priority to the buses totally screwed up the multi-million dollar light synchronization project that had just been completed a few years before, so cars that used to get green lights most of the way now have 50/50 odds of hitting a red light at every single major intersection. Worst of all, the county can't even fix THAT problem, because the grant money used to build the Busway requires that they be given green-light priority over everything. We literally would have been better off if the money that built the busway had been spent grade-separating every major intersection along the Busway's route and widening US-1 (the road it's adjacent to) to 8 lanes. Or just doing what they should have done in the first place, and extended Metrorail along the route instead... as grade-separated light rail (stations at grade, but flyovers over major roads) that continued onward to downtown along the existing Metrorail tracks under third-rail power (like the SF Muni, which runs from catenary power at grade, and thirdrail power underground).
> The current total number of trips (bus, plane, car) is about 8 million per year.
You're assuming the number would remain constant if San Francisco suddenly became a painless ~3-hour trip from LA, instead of increasing exponentially. Remember, back when Eisenhower proposed building the interstates, he was heckled and jeered for building roads "nobody would use". Back then, when travel was slow and/or expensive, people just didn't travel unless they HAD to. Driving from New York to Florida was something a family might do with their kids once in a lifetime, not two or three times a year. The idea of living 45-60 miles from your office and driving the round trip daily would have been considered insane.
The interstates didn't just make travel faster and more convenient, they induced several orders of magnitude more travel than had ever existed just BECAUSE they existed and were fast & convenient. High-speed rail has had the same effect in Europe and Asia. Yes, you can drive from Amsterdam to Paris... and people do it every day. But most people either take Thalys if they're affluent, or fly if they're poor, because the drive is more or less identical to I-95 between Washington, DC and New York. Of course, gas is more expensive... but if you ask Europeans why they take Thalys, Eurostar, or ICE instead of flying or driving 250-400 miles, gas prices are usually mentioned as an afterthought -- if they get mentioned at all. Most of the time, they'll just look at you like you're a wacky, weird American & tell you that driving 4-6 hours sucks & the train is nicer.
Kind of like electric lights. Electricity was known to the ancients (the Egyptians, among others, used it for electroplating things with gold), and by Ben Franklin's day, it was well known that you could stick metal rods into jars of acid & get a weird shock from it. I think someone even accidentally discovered the precursor of Indiglo lights sometime in the early 1800s, but wrote it off as a nifty-but-useless curiosity. We even had arc lights capable of illuminating half a city block to the brightness of a full moon on a clear night by the mid-1800s (google "Moon Tower" sometime), which was made somewhat commercially viable by a French guy. What we DIDN'T have was commercial power generation and bulbs that didn't consume themselves within hours. Edison took care of the "bulb" part, Tesla (through Westinghouse) ultimately fixed the power distribution part.
Ditto, for telephones. Alexander Graham Bell didn't just spontaneously wake up one morning and invent the telephone, and his famous first phone call wasn't the first time sound had been conveyed by electricity over wires. It was just the first time he did it with the media present to generate buzz and attract investors. The individual components to make it (sort of) do-able existed for years beforehand. All BELL did was acquire enough patents to avoid being sued, and launch the first real commercial infrastructure for making telephones useful. Unfortunately, patents were as much of a double-edged sword back then as they are now... for every innovation they sparked, ten, twenty, or a hundred other potential innovative uses were squashed or sued into oblivion.
The only thing that really changed is that back then, if something couldn't be manufactured and sold without risking confiscation and destruction by the authorities, consumers weren't going to get it. With software, consumers can somewhat take matters into their own hands and implement something on their own anyway. OK, to a very limited extent, consumers did it back then, too (I believe Popular Mechanics was the early-20th century equivalent of "Make" magazine, and used to have articles about modifying commercially-available products in ways that might have been frowned upon by the IP lawyers of their day), but bits are a lot easier to synthesize than atoms.
Part of it might be the fact that the first-gen phones had Qualcomm GPUs, but (AFAIK) Qualcomm only grudgingly and recently released their programming info, and few devs are really interested in dedicating months of their lives to reimplementing the graphics subsystem of a phone that was resoundingly obsoleted by the Nexus One (and has very real resource constraints compared to pretty much any phone that shipped with 2.1+).
There are plenty of good things a first-gen Android phone can be repurposed for instead of trying to be like a 90 year old diva who's had more plastic surgery than Michael Jackson and can still pass for 50 (for a couple of hours) if her team of cosmetologists works on her for a couple of hours before she steps outside. As long as it doesn't rain, and she doesn't touch her face or perspire. An ancient Android phone makes a great programmable remote control, robot controller, embedded home automation controller (with the added bonus that most first-gen HTC phones even have real serial ports hidden on the headphone and USB jacks and just need level shifters), etc. In fact, I think I even saw a project somewhere that repurposes the first-gen GSM phones with prepaid service to do things like remote monitoring and telemetry via SMS (the HeroC and Droid Eris aren't quite as useful in that regard, at least in the US, because neither Sprint nor Verizon have dirt cheap plans you can activate that offer the ability to send/receive SMS and nothing else).
> I don't know why everyone goes on about CM as if they're the greatest thing in the ROM creation world.
Most non-CM AOSP-based ROM distros seem to be created by devs with a fetish for ascetic minimalism. CM goes in the other direction, and gives you the kitchen sink in a nicely-presented package with sensible defaults. In a real sense, CM9 is the fully-featured "carrier ROM" we wish our carrier had actually given us. It lets you have your cake and eat it too. You can have pretty eye candy (like users of Sense and Touchwiz) and still be running bleeding-edge builds of Android within hours of the sourcecode getting released by Google (unlike Sense/Touchwiz, which hold back their respective users until HTC/Samsung get around to porting them).
CM does a good job of distilling out the stuff that varies from phone to phone so its developers don't have to reinvent the wheel from scratch with every new release and subject users to months of half-baked semi-/non-working apps that the developer himself doesn't really care about.
In a very real sense, CM is the "Ubuntu" of the Android universe, while most AOSP distros metaphorically fall somewhere between "Slackware" and "Debian". It's polished, generally "Just Works" in ways most users like and approve of, and doesn't intentionally go out of its way to be pedantic or make political statements that mainly piss off users. It separated out the Google apps because Google forced them to do it, but made it as easy as possible to add them back.
Not to mention the fact that attraction to feline odors is only suicidal to humans when we run into burning buildings to try and retrieve our kitties from underneath the bed, and emerge with second-degree burns and major laceration wounds (burns from the fire, laceration wounds from... well, nevermind. Our little kitty is safe. Pissed, but he'll get over that as soon as we give him some tuna.)
Not to excessively praise Microsoft, but they aren't the evil party with respect to Secure Boot and Trusted Computing -- Intel is, with AMD wetting itself trying to fall in line and do the same. Microsoft is the 500 pound gorilla that decreed, "End users must be able to unlock their own bootloaders, and sign their own binaries for their own machines if they feel like it" (and have x86 hardware... their ARM ambitions aren't quite as nice).
In a world dominated by Intel and Linux, without Microsoft to occasionally push back, our PCs and tablets would be as locked down and TiVO-ized as American Android cell phones usually end up being. A new laptop would be $50, but it would be bootloader-locked to a special ad-supported kernel you couldn't touch, and require inline encryption of flash (so you couldn't defeat it by trying to flash the chips directly, nor recover the key because it would all be buried inside Intel's Secure Computing Module).
The sad, harsh truth is that Microsoft might not be "free" or "open", but the hardest locked-down and most TiVO-ized computing devices on earth almost invariably run some bastard fork of Linux. Microsoft wants your money, but once it gets it, it doesn't really *care* what you do with the hardware its OS was installed upon. Contrast that with, oh, say, Motorola... whose motto is, "if the uppity users are getting too close to defeating the phone's security, push out another update to try and wipe the exploit away".
The truth is, SecureBoot IS a good thing... as long as WE have the keys to our own machines, and can use it to advance OUR agenda, instead of allowing the keys to be retained by someone else who can then turn around and maintain control of the devices we theoretically own. Instead of whining about having to look up the 128-bit certificate code printed on a sticker slapped onto the computer (and laser-etched onto the CPU for backup safekeeping), or open up the case and add/remove a jumper to allow us to set our own cert code & disable it entirely if we desire, before we can install Linux, we should thank Microsoft for ensuring that we'll still be able to do whatever we want with our own damn computers.
BIOS-flashed viri are still rare, but are far from theoretical anymore. By now, there have been at least a half-dozen bits of malware that reflash themselves into the BIOS to rewrite themselves onto any new hard drive you might connect at boot time (automatically reinfecting and/or rootkitting the hard drive if you try to blow it away by booting from Knoppix and wiping the hard drive before reinstallation.
Secure Boot is neither good NOR evil. It's what we allow others to make of it. As long as WE have the keys to our own computers, it has the potential to be a GOOD thing. Microsoft isn't the sneaky enemy trying to lock us out of our own hardware... Intel and AMD are. We have to recognize our enemy... and no, it's not the New Reformed Judean Popular People's Front of Palestine; it's the fsck'ing ROMANS (even if they DID build the aqueduct, the sewers, give us public education, and... well, go watch Monty Python's Life of Brian for the rest if you haven't figured out the reference by now;-)
The way I'm seeing the court's logic, it's OK to resell an OEM copy, but ONLY if the first sale was in compliance with the licensing terms. So, it would still be illegal for a (soon to be "ex-") Microsoft VAR to put up a web site & sell "virgin" licenses for Windows that were meant for sale with a new PC, or for use by Enterprise customers, but 100% legal for someone who acquired the same license by purchasing a new PC to RE-sell it.
The obvious question being, "How much pretense of a first sale would have to occur before a court would rule it was abusive & NOT ok?" For example, Could a German mfr bulk-license Windows on OEM, "every PC gets a copy" terms, then arrange to fulfill all of their "linux" sales through a thirdparty who "bought" the outgoing PCs (completing the "first sale"), then harvested their Windows licenses, reimaged the hard drives w/Linux, re-sold them out the back door for $15 less than the same PC with Windows, and sold the harvested Windows licenses to others?
Upgrades are a special case. When you upgrade "most" products, you don't get another license... the old one is extinguished the moment you activate the new one.
Also, did the court rule that consumers have the *right* to buy & sell used licenses, or merely that it doesn't constitute infringement? Big difference -- in case 1, the licensor must cooperate. In case 2, they can't sue you, but can use DRM to render the used license worthless.
I think it's a combination of both. New versions of Android depend upon very few new mainstream additions to the kernel, but DO depend upon changes and improvements Google itself has made to the Android-specific parts of the kernel... and those changes always get made to the latest upstream kernel from Linus.
I suspect the benefits to Android of changes made to the kernel by Linus himself (his own code, or committed on behalf of others) are few and far between, but I can't necessarily say they're nonexistent. I've been painfully aware of the Linux ABI problem ever since I got my first Android phone, and by now I've largely come to the conclusion that forcing proprietary loadable kernel modules to communicate with the rest of the kernel through a stable thunking layer (allowing kernel modules and monolithic code for which source is provided to communicate directly as always) that would preserve at least the illusion of a stable ABI is probably the least-bad solution to a problem that mainstream Linux will likely never solve (mostly, for ideological reasons).
It wouldn't require the cooperation of anybody involved with Linux itself (neatly sidestepping the intractable political problems), and it would be a neat surgical solution that Google could forcibly apply only to kernel modules that aren't open source. It would require minimal extra work by vendors (almost no additional work if the requirement only applied to new phones going forward), and would allow end users and manufacturers to politely ignore each other and do their own thing without actively stepping on each other's feet. If a manufacturer had no interest in upgrading current users to a newer version of Android, the lack of loadable kernel modules compatible with the new version would no longer be the deathblow holding them back that it is now.
^^^ I forgot to mention... even "GSM" phones are generally crippled on AT&T and T-Mobile unless they're sold by AT&T or T-Mobile (respectively). To the best of my knowledge, if you live in Finland and buy a phone with LTE, it won't be compatible with AT&T's LTE. Likewise, I've gotten mixed answers about whether random European phones that can do 1700/2100UMTS can ALSO do HSPA+ on T-Mobile. The general consensus seems to be that the're no guarantee that a random imported phone will be able to do HSPA+, but that most phones that go the extra step of supporting 1700/2100 UMTS can usually do HSPA+ too.
Likewise, it's apparently possible for many/most European phones to limp along while roaming on T-Mobile using a hybrid uplink/downlink mode that does everything on 2100MHz, but I suspect the data rate is (at best) half what you'd get with a phone that can do 1700/2100, let alone HSPA+ (which maxes out at ~22mbit/sec, and seems to get about 10-14mbit/sec in places where T-Mobile has deployed it well).
By the same token, Sprint and Verizon are both deploying "LTE", but they (like AT&T) are deploying the degenerate American variant that's only "LTE" because the American carriers pressured the ITU to add a footnote to the official specs that says, "${this} is LTE because the American carriers twisted our arm and forced us to say it is, but nobody else has to support it because it's an optional (and frowned upon) minimal subset of the actual standard that we don't ever expect to exist outside the US". As usual, it's incompatible with everything, including "LTE" as deployed by the other two networks.
There are specific use cases where prepaid can be cheaper (most of which can be described as, "never use the phone for anything besides voice calls, and rarely make THOSE"), but if you're a typical customer with Android phone who uses 2-4 gigs of data per month and wants it to be as fast as possible, your options in the US can basically be summed up as, "T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, US Cellular, and a few other regional carriers... with 2-year contract, and buying your own phone won't save you a cent unless you also buy the subsidized phone and sell it on eBay"
T-Mobile is the only carrier that allows you to buy your own phone, sign a contract, and slash $20/month off your bill. T-Mobile will allow you to get prepaid service, but then they drop you down to EDGE (~153kbps) speeds for the rest of the month once you exceed a gigabyte.
For the most part, prepaid service in the US is marketed to two groups: elderly people who treat everything like a 1970s long-distance phone call and never use the phone unless it's a dire emergency, and people who are so poor and have such bad credit, they can't even come up with a $200-300 deposit (refunded after a year of paying bills on time) to get a regular plan with subsidized phone (and instead, pay more for less service... in America, being poor is expensive).
As far as T-Mo's prepaid service goes, I believe it's been around for a while, but they practically guarded its existence as a state secret and only advertised it overseas (to people who were going to visit the US for an extended period of time). They didn't start advertising it HERE as a service available to everyone until VERY recently.
Four words (that, judging from the wording on at least HTC's bootloader-unlock page, at least HTC is officially aware of): "Magnuson Moss Warranty Act".
Briefly speaking, if your phone's headphone jack has a weak solder joint that goes bad while you own the phone, the manufacturer will have a HELL of a time trying to convince the Federal Trade Commission that it happened because you rooted the phone, unlocked the bootloader, and installed Cyanogen.
That doesn't mean the manufacturer can't reflash the phone to stock before it even tries to figure out what's wrong with it, and it doesn't oblige the manufacturer to restore Cyanogen and/or make it work with anything besides stock before returning it to you. It just means they can't point at a delaminated OLED, loose solder joint, or burst capacitor, and disclaim the warranty because you reflashed it to another ROM.
In theory, they could TRY to deny a warranty claim for heat damage if they could prove you disabled their power management... but unless they could prove you actually OVERCLOCKED the CPU (vs merely locked it to max speed with all cores active), they'd be opening up an even bigger can of worms. A few years ago, Toshiba & HP got in trouble with the FTC for selling laptops that couldn't actually run at their advertised speed for sustained lengths of time. If they argued that running your phone "balls to the wall" at 100% speed with all cores active constituted abuse, they'd risk being forced to either recall an entire production run of the phone or give rebates to owners as compensation for misleading advertising (Toshiba and HP both had disclaimers in fine print stating that advertised speed was a raw CPU capability and that actual performance might be less, but the FTC takes an exceptionally dim view of such disclaimers unless they're featured prominently on the packaging, in all advertising, and the manufacturer basically bends over backwards to make it bleedingly obvious that the device will never run at its advertised speed).
> I'm in the US, but I pay full price for my phones and just use pay-as-you-go phone service
And most hardcore Android users would have $200+ monthly bills (or have to give up 10mbit/sec or faster data) if they did the same.
Yes, there are prepaid services... and they all impose major catches if you plan to use them with an Android phone, expect high-speed data, and actually USE several gigabytes per month of it. From your description, it sounds like you mostly use your phone for making voice calls. Some Android users spend hours per day using their phones, but can't remember the last time they actually used their phone to make a voice call to somebody.
Count your blessings. At least you CAN unlock your bootloader and reflash, unlike most users stuck with a Motorola phone. Head over to XDA-developers.com sometime and feel the misery and despair in the forums for phones like the Motorola Photon/Electrify. Lots of people bought Motorola phones believing their promises that they'd be unlocking the bootloaders (especially after Google's purchase agreement was announced). The unlocking never happened, and quite a few angry users have sworn to god (or their favorite deity or deities) that they will never, EVER buy another Motorola phone with locked bootloader, regardless of how badly Samsung's radios might suck by comparison.
Having a phone that withers on the vine due to manufacturer neglect sucks. Having a phone that gets metaphorically dunked in a jar of Round-Up by a manufacturer hellbent on keeping you from taking matters into your own hands and upgrading it yourself is an entirely new and higher level of "suck" that defies normal attempts at definition.
As long as your carrier is AT&T, or you don't care about data faster than GPRS.
As a practical matter, unlocked GSM phones don't exist as normal consumer goods in the US. If somebody is selling them, they're imported.
Most imported GSM phones *still* can't do UMTS on T-Mobile's frequencies (1700/2100). Some imported phones don't even support EDGE (though thankfully, that seemes to have been almost exclusively a Nokia disease), and are stuck with uselessly slow GPRS when operating on T-Mobile. And even if the phone DOES (by some miracle) support 1700/2100MHz UMTS, it still probably won't be able to do HSPA+, so you'll still be stuck with half the speed of a "real" T-mobile phone.
As for using non-VZW phones on Verizon, good luck... hopefully, 1xRTT is fast enough for you, because non-Verizon phones can't do EVDO on Verizon (not even when roaming). I don't remember the exact reason why, but it basically comes down to this: unless the non-VZW phone has an identical twin sold by Verizon and you can get the Verizon radio modem firmware to flash to your phone, it will never do EVDO on Verizon.
Sprint? Forget it. Short of doing some very, very illegal things to make your shiny new non-Sprint phone impersonate your old Sprint phone, Sprint will never allow you to activate a non-Sprint phone on your account. They'll happily let you roam with it on Sprint, as long as it's associated with another company like Telus (Canada) or Verizon, but they'll never allow you to use that same phone as a Sprint customer.
There's no inherent reason why a CDMA phone can't be as interoperable as an unlocked GSM phone. In many other countries, they are. Unfortunately, Qualcomm decided to make R-UIM (the CDMA superset of GSM's SIM standard) an optional feature that Sprint and Verizon declined to implement.
Until the FCC decides to force Sprint and Verizon to allow activation of any phone that's physically capable of working on the network, and until foreign phones routinely ship with 1700/2100 HSPA+ implemented and enabled, buying an unlocked phone and using it in the US is somewhere between an "urban legend" and an "april fool's joke".
Forcing manufacturers to open-source everything would be almost impossible, if only because more than half the phones sold in America (and basically all the phones sold for use on a CDMA network, and most of the phones sold for use on T-Mobile's 1700/2100 HSPA+) use Qualcomm chips, and Qualcomm has never been open-source friendly.
I can think of a much better strategy for empowering users: introduce a kernel compatibility layer that's 100% open source, and require as a licensing condition that any and all non open-source loadable kernel modules shipped with an Android phone and the kernel interact with the kernel ONLY through that compatibility layer. That way, when the next version of Android comes out, end users could just recompile the compatibility layer for the latest kernel required by the new version of Android, and keep using the drivers that shipped with their phone that they already have in their possession.
Google: do you want to know why the quality of Android software tends to lag behind IOS's best software? It's because the best Android developers are perpetually stuck spending half the year trying to hack, patch, and rewrite the broken binaries that shipped with their phone so they'll work with the new version of Android. Spend a few days looking over XDA, and let the magnitude of work being done sink in. Now imagine how much better Android software might be overall if the developers spending 3 months trying to patch a broken.ko for the front camera were able to spend it writing a better camera app instead. It's staggering how many thousand hours of development time get squandered week after week, year after year, endlessly fixing problems that Google could solve once and for all with just a tiny bit of effort (creating, and enforcing the use of, a compatibility layer for proprietary loadable kernel modules).
The big problem with PHP is that you can get yourself into situations where trying to handle error conditions can actually make things worse than just letting it crash, burn, and try to clean up its own mess for you. Let's start with the fact that try/catch DOESN'T actually work with php_mysqli and pile things onto the "things that suck about PHP" list from there.
I borked an entire database table once thanks to PHP's willingness to recast just about anything, even when recasting contradicts the prepared statement declaration command in php_mysqli itself. The ONLY thing stopping me from porting the whole app to Java is the fact that I can't figure out how to get Tomcat to not accept incoming http connections or respond AT ALL until it's 100% ready to deal with requests, instead of crapping out and returning semi-random 500 errors for that period of 20-90 seconds when it's in an "indeterminate" and "undefined" state while starting up.
Java certainly isn't assembly language, but to be honest, the only time I ever find it to be *slow* anymore is if I forget to give the JVM more ram (damn you, Sun, and now Oracle, for refusing to give us a default option that says, "just use as much ram as you need until Windows runs out of physical ram and starts swapping too much"). Since sometime around 1.6, if there's any meaningful difference between the performance of C# and Java under Windows in any use case not involving DirectX, I haven't really seen it. C# compiles to intermediate object code that gets compiled to native code before running. Java compiles to JVM assembly language, which gets compiled to native x86 code at launch prior to running. Different nomenclature, same difference.
The only area where Java really still falls on its face compared to.Net/C# is Swing... and Swing's problem isn't really *performance* anymore. Rather, it's the fact that Swing still firmly inhabits the "uncanny valley" where it mostly looks and acts like Windows, but doesn't inherit Windows' settings/history/context... so if you change the default scaling of Windows, or set custom favorite directories for the file dialog, or things like that, Swing doesn't change to reflect them. But actual speed hasn't really been an issue for a few years now. At least, not on anything quadcore, with at least 8 gigs of ram and running Windows or Linux (I'll grant that the Mac version of Java might still suck badly).
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> There is no reason a tablet or smartphone cannot be connected to a docking station containing a keyboard and large screen,
> have a dock at work, a dock at home and use the touchscreen everywhere else...
Rrrrright. Let me know when a best-of-breed ARM can run even half as fast as Intel's best Xeon, and keep running that fast for more than 3 minutes without thermal management kicking in when used in a typical mobile phone or tablet.
An 8 year old 1.6GHz Pentium M would completely spank a shiny new 1.4GHz Exynos, and beat it like the wife of a drunk guy on some cheesy reality TV show involving cops and trailer parks. In real performance, the highest-end Android phone money can buy today is approximately comparable to a 750MHz high-end corporate laptop from 2004.
The rumblings are just beginning, but users over at XDA have slowly been discovering new phones & tablets that really can't run at full speed, all cores & guns blazing, for extended periods of time. Bug reports from users reporting games that radically drop framerates and slow down at somewhat unpredictable intervals after more than a few minutes of punishing the system as hard as the game can push the GPU are commonplace, and the intersection between the two arrives first at XDA when users defeat the phones' speed governors to let them play games at maximum performance only to see the phone hang & crash after just a few minutes. I expect regulators to notice any day now, and the outcome isn't going to be pretty. The last time manufacturers tried selling computers that couldn't run 100% at their advertised speed for extended lengths of time, the FTC smacked them down pretty hard for false advertising. That's part of the reason why many new phones can be trivially overclocked to insane speeds like 1.8GHz or more, as long as active thermal management is left enabled & you're doing things that require short bursts of instant gratification instead of long periods of back-breaking sustained labor. The chips themselves could go faster in a PC-type environment, but nobody is crazy enough to try and sell a phone that needs a fan to cool the CPU & GPU.
Of course, there's no reason why the docking station can't have additional CPUs, and a faster GPU, except then the bus between the CPU and ram becomes an intolerable bottleneck, so you give the docking station its own ram as well. Then you realize that even the most ghetto 1x PCI Express SSD would completely spank the transfer rate you get between the phone's internal flash and the dock, so you add a local SSD and move a cached copy of the operating system to the dock as well. Congratulations, you've just created a laptop that's tethered to a phone & uses it for internet access and as a big, expensive flash drive.
Then, one day, in a restaurant, someone grabs your phone from the table. Or you drop it onto the pavement in a parking lot while trying to get into your car on a rainy day. Or drop it in the toilet while trying to tweet and pee. Or any of the other 200 ways a phone can get destroyed/lost. Thank ${deity}, you had a full backup online. Except if you're going to spool everything to online realtime backup, why do you even have to bother with the phone at all? A real computer could just dispense with the phone, keep itself sync'ed up to your online copies, and dispense with the ceremony of tethering the phone in the first place. And we've come full circle... a phone that lets you access your desktop PC's data on the go, but is really just your fallback access device to use when you don't have your desktop PC around.
Insofar as "proprietary formats" go, pray tell what popular consumer formats you're talking about? The only problems I've ever had using NTFS filesystems or NetBIOS shares with Linux involved Vista Home and an embedded Linux appliance with an old version of Samba that didn't know how to authenticate to it. DRM-protected WMP? OK, maybe... if consumers actually used or cared about it, which they don't... which is why nobody actually uses
Windows might be losing market share to OSX. God only knows whether it's gaining or losing market share compared to desktop Linux this week/month/year, and it doesn't particularly matter because any change is below the margin of error anyway. Windows is not, however, losing market share to Android Phones or iPhones.
In America, at least, 99.9% of the people who own an Android phone or iPhone own at least one desktop PC, laptop, or both IN ADDITION to their phone.
Microsoft lost most of their mobile market share almost OVERNIGHT when they stupidly announced that the HTC HD2 would never run Windows Phone because "it had too many buttons", and just about everyone who owned a phone running Windows Mobile ran straight to Android without passing "Go". THAT is Microsoft's lost market share. Nearly every Android phone and iPhone sold since that time represents a PDA phone sold to somebody who formerly owned a phone that was a half step better than a Jitterbug. People who own an Android phone or iPhone today and do NOT own a PC or laptop probably didn't own a PC or desktop 4 years ago, either. People who owned a desktop PC and a laptop 4 years ago mostly still own a desktop PC, a laptop, and have recently added a tablet (Android or iPad) to the pile, and probably have a best of breed Android phone or iPhone filling the role of "pocket laptop with wireless internet access", just like they did 4 years ago.
If you REALLY want to see lost market share, do your census a month after Windows 8 comes out, and count anybody who yawned and stayed with Windows 7 (or reverted to Windows 7 after being unimpressed by Windows 8) because Windows 8 is ugly, looks like Unity on a bad day, and took away Aero Glass because Microsoft apparently wanted to make extra sure the reaction of everybody with a high end PC would be "yuck, Windows 8 is fugly".
If it's not obvious, I do think that Microsoft has gone batshit crazy and suicidal in its old age. If you look at just about every business and strategic decision they've made since ~2008, they've dropped the ball and bent over backwards to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at every possible opportunity. They've become irrelevant to everyone who used to own a Windows Mobile phone, they've completely pissed off two entire generations of Windows Phone buyers by screwing them out of upgrades and saddling them with a phone that was obsolete roughly 3 months after it came out, they locked them down for reasons nobody can figure out (since they don't actually have any real software that anybody will pay for to generate royalties for Microsoft), they've completely dropped the ball on trying to run an ad network like Google, and now it looks like they've spent the past 3 years brainstorming ways to give people who own Windows 7 a reason to stick with it for the next 10 years.
And it makes me sad. As fashionable as it is around here to bash Microsoft, they've generally been a force for good. If nothing else, they gave us mice with scroll wheels. But lately... (shakes head)... well, the only word I can really think of to describe it is "Schadenfreude". It's almost heresy to say, but they really DO need Bill Gates to come back and save Microsoft from the zombie it's become. Microsoft's current management is like Apple under Scully.
After a major downpour, many roads end up with areas under 3-8" of standing water due to clogged storm drains. Major roads, like nw 87 Avenue north of SR836 in Miami. Or the intersection of Flagler Street &57th Ave. Literally half the major roads between the Turnpike & Palmetto Expressway have at least one noteworthy flood zone. The westbound lanes of nw 58 street used to be submerged for days at a time during the summer until the county finally ripped them up & rebuilt them ~6 years ago (the westbound lanes were originally the whole 2-lane road, then a developer built 2 more lanes almost 4 feet higher ~30 feet away, and the county just left it like that for a decade). Doral (Miami area, directly west of MIA) used to have its roads flood all the time.
West Dade in general has major road flooding problems due to Dade County's stupid policy of making developers build their own substandard & half-assed road segments instead of just biting the bullet, building them right, and paying for them with impact fees. That's why western Dade is a maze of disjointed road segments with half-mile gaps, dead ends at canals, and roads that go from 2 to 6 to 4 to 6 to 2, then veer 50 feet to one side and continue as 2 lanes before widening again. And flood at the slightest hint of rain.
Broward County did the opposite, and most of *its* western roads are top quality. Broward's flooded roads are usually found inside gated communities that can't afford to maintain their own roads properly.
> An SUV has other advantages.
You forgot the fact that in places like South Florida, a SUV or pickup truck can mean the difference between being able to drive home in relative safety during a torrential downpour, vs being stuck wherever you are for several hours. When late-afternoon storms dumping inches of rain are a daily occurrence (esp. July through August), this is a Very Big Deal, and happens on a regular basis.
If you REALLY want to have some fun, try calling any major corporation (Comcast, Sprint, Microsoft, Marriott, whomever) and announcing to the CSR that you're recording the call for training and quality purposes. Assuming they don't hang up on you INSTANTLY, the conversation isn't going to progress beyond "I'm sorry, we can't continue until you stop recording."
Pointing out to them that THEY'RE doing the exact same thing to YOU will get you nowhere. Telling them that you'll discontinue recording when THEY do will get you hung up on. Telling them you'll quit recording when they tell you how to obtain your own copy of their recording later will get you hung up on. Simply put, no corporation will EVER voluntarily or knowingly allow you, a peon, to record your conversation with them, even though they feel perfectly entitled to record their conversation with YOU, and use it against you if it suits them.
There should seriously be a law granting consumers the automatic reciprocal right to silently record any conversation where the other party announces that the call is being recorded & makes it clear that you do NOT have the option of continuing the call unless you agree to let them do it.
> If so, then some northern cities might actually be able to survive,
Er... is there any evidence that ANY city that presently has a population in excess of one million lies within an area that, under any conceivable scenario, might be glaciated beyond the point of aggressive snow removal within the next thousand years?
Remember, humans don't passively accept changes to our environment. We actively change our environment to suit our needs. Some things, like a hurricane, are clearly beyond that ability. Others, like stormwater management, are generally quite manageable. Glaciers "flow", but they aren't like a big, roaring, frozen tsunami. They're generally the result of year after year of snow that falls, remains frozen (possibly melting briefly into water before refreezing), and eventually flows downhill due to accumulated mass. I think it's safe to say that if snow never completely melted, the Edinburgh metro area (just to name one particularly northern and frosty big city) would still be doing snow removal... it would just be doing it year-round, and treating the snow like something that had to be transported away from the area for disposal elsewhere. Instead of scraping surface snow into piles, it would be scooped up into trucks, hauled to melting facilities, dumped, melted, pumped, and poured into the ocean. Ditto for Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities with the slightest risk of glaciation. It the long run it might be a lost cause, but people still have to drive to work tomorrow morning, and they're going to do what they can, as long as they can, to ensure it's possible.
Going a step further, it's reasonable to presume that if advancing glaciers from a nearby mountain were putting a major city (like Berne) in danger, the authorities would treat it the same way they treat snow at risk of causing an avalanche -- they'd break chunks off the advancing edge with explosives long before it got anywhere near a populated area, and remove it like rock debris. Then dump it, melt it, and pump it away.
Long before any big city were in danger of uncontrolled glaciation, its population would have largely abandoned it over the span of a few hundred years for a toastier climate anyway, if only because the endless year-round snow removal and ice-mining would become more expensive than the local tax base could justify.
The truth is, there are millions of people who already live under semi-glacial conditions. Roughly half the suburban and rural population of Alaska, for example. They aren't at daily risk of advancing ice sheets, but they have a more long-lasting problem: permafrost. Permafrost is a problem because the weight of a building causes frozen foundations to melt. The solution? They refrigerate the foundation to ensure it stays frozen. I can't remember the city's name offhand, but I know there's a city in Russia with a population of about a half million that's been under near-glacial conditions since its founding *anyway*. It snows 11-12 months a year.
In areas that would be at risk of glaciation, the biggest hassle to the local population wouldn't be advancing glaciers... it would be the month or two each year when it gets *just* warm enough to melt the standing ice and top inch or two of topsoil, because that's when the local roads would turn to mud, and paved roads built on top of permafrost would have chunks breaking off due to erosion from summer water flow.
Keep in mind that we've had things like large-scale energy production for a grand total of about 200 years, something resembling modern society for about 500, civil engineering for about 4,000 years, and recorded history in some form for about 10,000. Worrying about the fate of northern cities 4,000 years from now should glaciation resume is a bit premature.
Repeat after me: during the last glacial max, people were not running from their lives to escape the advancing glaciers. Many of those glaciers got the way they were because no attempts were ever made to treat them like stormwater runoff, and it's amusingly naive to think glaciation would ever be allowed to occur naturally and without human interference.
Well, let's not go overboard here. The trolleys were ripped up because by the late 1950s, most of the people left riding them were poor, and most voters were annoyed by having to share roads with them. They snarled traffic, caused horrific accidents, and generally added nothing of value to the daily lives of America's growing middle-class majority -- most of whom had long since fled to the suburbs and drove to work in the city. Don't believe me? Look at the subways and elevated rail lines. They might have been left to rot and limp along without funding or proper maintenance into a long sunset, but nobody seriously called for their wholesale demolition and destruction. Not even GM. Why? Unlike trolleys, subways and elevated trains don't screw up traffic, so people who don't use them are still largely indifferent to their continued existence.
If you look at popular light rail lines in America, they're almost NEVER "light rail vehicles sharing right of way with cars". They're "rail lines that can mostly run at grade, and can cross minor streets directly, but tend to go over or under any real road wider than 4 lanes". Building a $5 million dollar bridge over a 2-lane residential street is as stupid as NOT building a $10 million bridge over (or box tunnel under) a busy 6-lane arterial road near a major freeway exit or mall. The problem is, most light rail supporters have ideological motivations that include "punishing drivers and interfering with their travel", which the car-driving majority know about and resent. If they could be pragmatic long enough to pitch light rail as a pragmatic compromise between 100% separate heavy-rail ROW and traffic-interfering trolleys -- able to do both equally well as appropriate, they'd have a lot more success. 50-ton trains have no business sharing streets with cars, except at occasional crossing points where there isn't much traffic to begin with.
This is something transit planners just don't seem to grasp, especially in places like Miami. They view BRT as a perfectly good alternative to mostly grade-separated light rail or outright elevated rail, because they look at it only from the perspective of riders. They don't seem to comprehend that 97% of the people who pay for its construction and maintenance don't actually use it. From the perspective of the driving majority, elevated rail is still kind of useful, because it (hopefully) gets OTHER drivers off the road, and doesn't screw up traffic when it's built and operating. From the perspective of drivers, BRT is actively harmful, because any reduction in traffic is neutralized by the additional gridlock it CAUSES. The South Dade Busway is a perfect example. The day it opened, the travel time between Dadeland and Cutler Ridge (~15 miles) INSTANTLY increased by about 10 minutes, and the delays have only gotten worse. Why? Right turns suddenly became traffic light controlled by lights that were usually red, the amount of traffic able to make left turns (and cross the Busway) on a green arrow was reduced to about half the original volume at the original light timings (read: red lights got a LOT longer in all directions), and worst of all... the decision to give green-light priority to the buses totally screwed up the multi-million dollar light synchronization project that had just been completed a few years before, so cars that used to get green lights most of the way now have 50/50 odds of hitting a red light at every single major intersection. Worst of all, the county can't even fix THAT problem, because the grant money used to build the Busway requires that they be given green-light priority over everything. We literally would have been better off if the money that built the busway had been spent grade-separating every major intersection along the Busway's route and widening US-1 (the road it's adjacent to) to 8 lanes. Or just doing what they should have done in the first place, and extended Metrorail along the route instead... as grade-separated light rail (stations at grade, but flyovers over major roads) that continued onward to downtown along the existing Metrorail tracks under third-rail power (like the SF Muni, which runs from catenary power at grade, and thirdrail power underground).
> The current total number of trips (bus, plane, car) is about 8 million per year.
You're assuming the number would remain constant if San Francisco suddenly became a painless ~3-hour trip from LA, instead of increasing exponentially. Remember, back when Eisenhower proposed building the interstates, he was heckled and jeered for building roads "nobody would use". Back then, when travel was slow and/or expensive, people just didn't travel unless they HAD to. Driving from New York to Florida was something a family might do with their kids once in a lifetime, not two or three times a year. The idea of living 45-60 miles from your office and driving the round trip daily would have been considered insane.
The interstates didn't just make travel faster and more convenient, they induced several orders of magnitude more travel than had ever existed just BECAUSE they existed and were fast & convenient. High-speed rail has had the same effect in Europe and Asia. Yes, you can drive from Amsterdam to Paris... and people do it every day. But most people either take Thalys if they're affluent, or fly if they're poor, because the drive is more or less identical to I-95 between Washington, DC and New York. Of course, gas is more expensive... but if you ask Europeans why they take Thalys, Eurostar, or ICE instead of flying or driving 250-400 miles, gas prices are usually mentioned as an afterthought -- if they get mentioned at all. Most of the time, they'll just look at you like you're a wacky, weird American & tell you that driving 4-6 hours sucks & the train is nicer.
Kind of like electric lights. Electricity was known to the ancients (the Egyptians, among others, used it for electroplating things with gold), and by Ben Franklin's day, it was well known that you could stick metal rods into jars of acid & get a weird shock from it. I think someone even accidentally discovered the precursor of Indiglo lights sometime in the early 1800s, but wrote it off as a nifty-but-useless curiosity. We even had arc lights capable of illuminating half a city block to the brightness of a full moon on a clear night by the mid-1800s (google "Moon Tower" sometime), which was made somewhat commercially viable by a French guy. What we DIDN'T have was commercial power generation and bulbs that didn't consume themselves within hours. Edison took care of the "bulb" part, Tesla (through Westinghouse) ultimately fixed the power distribution part.
Ditto, for telephones. Alexander Graham Bell didn't just spontaneously wake up one morning and invent the telephone, and his famous first phone call wasn't the first time sound had been conveyed by electricity over wires. It was just the first time he did it with the media present to generate buzz and attract investors. The individual components to make it (sort of) do-able existed for years beforehand. All BELL did was acquire enough patents to avoid being sued, and launch the first real commercial infrastructure for making telephones useful. Unfortunately, patents were as much of a double-edged sword back then as they are now... for every innovation they sparked, ten, twenty, or a hundred other potential innovative uses were squashed or sued into oblivion.
The only thing that really changed is that back then, if something couldn't be manufactured and sold without risking confiscation and destruction by the authorities, consumers weren't going to get it. With software, consumers can somewhat take matters into their own hands and implement something on their own anyway. OK, to a very limited extent, consumers did it back then, too (I believe Popular Mechanics was the early-20th century equivalent of "Make" magazine, and used to have articles about modifying commercially-available products in ways that might have been frowned upon by the IP lawyers of their day), but bits are a lot easier to synthesize than atoms.
Part of it might be the fact that the first-gen phones had Qualcomm GPUs, but (AFAIK) Qualcomm only grudgingly and recently released their programming info, and few devs are really interested in dedicating months of their lives to reimplementing the graphics subsystem of a phone that was resoundingly obsoleted by the Nexus One (and has very real resource constraints compared to pretty much any phone that shipped with 2.1+).
There are plenty of good things a first-gen Android phone can be repurposed for instead of trying to be like a 90 year old diva who's had more plastic surgery than Michael Jackson and can still pass for 50 (for a couple of hours) if her team of cosmetologists works on her for a couple of hours before she steps outside. As long as it doesn't rain, and she doesn't touch her face or perspire. An ancient Android phone makes a great programmable remote control, robot controller, embedded home automation controller (with the added bonus that most first-gen HTC phones even have real serial ports hidden on the headphone and USB jacks and just need level shifters), etc. In fact, I think I even saw a project somewhere that repurposes the first-gen GSM phones with prepaid service to do things like remote monitoring and telemetry via SMS (the HeroC and Droid Eris aren't quite as useful in that regard, at least in the US, because neither Sprint nor Verizon have dirt cheap plans you can activate that offer the ability to send/receive SMS and nothing else).
> I don't know why everyone goes on about CM as if they're the greatest thing in the ROM creation world.
Most non-CM AOSP-based ROM distros seem to be created by devs with a fetish for ascetic minimalism. CM goes in the other direction, and gives you the kitchen sink in a nicely-presented package with sensible defaults. In a real sense, CM9 is the fully-featured "carrier ROM" we wish our carrier had actually given us. It lets you have your cake and eat it too. You can have pretty eye candy (like users of Sense and Touchwiz) and still be running bleeding-edge builds of Android within hours of the sourcecode getting released by Google (unlike Sense/Touchwiz, which hold back their respective users until HTC/Samsung get around to porting them).
CM does a good job of distilling out the stuff that varies from phone to phone so its developers don't have to reinvent the wheel from scratch with every new release and subject users to months of half-baked semi-/non-working apps that the developer himself doesn't really care about.
In a very real sense, CM is the "Ubuntu" of the Android universe, while most AOSP distros metaphorically fall somewhere between "Slackware" and "Debian". It's polished, generally "Just Works" in ways most users like and approve of, and doesn't intentionally go out of its way to be pedantic or make political statements that mainly piss off users. It separated out the Google apps because Google forced them to do it, but made it as easy as possible to add them back.
Not to mention the fact that attraction to feline odors is only suicidal to humans when we run into burning buildings to try and retrieve our kitties from underneath the bed, and emerge with second-degree burns and major laceration wounds (burns from the fire, laceration wounds from... well, nevermind. Our little kitty is safe. Pissed, but he'll get over that as soon as we give him some tuna.)
Not to excessively praise Microsoft, but they aren't the evil party with respect to Secure Boot and Trusted Computing -- Intel is, with AMD wetting itself trying to fall in line and do the same. Microsoft is the 500 pound gorilla that decreed, "End users must be able to unlock their own bootloaders, and sign their own binaries for their own machines if they feel like it" (and have x86 hardware... their ARM ambitions aren't quite as nice).
In a world dominated by Intel and Linux, without Microsoft to occasionally push back, our PCs and tablets would be as locked down and TiVO-ized as American Android cell phones usually end up being. A new laptop would be $50, but it would be bootloader-locked to a special ad-supported kernel you couldn't touch, and require inline encryption of flash (so you couldn't defeat it by trying to flash the chips directly, nor recover the key because it would all be buried inside Intel's Secure Computing Module).
The sad, harsh truth is that Microsoft might not be "free" or "open", but the hardest locked-down and most TiVO-ized computing devices on earth almost invariably run some bastard fork of Linux. Microsoft wants your money, but once it gets it, it doesn't really *care* what you do with the hardware its OS was installed upon. Contrast that with, oh, say, Motorola... whose motto is, "if the uppity users are getting too close to defeating the phone's security, push out another update to try and wipe the exploit away".
The truth is, SecureBoot IS a good thing... as long as WE have the keys to our own machines, and can use it to advance OUR agenda, instead of allowing the keys to be retained by someone else who can then turn around and maintain control of the devices we theoretically own. Instead of whining about having to look up the 128-bit certificate code printed on a sticker slapped onto the computer (and laser-etched onto the CPU for backup safekeeping), or open up the case and add/remove a jumper to allow us to set our own cert code & disable it entirely if we desire, before we can install Linux, we should thank Microsoft for ensuring that we'll still be able to do whatever we want with our own damn computers.
BIOS-flashed viri are still rare, but are far from theoretical anymore. By now, there have been at least a half-dozen bits of malware that reflash themselves into the BIOS to rewrite themselves onto any new hard drive you might connect at boot time (automatically reinfecting and/or rootkitting the hard drive if you try to blow it away by booting from Knoppix and wiping the hard drive before reinstallation.
Secure Boot is neither good NOR evil. It's what we allow others to make of it. As long as WE have the keys to our own computers, it has the potential to be a GOOD thing. Microsoft isn't the sneaky enemy trying to lock us out of our own hardware... Intel and AMD are. We have to recognize our enemy... and no, it's not the New Reformed Judean Popular People's Front of Palestine; it's the fsck'ing ROMANS (even if they DID build the aqueduct, the sewers, give us public education, and... well, go watch Monty Python's Life of Brian for the rest if you haven't figured out the reference by now ;-)
The way I'm seeing the court's logic, it's OK to resell an OEM copy, but ONLY if the first sale was in compliance with the licensing terms. So, it would still be illegal for a (soon to be "ex-") Microsoft VAR to put up a web site & sell "virgin" licenses for Windows that were meant for sale with a new PC, or for use by Enterprise customers, but 100% legal for someone who acquired the same license by purchasing a new PC to RE-sell it.
The obvious question being, "How much pretense of a first sale would have to occur before a court would rule it was abusive & NOT ok?" For example, Could a German mfr bulk-license Windows on OEM, "every PC gets a copy" terms, then arrange to fulfill all of their "linux" sales through a thirdparty who "bought" the outgoing PCs (completing the "first sale"), then harvested their Windows licenses, reimaged the hard drives w/Linux, re-sold them out the back door for $15 less than the same PC with Windows, and sold the harvested Windows licenses to others?
Upgrades are a special case. When you upgrade "most" products, you don't get another license... the old one is extinguished the moment you activate the new one.
Also, did the court rule that consumers have the *right* to buy & sell used licenses, or merely that it doesn't constitute infringement? Big difference -- in case 1, the licensor must cooperate. In case 2, they can't sue you, but can use DRM to render the used license worthless.
I think it's a combination of both. New versions of Android depend upon very few new mainstream additions to the kernel, but DO depend upon changes and improvements Google itself has made to the Android-specific parts of the kernel... and those changes always get made to the latest upstream kernel from Linus.
I suspect the benefits to Android of changes made to the kernel by Linus himself (his own code, or committed on behalf of others) are few and far between, but I can't necessarily say they're nonexistent. I've been painfully aware of the Linux ABI problem ever since I got my first Android phone, and by now I've largely come to the conclusion that forcing proprietary loadable kernel modules to communicate with the rest of the kernel through a stable thunking layer (allowing kernel modules and monolithic code for which source is provided to communicate directly as always) that would preserve at least the illusion of a stable ABI is probably the least-bad solution to a problem that mainstream Linux will likely never solve (mostly, for ideological reasons).
It wouldn't require the cooperation of anybody involved with Linux itself (neatly sidestepping the intractable political problems), and it would be a neat surgical solution that Google could forcibly apply only to kernel modules that aren't open source. It would require minimal extra work by vendors (almost no additional work if the requirement only applied to new phones going forward), and would allow end users and manufacturers to politely ignore each other and do their own thing without actively stepping on each other's feet. If a manufacturer had no interest in upgrading current users to a newer version of Android, the lack of loadable kernel modules compatible with the new version would no longer be the deathblow holding them back that it is now.
^^^ I forgot to mention... even "GSM" phones are generally crippled on AT&T and T-Mobile unless they're sold by AT&T or T-Mobile (respectively). To the best of my knowledge, if you live in Finland and buy a phone with LTE, it won't be compatible with AT&T's LTE. Likewise, I've gotten mixed answers about whether random European phones that can do 1700/2100UMTS can ALSO do HSPA+ on T-Mobile. The general consensus seems to be that the're no guarantee that a random imported phone will be able to do HSPA+, but that most phones that go the extra step of supporting 1700/2100 UMTS can usually do HSPA+ too.
Likewise, it's apparently possible for many/most European phones to limp along while roaming on T-Mobile using a hybrid uplink/downlink mode that does everything on 2100MHz, but I suspect the data rate is (at best) half what you'd get with a phone that can do 1700/2100, let alone HSPA+ (which maxes out at ~22mbit/sec, and seems to get about 10-14mbit/sec in places where T-Mobile has deployed it well).
By the same token, Sprint and Verizon are both deploying "LTE", but they (like AT&T) are deploying the degenerate American variant that's only "LTE" because the American carriers pressured the ITU to add a footnote to the official specs that says, "${this} is LTE because the American carriers twisted our arm and forced us to say it is, but nobody else has to support it because it's an optional (and frowned upon) minimal subset of the actual standard that we don't ever expect to exist outside the US". As usual, it's incompatible with everything, including "LTE" as deployed by the other two networks.
Perversely, but in general, yes.
There are specific use cases where prepaid can be cheaper (most of which can be described as, "never use the phone for anything besides voice calls, and rarely make THOSE"), but if you're a typical customer with Android phone who uses 2-4 gigs of data per month and wants it to be as fast as possible, your options in the US can basically be summed up as, "T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, US Cellular, and a few other regional carriers... with 2-year contract, and buying your own phone won't save you a cent unless you also buy the subsidized phone and sell it on eBay"
T-Mobile is the only carrier that allows you to buy your own phone, sign a contract, and slash $20/month off your bill. T-Mobile will allow you to get prepaid service, but then they drop you down to EDGE (~153kbps) speeds for the rest of the month once you exceed a gigabyte.
For the most part, prepaid service in the US is marketed to two groups: elderly people who treat everything like a 1970s long-distance phone call and never use the phone unless it's a dire emergency, and people who are so poor and have such bad credit, they can't even come up with a $200-300 deposit (refunded after a year of paying bills on time) to get a regular plan with subsidized phone (and instead, pay more for less service... in America, being poor is expensive).
As far as T-Mo's prepaid service goes, I believe it's been around for a while, but they practically guarded its existence as a state secret and only advertised it overseas (to people who were going to visit the US for an extended period of time). They didn't start advertising it HERE as a service available to everyone until VERY recently.
> Doesnt that void the warranty
Four words (that, judging from the wording on at least HTC's bootloader-unlock page, at least HTC is officially aware of): "Magnuson Moss Warranty Act".
Briefly speaking, if your phone's headphone jack has a weak solder joint that goes bad while you own the phone, the manufacturer will have a HELL of a time trying to convince the Federal Trade Commission that it happened because you rooted the phone, unlocked the bootloader, and installed Cyanogen.
That doesn't mean the manufacturer can't reflash the phone to stock before it even tries to figure out what's wrong with it, and it doesn't oblige the manufacturer to restore Cyanogen and/or make it work with anything besides stock before returning it to you. It just means they can't point at a delaminated OLED, loose solder joint, or burst capacitor, and disclaim the warranty because you reflashed it to another ROM.
In theory, they could TRY to deny a warranty claim for heat damage if they could prove you disabled their power management... but unless they could prove you actually OVERCLOCKED the CPU (vs merely locked it to max speed with all cores active), they'd be opening up an even bigger can of worms. A few years ago, Toshiba & HP got in trouble with the FTC for selling laptops that couldn't actually run at their advertised speed for sustained lengths of time. If they argued that running your phone "balls to the wall" at 100% speed with all cores active constituted abuse, they'd risk being forced to either recall an entire production run of the phone or give rebates to owners as compensation for misleading advertising (Toshiba and HP both had disclaimers in fine print stating that advertised speed was a raw CPU capability and that actual performance might be less, but the FTC takes an exceptionally dim view of such disclaimers unless they're featured prominently on the packaging, in all advertising, and the manufacturer basically bends over backwards to make it bleedingly obvious that the device will never run at its advertised speed).
> I'm in the US, but I pay full price for my phones and just use pay-as-you-go phone service
And most hardcore Android users would have $200+ monthly bills (or have to give up 10mbit/sec or faster data) if they did the same.
Yes, there are prepaid services... and they all impose major catches if you plan to use them with an Android phone, expect high-speed data, and actually USE several gigabytes per month of it. From your description, it sounds like you mostly use your phone for making voice calls. Some Android users spend hours per day using their phones, but can't remember the last time they actually used their phone to make a voice call to somebody.
Count your blessings. At least you CAN unlock your bootloader and reflash, unlike most users stuck with a Motorola phone. Head over to XDA-developers.com sometime and feel the misery and despair in the forums for phones like the Motorola Photon/Electrify. Lots of people bought Motorola phones believing their promises that they'd be unlocking the bootloaders (especially after Google's purchase agreement was announced). The unlocking never happened, and quite a few angry users have sworn to god (or their favorite deity or deities) that they will never, EVER buy another Motorola phone with locked bootloader, regardless of how badly Samsung's radios might suck by comparison.
Having a phone that withers on the vine due to manufacturer neglect sucks. Having a phone that gets metaphorically dunked in a jar of Round-Up by a manufacturer hellbent on keeping you from taking matters into your own hands and upgrading it yourself is an entirely new and higher level of "suck" that defies normal attempts at definition.
> You can do that in the states as well.
As long as your carrier is AT&T, or you don't care about data faster than GPRS.
As a practical matter, unlocked GSM phones don't exist as normal consumer goods in the US. If somebody is selling them, they're imported.
Most imported GSM phones *still* can't do UMTS on T-Mobile's frequencies (1700/2100). Some imported phones don't even support EDGE (though thankfully, that seemes to have been almost exclusively a Nokia disease), and are stuck with uselessly slow GPRS when operating on T-Mobile. And even if the phone DOES (by some miracle) support 1700/2100MHz UMTS, it still probably won't be able to do HSPA+, so you'll still be stuck with half the speed of a "real" T-mobile phone.
As for using non-VZW phones on Verizon, good luck... hopefully, 1xRTT is fast enough for you, because non-Verizon phones can't do EVDO on Verizon (not even when roaming). I don't remember the exact reason why, but it basically comes down to this: unless the non-VZW phone has an identical twin sold by Verizon and you can get the Verizon radio modem firmware to flash to your phone, it will never do EVDO on Verizon.
Sprint? Forget it. Short of doing some very, very illegal things to make your shiny new non-Sprint phone impersonate your old Sprint phone, Sprint will never allow you to activate a non-Sprint phone on your account. They'll happily let you roam with it on Sprint, as long as it's associated with another company like Telus (Canada) or Verizon, but they'll never allow you to use that same phone as a Sprint customer.
There's no inherent reason why a CDMA phone can't be as interoperable as an unlocked GSM phone. In many other countries, they are. Unfortunately, Qualcomm decided to make R-UIM (the CDMA superset of GSM's SIM standard) an optional feature that Sprint and Verizon declined to implement.
Until the FCC decides to force Sprint and Verizon to allow activation of any phone that's physically capable of working on the network, and until foreign phones routinely ship with 1700/2100 HSPA+ implemented and enabled, buying an unlocked phone and using it in the US is somewhere between an "urban legend" and an "april fool's joke".
Forcing manufacturers to open-source everything would be almost impossible, if only because more than half the phones sold in America (and basically all the phones sold for use on a CDMA network, and most of the phones sold for use on T-Mobile's 1700/2100 HSPA+) use Qualcomm chips, and Qualcomm has never been open-source friendly.
I can think of a much better strategy for empowering users: introduce a kernel compatibility layer that's 100% open source, and require as a licensing condition that any and all non open-source loadable kernel modules shipped with an Android phone and the kernel interact with the kernel ONLY through that compatibility layer. That way, when the next version of Android comes out, end users could just recompile the compatibility layer for the latest kernel required by the new version of Android, and keep using the drivers that shipped with their phone that they already have in their possession.
Google: do you want to know why the quality of Android software tends to lag behind IOS's best software? It's because the best Android developers are perpetually stuck spending half the year trying to hack, patch, and rewrite the broken binaries that shipped with their phone so they'll work with the new version of Android. Spend a few days looking over XDA, and let the magnitude of work being done sink in. Now imagine how much better Android software might be overall if the developers spending 3 months trying to patch a broken .ko for the front camera were able to spend it writing a better camera app instead. It's staggering how many thousand hours of development time get squandered week after week, year after year, endlessly fixing problems that Google could solve once and for all with just a tiny bit of effort (creating, and enforcing the use of, a compatibility layer for proprietary loadable kernel modules).
The big problem with PHP is that you can get yourself into situations where trying to handle error conditions can actually make things worse than just letting it crash, burn, and try to clean up its own mess for you. Let's start with the fact that try/catch DOESN'T actually work with php_mysqli and pile things onto the "things that suck about PHP" list from there.
I borked an entire database table once thanks to PHP's willingness to recast just about anything, even when recasting contradicts the prepared statement declaration command in php_mysqli itself. The ONLY thing stopping me from porting the whole app to Java is the fact that I can't figure out how to get Tomcat to not accept incoming http connections or respond AT ALL until it's 100% ready to deal with requests, instead of crapping out and returning semi-random 500 errors for that period of 20-90 seconds when it's in an "indeterminate" and "undefined" state while starting up.
Java certainly isn't assembly language, but to be honest, the only time I ever find it to be *slow* anymore is if I forget to give the JVM more ram (damn you, Sun, and now Oracle, for refusing to give us a default option that says, "just use as much ram as you need until Windows runs out of physical ram and starts swapping too much"). Since sometime around 1.6, if there's any meaningful difference between the performance of C# and Java under Windows in any use case not involving DirectX, I haven't really seen it. C# compiles to intermediate object code that gets compiled to native code before running. Java compiles to JVM assembly language, which gets compiled to native x86 code at launch prior to running. Different nomenclature, same difference.
The only area where Java really still falls on its face compared to .Net/C# is Swing... and Swing's problem isn't really *performance* anymore. Rather, it's the fact that Swing still firmly inhabits the "uncanny valley" where it mostly looks and acts like Windows, but doesn't inherit Windows' settings/history/context... so if you change the default scaling of Windows, or set custom favorite directories for the file dialog, or things like that, Swing doesn't change to reflect them. But actual speed hasn't really been an issue for a few years now. At least, not on anything quadcore, with at least 8 gigs of ram and running Windows or Linux (I'll grant that the Mac version of Java might still suck badly).