Google has no interest in eliminating the ability to root. Quite the opposite, actually. There's a pretty strong sentiment among Google engineers in general, and the Android security team in particular, that it's important that users have the ability to fully own and control their own hardware.
You'd never know it from the consumers' standpoint. Google might be pro-root, but the phone manufacturers (Samsung, et al), the carriers, and the app developers are hardcore against root and Google has absolutely no spine to stand up to them. So guess who wins? As it is, I had to buy a T-Mobile phone to use on AT&T because AT&T locks their bootloaders on the phones they give out.
I've rooted every Android phone I've owned, but I fear for how long I'll be able to continue to do that. Considering the trajectory of things, Google being a wuss, and how much of what I do on my phone that depends on root access. More and more of my financial apps now refuse to run on a rooted phone. Android Pay (a Google product, ahem), and even the Nintendo Miitomo app refuse to run if you're rooted. Didn't Netflix also not run if you were rooted? I forget... I gave up on that shitty company years ago.
If Google gives up Android entirely, and I'm now stuck to accept whatever closed, handicapped firmware I'm left with after the carriers have their way with it, I might be done with smartphones entirely.
Sorry, but you'll pry my landline out of my cold dead fingers. I imagine those that are cell-only are a mix of spoiled urban dwellers combined with idiotic rural folks who probably also see smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and first-aid kits as wastes of money too. If they could save $1000 on their car and not get seatbelts, they'd probably do that too.
So here's a reality check for all of you folks living in your urban distortion bubble: cell phones are unreliable for the majority of the country that aren't cities. Power goes out, cell phone reception is weak often on a good day, and also prone to going out from weather, power outages, and other random acts of nature and human stupidity. When the closest hospital is 30 mins away and the police might be the same, the last thing you want is your safety to be at the whim of a technology as fickle and fragile as cell phones. Our land line never goes out. Ever. The power was out for days due to Irene but the land line still worked and was a critical lifeline to the outside world. Batteries and generators kept the computing equipment working for the internet connection (which runs over the phone line: DSL). In fact, we have zero cell phone reception without our landline.. which provides the DSL which then allows the microcell to connect. Since you've got the copper loop already live for the DSL, the few bucks more per month to have dialtone enabled on it is well worth the investment. Cable internet? A joke... goes down multiple times a week, unreliable and the cable company are a bunch of incompetent crooks who can't fix something to save their lives and will charge you through the ass for it regardless. So I pay less than cable and get 50/25 MBit DSL which is rock solid.
So yeah, while all the young idiots are bitching because the battery backups on the cell towers died again from the latest storm-triggered power outage, I'll be cozy and rocking on my landline again thank you. Happens many times a year, in all those places that aren't cities... you know, most of the area of the USA.
I still use ICQ with my dad. It's the only IM I'll ever manage to get him to use, as he's the sort to never even get on Facebook or make a Google account. It's kind of nostalgic and I don't mind, and I still use my original sub-500K UIN.
Hangouts on the other hand is THE primary IM and video-chat tool used among my friends and family. I don't get all the hate...it works great, better than Skype and all the numerous half-baked, feature-limited "new" chat options Google has come out with since. We particularly love its cross-platform ability and web/desktop client to seamlessly move from one device to another mid-chat and not miss a beat.
Looks like FAN company/corporate discounts will no longer be applied to these new plans. This was the only thing keeping them competitive w/ T-Mobile pricing.
I beg to differ. In fact, places that deal with HIPAA and PCI compliance rules have to be crazy-OCD about this sort of stuff. On paper, it would seem that the mandatory telemetry could easily violate these regulations, and Microsoft refuses to give assurance or proof otherwise.
Windows is racing Apple to see which can become wholly unsuitable in an enterprise environment first.
...like all computers did for decades. Instead, they've managed to brainwash their zealot disciples into believing that thinner is better, disposable is ok, and they need a new computer every 2... no, 1 years!
These laptops aren't thinner than a SODIMM memory module or an M.2 drive. Until they are (and they shouldn't be, because they don't need to be and to do so would mean a battery even more insufficient than they already are), any manufacturer telling you that you can't have removable/expandable memory or SSD storage is feeding you marketing BS to justify their anti-consumer design choices. Just so that you needlessly buy more laptops more often instead of repairing/upgrading the one you already have.
There's nothing "Pro" about the MacBook Pro anymore. A Dell tablet has more ports, expandability and options. Hell, there's nothing "pro" about any Mac anymore. Apple has totally given the finger to the professional and high-end user. Where I work (thousands of employees) I see the pendulum swinging back from Mac to non-Mac again since, after a few years of people flocking to Macbooks because of some misguided fashion fad, they're realizing that Macs simply fall short on too many fronts and flat out cannot offer them a computer with the hardware they need to do their jobs. I can spec out a non-Mac that runs circles around the highest-end MacBook "Pro" and costs less. Don't even get me started on the "Mac Pro"... that thing was an useless abomination the day it was released and has only gotten worse as the hardware innards become more and more outdated over the years. It's a nightmare to service and an unexpandable, optionless junk creation not even worth the now-tainted branding of "Apple" it's so bad, let alone "Pro". It's not even white.
So don't single out Apple. Everyone is shipping non-serviceable laptops now.
You couldn't be more wrong. This is absolutely not the case. Hell, even Dell ships pretty much all their laptops with upgradeable memory to some degree, and the Latitudes especially so (the memory is always easy-access, compared to some Inspirons where you might need to take out the motherboard first). I also continue to service many modern non-Dells that the unwashed masses bring to me in my side work, and see SODIMM sockets on pretty much all (although unfortunately sometimes only 1).
I do all the Dell purchasing where I work, and have for years. The only Dells I've gotten in without upgradeable RAM were the tablets, and even those were still crazy serviceable compared to Surface-junk and iPad-crap which are meant to be disposable and tossed if you look at them wrong. Even on the Dell tablets, the SSD storage is standard and removable, which is nice if you just need more space or if butterfingers drops and breaks his tablet but needs his precious data off it that he wasn't storing where he was supposed to.
I won't own a windows 10 machine and linux might be possible if all the hardware worked.
It's really not hard to have a quality Linux experience on a laptop, and hasn't been for a while. You just need to get away from shopping for any old POS cheap laptop then deciding to throw Linux on it. Instead, shop hardware with Linux in-mind first. Wifi is usually the biggest issue with Linux drivers (video being second). Pretty much any laptop has a removable standard wifi card in it. Even if you can't/don't get the laptop with an Intel card from the manufacturer (Dell Latitudes have pretty much always offered this as an option), it's trivial to replace it after the fact if you absolutely must have that model.
As for video: anything with Intel integrated graphics will work decent. If you need power, get something with an nVidia card.
Hell, I was even running FreeBSD on laptops regularly a number of years ago.
Falsehood #1. They are still the predominant standard among digital cameras and camcorders.
Any quality digital camera for years now uses wi-fi to transfer files
Falsehood #2. Wifi is still a pretty uncommon feature, and even when present is fairly problematic, finicky, and requires an unreasonable number of steps to initiate.
and who uses low-end digital cameras anymore, when their phone is just as good?
Falsehood #3. Unless you're unfairly comparing across differing generations of technology, a dedicated digital camera is superior to a phone camera by simple virtue of physics: larger sensors. Even a low-end point-and-shoot digital camera has a sensor many times larger than that in a cell phone, allowing in more light, more signal, and a resulting better picture.
When you do this, is having to carry a cheap small dongle really that serious of an issue?
Falsehood #4. Dongles are a PITA and constantly get lost. What's the point of losing a millimeter on the laptop thickness in some artificial inverted penis-size competition where the manufacturer has brainwashed everyone into thinking they need/want "THINNER!" when really they don't, but the trade-off is a pile of dongles that are an even bigger hassle to lug around than +1mm in laptop thickness, meanwhile they get lost all the time so the TCO of the laptop skyrockets.
Anyway, micro-SD is far more popular than SD.
And finally, Falsehood #5. What universe are you from? Have you even shopped for cameras ever? I cannot even fathom where you're pulling all this nonsense from. Nothing you say is true to the point where you're either delusional or trolling.
It'd be one thing if Hangouts had been replaced by something that had feature parity, but Duo is something else entirely and is not a replacement. For example, in my circles of family and friends, Hangouts is used almost exclusively and we split our use about 50/50 between desktop (browser) and mobile. We depend on seamless migration of chats synchronized between devices. Last I knew, Duo was tied to your phone # and so didn't allow multiple device access and had no desktop component. Has that changed?
Chrome? Isn't that the trojan that gets bundled with every unrelated download one finds on the internet, and then once it gets sneaks onto a user's computer and tricks the user into making it their default browser, arrogantly takes over the computer spawning a dozen background processes that exhaust all available CPU and RAM, bringing everything to a crawl?
I've been in IT for decades, and have been rather ambivalent about Firefox-vs-Chrome until just recently, mainly just being content as long as users weren't using IE. However, despite any influence from me, I've seen countless longtime Chrome fans abandoning it and coming back to Firefox because of the background process/CPU/RAM issue I mention above. This is also being seen on both Windows and Mac platforms... it's not specific to either OS. At my work, Firefox continues to be the deployed browser of choice to all the many thousands of computers we manage because Chrome is an ass and thinks you don't want to use your computer for anything but web browsing.
Cortana is such an annoying piece of crap. We're disabling it across our entire enterprise network on all Win10 computers via group policy, along with a myriad of other Win10 BS items which range from "nuisance" to "security/privacy violation/threat".
Some of the businesses Microsoft is forcing Win10 upon actually care about security, privacy, and ease of use... even if Microsoft doesn't.
I disagree. I think it looks amazing. Every smartphone I've owned at this point has been an OLED screen and I can't go back to LCD. I definitely notice the blacks, and the more-vibrant colors (LCD looks very subdued and washed-out). A Pixar movie on OLED is something to behold.
Of course there are. Chrome is the new above-board "virus" being shoved on everyone as unwanted bundle-ware along with anything they download, then making itself the default browser (worked so great for IE, right?). Then once it's on there, it arrogantly thinks that "OH I HEAR YOU WANT TO RUN CHROME, OK I'M GOING TO TAKE OVER YOUR COMPUTER ALL TO MYSELF", spawns a dozen processes or so and proceeds to suck up all available RAM and CPU. This is not platform specific (we're seeing it on Macs and Windows) and as a result people are switching back to Firefox because they're tired of the horrible performance and Chrome taking over the whole computer (hey Google, computers are meant to multitask).
I personally have never had a good taste about Chrome but I'm seeing tons of previous Chrome fanboys coming to the Firefox side now. *shrug*
This reminds me of Guy Pearce in Prometheus. Ridley Scott got a 44 year old to play a 90 year old dude, required over 5 hours of makeup, and he doesn't even appear as his younger self in the final film release. Why didn't he just get a 90 year old to play that part?
Ridley Scott initially wanted Max von Sydow for the role of Peter Weyland. However, Scott and Damon Lindelof conceived of a scene in which David the android (Michael Fassbender) would interface with Weyland while in hypersleep, and that Weyland's dream would reflect his looks as a younger man since he is obsessed with immortality. Though the scene was cut from the script and never filmed, Guy Pearce had already been cast in the role and thus underwent extensive make-up to appear elderly. Fortunately, Pearce was also allowed to appear as the younger Peter Weyland giving a TED Talk in one of the promotional clips of the movie. A longer version of this clip is available as a bonus feature on the home theater edition.
I was an unhappy cable customer who switched to DSL. Best thing I ever did for my internet connection. Sure, cable can be faster... when it works. But after many weeks of it going down several times a week, usually at least once a day, and many service calls, I had had enough. DSL that works 24/7 is far better than spotty cable even if it's a bit slower.
On the plus side, I also get to work with a local company with legendary amazing(ly good) customer service, who are proud of their company and act it, and I now have 50 Mbit/s down, 25Mbit/s up DSL that is more than fast enough for our needs and is cheaper than cable. And if I need faster, 100Mbit/s DSL is an option.
I'm extremely rural, but amazingly both cable and blazingly-fast DSL are an option for me because our local telco is five stars. To such a degree, limiting ourselves to their service area was one of the top priorities when shopping for this house... no lie.
Windows? People still use that malware delivery system?
This entire house is Microsoft-free. There are a couple MacBooks, my Linux workstation, another Linux laptop, 3 Rokus, 4 Android (Linux) smartphones, 2 Android tablets, and the primary media box is a Raspberry Pi 2 running Rasplex (Linux).
The world has moved on. The last Windows holdouts are businesses that haven't entered into the 21st century yet.
One thing really bugs me about the LG monitor though - it has about five USB ports on it, but it's basically the equivalent of an unpowered USB 3 hub! Seems like it wouldn't have taken much effort to supply decent power through the output ports, an iPad connected cannot even charge while in use.
There's a big difference between making an unpowered USB hub, and making a special USB port that supports Apple's bastardized, non-standard USB wiring for charging. A lot of times even hubs have to have standard USB ports that power everything but Apple, then 1 or 2 specially-marked non-standard USB ports just for iPods and iPads.
Plug an iPad into a standard USB port, and you get 500mA. Plug anything else into it, and you can get 1-2A.
Blame Apple, not LG. There are standards for USB, just as there are for SSD drives. Apple just refuses to follow them because they can screw over users and extort more money that way.
Doubt it, most NAS can't either. There is no way they have a processor powerful enough to last 10 hours on a battery
Well, to be specific: most off the shelf commercial NAS appliances can't. However, "NAS" is like "server", and is based upon what something does, not how you got there. You can build a "NAS" that is every bit (and more) a "NAS" as something off the shelf, but also has sufficient CPU power to transcode many simultaneous 1080p streams. And also has more drive bays and a better web GUI.
That's what I did, because I knew I'd be tucking the Plex box in the living room so I wanted a unified box instead of building and supporting two separate devices. 2 years in and it's still running great while the user list grows.
Slashdot Mirror
Right there with you, for all the same reasons. And with a third-party firmware, I'm current on Android 7.1.
No phone since the S5 has been able to sell me on being an improvement/upgrade. Apparently phone makers don't want my money.
Google has no interest in eliminating the ability to root. Quite the opposite, actually. There's a pretty strong sentiment among Google engineers in general, and the Android security team in particular, that it's important that users have the ability to fully own and control their own hardware.
You'd never know it from the consumers' standpoint. Google might be pro-root, but the phone manufacturers (Samsung, et al), the carriers, and the app developers are hardcore against root and Google has absolutely no spine to stand up to them. So guess who wins? As it is, I had to buy a T-Mobile phone to use on AT&T because AT&T locks their bootloaders on the phones they give out.
I've rooted every Android phone I've owned, but I fear for how long I'll be able to continue to do that. Considering the trajectory of things, Google being a wuss, and how much of what I do on my phone that depends on root access. More and more of my financial apps now refuse to run on a rooted phone. Android Pay (a Google product, ahem), and even the Nintendo Miitomo app refuse to run if you're rooted. Didn't Netflix also not run if you were rooted? I forget... I gave up on that shitty company years ago.
If Google gives up Android entirely, and I'm now stuck to accept whatever closed, handicapped firmware I'm left with after the carriers have their way with it, I might be done with smartphones entirely.
Sorry, but you'll pry my landline out of my cold dead fingers. I imagine those that are cell-only are a mix of spoiled urban dwellers combined with idiotic rural folks who probably also see smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and first-aid kits as wastes of money too. If they could save $1000 on their car and not get seatbelts, they'd probably do that too.
So here's a reality check for all of you folks living in your urban distortion bubble: cell phones are unreliable for the majority of the country that aren't cities. Power goes out, cell phone reception is weak often on a good day, and also prone to going out from weather, power outages, and other random acts of nature and human stupidity. When the closest hospital is 30 mins away and the police might be the same, the last thing you want is your safety to be at the whim of a technology as fickle and fragile as cell phones. Our land line never goes out. Ever. The power was out for days due to Irene but the land line still worked and was a critical lifeline to the outside world. Batteries and generators kept the computing equipment working for the internet connection (which runs over the phone line: DSL). In fact, we have zero cell phone reception without our landline.. which provides the DSL which then allows the microcell to connect. Since you've got the copper loop already live for the DSL, the few bucks more per month to have dialtone enabled on it is well worth the investment. Cable internet? A joke... goes down multiple times a week, unreliable and the cable company are a bunch of incompetent crooks who can't fix something to save their lives and will charge you through the ass for it regardless. So I pay less than cable and get 50/25 MBit DSL which is rock solid.
So yeah, while all the young idiots are bitching because the battery backups on the cell towers died again from the latest storm-triggered power outage, I'll be cozy and rocking on my landline again thank you. Happens many times a year, in all those places that aren't cities... you know, most of the area of the USA.
And the rockets will coal powered. Beautiful, clean coal. That's the secret to making America great again.
If you're trying to use email to transfer files that large, you're doing it wrong.
I still use ICQ with my dad. It's the only IM I'll ever manage to get him to use, as he's the sort to never even get on Facebook or make a Google account. It's kind of nostalgic and I don't mind, and I still use my original sub-500K UIN.
Hangouts on the other hand is THE primary IM and video-chat tool used among my friends and family. I don't get all the hate...it works great, better than Skype and all the numerous half-baked, feature-limited "new" chat options Google has come out with since. We particularly love its cross-platform ability and web/desktop client to seamlessly move from one device to another mid-chat and not miss a beat.
Looks like FAN company/corporate discounts will no longer be applied to these new plans. This was the only thing keeping them competitive w/ T-Mobile pricing.
Telemetry is not spyware.
I beg to differ. In fact, places that deal with HIPAA and PCI compliance rules have to be crazy-OCD about this sort of stuff. On paper, it would seem that the mandatory telemetry could easily violate these regulations, and Microsoft refuses to give assurance or proof otherwise.
Windows is racing Apple to see which can become wholly unsuitable in an enterprise environment first.
...like all computers did for decades. Instead, they've managed to brainwash their zealot disciples into believing that thinner is better, disposable is ok, and they need a new computer every 2... no, 1 years!
These laptops aren't thinner than a SODIMM memory module or an M.2 drive. Until they are (and they shouldn't be, because they don't need to be and to do so would mean a battery even more insufficient than they already are), any manufacturer telling you that you can't have removable/expandable memory or SSD storage is feeding you marketing BS to justify their anti-consumer design choices. Just so that you needlessly buy more laptops more often instead of repairing/upgrading the one you already have.
There's nothing "Pro" about the MacBook Pro anymore. A Dell tablet has more ports, expandability and options. Hell, there's nothing "pro" about any Mac anymore. Apple has totally given the finger to the professional and high-end user. Where I work (thousands of employees) I see the pendulum swinging back from Mac to non-Mac again since, after a few years of people flocking to Macbooks because of some misguided fashion fad, they're realizing that Macs simply fall short on too many fronts and flat out cannot offer them a computer with the hardware they need to do their jobs. I can spec out a non-Mac that runs circles around the highest-end MacBook "Pro" and costs less. Don't even get me started on the "Mac Pro"... that thing was an useless abomination the day it was released and has only gotten worse as the hardware innards become more and more outdated over the years. It's a nightmare to service and an unexpandable, optionless junk creation not even worth the now-tainted branding of "Apple" it's so bad, let alone "Pro". It's not even white.
So don't single out Apple. Everyone is shipping non-serviceable laptops now.
You couldn't be more wrong. This is absolutely not the case. Hell, even Dell ships pretty much all their laptops with upgradeable memory to some degree, and the Latitudes especially so (the memory is always easy-access, compared to some Inspirons where you might need to take out the motherboard first). I also continue to service many modern non-Dells that the unwashed masses bring to me in my side work, and see SODIMM sockets on pretty much all (although unfortunately sometimes only 1).
I do all the Dell purchasing where I work, and have for years. The only Dells I've gotten in without upgradeable RAM were the tablets, and even those were still crazy serviceable compared to Surface-junk and iPad-crap which are meant to be disposable and tossed if you look at them wrong. Even on the Dell tablets, the SSD storage is standard and removable, which is nice if you just need more space or if butterfingers drops and breaks his tablet but needs his precious data off it that he wasn't storing where he was supposed to.
I won't own a windows 10 machine and linux might be possible if all the hardware worked.
It's really not hard to have a quality Linux experience on a laptop, and hasn't been for a while. You just need to get away from shopping for any old POS cheap laptop then deciding to throw Linux on it. Instead, shop hardware with Linux in-mind first. Wifi is usually the biggest issue with Linux drivers (video being second). Pretty much any laptop has a removable standard wifi card in it. Even if you can't/don't get the laptop with an Intel card from the manufacturer (Dell Latitudes have pretty much always offered this as an option), it's trivial to replace it after the fact if you absolutely must have that model.
As for video: anything with Intel integrated graphics will work decent. If you need power, get something with an nVidia card.
Hell, I was even running FreeBSD on laptops regularly a number of years ago.
SD Cards were a minor standard five years ago.
Falsehood #1. They are still the predominant standard among digital cameras and camcorders.
Any quality digital camera for years now uses wi-fi to transfer files
Falsehood #2. Wifi is still a pretty uncommon feature, and even when present is fairly problematic, finicky, and requires an unreasonable number of steps to initiate.
and who uses low-end digital cameras anymore, when their phone is just as good?
Falsehood #3. Unless you're unfairly comparing across differing generations of technology, a dedicated digital camera is superior to a phone camera by simple virtue of physics: larger sensors. Even a low-end point-and-shoot digital camera has a sensor many times larger than that in a cell phone, allowing in more light, more signal, and a resulting better picture.
When you do this, is having to carry a cheap small dongle really that serious of an issue?
Falsehood #4. Dongles are a PITA and constantly get lost. What's the point of losing a millimeter on the laptop thickness in some artificial inverted penis-size competition where the manufacturer has brainwashed everyone into thinking they need/want "THINNER!" when really they don't, but the trade-off is a pile of dongles that are an even bigger hassle to lug around than +1mm in laptop thickness, meanwhile they get lost all the time so the TCO of the laptop skyrockets.
Anyway, micro-SD is far more popular than SD.
And finally, Falsehood #5. What universe are you from? Have you even shopped for cameras ever? I cannot even fathom where you're pulling all this nonsense from. Nothing you say is true to the point where you're either delusional or trolling.
It'd be one thing if Hangouts had been replaced by something that had feature parity, but Duo is something else entirely and is not a replacement. For example, in my circles of family and friends, Hangouts is used almost exclusively and we split our use about 50/50 between desktop (browser) and mobile. We depend on seamless migration of chats synchronized between devices. Last I knew, Duo was tied to your phone # and so didn't allow multiple device access and had no desktop component. Has that changed?
Chrome? Isn't that the trojan that gets bundled with every unrelated download one finds on the internet, and then once it gets sneaks onto a user's computer and tricks the user into making it their default browser, arrogantly takes over the computer spawning a dozen background processes that exhaust all available CPU and RAM, bringing everything to a crawl?
I've been in IT for decades, and have been rather ambivalent about Firefox-vs-Chrome until just recently, mainly just being content as long as users weren't using IE. However, despite any influence from me, I've seen countless longtime Chrome fans abandoning it and coming back to Firefox because of the background process/CPU/RAM issue I mention above. This is also being seen on both Windows and Mac platforms... it's not specific to either OS. At my work, Firefox continues to be the deployed browser of choice to all the many thousands of computers we manage because Chrome is an ass and thinks you don't want to use your computer for anything but web browsing.
Cortana is such an annoying piece of crap. We're disabling it across our entire enterprise network on all Win10 computers via group policy, along with a myriad of other Win10 BS items which range from "nuisance" to "security/privacy violation/threat".
Some of the businesses Microsoft is forcing Win10 upon actually care about security, privacy, and ease of use... even if Microsoft doesn't.
I disagree. I think it looks amazing. Every smartphone I've owned at this point has been an OLED screen and I can't go back to LCD. I definitely notice the blacks, and the more-vibrant colors (LCD looks very subdued and washed-out). A Pixar movie on OLED is something to behold.
Nice to see Apple catching up to 2010.
Of course there are. Chrome is the new above-board "virus" being shoved on everyone as unwanted bundle-ware along with anything they download, then making itself the default browser (worked so great for IE, right?). Then once it's on there, it arrogantly thinks that "OH I HEAR YOU WANT TO RUN CHROME, OK I'M GOING TO TAKE OVER YOUR COMPUTER ALL TO MYSELF", spawns a dozen processes or so and proceeds to suck up all available RAM and CPU. This is not platform specific (we're seeing it on Macs and Windows) and as a result people are switching back to Firefox because they're tired of the horrible performance and Chrome taking over the whole computer (hey Google, computers are meant to multitask).
I personally have never had a good taste about Chrome but I'm seeing tons of previous Chrome fanboys coming to the Firefox side now. *shrug*
Dell Latitude or Precision Mobile, then install Linux. You can configure these exactly how you'd want.
This reminds me of Guy Pearce in Prometheus. Ridley Scott got a 44 year old to play a 90 year old dude, required over 5 hours of makeup, and he doesn't even appear as his younger self in the final film release. Why didn't he just get a 90 year old to play that part?
From: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt14...
Ridley Scott initially wanted Max von Sydow for the role of Peter Weyland. However, Scott and Damon Lindelof conceived of a scene in which David the android (Michael Fassbender) would interface with Weyland while in hypersleep, and that Weyland's dream would reflect his looks as a younger man since he is obsessed with immortality. Though the scene was cut from the script and never filmed, Guy Pearce had already been cast in the role and thus underwent extensive make-up to appear elderly. Fortunately, Pearce was also allowed to appear as the younger Peter Weyland giving a TED Talk in one of the promotional clips of the movie. A longer version of this clip is available as a bonus feature on the home theater edition.
I wonder if Samsung is wishing they had listened to users and kept batteries user-removable.
I was an unhappy cable customer who switched to DSL. Best thing I ever did for my internet connection. Sure, cable can be faster... when it works. But after many weeks of it going down several times a week, usually at least once a day, and many service calls, I had had enough. DSL that works 24/7 is far better than spotty cable even if it's a bit slower.
On the plus side, I also get to work with a local company with legendary amazing(ly good) customer service, who are proud of their company and act it, and I now have 50 Mbit/s down, 25Mbit/s up DSL that is more than fast enough for our needs and is cheaper than cable. And if I need faster, 100Mbit/s DSL is an option.
I'm extremely rural, but amazingly both cable and blazingly-fast DSL are an option for me because our local telco is five stars. To such a degree, limiting ourselves to their service area was one of the top priorities when shopping for this house... no lie.
Windows? People still use that malware delivery system?
This entire house is Microsoft-free. There are a couple MacBooks, my Linux workstation, another Linux laptop, 3 Rokus, 4 Android (Linux) smartphones, 2 Android tablets, and the primary media box is a Raspberry Pi 2 running Rasplex (Linux).
The world has moved on. The last Windows holdouts are businesses that haven't entered into the 21st century yet.
I use Avira on Windows and Avast on Macs. On Macs, Avast is quite silent.
One thing really bugs me about the LG monitor though - it has about five USB ports on it, but it's basically the equivalent of an unpowered USB 3 hub! Seems like it wouldn't have taken much effort to supply decent power through the output ports, an iPad connected cannot even charge while in use.
There's a big difference between making an unpowered USB hub, and making a special USB port that supports Apple's bastardized, non-standard USB wiring for charging. A lot of times even hubs have to have standard USB ports that power everything but Apple, then 1 or 2 specially-marked non-standard USB ports just for iPods and iPads.
Plug an iPad into a standard USB port, and you get 500mA. Plug anything else into it, and you can get 1-2A.
Blame Apple, not LG. There are standards for USB, just as there are for SSD drives. Apple just refuses to follow them because they can screw over users and extort more money that way.
Doubt it, most NAS can't either. There is no way they have a processor powerful enough to last 10 hours on a battery
Well, to be specific: most off the shelf commercial NAS appliances can't. However, "NAS" is like "server", and is based upon what something does, not how you got there. You can build a "NAS" that is every bit (and more) a "NAS" as something off the shelf, but also has sufficient CPU power to transcode many simultaneous 1080p streams. And also has more drive bays and a better web GUI.
That's what I did, because I knew I'd be tucking the Plex box in the living room so I wanted a unified box instead of building and supporting two separate devices. 2 years in and it's still running great while the user list grows.