Recent Comments

I expect many "average" users would like to reduce or eliminate the ads their phone loads and shows, but they don't explicitly know they need root access for that. I commend Firefox for keeping adblock alive as all others have eliminated the option.

I mostly liked the old Android app permission system, until they removed network access as a component. Where else do you get a nice list of the things an app is allowed to do? Certainly not on Linux/BSD unless you audit the source, yourself, or else install a carefully crafted SELinux policy for each. And when there are multiple apps that do the same task (say: solitaire) you can shop-around, until you find one that requests the fewest permissions.

An app update wants new permissions??? Just decline and keep using the old one. Or if you want to try it, just backup your apps before upgrading, and reinstall the old one if the new version has undesirable changes.

Unfortunately the most recent revamp REMEMBERS that you (perhaps accidentally) accepted the new permissions of the app update, and will reinstall it without any extra prompting, requiring you to clear the Play Store's app data before rolling-back.

I'm not so sure Cyanogen's system of allowing users to limit permissions would work on a larger scale... App developers would start including unit tests to see if they actually have each permission up and working, and if not, the app just exits.

AOSP or even Replicant is probably what you want then. You can get android without google or any other company involved, if you wish.

If something is for the enterprise, its not secure enough for me as an individual for my personal phone. I want a phone with *no* remote wiping even possible. No hooks. I don't want anyone to have control over any aspect of it, other than myself, to the extent that its possible.

" we don't need radical changes in metaphor, just refinements in usability and convenience"

" It's clear they're making a huge effort to listen to their users and find out where the pain points are: it's a radical concept in software development (listening to the users and applying fixes as relevant). I wish others did it too."

And these are the reasons why I switched from FireFox to Pale Moon for my daily browser. You are correct; more projects need to do this but I think this *is* coming. I think there are slowly but surely going to be forks of good projects who have lost their way and have gone down that "changes in metaphor" road. The forks will try to restore the sanity and they will gain a following.

What I meant by that sentence is, "I feel like others have rooted my phone from the moment I first use it." The fact that Android is so closely tied into Google, has that miserable app permissions system that allow devs to simply ask for one more permission each round until they rule the world mwah ha ha ha, and is probably phoning home more than you know, kind of freaks me out.

Android is not consumer-focused, it's enterprise focused. And those enterprises need your data, your ad-watching-eyeballs, and your credit card to stay in business. Fuck that, I just want pocket computing.

Glad I had a chance to edit the summary and make sure everyone recognizes the intro was a tongue-in-cheek slam at some other DE. Seriously, the new XFCE looks great, and I love the idea you can configure Alt-Tab to do things other than the traditional way - I like the vertical list of full title apps (there was another DE that did it this way but I can't remember which anymore). At this point in the evolution of desktop environments, we don't need radical changes in metaphor, just refinements in usability and convenience. That seems to be exactly what the XFCE team is doing.

Check out the language in their press release, too. It's clear they're making a huge effort to listen to their users and find out where the pain points are: it's a radical concept in software development (listening to the users and applying fixes as relevant). I wish others did it too.

Looks like a good looking desktop experience. I'm looking forward to checking it out - might even encourage me to give LXDE a rest for a while (until LXQT comes out, anyway). At this point, I'd say XFCE is leading the race in traditional desktop environment usability, and it's not clear to me what "extra" you get by installing something like a full-on Gnome3 or Unity install. For all that extra storage and all the additional memory required, it's not clear to me what you gain by way of usability or convenience. This is what was forgotten like a year ago. More is not better, dorkwad developers!

The average user does not know what root access is and does not need it. I don't think that you or most of us here are average users. Hence, it does not make sense to enable root access on all handsets but it makes sense to make it easily obtained if the advanced user wishes to do so.

Like this? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-phone-lens-150x-cell-phone-based-microscope

Damn, you almost had me crying before I got to the 3rd paragraph...

ARM processors often have something similar to Intel Active Management Technology, a seperate processor etc that can backdoor everything.

FUCK SYSTEMD.

""When Debian starts pulling the kind of sketchy shit that the Redhat crowd pulled with systemd and Gnome (among other instances), I'll give a little weight to some of the concerns"

That time has arrived.

"When Debian starts pulling the kind of sketchy shit that the Redhat crowd pulled with systemd and Gnome (among other instances), I'll give a little weight to some of the concerns"

That time has arrived.

Mikee? Is that you?

I'm looking forward to trying this out. I'm currently running Xubuntu 14.04, but would like to upgrade when they finally add it to a future release. Looks like Xubuntu 15.04 is using XFCE 4.11.2 :(

That is the problem. My hardware. My device. Regardless of ease of rooting these days I prefer root access when it is handed over. Throw in the beefed up security and these guys meet a personal and business need. If they can provide excellent enterprise level device controls the money will roll in.

Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto, the two Spocks, where in an amusing car commercial for Audi recently.

I must need to air out my cave, but I'd never seen/heard him sing and had never heard of this little gem. He's actually pretty good, and that he can do that material with a straight face? *That* is acting!!

Please fill out this field.

Something of a follow up to a previous story:

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-09-15/uptake-of-software-defined-networking-routing-hurting-hardware-sales

I imagine that, like with cameras, larger lens size improves performance in low light conditions. But when gathering enough light isn't the limitation, it should work fine.

I don't personally think it's bad, but I can give you their side. All the "bad" I've heard has boiled down to the following points:

• This amounts to allowing the FCC (not Congress) to declare a tax. (As phone providers are required to tax/fee their customers to death in order to pay for "last mile" coverage, so people fear broadband providers will be forced to do the same.) The people issuing this objection are staunch anti-tax conservatives and libertarians.
  • Such a tax on Americans with broadband could be anywhere between $48 and $150+ - per year. (Gasp!)
  • Americans won't want to pay the extra $4-$12.50 per month and the broadband companies will lose all their customers. (Hysteria!)
  • Because all the customers will leave, the broadband companies will stop being "able to innovate".
• Even if that doesn't take out the broadband companies, all the expense of abiding by the new "restrictions" - no data caps, no traffic shaping (not true), Netflix using up all the bandwidth - will bring them down in a tangle of red tape and overloaded, smoking fiber.
• The broadband companies will have "no incentive" to keep laying fiber.
• One of the FCC guys on the board alleges that Obama pressured Wheeler into doing this rather than letting him use his good judgement.

So there's the list. The other side has better points, in my opinion. Net Neutrality is going to do more good than it does bad in my opinion. Fingers crossed for the future.

Not an expert in this stuff, but I don't imagine you can get a terribly strong zoom to work well with such a small lens.

There's a reason binoculars have big objective lenses.

$10 per month per account could add up.

$10 for internet.

$10 for mobile phone.

$10 for home phone.

Perhaps it will be $10 for one account if the account bundles internet, mobile and home phone.

What about if a household has multiple phones? $10 per mobile?

Wait until a month after this comes down and everyone realises they are being taxed $10 per account. Let the screaming begin.

That is how I feel about touchscreens.

From the information available at the time. $100 to $200 a year is the range for how much extra it could cost consumers. Now they are estimating up to $10 depending on how much the estimate blows out. http://www.canberratimes.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/revealed-the-true-cost-of-metadata-retention-20150302-13sdk5.html

Nope, not bad as far as I know. If cable companies are pissed off, good. That means we scored a point for the consumer, and took a step to protect ourselves from being unfairly charged for crap service.

Funny, that was my first thought when I heard he died. I knew Mr. Nimoy from his role as Spock, but I always preferred the smiling, singing version. Even Bill Shatner said "I loved him like a brother. We will all miss his humor, his talent, and his capacity to love." His nuanced performance of an alien isn't what made him human

On the bright side, Slashdot has killed Beta.
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/02/27/1010241

No story on Leonard Nimoy is complete without a link to the Bilbo Baggins video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_duzQzS1I

Enjoy the nightmares...

No it isn't. I've just checked, and the Google Play Billing Service permission isn't mentioned at all in that FAQ. BTW, that FAQ page says it is deprecated and the content should now be here: http://osmandapp.github.io/faq.html#permission

That doesn't mention the reason for the billing permission either.

The billing permission requirement was added on November 4, 2014, in this commit:
https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/commit/275ea7728cac21815c633af4722d0066f0fc273b

But the message on that commit only says "Add billing permission" and doesn't say one word about why. And it is a separate commit from whatever changes to the actual code were made that use the permission, so it is not at all easy to learn what it is for.

Mee too. I feel uninformed and alienated now :D

Well, if you want to go that path, 5120x2880 is also a double (x and y) resolution of Dell U2713HM and few other Dell monitors (possibly using the same panel). This could also be interpreted the other way from your conclusion. The most likely scenario however, is that LG came up with a high-res panel which got used by several companies, including Apple and Dell.

There is zero evidence to your claim that Apple ordered the panel from LG. If they did I am sure that they would not allow any other company to get access to "their premium panels", and especially not to let anybody beat them to the game and release a 5K monitor before them, like Dell did.

And why do you think that 5120x2880 is a weird resolution? The numbers are higher than everything else around but they are just a multiple of very commonly used 720p resolution (1280x720 -> 2560x1440 -> 5120x2880 - doubling x and y at each step).

And I think that your argument that Apple loves "2x pixel ratio" does not make sense in this case. We are not talking about a phone or a tablet where doubling a display makes sense because the apps are full-screen and they scale easier. This is iMac where the applications are designed to run at any size you want them to be. And even iPhone resolution did not follow 2x (x and y) resolution jumps, actually the only 2x (x and y) change was from iPhone 3 to 4. After that the increments were much smaller and also aspect ratio changed.

And finally your comparison of who sold how many is irrelevant to the question. And you are also comparing apples and oranges (monitors and computers).

Both the iMac and the Dell 5k monitor use the same LG AH-IPS panel. Because LG is a well known Apple supplier and the 5120x2880 resolution of the panel is exactly doubling the X and Y resolution of the previous iMac's 2560x1440 resolution, leads one to believe that this panel size was very likely specified by Apple. They seem to love to do that perfect "2X pixel ratio" thing even when it leads to an odd resolution like 5120x2880 for the iMac or 2048x1536 for the iPad.

Plus, how many of those Dell monitors do you think they sold at $2500 vs. how many iMac Retina's that Apple managed to sell (also at $2500) to fanboys.

My first experience with paytv is when I visited my mother in the 90s. I could have spent half the trip watching tv. A lot of old tv shows and movies from the 60s 70s and 80s. It rocked. These days, paytv is not much different from TV. May as well just download stuff. Pity not everything is available. I would pay to be able to access old stuff.

Good. An ISP should be a black box. Pay money, get an internet service. The shit will hit the fan in September 2015 when Australian ISPs start giving private information to media cartels.

Apple does make nice hardware. However, it should be noted that they are not the first to have 5K displays:
http://gizmodo.com/dells-27-inch-5k-monitor-is-like-filet-mignon-for-your-1630946185

The Apple car will be one hell of a white-knuckle ride:

http://mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/apple-maps-600.jpg

We discussed the issue a few months ago:

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-10-20/regulating-the-internet-like-a-utility-wont-yield-an-open-internet

Anyone think this is a bad thing? I'd love to hear reasoned arguments.

Yes, and it'll bend in half the thinner they make them.

Say what you will about their legal department (i.e. they are assholes), but you have to admit that Apple makes some damn nice hardware. Also, they often push manufacturers upper bounds to make sure their stuff is the latest and greatest.

For example, when most desktop users are still drooling over the new 4K monitors, Apple releases a 5K iMac. Most people have heard of their CNC milled MacBook frames, but another example of a neat manufacturing technique is how they use lasers to shine light through metal. No other company puts that much effort into the design.

Don't celebrate yet. The FCC has done such net neutrality decisions several times before... they keep getting tossed-out by the courts. Needs at least some mention of that.

Almost marked you as spam :-)

Will it have rounded corners?

Like many, I dropped my cable TV subscription some time ago. But it wasn't so much the cost that drove me away but the content. There wasn't anything I wanted to watch anymore. The interesting channels that originally made cable so exciting (History, TLC, Discovery, SciFi) had become so genericized that I might as well have been watching broadcast TV. More and more channels were resorting to "reality" shows, in which I have absolutely no interest. The news shows were just talking heads dealing superficially with the issue-of-the-day while ignoring more troublesome news. The movie channels kept showing the same films over and over again. And, oh God, the advertising! The marketing was becoming ever more discordant and shrill; it was like surfing the web without an ad-blocker.

So I took stock of my watching habits; was there anything cable TV gave me that I couldn't do without? News and weather? I had stopped turning to the TV for that long ago; the web tended to be more timely and offer deeper* analysis. Movies? My DVD collection was fairly extensive and I preferred being able to watch a movie on my schedule rather than waiting for it to roll around on cable. TV shows? Well, there were a handful I would miss but most could be replaced either by streaming from the web or simply waiting for the seasonal compilation to hit retail in DVD format. And I wouldn't be inundated with adverts while watching them.

I quit watching TV because they no longer had anything to offer me. That I was saving money in the bargain was just a nice bonus.

If TV - whether it be broadcast or cable - wants to survive as a medium, it needs to start offering people a worthwhile product. Stop pushing the cheapest possible programs ("reality" TV), diversify your lineup (e.g., a History channel that actually is about history, and not pawn shops), and severely cut back on how many adverts intrude on the watching experience. Otherwise more and more people are going to realize your offerings are crap and look for something better on which to spend their money.

* and seeing as how shallow a lot of web-based reporting is, that's a pretty damning statement on TV news

I wasn't talking about the Passport specifically, I was talking about classic Blackberry style phones in general (as in the Motorola Admiral I mentioned). And who the fuck are you to tell me what my wife prefers anyway?

"But I felt less rabid about the subject when I installed Swype. Swype and its competitors do a great job of helping you get words entered in an efficient and generally painless manner."

About ten years ago, we called these programs keyloggers.

Oh come on. The Passport's keyboard isn't any wider than a landscape slider.

Indeed, this is why my wife prefers a slider to a fixed keyboard, she finds the fixed keyboard makes Blackberry and similar phones difficult to hold. She tried a Motorola Admiral when we were looking for her first smartphone, and it kept slipping out of her hands when she'd type.