Recent Comments

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.

That phone may be technically "newer" than the Photon Q, but it's a huge step backwards, not an upgrade. Much lower specs all around, and it's on JB 4.1 despite being released after Kitkat went mainstream. That's inexcusable, and only a consideration in an emergency.

Thank you for bringing it up though!

Your comment was the first time I'd realized that Cuba got Netflix before Australia. That's...well, I wish I could say surprising.

You have summed up my thoughts exactly. Yesterday I had a recruiter ask me if I knew LAMP. Mind you Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl are all on my CV.

recruiter: I do not see LAMP do you know LAMP
me: Did you read my CV
recruiter: Yes but I do not see LAMP
me: Do you know what LAMP means?
recruiter: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP
me: Do you see those on my CV anywhere?
recruiter: Yes, but I still do not see LAMP

May the Gods save us from recruiters and HR staff like that!

Right before Nexflix takes off here...

I will be on this bandwagon as soon as Apple finishes laying down enough roads such that I can drive to work. On the bright side, at least having to stop the car; roll the windows down; roll the windows back up again at random intervals won't be required.

I had Comcast, and they did the same thing. I just cut my cable tv out completely. It wasn't that I couldn't afford it, but that the rates kept creeping up, and I had friends who had better service, more channels, etc, but somehow paid less than I was. Completely ridiculous for me to keep paying what I was, especially since 80% of the channels I had were full of crap that I don't think anyone watches, and to get the channels you want, you are forced into paying for the crap. I started watching Netflix, and all has been well. Comcast can go choke on their own garbage.

Yep, bar it is!

A fine backhanded compliment of your Clojure book :p

I think we'll probably see a crash in sporting leagues tv contracts. They've been high as the cable companies have been able to raise everyone's rates ( everyone has epsn, right?) in order to accommodate. But as more people cut the cord or drop sports channels, the base will be smaller and end up more price sensitive.

I'd rather go to a bar for 16 Sundays and get a drink and some food, than to have higher bills throughout the year.

I just got my DirecTV bill for February and to my surprise it was significantly higher than usual. After a bit of checking it seems DirecTV has raised its rates. So immediately I started evaluating my programming packages with them and after careful consideration I eliminated several pieces of programming and the result is a lower bill than I had previously. So the end result of DirecTV raising rates will be less revenue from me. The programming I chose to do without can be had easily via NetFlix, HuLu, youtube or several other online sources. So I lose nothing but DirecTV loses money. If they had not raised my rates I probably never would have changed my programming. I still think there is a market (at least for the moment) for providers like DirecTV, especially for live events in HD (sports, concerts, etc.). Most of the professional sports in the U.S. have their online presentations locked down pretty tight and priced way too high (IMHO) for the quality it delivers. I can subscribe to something like MLB.TV but if my broadband connection is not up to the task then the quality is not worth the cost and the same event on something like DirecTV will be far superior. If the various online outlets for live events get the quality up and the price down then I think that will be the real end of DirecTV and others like them.

When it's better reading a book on Clojure than watching what's on TV... well, I'll read the book.

No worries Lenovo, I accept your apology. But I will also never again consider one of your machines. I need to trust my hardware manufacturer, and now thanks to your ass-hattedness, I no longer trust you.

Whichever dumbass middle manager thought this would be a great revenue earner for you should be made to fall on his own sword and then fed to a pool of sharks. The trust of your clients is worth more than a little ad money. How could you all have been so stupid?

Anyway, enjoy irrelevance. Your brand is tarnished. Maybe you and Sony should get together and have a party? You're made for each other - you both screwed the pooch in the same way.

taking a post that comes in this format and turning it into an article is too much work. No one wants a ton of hyperlinks. Tell me why I should care about this release. Until then, I don't care.

I used to be a big fan of the physical keyboard, certainly when I'm in hunt-and-peck mode on my Android (Note 3). 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. I don't miss the hardware keyboard so much anymore.

That said, when I have to do some really serious typing, I saddle up a Bluetooth keyboard before getting started. Touchscreen keyboards are only good up to a limit, I think.

I'd be happy for a double screen though, so the on-screen keyboard didn't obscure so much of what I was looking at while typing (not so much a problem on the Note 3 but a bit worse on smaller devices). I'd also love that double screen to fold like those awesome old clamshell phones where all the delicate bits were protected on the inside in your pocket. Tired of having to worry about screen scratches, or worse, taking a lovely, sleek device and armoring it with the non-sleek options out there that are really required to prevent your device from taking a beating.

We've searched high and low for a suitable Qwerty replacement for the inevitable day her phone is no longer usable, and there just isn't anything out there on any carrier.

First link in the summary mentions the LG D520 (Optimus F3Q). It's nearly a year-old now (but still much newer than the Photon Q) and available on T-Mobile. Might not be ideal, but at least there's still an option.

I still have my Nokia N900 slider! Maybe I could ebay it! (although the battery has long since died and would need to be replaced) The Debian GNU/Linux Maemo distro with a GTK+ DE predated both Apple iOS and Android by many many years.

But as a user of a sliding keyboard phone, I was always petrified that I would break it. So many moving parts made of tiny plastic pieces - I'm sure if I would have dropped the phone¹, it would have exploded into hundreds of tiny shards.

¹ I did install the app "N900 Fly" that used the accelerometer to measure how far up in the air you could hurl the phone. Alas, my personal score was not able to place in the top scores list.

This is where I am getting my roms: http://download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=xt897. I do know I had to go through several different custom recovery choices and versions before I found one that worked correctly. I encourage you to keep trying because you should be able to load 4.4 or better: http://www.techaudible.net/cyanogenmod-11-for-motorola-photon-q/

just another vector for a possibility of failing.

The battery is $5 on eBay and Amazon. It's the same battery used in the Lumia 521, so they are plentiful.

I really wish I'd kept my N900. I sold it for twice what I paid for it, but in the end I would have been better off keeping the phone.

My wife has a Photon Q and so far we've been unable to get any custom ROM to run on it. We can unlock the bootloader with Motorola's permission (which I think is a load of horseshit, having to get permission from the manufacturer to fully utilize the hardware, but that's a rant for another post). We can flash a custom recovery, and we can flash a custom ROM. Then it gets stuck in a boot loop, no matter the recovery or ROM used. So, she's back on the aging and soon to be unsupported 4.1.

We've searched high and low for a suitable Qwerty replacement for the inevitable day her phone is no longer usable, and there just isn't anything out there on any carrier. If she didn't need Android for playing Ingress, she would probably go back to a Qwerty feature phone, since she doesn't care as much about which OS she has but more about the ability to text without having to touch the screen.

They keyboard is very awkward on the phone for me. To use the keyboard comfortably for my thumbs, I have to have the phone on the verge of falling out of my hands.

I never liked them. Keys too small. True about the not taking up half the screen. I would rather have a slide out d-pad style game pad and a decent snes emulator. Games over 2 decades old for less than $15 to play on my phone would also be good (jab at nintendo for selling very old games for excessive prices there)

have a look at neo900.0rg. they plan to refurbish n900 with new motherboard and internals allowing one to run any OS they like...

I feel the same way about bluetooth keyboards as I do about bluetooth headsets...

If somebody made one that clipped solidly and unobtrusively onto my phone, and also charged its own battery from the phone, they'd probably be quite useful, and I'd be happy to try one. Since they don't do any of that, they're an extra piece of hardware that is a lot of extra hassle, so it just gets left at home, rendering it useless.

I mentioned phone cases with bluetooth keyboards, in my earlier comment... The upshot is, they aren't available for most phones, and reviews for them range from awful to horrible.

Oddly enough, predictive text and Swype still work just fine on QWERTY slider phones, too.

The summary gives several good examples of where Swype simply does not work, including a photo link.

Maybe it's because they are considered obsolete? I didn't upgrade my original Droid until very recently (when it finally died) and I lamented the loss the of the slide-out keyboard. I was extremely happy with both a) how far predictive text input technologies had come, and b) swype. I can type much faster with one thumb and swype than I ever could with two thumbs (and I'd had years of practice with various Palm Treos beforehand). The magic technologies aren't without their problems, and now I'm much more likely to "type" a completely different word than what I intended rather than just missing a character here or there. For the reader of my messaging, it is a step backwards. For me, it is a step forwards.

It looks like the solution is the bluetooth keyboard.

I couldn't believe how long it took someone to figure out that having a keyboard was a waste of space/weight/parts/etc. So I never missed 'em.

But it looks like you can add one to any phone in existence...

So get a BlackBerry Passport. Higher resolution than most Android phones, ability to run Android apps, and the most progressive physical keyboard ever put on a phone (with touch-sensitive gestures). Amazing build quality. Stop complaining and put your money where your mouth is. Stop rewarding companies for the same old crap.

I have nothing to add to the original post except to agree with all of it. I went from a Moment to an Epic to a Photon Q where I am currently parked until someone decides to revive the slider platform. At least Cyanogen is still creating images for the Photon Q so I can stay relatively current as far as the OS goes.

LG seems to be the last manufacturer keeping the torch burning, but they have their problems... They have a bad habit of not offering the option of auto-adjusting screen brightness on many of their phones, even high-end and feature-packed ones like the afore-mentioned LG Mach (LS860).

The drought of sliders has led to some very strange pricing. If you have an old but good-condition slider phone, it'll fetch $100+ today. The 3 year-old Motorola Photon Q (arguably, the missing Droid 5) running Android 4.1 is going for $300+ New on Amazon. Even the ancient used Droid 4 is selling for $120.

There seems some faint hope in the form of phone cases with built-in slide-out bluetooth QWERTY keyboards, but they really only exist for iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phones. The reviews for them are really TERRIBLE, and the separate battery must be quite a hassle to keep charged.

Argl! No! Ouch! Arghh! Joke! Ahhh! *gasp* it was a joooooooke! *whimper*

Let's revisit the SONY BMG ROOTKIT for a moment, and read/listen to a quote from Thomas Hesse:

"Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" - Thomas Hesse, President, Global digital business, Sony BMG

Listen:

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/they_dont_know_so_why_should_they_care.wav

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00000703.html

Upon checking the right support column, it appears you can get other options for more $$$

I saw that, and it is interesting. But I can't understand why the CD/DVD ROM only drive. What about DVD Dual Layer and Blu-Ray? Is a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray re-writer forbiddingly different somehow? That's a lot for a laptop that can't write DVD's or recognize Blu-Ray.

I just don't see a story here... Anechoic chambers exist, and some guy got to go inside one. Not particularly sciency, and not much technology at all. How is that news, or particularly relevant to this audience?

I don't have a laptop, nor any real need of one, but if I did, I would look into these guys instead of hanging on to the long lost Thinkpad era.

How much before this type of action is illegal or at least warrants full immediate cash compensation

We promise to be more diligent and not let you find it again.

Indeed, they have fallen and deep. The build quality is definitely not the same good as before. You clearly see they are weaker made.
The last times the company I work for had to do with Lenovo we have just had trouble:
- Two months for changing a DVD station under warranty.
- Lenovos own automatic update installed a faulty version of the BIOS bricking the motherboard. Because it bricked all motherboards of the same model, they could not fix them fast enough for everybody all around the globe so we had to be without computer for a long time.

How is it even possible to have so low quality control that a faulty version of a BIOS is reaching automatic updates?

I take it as a sign of the times how far the once mighty Lenovo (in pseudo-proxy-of the once mighty IBM) has fallen

I loved my first IBM Thinkpad: full of reliableness and gusto. I type this now on my chiclet stricken, touchpad button missing (although I never use the touchpad: long live the nub!), X1 Carbon. I look at even the very next generation of X1 Carbons and see faults that would make me -- a true believer -- second guess the company's strategy.

I recommended an Ideapad to my less-than-tech-savvy friend. When it experienced its first problems I shrugged them off as the fault of Microsoft. When the problems became persistent -- for example, an incompatibility between the wifi driver and Google Fiber's router -- I started to see the Lenovo of now for what they are: a memory of what once was.

use the secure-delete package instead of something like DBAN or another Windows wiping tool.

"Description: tools to wipe files, free disk space, swap and memory
Even if you overwrite a file 10+ times, it can still be recovered. This
package contains tools to securely wipe data from files, free disk space,
swap and memory."

Once DBAN was recommended by many, but it appears to have been snatched up
by a company and depending on many factors, including whether or not the
company involved is located in the US, I'm sure it's been hobbled by now.
I would not trust DBAN.

I would not trust other Windows wiping tools for many reasons, one because
you'd be using Windows, two I've heard of these programs being modified by
malware after installation and rendered useless. They will go through the
motions but not wipe everything or in some instances, wipe nothing!

use 'hexdump -C drivenameyouwiped | less' following the wiping using
secure-delete.

you can also use the 'dd' command to add additional wipes if you're
paranoid.

before you feel your job is done, i'll just leave this here
for your consideration:

---DCO and HPA (Host Protected Area of HDDs)---------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/DCO_and_HPA
http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
http://hddguru.com/software/2006.01.20-Hitachi-Drive-Feature-Tool/
http://hddguru.com/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Restore-Tool/
http://www.itsecure.at/hparemove-v0-2/
http://www.sleuthkit.org/informer/sleuthkit-informer-17.html#hpa
-----------------------------------------------------

More than acceptable :)

And kudos to Filippo for helping all the users out there that do not have the expertise to reinstall the same OS or install a different OS such as Linux. Although, helping them install and learn Linux would be even nicer than that malware of an OS that shipped with the systems.

So, like what if I just trash the partitions with a bootable live ISO?

As long as it runs Linux, I don't honestly give a shit about Lenovo crapware.

but that would never be, especially in the Land of The Free!

I welcome anything that helps kill off the constantly vulnerable and non-free flash player.

For years, I used gnash or other open source flash implementations to view homestar. They worked well enough. Everynow and then there was an artifact. I wouldn't be surprised if shumway didn't have similar issues. Reverse engineering the format and implementing action script with all of its versions and variants isn't trivial.

If for nothing else other than to let me continue watching Homestar Runner, I welcome our new SWF overloards!!!

I really appreciate how much easier on the eyes (and the brain attached thereto) pipedot is than so many other sites.

If the letters/numbers/symbols/this-stuff-I'm-typing-right-here that make up the summaries and comments were just a little larger (without me having to do anything other than load the page), I think I'd like that a little better. The size used in titles and sidebars and such is okay as-is.