Posts by dotdavid 1712 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2010
When they first announced the speed upgrades I checked and it was saying it would be available this time next year. I logged on today and was told it was now available. Maybe I read the date wrong or a glitch? I guess I'll find out soon enough.
Anyway it's worth having a double-check on "My Virgin Media"
"ISP margins are tiny - maybe a couple of pounds a month per customer."
I would suggest they cut the junk mail marketing budget then. They're always sending me crap addressed 'to the householder' despite me being a customer, and addressed crap trying to get me to "upgrade" my broadband-only contract to a mobile phone deal.
My Galaxy S3, the source of much of my constant irritation with Samsung, finally gave up the ghost and I got a discounted LG G3 to replace it. Very impressed, although the unremovable cruft like McAfee does annoy me. Still if it annoys me a lot at least I can put CyanogenMod on this phone as it uses a Snapdragon with source provided by Qualcomm rather than Samsung's Exynos chipset with no source available.
"Samsung as a hardware manufacturer makes money each time you buy a new device from them and than loses money each time they have to support it with software upgrades"
Okay for old non-connected TVs, phones and other devices. Not okay for connected "smart" ones. If they can't do updates for a reasonable time period after a device sale they shouldn't be selling smart devices as they are blatantly not being smart.
OnePlus' handsets look pretty close to stock but unfortunately aren't.
After a public falling-out with Cyanogen Inc they created their own OxygenOS fork of CM (I think) with poached key members of the Paranoid Android custom ROM dev team. It's pretty close to AOSP so in theory shouldn't be too hard to update, but most custom Android distros take quite a few months to rebase on new AOSP releases and I can't imagine OxygenOS would be any different.
"The EFF also petitioned the Librarian to include Blu-Ray encryption on the list of hackable products, arguing that it was needed for educators making teaching material and for making private remixes of films."
But that would lead to widespread piracy of films, which are impossible to copy and/or download at the moment!
Android One devices get whole new ROM versions which include the patches, plus additional features if it's an Android version upgrade, and retain user data. This allegedly happens for up to two years although I wonder if it's two years from the sale of the device or two years from the release-to-market of the device. I suspect the latter.
"But you can't hack a sextant, or the planets"
Yeah CyanogenMod support kinda goes on a scale.
- Manufacturer's ROM. You'll be lucky to get one or two updates unless you're running a Nexus or certain Moto phones.
- CyanogenMod with their built-in OTA updater
- Unofficial CyanogenMod on XDA developers, which tend to be a bit more fiddly to keep up to date as they tend not to have an OTA update mechanism
The latter category though can have support for years, depending on the install base for your phone. My Asus Transformer TF101 is running the latest Android despite official support ending at Android 4.0 and the latest official CyanogenMod being CM10 (Android 4.3), thanks to the efforts of a particularly dedicated device maintainer.
Hmm, not convinced UHD is anything but a niche field at the moment and for the foreseeable future. The OTT broadcasters can reasonably-easily add support for it, so they have, but the broadcasters would have to spend much more rolling it out - is it any wonder they're approaching it with caution?
"Not sure if new phones with newer versions have it turned on by default."
There were rumours that Lollipop would have it on by default, but presumably due to performance it wasn't. Some of the high-end smartphones have dedicated silicon that aids with the disk encryption/decryption process so the performance impact is lessened; I suspect until these devices are more common the encryption will remain optional.
A several-pass random wipe as part of the factory reset process would be welcome however.
"You're perfectly right that all MS needed to do was offer a choice, even if it defaults to tiles"
Completely agree but the reason MS claim to not add options for these sorts of things is it increases complexity for users; they're put off by large lists of things they don't understand (hence the ribbon, eugh, which is supposed to be task/context-sensitive and hide the stuff you don't need to use *now*) and if someone needs to provide support they can be sure all the buttons etc are in the same place on everyone's machine if there is only one style of Start menu.
As another commentard noted, Windows is not exclusively developed for IT professionals, unfortunately. It's lowest-common-denominator thinking.
Is Dabbsy really the anti-Worstall? Their opinions of this subject don't seem to be opposed. Worstall seems to like Uber as an antidote to the inefficient rent-seeking that comes from having an arbitrary limited number of taxi licences available, like New York's taxi medallions. I'm not sure whether this is how the London black cab system works; can't anyone become a cab driver by passing the relevant knowledge exams or are there limited "places"?
Amazon are encouraging Prime subscriptions by following the satellite TV bundling model - the fact that you get a lot of stuff with your subscription can make the unwary think they're getting a good deal despite the fact that they probably don't use half the provided services.
Well it works for Sky and Virgin Media and whatnot.
"Does anyone actually use Amazon for TV"
Of course now the TV service is bundled up with the "free next day delivery service" which is actually sometimes useful, I suspect the waters are muddied for prime subscribers. Will many ditch their prime subscriptions because the TV thing can't play on any of their devices, or will they just grumble and keep on paying to get the other Prime benefits, or better still for Amazon buy one of their horribly locked down FireTV dongles? Amazon have obviously done the sums and expect people to choose the latter two options.
Don't blame Cyanogen, blame Samsung. The former i9300 device maintainer wrote a series of Google+ posts explaining why; TLDR Samsung don't release the code and have rubbish dev relations with the open source community. It's why I'll never buy another Samsung phone.
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