Posts by JohnFen 5648 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2015
"People simply have to have confidence in their ability to use these modern instruments to transact their business, privately communicate, and securely maintain their information."
I agree wholeheartedly with this. But, speaking personally, the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook reduce my confidence in these systems more than people like this guy.
"Apple and Samsung appear convinced otherwise."
True -- just because they're overpriced doesn't mean there aren't suckers out there willing to pay that price. The Samsung thing is relatively recent, though. My 6 year old Samsung phone is repairable enough that I've fixed it three times now (once was replacing the battery, though, which may not count as "fixing" on that device as the battery is designed to be easily replaceable).
"if I am corrected or someone gives a decent reason then I am happy to take it on the chin"
I don't even consider that as "taking it on the chin". I am happy to be corrected! When I make a mistake and someone corrects me, that's a moment to celebrate as it means that I've become just a little less stupid.
"I suggest Microshite move on from W10 and go to W10.1"
But Win10 is that last version of Windows *snicker*. As if refusing to update a version number on subsequent releases means that those releases aren't new versions. Microsoft clearly couldn't be more full of shit than they are around All Things Windows these days.
"Especially resorting to gimping themselves with a 9+ year old outdated operating system."
An "outdated" operating system that works correctly, is easy to use, and allows you to be productive beats a "modern" operating system that does not. Every time.
"Web apps packaged as mobile apps is a big thing now"
Yes, and that's one of the reasons (but nowhere near the biggest reason) that I've stopped even evaluating new apps anymore. I'm really looking forward to getting off of this "mobile OS" train entirely. It's become something of a nightmare.
"they currently have a controlling share in anything which has to work cross-platform.
e.g. chat apps."
They do? I think the dominant chat app is WhatsApp right now, which isn't an Apple product.
However, the point that DougS was making was that iPhones themselves don't have enough market dominance to allow them to be considered a monopoly. If there's no monopoly, then there can't be an abuse of monopoly -- so whatever Apple wants to do in terms of dictating what is or is not allowed to exist on iOS is unimportant in terms of this aspect of the law.
Yep, me too. The gigabytes of music I have stored on my phone continue to be available to me no matter what. That alone is a wonderful reason to not use streaming services.
...that said, I can stream directly from my music server at home should I really want to do the streaming thing. It's occasionally useful.
"Because it would have a different number, making it harder for people to contact you."
Most (all?) US carriers will let you have the same number on multiple phones. I assumed this was globally true, but apparently not. I never thought I'd actually see an area where US cell service is better than the service in other industrialized nations, but here we are!
Regardless, as you point out, you don't need this particular device to do this -- the ability doesn't depend on the phone(s) involved, it depends on what your carrier allows. If this is the main selling point for the TCL phone, then there's really no reason to buy the TCL phone.
"this particular handset is just too pricey for this use case."
Exactly, which means it doesn't address this use case. If people want to fulfill the use case you describe, they've been able to for years, using phones that cost under $50 (and if your goal is to have a phone that you don't mind losing or breaking, cost is the most important factor). So I remain confused as to what this device is supposed to do for me.
"My Android devices update the applications automatically on a regular basis, so in this context auto updates are probably a very good thing."
Mine don't, because updates problems do happen, so it's important for me to be able to choose if/when I'm ready to take that risk.
"A better idea would be the system update process to have an option to take a backup before applying system updates."
If we have to choose one or the other, the better idea is to let people turn off auto-updating. But, really, the best thing would be to allow people to turn off autoupdating and provide some automatic backup before updating.
Automatic backups are a difficult thing to accomplish, though, because you have to put that backup somewhere, which means the user is going to have to configure something.
"There's a giant cloud of SMUG hanging over Redmond, these days. I blame THAT."
But this is a wider problem than just Microsoft. It's practically epidemic across Silicon Valley as well. I'm not sure what to root cause is, but I started noticing many years ago that the younger programmers entering the field, by and large, knew how to produce programs in specific languages and frameworks, but tended not to know anything but the very basics of software engineering.
I suspect that the real problem is that many people are entering the field solely because they want to make a fat paycheck, not because they want to be engineers, so they learn pretty much the bare minimum.
"The update debate has divided security experts about whether automatic updates are more trouble than they're worth because bad code can cause data loss."
There is no worse thing that software can do than cause data loss. That said, I think this is the wrong debate. The real debate should be around forcing people to update.
If someone wants to have updates automatically applied and are willing to accept the risk, I have no problem with that. But it should be optional. I think this is an ethical issue -- it is not ethically supportable to force updates on people, full stop.
"Killing people isn't the goal of war"
Technically true -- I was being glib. But effectively, killing people is the goal of war. A nation only takes to war if they can't get what they want without killing people, therefore the killing people is the whole point of war.
...that of getting killed.
The entire point of war is to kill people. If the battlefield is full of nothing but robots, then the battlefield will move to where the people are. All that will be accomplished in the end will be to kill fewer soldiers and more civilians.
I think I have about two dozen aliases, although really I only use four of them with any frequency anymore. This used to be what most people did. Has that changed?
Although I'm certainly not going change doing this. Different identities for different purposes has huge advantages, and no disadvantages. More so now than ever.
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