Given the battery specs and the form factor of the products, they could have used a 14500 cell that retails for $5. That's not as much recurring revenue as charging $80 for something proprietary though.
I didn't realize Google had gone evil way back in 2012.
I don't have a problem with Youtube trying to make downloads difficult, but using its advertising monopoly to bully publications into not discussing software Google doesn't like is outrageous.
It's fine that a window position sensor might eventually fail on a car. It's not fine that a window position sensor causes the car to limit its maximum speed.
When I have driven cars with electronic door poppers, I found them to be a downgrade from traditional mechanical door handles. It's even possible to make the latter sit flush, and cars have been doing it since at least the 1960s.
I'm all for trying new things in the hope that there might be a better way, but make sure it's actually better before putting it into a volume product where it has safety implications.
As long as? I'm not sure if there's a common way, largely practiced by many people where they don't own their own domain name that they can point anywhere?
It used to be common to let an outside agency run your website, and they may own the domain. It's probably still very common to manage your domain with your hosting company. If you get blacklisted by your hosting company, you may not be able to transfer your domain out.
When I've rented cars with electronic door poppers instead of conventional door handles, I've found them annoying. Do many people actually prefer them?
Purely mechanical flush exterior door handles are possible if aerodynamics (or giving the impression of trying too hard to be aerodynamic) are a factor. Aircraft have used them for decades. Several older cars have used them including the Chevrolet Corvette (third generation), Subaru XT, Fiat Barchetta, and Pontiac Grand Prix (third generation).
I've been a happy KDE user for years, but I recently discovered that Gnome is surprisingly good on a tablet. KDE is usable, but feels about as touch-native as Windows does. Gnome is easily as good a tablet experience as an iPad.
There's only one fly in the ointment: Gnome's onscreen keyboard is both terrible and difficult to replace.
GNOME on touchscreens is in a weird place -- everything it needs to be perfect is right there. But there are a handful of pain points and weird bugs that make me think none of the developers are actually using it on a touch device. The OSK is the worst offender.
I still prefer it over KDE on my 2-in-1/convertible laptop, though. Despite the jank it also irons out a lot of the pain points that more traditional desktops have with touch, and is clearly made with it in mind, even when the execution is iffy.
Indeed, Gnome jettisoned everything for a touch-based interface, but is not actually usable as one. For example, there’s no video player that works well with touch even though at least three cosplay with large round buttons and no menus. Believe it or not, they require keyboards for essential functionality and taps are not recognized or broken.
Using phosh on a starlite btw. Web players work well however! No thanks to gnome.
Maybe of interest: One of our recently-elected community-wide goals is to improve the Input story, and we started a new on-screen keyboard project called Plasma Keyboard in context of that. It's a bit experimental and a very early effort, but maybe something promising for you to track in some way.
Much better than the Gnome OSK despite signs that it's early (I got some transparent flickering over the panel).
I'd like it to have more punctuation and special characters available as long presses on letters, and for it to have a terminal mode with arrows, tab, ctrl, etc....
I've been unimpressed with Google's commitment to making the fundamentals of Android great. They seem to prefer doing the minimum required there and putting all their efforts into something more sexy, like generating fake photos that look like they were taken with a 2400mm lens.
I don't want my phone to generate fake photos; I do want it to always let me manually take screenshots, but require turning on a permission that's a little awkward to find to allow an app to do so.
I wonder what an alternate history where Google didn't implement remote attestation and actively made it difficult for apps to snoop on user modifications would look like.
I suspect the Fire Phone is where things changed. If Amazon had iterated on it and done a good job, it might have been a competitive threat to Google's revenue model for Android; that's less likely if it won't run games and banking apps.
> The “you can’t outlaw math!” crowd are kind of right but that argument assumes free and unencumbered end user devices, which, as crazy as it sounds, might not be a given in the particularly awful dystopian futures available to us right now.
That future is already here for the substantial number of people who have only iOS devices. Even in the EU where Apple is forced to allow alternate app stores and direct installation of apps, the apps must be signed with a key that Apple can revoke. Google seems to be planning something similar for "certified" Android, and some important apps refuse to run on any other kind of Android.
I'm disappointed so many smart people in the tech world participated in this corporate power grab.
Well said. And I am disappointed in myself as much as anyone. My only consolation is that I at least took a frontline part in making Linux, GNU, FreeBSD, and FOSS in general what it is these days, on the back-end.
I suppose someone who understands the problem choosing an iPhone in spite of it is very slightly culpable, but it doesn't sound like you helped build any of these systems that deprive end users of their final say over computers they own.
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