At Noon CDT Apple is releasing iOS8 which means that all of the cell networks and WiFi hotspots will be jammed to receive the ‘working’ symbol as the Apple servers grind their little spindles to molten destruction.
Releasing this to every device at the same time is definitely going to clog the ‘tubes’. It would be a good time to do something nefarious or nasty as communications will be crippled for a few hours.
I won’t try to use the iPAD today.
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19 comments
LOL yeah. 🙂 Soooo glad I use Android! Having worked for Apple… they couldn’t pay me to use their junk! 😛 LOL
Plus, I have the benefit here of my 36″ Android Smart TV (great for my old eye’s!) and my new Android 5” HD IPS display 4G Smartphone for portability. The display on the little phone is actually sharper and nicer than the TV. And the best price there is. 🙂
I decided on this one (It’s actually manufactured by BenQ. Seems a lot of companies are fed up with Samsung, who manufactured their previous models). *shrug*:
Kogan Agora 4G Smartphone
I’m loving it! 😀 Has a big battery with good life. And is one of the very few that supports microSD’s up to 128 GB (they state 64GB, but I have a 128 that works fine. Doesn’t work on my TV though.)! Most are limited to 32 GB. Wish it had more than 1 GB RAM though. 😉 But that’s a normal size for a phone. LOL
There are a lot of annoyed people who have been scrambling to dump stuff off their devices to make room for the new software. It doesn’t need the 6Gigs forever, but it needs the room for the install.
I have a lot of empty space, but I’m betting that at least one family member is going to have to dump all kinds of things to the iCloud to install this beast.
I pity anyone who has to do this without WiFi access because their phone bill will be horrendous with a 1Gig extra data charge.
I may get a smartphone, but only to reduce my phone costs. I like the Samsung phone I have because it has a slide out keyboard and a super battery, but that phone sounds like a winner. They don’t export to the US.
I wouldn’t be putting a recipe for cat food on iCloud!
I’m not certain, but I think Kogan does now ship to the USA. It’s recent, and I’ve not tried it of course. 🙂 He had been trying for years to setup a USA distribution center, but was unable to because the US companies totally hate any competition, especially from someone they know will kill their price monopolies! So I think he now ships from the UK to the rest of Europe & USA. But only some products that are on his ‘International’ site. 🙂 Prices are USD. The biggest problem buying from UK/Aus was warranty. But he now has International warranty on some items (up to 5 years on this phone).
Kogan International: Agora 4G Smartphone
He sells unlocked phones and the telecoms don’t like that. It’s really annoying that you can’t move your phone when you move your account. The wireless vendors control what phones are on their network, and it’s really annoying. The US also uses slightly different frequencies than the rest of the world. The rest of the world got to see what was wrong and corrected it, so the US has the most antique system around.
Well, you could email them and ask. 🙂 And they do have a full 14 day refund policy on their branded products. 🙂
He’s better off concentrating on Asia [the fastest growing market] and Europe [the most secure phones] than the US, which doesn’t adhere to global standards for frequency bands or security protocols. The dominate players in the US market don’t like competition and they will use their political power to block anyone who tries to introduce competition into the markets.
The only entry would be through WalMart, but WalMart would screw him over and it would end up costing him money.
I think he wants to cover the World! Be the next Dell! 😉 😀 And why not? NObody thought he’d get anywhere near where he has! Good luck to him! 😀
Would this help? TigerDirect have an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S4 there for US$450 🙂
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8182706&Sku=S127-0510They also have an S5 unlocked for $620. They are pretty good prices for those Samsung’s. 🙂
(I buy from TD now and then because they are one of the very few US h/w sellers that ship to Aus! Even Amazon doesn’t!) Morons.
Tiger Direct is one of the two places I get hardware. Amazon may carry it, but TD and Newegg actually know what this stuff does and has more reliable reviews of strengths and weaknesses in individual pieces of equipment because they have a more knowledgeable customer base to write the reviews. I don’t buy wireless routers because the design is compatible with the decor of my home … 😉
I’m going to dump sand on the Android love on this thread. I have a Samsung Galaxy S3. I also have an iPad that predates usable Android tablets. The iPad Just Works. The Android is a constant annoyance. The current annoyance is that the camera has decided that sometimes it’s going to work, sometimes it’s just going to do nothing. Then there is syncing pictures to my laptop. Android has no software to do that natively, you have to install 3rd party software. The one I chose is called iSyncr, which appears to be the best software available for doing this. For some definition of “best”.
Frankly, dealing with Android, to me, is too much like dealing with Windows — constant annoyances that any fully baked OS should have worked out long ago. Like, no reasonable way to back up and restore the device, there is a debug mode that works if you’ve rooted the device, but no native backup/restore capability. What. The. F***? Meanwhile, when I got rid of my first generation iPad and bought the retina version, I plugged it in, told iTunes that it was now my new iPad so restore it from my old configuration, and within an hour it was in service configured *exactly* as my old iPad had been configured — software, data, configuration, *everything*. Even the exact same photos in the photo album!
That’s the same experience I have with Macs too. I once dropped my Macbook Pro out of the back of my Jeep, it slammed into the pavement and dented in the corner of the bezel. Crashed the drive, of course. Laptop drives are tough, but not *that* tough. So I popped the drive out, popped in a new one from my pile of spares (what, you don’t keep spares around? Uhm, yeah, my garage looks like a computer junkyard 😉 ), re-installed MacOS on the new drive, and then MacOS asked me “do you want to restore your system from your Time Machine backup?” Said backup which occurs automatically whenever I plug in my monitor (which is attached to a docking station that has the USB drive on it). So I answer “Yes”, and again, after a couple of hours, I’m right back where I left off. Well, I lost half an hour of work. Oh well.
I’m at the stage of my life where I want stuff to Just Work. I don’t want to fiddle with the technology. I don’t want to test out fifteen different sync / backup programs looking for one that SORT of works, but not completely. I don’t want to have to completely wipe my phone and re-configure it from scratch every six months because pieces of the bloody OS have decided to take a dump and disable critical functionality. That’s why I’m annoyed by Android and Windows. They require an inordinate amount of fiddling to get even basic functionality working. Crap, I had to write my own backup software (using rsync and a NAS running ZFS doing snapshots on a regular basis) on Windows to emulate Time Machine, and even there, when I had a hard drive crash and had to rebuild my machine, I had to re-install every single program one at a time by hand because of the $#%@! registry BS…
Just Work, dammit! All this fiddling BS with Android and Windows/Linux might turn on nerds and geeks, but I’m too bloody old to waste my time on that kinda nonsense, I got things to do before I croak and no time to fight my technology while doing them…
LOL Well, to each his own. 😉 I’ve not had any serious problems with Android since 4.2. Just like iOS, it improves (though Apple do love to screw things up with new releases!) I get around the Win crap by not using an App’s native installer. I use a 3rd party app that installs and records every detail of the install, and makes a backup before and after. I keep them in a, external 120 GB SSD (mainly for reliability and longevity since there are very few writes.) It also keeps watch on updates too. and is extremely useful for deleting the extra crap some app’s install! (Like that useless ASK Toolbar in browsers and many others). Plus I use Bitsum Process Lasso & Sandboxie, because so many win App’s are not good at sharing resources well and Win resource management sux! I’m still on the Apple mail lists, and still get the many bug & security reports every week (including iOS). Anyway, haven’t had a win issue on my W7 Ultimate x64 in over 3 years since I got fed up and bout the tools to make it behave like a OS should! And it’s the same for Android in some ways. Once it’s ‘rooted’ (and I only buy devices that can be), I set it up the way I want! Not the way someone in CA thinks it should be! 😀
I just updated BitDefender Total Security from 2014 to 2015. If not for my install manager, it would have been bad! I upgraded from 13 to 14 with no problems, no so with the u/g to 15! It’s an installer that d/l the parts of the app via the Internet. Supposed to save all settings from a previous install. The 15 installer did the backup, removed 14, than said I had no internet connection and aborted! And nothing i could do would change it’s tiny mind! 😉 But, it took me 2 mins to have 14 back, than a WTF email to support! Been using BD a decade, first problem ever. *shrug* They are all going for *cute* rather than functional! Apple started all that, then M$ had to follow of course, and everyone else follows whatever M$ does! Morons!
I still have my G4 Powerbook (DLSD/High-Res 17″, 1.67 GHz, 2GB RAM, 180 GB HDD, DL Superdrive) that Apple gave me when I began as Svc Manager ’05. Was a pre-production model, and the best Powerbook Apple made), and see no reason to get anything newer. I don’t even use that, unless I get nostalgic for some reason! LOL
There are ways to make any OS work the way one wants and needs. Some easier than others. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it is! Unfortunately, having worked for them, I trust Apple less than M$! And that’s saying something! 🙂
Thing is, both my Macbook Pro and my iPad *JUST WORK*. I didn’t have to look for 3rd party software to make them work right. They just do it. I plug in the cable to the dock, a backup happens automatically every hour. I plug in the iPad, it backs itself up. Etc.
I usually had to re-install Windows from scratch every six months or so because installing / uninstalling some software package or another managed to get it into a weird state. Towards the end, there were software packages I couldn’t install at all when logged in as myself, I had to log in as Administrator to install them, because Microsoft’s .msi interpreter didn’t like something in my normal login environment. Given that one of my duties was creating (and testing) .msi packages for my employer’s software, that was a PITA of the first class!
I still have Windows 2008R2 running on a server on my network because of some video surveillance software that only runs under Windows (and prefers Server 2008R2), but that’s an install-and-forget kind of thing. Now I just use virtual machines on my Macbook Pro to run Windows on the few occasions I need it for work related things. That way I can just snapshot the entire virtual machine state from outside of Windows before I install or uninstall software, and roll back the snapshot at a level Windows can’t f**k up if something goes wrong… not to mention being able to make full-state backups by simply shutting down the VM and copying the VM directory to an external hard drive. The only reason I would run Windows on physical hardware nowadays is to play games, and now that Steam is on MacOS, and my favorite games run on Steam, that’s not very compelling anymore.
Well, all I can say is, you’ve been lucky. 🙂 And good luck to you! 😀
As for win, as I said, the installation system sux! Always has, probably always will! Since I went 3rd party, no problems. 🙂
I have tried several online or Cloud backup sites. the only two I trust are Mediafire and SpiderOak. Bust even so, there is no way in hell I would EVER store anything even remotely sensitive or important there! 😀 I had lenghthy chat’s (either via IM, phone and/or email) with many vendors. They all made grand promises, but when I told them to put up… *crickets*! Except for Medifire & SpiderOak (and Filefactory, who are Aus., so can’t be trusted with any privacy thanks to Gov reg’s). Never had a problem with MF and I have about 140 GB stored there (but nothing not on my NAS & LTO tape), encrypted and some plain like pic’s I share etc. I have 2 TB storage space, and their desktop & mobile app’s work well and unobtrusively to sync files that I want synced. It’s also one of the cheapest solutions out there. 🙂
SpiderOak is a bit different. Their model is ‘zero knowledge’ (what they call “Our ‘Zero-Knowledge’ Privacy Promise”) and have very high encryption and robust storage. I only have the free 2GB account to play with for now. But so far, I’m impressed (and THAT doesn’t happen often!) LOL They have several options, up to full Enterprise private clouds (for a price! Though reasonable actually.) 😉 😀
SpiderOak
I get all my games from GOG now. I have about 68 I think. 🙂 I like my old faves! LOL And They have some great modern ones also (I like the Witcher series 1-3, Disciples 2 Gold and Torchlight 1 & 2. I also like the 5 games in the Myst series, which I have on my Mac too actually, well Myst & Riven). 🙂 The great thing is, they often have specials and freebies. I doubt I’ve paid more than $100 for 68 games! 🙂
I only have one steam game that I like “Defense Grid: The Awakening” with all the DLC’s. I hate Steam actually! Had a lot of problems with their stupid licensing & DRM (try playing a game on one of three machines! You need 3 licenses! Screw that!) I actually own it and paid for it, but I got a hacked non-stem version to play! Especially since I don’t like my gaming/media system connected to the ‘net when I play/work. I haven’t decided if I’ll get a hacked DG 2 when released ‘any day now’. We’ll see. I have the beta ’cause I donated $150 to development, thought not really a *donation* more a pre-product buy + a bunch of extra’s only available to ‘doners’. *shrug*
Meahh. 😉
I actually have two Time Machine backups, one at home and one at work. When I plug in the monitor cable into the Thunderbolt port on the MBP, it backs up whatever isn’t on that particular backup volume to that backup volume. If my house burned down and my computer went down with it, I’d still have a full backup of everything I care about on the backup volume at work. And yes, you can encrypt that backup. The encryption scheme Apple usesappears to be secure.
I store nothing in the cloud that I care about. I’ve seen cloud vendors come, I’ve seen cloud vendors go. If it’s something I care a lot about, it’s on my MBP being backed up redundantly. If it’s something I don’t care that much about, it’s on my big 12-disk rack-mount storage server, which serves CIFS, AFS, NFS, and iSCSI (needed for the surveillance server, surveillance software does *not* like writing to CIFS file shares). I don’t care if my large collection of kitty pron gets wiped out, the world has too many cat videos anyhow. I do care if the only photographs I have of my grandmother’s funeral get wiped out…
Regarding Steam, I am baffled. I can run the same program any one of my computers at any given time. I log into Steam on Windows, it logs it out on the Mac. No big deal there, I can’t play games on two computers at a time. Are you trying to play a game on three computers at a time? Regarding the DRM, Steam gets it “right” in my opinion. I don’t have to worry about keeping track of physical disks, if I have to re-install my computer or buy a new computer it Just Works on the new install or new computer, etc. All Steam cares about is that I’m only playing games on one computer at a time, which is fine as far as I’m concerned, because that’s all I’m physically capable of doing. Yes, it uses the Internet as a substitute for the CD or DVD “key disk” that programs used to use. But the convenience is that I don’t need those things. (And BTW, some Steam games actually don’t use the Steam DRM, and can be played directly as vs via the Steam application, Europa Universalis IV is one such game).
Oh, GoG is great too. And yes, many of the games run on MacOS…
So we all agree that Steve was better than Bill at cloning the Xerox PARC interface, and operating systems based on Unix are more stable than the others.
This all boils down to whether a particular OS does what you want. Apple’s not only don’t meet my needs which are primarily character-based, and don’t offer an easy way of making them work for for me.
Linux/BSD/etc. are more suited to my environment than any GUI because graphics are not critical and multi-media non-existent in what I primarily deal with. The entire purpose of the iPad is to run a video phone app with some family members. The choice was theirs, and I went along with it. Now that I have a Logitech keyboard for the beast it is somewhat more functional for me, but the writing tools suck.
If I break down and get a smartphone it will be an Android based on price, and the fact that Samsung has a model with a slide out keyboard. I won’t be using it for any interaction on the ‘Net that isn’t over WiFi, I’m too cheap.
If it works for you, it is the best system available. We can discuss it forever, but that fact won’t change.
Agree Bryan. 🙂 And Badtux. 🙂
Hmmmm. I have heard that steam have fixed the licensing DRM issues over the past couple years. The last time I tried was 2010 when I bought DG. I could only install and run from one PC (I had 2 then). I got nowhere with them, and found the hacked version which fixed the problem. 🙂
Yeah, i like my CLI/shell too much to give it up. I was explaining to a much younger person why I prefer Linux, and too her credit, she wanted to try it. So I pointed her to Linux Mint and instructions on how to dual-boot on her notebook. 🙂 She’s studying graphics/web Design, so I told her it was an advantage to learn Linux and why. Apparently, everything on her Uni course is Win/Mac. And they don’t even use PhotoShop (which, as much as I despise Adobe, is the defacto standard for the web), they use CorelPaint! What a bunch of cheap bastards! And they charge a fortune in tuition!
I have hundreds of scripts I’ve written or found over the years. I used 4DOS & 4 NT since DOS & Win NT, now I use Take Command. I can do more with a script in a couple min’s than anyone can do with a GUI in 10 or more! LOL I even have a bash shell that was ported to win with all the GNU and other tools. Helps if I need to do a quick edit for my hosted CentOS server and don’t want to boot linux to do it. 🙂
Hey badtux, here’s the latest discount promo from GoG, in case you missed it. Some goodies here (and as usual, some rubbish!) LOL I have most of the good ones (the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series for example. Well, 1 & 3 were good, 2 wasn’t so much!) Some on Mac & Linux. Only 1 day 10 hours to go (at posting). 🙂
Pew Pew Promo! Have a very shooty weekend, everyone.
LOL I just decided to buy “Incoming + Incoming Forces” for $2.39, because… you know… some mindless mayhem can be a good thing when one just wants to switch off and not think for awhile! LOL
Did you see? They have discount Movies now also! 😀
Err, you do know that MacOS X comes with the ‘bash’ shell and a full Unix CLI, right, Kryten? And MacPorts runs most Linux software natively. This isn’t the old Mac OS, this is basically FreeBSD with a GUI on top of it. It’s a nice GUI. I enjoy using it. But 75% of what I do with my Macbook Pro is at the good ole’ Bash prompt, ssh’ing into various Linux servers to manage them.
I could do that with Linux too, of course. But I can’t run Linux on a laptop. There are three reasons I can’t run Linux on a laptop:
1) Linux doesn’t support any WiFi adapters on modern laptops.
2) Linux doesn’t support any Bluetooth adapters on modern laptops.
3) Linux doesn’t support any of the graphics systems on modern laptops.
There are work-arounds for all that, generally requiring running drivers from other operating systems in some weird emulation mode, but I don’t have time for that kind of nonsense. I have things to do. I have novels and songs to write, Jeep expeditions to historical sites to participate in, I have musical instruments yet unlearned, I have, in short, too much to do and too little time to do it. Mortality is showing its ugly snout and life’s too short to waste on hacks that barely work at best. If it doesn’t Just Work, I don’t want it.
As for Windows, I’ve written PowerShell scripts under Windows. It reminds me of some weird amalgamation of Perl and REXX (gosh, remember REXX from IBM mainframe days? How demented!). But it does allow scripting a lot of things inside the Windows internals. In some ways WMI is more advanced than anything available on Linux. But then, on Linux you generally frob some text file with awk and sed, restart a daemon, and there you go. But anyhow, I had a fairly well configured setup under Windows. It kept breaking though, mostly because of registry pollution. Not to mention that Windows laptops are crap. They are. They’re junk built to a price point, designed to fall apart at the end of warranty. Lenovo used to make good laptops, but even they’ve fallen prey to that syndrome with their latest. Meanwhile this 2011 model Macbook Pro that I’m using works just fine, it outlasted the HP I bought to replace it in 2013. Funny how that works, eh?
Uhhh yeah, I do know OS-X has shell support etc. I do have desktop, notebook & server cirt’s (support, user and admin) for OS-X! Granted, they haven’t been updated in 4 years… but I doubt it’s changed that much, except superficially. I do have OS-X on one of my PC’s actually. Just never use it, don’t have a need to. 😉 😀
I used Powershell for a bit. Went back to Take Command! LOL Much better.
Before I left Apple (and one of the main reasons I did), was because we had to repair the new Intel Macbooks before they could even be sold! And Apple released 4 secret updates in a year (because if they had announced them, they would have had to replace all the notebooks the previous suckers bought!) The number of warranty claims were staggering! And all Svc. Managers were told to find any and every reason to void all warranty claims! The smallest scratch would do it! And don’t even get me started on how amazingly crappy the first 3 iPod versions were! We had over 60% warranty claims alone!
When I worked of Apple in 90-91 all that would have been inconceivable! And heads would definitely have rolled! Now, it’s the business model. And just FYI, I resigned because a student suicided after her new Macbook died and she couldn’t get it repaired under warranty because it had a few scratches and she’d put stickers on it! She’d saved and her mom paid half to get it! She couldn’t afford to get another one! Her school was one of the biggest Mac user’s in the State! After the suicide, I had a frank discussion with the principal, and the next year they changed to PC’s! So that policy cost Apple Aus. bigtime! And I am very glad! I’d do it again!
So, don’t expect me to like the company just because some people get lucky with the products they sell. I am sure they are better now than they were when I was there from 05-07, but I wouldn’t have one as a gift!
Funny how THAT works, eh?!