It's nice that there are cheap 2G phones in India, but I need a phone that works in the US, and wouldn't mind having a cheap phone that can also work in Europe. These days that means at least 3G, or maybe LTE, because the US carriers are phasing out 2G as fast as they can to recycle the spectrum. And it would be really nice to have a $30 spare dumb-phone to keep in the car or to use at times it's not convenient to keep my smartphone charged.

My last dumb-phone had a 2-week battery life. 90% of the time, I want a phone to make phone calls and send text, and I'd rather have something that's 1/4 as large as the pocket computer I'm carrying around. The other 10% of the time, I either want to check my email, or I want a camera, and yeah, I never bother using my camera any more, even though it takes better pictures than my phone, because it is convenient to only carry one device around.

I can read interesting material much faster than I can listen to it on video, and I can differentiate between interesting and uninteresting material much MUCH faster reading it than slogging through a video. Transcripts aren't perfect, but at least they're a start.

Search Engines try to find the most interesting pages that match queries from humans; they do this using robots running algorithms that model what humans might find interesting. "Search Engine Optimizers" try to model what search engine robots will do, and trick them into showing their customers' uninteresting web pages first instead of pages that humans will actually find interesting, because they want to sell you crap. (Doesn't matter if they're good at it, as long as their also-scum customers pay them.)

SEOs will tell you they're not doing the black-hat stuff that got them a bad name, and that they're really providing legitimate services for their customers*. Sure, they'll help you rewrite your web page so Google's robots can find the interesting parts (Google will also tell you how to do this, for free, and I agree that charging a customer money to tell them not to hide their important content in singing dancing Flash-Animated Javascript-requiring Videos is actually a non-scummy valuable service to the public - but most people who sell those services call themselves "web designers" or similar consulting titles.)

Some of them will also tell you how to write actual interesting content for your web pages - but most people who do that call themselves "editors" or "content specialists" or similar titles, and only fall back on the term "SEO" if they're appealing to dumber customers or trying to also offer scummy services.

If Google's changing their search rankings in a publicly documented way, and you're calling it a "mobilegeddon" because it breaks all your little tricks for boosting uninteresting content to higher search rankings, you deserve it. If you're a legitimate web design specialist, you don't need scare tactics like that, you just need to learn what Google wants and offer legitimate re-design services.

And yes, I did RTFA, but I didn't WTFV.

Bah - Yahoo's dumping their maps just about the same time that Google's been making Google Maps much less usable, at least on browsers. Not only does it take a lot longer to load the map of where it thinks you are before it's willing to listen to you type what you really want a map of, it's been getting much harder to actually display directions even after that. For instance, if you want to go from A to B, it shows you a short abstract of the directions, and lets you click on parts to expand them. But you can't just expand the area around B without losing the fat purple line display of the route. Almost all the time, when I'm looking for directions to somewhere, the part I need the most detail about is the area around the destination; I usually know where I am, and how to get to the freeway from there.

For a while I was able to use "Classic Google Maps" and avoid this "upgrade", but that seems to have gone away.

There's really only one thing to eat while reading a story like this (other than Moar Chocolate, for Research Purposes.) It's Scalzi's Schadenfreude Pie. Dark, bitter, sticky, chocolately.

Well, thank you very much, telling me that I'd get better battery life if I installed the new Android version. As far as I can tell (at least with all previous Android versions), Google's instructions for installing the new software are "What? You don't have one of these three Google-brand phones? Then wait for your carrier!".

That's bad enough for my phone (which has a carrier, and Samsung's a reasonably major brand, though my previous HTC phone never got upgraded), but my tablet's Wifi-only, so there's no carrier, just a manufacturer who sold that model 2 years ago and doesn't have that tablet easily located on their website, and as far as I can tell, if I were to dump IceCreamSandwich for Cyanogen (who at least tell you what hardware resources you need for each version), I'd lose access to the Google Play Store?

Are you counting the notes, or the intervals? Are you counting the root once or twice (1 and 8)? Got fencepost errors?

I end up dealing with this a bit more, because I play mountain dulcimer, and dulcimer tab notation starts at 0 instead of 1, counting from the open strings to N frets in a mostly-diatonic scale. (Usually the tuning on the middle string means you end up with at least one more note available, plus most dulcimers these days add the 6.5 fret (which gets you the 7th note in the melody string's scale, as opposed to a flat-7th Mixolydian), which gives you a few more choices.

Last year I was looking into getting either a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone Black. BBB had a newer ARM rev for the CPU, so it can run more kinds of OS. But the RPi has the removable flash as its drive, so you can easily load whatever OS image you want, change OSs by switching flash chips, and if you hose it too badly you can take it out and reload, without worrying about whether you've bricked the board. Also, the specs at the time said the RPi had a better GPU, and could do 1080p at 60 Hz vs. only 30Hz for BBB, which means I can plug it into TVs and monitors without as much flicker. I chose the RPi.

BBB nominally costs a bit more, but by the time you buy cases and power supplies and flash and such, it pretty much balances out.

Nice to see somebody getting it right.

A Floppy Disk is that device you almost never bother using, but which gets added to your virtual machines by default, at least under VMware (haven't paid attention on OpenStack.) The recently-discovered VENOM vulnerability exploits bugs in the floppy drivers, which have been around for a decade, to let a process on a virtual machine break out into the hypervisor and maybe mess with other virtual machines.

So it's especially timely to have a convenient new platform for using floppies!

GSM rolled their own crypto. They depended on Obscurity to protect their algorithm. Somebody handed a copy to Ian Goldberg, then a grad student at Berkeley, and the reason it took him three whole hours to break it was that the Chinese restaurant near campus was having the good lunch special that day.

It was a weak enough algorithm (designed in electrical-engineer-math style, which is fine if you want checksums for reliability) that I'll give them credit for incompetence, though the fact that 10 bits of the already-too-short key were always set to 0 looks much more like malice (with a slight possibility that an early hardware implementation didn't have enough spare bits on some part of the chip.)

Ron Rivest can sometimes get away with rolling his own algorithms - but RC4 and MD5 are looking pretty weak these days, even if you don't count the (documented from the beginning) rules about making sure to never ever use the same RC4 key twice, which was ignored several different ways in PPTP and in a number of other protocols implemented by people who were rolling their own implementations without understanding the algorithms.

Phones and Tablets are different problems - with phones and 3G/4G/LTE tablets, you've got a carrier who can push updates to you, but if you've got a Wifi-only tablet, there's no carrier, just a manufacturer. Do they have an incentive to upgrade? Does the user have a way to tell?

Google's new product announcements always say "See all our shiny new features! If you have one of these three Google Nexus products, you can get it! Otherwise, wait for your carrier to maybe do something!", but never say (at least to consumers; I assume they tell manufacturers) "If your device has at least this generation processor and this much memory, you can upgrade, here's how." Part of that is because, for the big-vendor phones, the manufacturer and sometimes the carrier heavily customize the product, replace half the user interface and tools with custom ones and add a bunch of useful apps or bloatware, and then you can't just do the OS upgrade yourself because you'd lose the customization and probably also lose the bloatware.

My old HTC phone was heavily customized, and the upgrade from 2.1 to 2.2 wasn't actually pushed out, though you could pull it for a little while, if your phone wasn't broken when locked-to-AndroidMarket got replaced with Google Play. My noname 4.0.x tablet which has Google Play but no obvious customization is now running 4.0.4 (I think it originally had 4.0.1), so it shouldn't be a problem to upgrade it if it's got enough horsepower - and Google never tells you how much horsepower they need, just what Nexus models support it.. I ended up replacing the HTC with a Samsung, and haven't taken the time to go back and install Cyanogen on the HTC; I assume if I did that to the tablet I'd lose Google Play access, which I depend on for apps and patches.

There are two kinds of 2.x phones out there - really old phones, and cheap low-end phones that run 2.3 because they don't have the horsepower to run 4.x. Many of them are pay-as-you-go phones you can buy at 7-11 or low-end ones from carriers for customers who don't want to pay iPhone prices.

My HTC was locked to Android Market, and wasn't willing to talk to Google Play, and the carrier never pushed out the 2.1->2.2 upgrade in a way that worked for me. 3.x was mainly a tablet release that didn't affect phones, and most of those seem to have been upgradeable to 4.0.