The malware writers will never agree to i!

Very, very, very few phones come with an external battery charger,

You might need to download the eBay app from Playstore. External battery charger and two batteries is £10 ($15) for most phones. Sure 1/2 the batteries only last about 6 months, and some of the chargers explode, but the rest last for years. At that price, you can't lose. Just buy more!

£ is GBP, not Australian. Something is badly wrong with Slashdot (and not just Beta)

Lots of people - possibly outside of thhe USA - have to go for DAYS without a power source - perhaps because they work (or play) away from home/ I normally keep a stack of four batteries charged. While this usage pattern my not be common in America and Japan, it is for much of the world.

As for removable SD car - I want to be able to instantly swap content OUT as much as in. I do not want to take one client's data onto another's premises ever. And I may have recreational content I do not want in the work place. I would guess a lot of people would like to be able to swap out the porn when they go to work/partner's house, etc.

I used to be an HTC user - but they stopped removable batteries and SD cards, so I switched to Samsung. I LIKE the plastic back. Doesn't break or scratch - and anyway, I only have my phone out of the fake leather case when I am changing the battery or SD card (or using it for satnav).

Thinness? WTF? Functionality is 1,000 times more important than appearance to most users. Curved screen edges? how breakable is that? a $700 device that won't last a month in the real world? If I wanted an iPhone, I would buy an iPhone.

My first response to the announcement was to check out Xaiomi. My sister-in-law (not a tecchie) - whose contract was up, and was waiting to hear the announcement - won't be buying this. I cant see many people over 30 who will.

Given that the SIM is supplied by the carrier, and we don't know where our carrier gets his SIMs, - they probably all get them from the same place, we are all fucked.

If you have a secret, I do not recommed using a mobile phone to discuss it.

Or indeed, telling anyone about it at all.

You don't actually have to watch paint dry. It dries anyway.

No. If you are free to put ads in your content, I am free to ignore them, whether mentally or using software assist. You may have the right to free speach, but you have no right to abuse or exploit me.

We have had Cola for generations.... However the health conditions that we blame it for, have been on the rise just recently.

It has been going down hill ever since they removed the cocaine and cola nuts.

If it aint broke, break it?

How many people kept on using 8086's once there was a 486? Kept on using DOS3.1 once DOS5 was available if they had an HD?

The early Android phones had very limited processing power, ROM and RAM - the equivalent of an 8086. Now we are getting phones with 4GB RAM (I remember mainframes with less than 1MB), then upgrading is not going to face the restrictions it did when there was only 86M of RAM.

As for "waiting for you carrier to upgrade" - you must live in the USA or Australia. Carriers elsewhere DO upgrade. However, I predict that locked boot loaders will go the way of the "Not quite IBM compatible PCs", and the Video cameras that were not Super8.

I have two Samsungs, one with a third party ROM, other with Touchwiz. The way I hear it, Lollipop is not yet ready for primetime. If you want a bug infested phone with no upgrade path, there is always Windows.

Google ads on Slashdot have become so intrusive on Android mobiles it is not actually possible to use the web site any more!

Nothing to do with Flash, the popup covers most of the screen on my Note3, and there is no obvious way to get rid of it other than leave the site. I thought it was a varus, til I found I did not have the problem on other sites.

This is a major achievement in the foot shooting league.

Posted from my PDP8 using an ASR33.

The main reason why its insanely expensive is the approval process. Of course big pharma does not want the cost reduced, as it prevents new netrans to their cosy cartel, and America effectively enforces this worldwide.

Once an alternative approval process with sufficent credibility gets going, the story will change very fast.

You, speak like its 1995 before anyone fully understood OoO, or started decoupling the micro ISA from the actual ISA.

That is a fair comment - I stopped designing processors around that time, and never actually implemented OOO. I have written assembler for x86, MIPS and Sparc, and many others besides, but I have never written a serious compiler for anything. I certainly would not want to have to debug modern OOO execution hardware!

My point is that OOO is an evil brought on us by poor mapping of high level concepts onto the hardware. I would prefer to have more threads and program in Algol68. If no OOO, then the discussion is different. As it is, I have retired.

There is a small charge for the use of my lawn. Bitcoins not accepted.

x86 was by far the best when it came to performace per dollar, the critical aspect when it comes to corporate purchasing.

Well, we here all know that in silicon, volume is king. As Sam Cohen (Who started Tesco), said, "pile them high and sell them cheap". However, in the 1970's a lot of PHBs did not know that. They argued that you should go for margin, rather than volume. And Visicalc had not been invented (well it had, but it was only used by small businesses).

Bean counters control of large organisations. IBM corporately may only have expected to sell 10,000 PCs, but even then a lot of us were expecting sales to run into millions. We were nerds, so what did we know about business? No one was going to listen to us. (Am I sore, hell, yes!)

there was that whole RISC/CISC thing going on and, you know what? RISC sort of won the technical war - it may be papered over with an ugly CISC instruction set on the inside, but internally, it's all condensed onto execution on a mostly RISC core.

RISC vs CISC choice can be made on a sound mathematical basis, and is dependent instruction decode speed vs the bandwidth of the memory interface, taking into consideration the caching available.

The PDP11 was designed at a time when instruction decode was fast relative to memory bandwidth, and caching did not exist. The ISA was designed to allow a single instruction fetch to manage multiple data movements - that was the reason for being able to specify two complex, multi-byte, address computations within one instruction. Of course, later PDP11's had very powerful caching, but not the original 11/10 and 11/20.

The earlier PDP8, which had only 8 instructions, was as RISC as you can get. It was designed when instruction decode was really slow compared to the memory (even with an asynchronous Omnibus). The 8/S was insanely slow! However, during the life of the PDP8 architecture, clocks speeded up enormously (100 x ?).

The RISC vs CISC advantages are not stable, and change with hardware developments. The problem with RISC is that the compilers are extremely difficult to design and maintain, and that is always true.

I am not saying x86 is bad because it is CISC, I am saying it is bad because it is a POOR CISC.

Good CISC is VAX or NS 32032. Unfortunately Ken Olsen refused to compete in the PC market in any serious way. (And said Unix is snake oil, but would not sell VMS for x86). NS were far too late with 32032.

I am waiting and hoping for a pepperoni flavoured GPU! It will make upgrading so much more fun!