google has to start being a responsible binary distributor, too!

I have an original N1 that I bought FROM GOOGLE. no carrier involved, flagship phone for google employees and then, later, the rest of us. it got up to 2.x of the os, google LOST INTEREST and gave up. to this day, the screen still freaks out halfway thru the day (loses its xy calibration and buzzes at you; known bug since almost day-1 of the device) and yet, google does not see fit to fix showstopper bugs on even flagship devices.

I won't buy another android phone, given how poorly google treats people. they have a short attention span, just like the carriers. they are NOT faultless here! they are just as much to blame. more so, if you realize that they let carriers run wild and loose with OUR PHONES, all the while denying updates and forcing crapware on us.

google really fucked the chicken, here. they could have controlled the vendors and carriers but they dropped the ball and we all pay for this lack of vision. we have unsecure phones and no way to update them. great. just great. super genius company (google) that refuses to support perfectly good, working hardware since its 'too hard' to do updates for so many devices. with all the smart heads (??) at google, and they can't do linux updates properly? wow. just wow.

(joni mitchell songs may be a bit too old for some of the folks here.)

"Rows and flows of copper wire,
Charging too much, all the while.
So many files I could have had,
But clouds got in my way..."

Right now, if Americans want video entertainment, we mostly turn to cable TV companies.

older guys, yes. but everyone I know who is 20something has cut the cord and gets all their data online, via netflix or torrents. I don't know anyone who still has cable tv and is young-ish.

over time, the cable co's WILL have to update their networks. in 20 yrs, I don't think there will be a broadcast tv system anymore. maybe even in 10, if we do it right. this is a fairly short time window and they are NOT going peacfully into the good night...

carry lots of e-raid spray?

âoeIs there really a secret underwater railroad smuggling flounder to freedom? Get on board the sole train, tonight on Sick, Sad World!â

better: hd-homerun (silicon dust). network based tuner, stream to any recorder or play 'live' to a computer. cant' go direct to hdmi, you do need a pc or equiv to do that, but its better to have the pc there to buffer so you can 'pause live tv' etc.

watching live is just stupid, these days. even if you don't record, at least buffer a few minutes ahead so you can skip thru commercials.

this is one evil downside to 'higher res'. more wasted (imho) storage and network! I like using just enough to get the job done. blue ray has too much; its over 30gig for a movie. the torrented versions tend to be 3gig (lets say) and that's a 10:1 compression and with very acceptable quality (not perfect but for 10 to 1, I'll take it!). no drm, no ads, no problems.

I can store movies on my nas if they are 3gig or so. but when they are 30gig, that's insane. storage is cheap, sure; but I won't just throw away 10x 'just because'. and now, they want to put even more data in the movie files, which will mean even more wasted network resources, storage and cpu. will we SEE that much improvement to justify it? I doubt it. if you compress it down to 'torrent style' again, maybe. but it won't be sold that way and it will appear that its not 'nas-able' and is still stuck on opto spinning discs with properietary players, probably insisting they connect to the net. (blech!)

audio is also like this; there are now 24/192k audio flac files which is overkill and wasteful for space.

storage is cheap. but why be so blatant about being so wasteful? the master needs to be in pure lossless high res. the stuff that we watch, as consumers, does NOT need to be 30gig and larger. that's part of the problem and it is why I reject BD and will reject the new format, as well.

careful, there! EVERYONE abandons phones. for some god damed reason, its a truth. MS, google and apple all abandon their mobile platforms way too quickly. none are knights in shining armor, here. they all suck and are all bad players, forcing re-re-rebuying of perfectly good hardware.

regular pc's don't get EOL'd so quickly (at least with linux and even with windows, support is quite long). apple eol's things universally too fast, but apple sucks and people already know this and expect it from apple.

its a big lie that google keeps android updated. the SOURCE CODE, yes, but not for PLATFORMS. the platform groups have the shortest attention span of any company I have ever seen. amazingly short. I don't trust google or android after having such a bad time with that whole scene.

I know the least about MS phones but they seem to have the same EOL'ing problem everyone else has.

phones suck. I hate phones. wish the 'portable computer' (which is NOT phones!) market would have gone another way.

also, let me ask a very related question: suppose you found a job at FB that is applicable to your background, but, like g+, you totally hate the concept of FB and never joined. now, the job at FB is directly relevant to your expertise and career path.

what happens, then? do they test you to see if you are 'like them'? do they outright ask for your social media id (not pw, but username)? if they sense you are not a 'joiner' will they even offer you a job, there?

this has also crossed my mind. I never joined FB and, in fact, never once saw what their webpages even look like. but I do see jobs there that would 'work' for my background. so, would it even be sensible to apply there? and if I did get a job there, would it last? would I be 'found out' sooner or later that I don't drink the koolaid and that I never joined in and played all the other reindeer games?

I doubt that I'd be successful there and I doubt that I'd even get past the first interview; but I'm curious how much you have to believe in the core 'vision' of a company like that in order to work there and keep your paycheck coming.

sometimes, I just want a paycheck (a stable long-term one) and I don't care as much about the core tech of the company. I'm not going to be a founder or partner, not a VC and not a VP so I won't make anything more than 'just salary'. I stopped caring about the core business of employers and I just want to keep getting my paycheck and keep doing my software stuff. (I used to care about what the company did, but I was young and thought you 'had to' believe in their ideas; but after decades in the field, I saw one business fail after another after another and soon, it all just became a blur.)

tl;dr: do you have to play along in order to keep your job (or get a job) at social media-based companies?

slightly OT, but its something I wonder about. suppose you are not a fan of the company Google, and you avoid as many of their services as you can. you never joined g+ and you block most of google's domains. you hate their spying and corporate lack of ethics.

now, suppose you are a tech worker and the company you work for gets bought by google. oh oh....

what do you do? suppose you are one who is going to stay (not get thrown to the side during corporate merging that usually goes on after an acquisition). does google put strong pressure on you, as a new employee, to join in with all that nonsense and social bullshit? do you have to drink the corp koolaid to continue to keep your job and work there? if you are anti-spying and pro-privacy, can you have a place at google or will your stay be cut short, eventually?

google buys a lot of companies. so I am asking this as a real question: what happens if you are not a google fan and get bought by google? I'm sure there are lots of people, here, who went thru this. care to tell your story? were you forced to join g+ and be part of all that beta-test (I guess, alpha test, if you are on the inside)? and if you don't show enthusiasm, do you suffer in your career at google?

I would never join google directly. but I do wonder what I would do if a company I worked for 'joined' google.

older people DO get it. I'm one of them and I've avoided FB, twitter and all social media since they all started. I never gave in. I never will, either. we all know the best way to avoid the hassles is to never join in.

I do contribute to various tech forums, but I'm not sure I consider that 'social media' as they have a direct purpose (code or hardware or something that we all discuss and share info and insights on). the pure social bullshit sites offer me nothing of value and they never really did.

is slash a social media site? not sure. its not a chit-chat site, we don't normally have direct 1:1 comms and its still very anonymous and shows no signs of having a 'true name' BS policy, even with the dice overloards - they wouldn't pull that crap on us. there's not much to data mine here, either, from what I can tell. so, I don't consider slash to be of the same form as the true SM sites. ('SM' sites, hmmm, how fitting, huh?)

but anyway, old people 'do get it' we just choose not to play in your sandbox, that's all.

so, what you're saying is that if we find ourselves in such a situation, *get arrested* so that it triggers the protections we should be getting, regardless.

is that correct?

btw, the hardware I'm using is kind of neat. its fanless atom N2800. an intel board that is low profile mini-itx and has an onboard dc-dc so you give it 18v (from an external brick) and that's the whole psu story. onboard is an msata port and I have a 4gb sandisk halfsize ssd that runs pfsense. the m350 case has an adapter that takes a right angle pci-e card adapter and you can use a decent chipset pci-e card for your 2nd nic. the first nice is a nice intel chip. no fans, decent speed and has been stable for years at a time, for me.

mini-itx fanless and intel gig-e chips for nics are the things to look for, imho. there are i3 chips that are 35w and with a good case, you can run them fanless, too (htpc case with heatpipes). if you need an i3, you can do that and still be silent (that matters to me).

subject says it all.

runs from very small disk (I use a 4gb m-sata ssd) and has a great ui, is a superb firewall and is bsd based. used to be the old openwall code.