History isn't encouraging, though. They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when that involved smearing a crude layer of flayed win95 across winCE and pretending it was a good fit for PDAs.

Now that hardware has advanced they have a much better shot at architectural unification (if memory serves, NT has basically edged out everything else except for whatever CE support they provide for legacy customers); but UI? That won't go well.

The CPU and GPU are fine, reports on battery life seem to vary, with excellent results if you turn the 'dynamic perspectives' thing off and don't firefly much, tepid ones if you actually try to use those features; but the screen is genuinely disappointing for a phone in that price range, although the internal storage is better than usual.

There's nothing offensively wrong with it; but the price tag befits a device that is genuinely compelling in some way, which it isn't.

Unfortunately, while stock android is undeniably Google's little fiefdom, 'FireOS' is a pretty much point-for-point a replacement of hegemonic Google with hegemonic Amazon (somewhat more, arguably, given the 'silk' browser's extensive default reliance on server-side processing).

It is pretty stark how lousy de-googled Android is; but Amazon isn't really here to change the dynamic of effectively closed control of the platform, just who controls it. Getting models with a 'clean' AOSP firmware(typically excluding drivers; because it seems to be blobs all the way down on the mobile side) isn't hard; but using them is fairly grim.

It's a trifle surprising given that the usual 'eh, let's just wrap our shit mobile website in a UIWebView and call it a day' school of 'app' development would likely have inherited SSL through sheer laziness, while whatever attempt at app development CNN attempted is apparently so dysfunctional as to be markedly worse than the state of website logins in general, and apparently so incoherent that the phone and tablet versions don't share login behavior...

That seems like the sort of thing that takes effort to screw up.

The one complicating factor, though, is that discrete sound cards are being squeeze from both sides: With even integrated GPUs offering HDMI and displayport audio, and even all but the most spartan (usually super-cheap and/or strictly business oriented) onboard audio supporting S/PDIF, the option of an external DAC or receiver becomes much more attractive, especially if you already have one that you like or want to be able to use other audio sources with a relatively expensive piece of high quality audio gear.

The performance of the analog components of onboard audio is, indeed, going to be more 'endurable' than 'good'; but digital logic is crazy cheap and (mostly) either works or doesn't, and basic boring onboard audio often has less ghastly driver mess than the cards trying to 'value add'(Creative, specifically, being a ghastly offender).

It's not as though they are a ghastly scam or anything, if you want to be able to plug a nice pair of headphones straight into your PC rather than an outboard module that's totally understandable; but they do occupy a slightly precarious middle ground between mostly-competent onboard audio and the full array of audio gear that accepts digital input.

Apropos of that... With at least certain Realtek chipsets(I'm afraid I don't have the model number handy, this was a couple of years ago) I ran into an issue with audio output from a program that made atypically demanding use of MIDI:

The audio worked, and was free of obvious noise problems; but the pitch and playback speed kept changing, sometimes correct, sometimes badly off. With a bit of fiddling, it turned out that putting the system under heavy load made it work properly, and the deviations only cropped up when it was lightly loaded. If CPU power saving was disabled(and so clock speed kept constant) the problem never occurred regardless of load. As best I was able to tell, some part of the sound system was using the CPU (instead of all those fancy system timers that were added because using the CPU clock is something best left to the bad old days of Turbo buttons) as a timebase; but not accounting for the fact that it only actually ran at the maximum frequency when load demanded it.

It was an entertaining bug, as they go; but not confidence inspiring. The $10 USB thing that replaced it had no such issues.

It doesn't help that the squeeze is really coming from both sides: On the low end, the performance of onboard audio has improved(SNR may still make the golden-eared cringe; but horrors of the old days are mostly banished, so adequate performance, usually with fairly well behaved default drivers, is rarely a problem).

On the high end, odds are good that the user already has a preferred DAC and amplifier which will skip the cheap and electrically noisy PC entirely. Even fairly nasty onboard sound often has digital out, and with HDMI and displayport including audio support, so do most graphics cards, even integrated GPUs.

Unless you are trying to drive a touchy and analog only device, maybe a nice pair of headphones or an older amplifier or receiver, there just isn't an obvious need for what creative is selling.

A phone with fairly tepid specs being sold for a flagship price (and AT&T SIM-locked, only) supported by one largely useless gimmick and a dedicated 'buy stuff on amazon' button.

Where do I sign?

They probably have some amount of TRS stuff quietly rotting in a back room somewhere; but the idea that they actually care about those services seems implausible at best.

Verizon does do dedicated lines of various flavors, if you pay them enough; but that's more or less irrelevant to the duel over how finely commodity ISP customers can be diced up and double billed. Nor could one seriously imagine even the most grandiose promises of fast-lanes actually making life-critical applications over cheapy links seem like a good idea.

I'm not surprised, alleging that the telegenic interests of assorted groups just so happen to be aligned with your bottom line is an old strategy; but this is pretty incoherent even by the low standards of the genre.

Yes, if there were a fast lane, one could theoretically put special-deaf-packets in it (or just as easily shove them into the slow lane, if they can't afford to pay); but this ignores the more pressing question of "What, pray tell, is currently suffering for want of special bandwidth and how demanding must it be if your existing service can't cope?".

I can imagine that certain disabilities might drive modestly higher bandwidth demands (the deaf, presumably, don't get much use out of VOIP, which is lower bandwidth than video good enough to make lip reading or signing an option; but last I checked uploading and downloading video wasn't exactly a niche case, even if it is one where Verizon can't seem to get Netflix working...); but nothing that exceeds the current or near-term demands of most internet users.

They obviously won't prefer this interpretation; but just how awful is Verizon planning to make the non-fast lane if these special disabled services will need to be fast-laned to work? Anyone?

Well, the most obvious step is to distinguish between "That's not true of me" and "That's not true". The first statement(while not always accurate) is much easier to confirm or deny. Plus, you aren't immediately put in the position of having to 'win' the debate in order to lay out your own position. If you immediately conflate population-level complaints with personal complaints, you end up taking on a markedly larger and more challenging position.

It may also be true that you suspect the harassment to be the work of a vocal and dedicated minority(and it would actually be rather interesting to see what the logs say about troll distribution in various internet locations) rather than a general thing; but you still gain nothing by tying the desire to defend yourself with the desire to defend a population.

As demonstrated by our victory in the war on drugs, clearly we can just step up enforcement to solve the problem!

Wiring costs can add up as well. At low voltages the amount of copper or aluminum you have to throw at the problem to get resistive losses down can be pretty significant.

Mostly because they are a newer profession and a trickier one to quantify.

Time and motion studies, along with 'scientific management' were already a serious hit in terrifyingly invasive performance enhancement for blue collar labor around the turn of the 20th century(Taylor and the Gilbreths being the poster children, with many successors). The workers who haven't been replaced by robots yet are likely still subject to a descendant of it. Though less amenable to automation, service sector jobs are also rationalized more or less as tightly as available technique allows.

Software development is still a work in progress because it only started existing comparatively recently and because it takes more technology to dismiss any "Oh, what we do here is unquantifiable skilled craftsmanship" positions.

It is selection bias, in that you apparently haven't heard of it happening to basically everyone it can reach; but the world does actually hate you, and is actively working on making software development absolutely as soul crushing as seems economically desirable.