More subscribers means more bandwidth, so you locate the servers in a distributed fashion, near where the users are. This is already the trend, but it would be moreso.

What's a river cruise in Egypt going for these days?

Oracle? SAP? Slashcode?

TFA said: "Otherwise, it risks having users (slowly but surely) switch to more secure platforms that do give them updates in a timely manner."

I'm curious what platforms those might be.

The only one I'm (slightly) familiar with at the moment is Replicant, which is an all-open port of Android - with support for a limitied - and (thus?) somewhat pricey (when even available)- handful of platforms.

("All-Open" being defined as "Functionality dependent on binary blobs we don't have open source replacements for is left out of the distribution. You might get it working by installing proprietary modules. But we think that's a bad idea / counterproductive / reduces incentive for people to MAKE open source replacements, so we don't recommend it or provide instructions." i.e. do a web search for somebody who figured out how to do it if you want, say, the front camera, WiFI, or Bluetooth to work and forget about GPS for now. (v4.2 on Samsung s3))

Now I think that's the right approach. And I'd love to see more support or help for the project.

But are there others? If so, what are they?

Airplane mode is still there, it's jut not on the power button. Swipe down from the top twice, or else once with two fingers, and there are a whole bunch of quick toggle options, including airplane mode, wifi, bluetooth, auto-rotate, GPS, flash light and cast screen (to Chromecast). It's unfortunate to have to learn a new pattern to access it, but it really makes sense to have it in the same place as all those other toggles, and it wouldn't make sense to put them all on the power button.

This is only true as long as consumers don't prioritize upgrades at point of purchase. If we could get OEMs to begin making binding upgrade and update support commitments, and get consumers looking at and comparing devices on that basis, then OEMs would be motivated to provide updates.

This difference is a matter of when information is published, not anything to do with technology.

The reason you got iOS 8 the day after it was released is because Apple didn't announce the release until it was ready to push to your iPad. Google must release Android updates to the OEMs many months before they can get it delivered to devices. The only way Google could provide the same instant update experience is to finish and release it to OEMs then embargo the release information for months until the OEMs were ready to go. There's no way that embargo would hold. Way too many people and way too many companies.

Google could arrange for the instant-update experience with Nexus devices easily enough, but only at the expense of pissing off all the OEMs.

The lag between announcement and availability is an unavoidable result of Android being an ecosystem, rather than a product.

(I'm an Android engineer, but I'm not speaking for Google. The above is my own perception, not an official statement.)

indeed. and Google's solution to this (for their own apps) was Google Play itself, which provided the core APIs they could update and control so it didn't matter what OS you were running.

but not everybody else in the app developer space had access to those same APIs, so there we are.

Yours is a common theory, but the experiment of the last 40 years in carry legalization in the US has not borne it out. In pretty much every state that decides to liberalize carry policies the opposition claims the outcome you theorize... but reality has produced nothing but declining violence levels, with some evidence that liberalized carry results in greater, faster declines than in similar states that don't do it.

Further, study after study has found that concealed carry permit holders are among the most law-abiding and least violent sector of society, with far lower levels of arrests and convictions of any sort than the average citizen. FWIW (and its worth is debatable) concealed carry permit holders are more law abiding than policemen, who are also armed. That doesn't even consider the fact that police officers routinely get away with crimes that would provoke arrest and prosecution if done by civilians.

This isn't to say that the US doesn't have a violence problem. It's getting better, but we have a long way to go. Lawful civilian carry really isn't the problem, though, and since taking all the guns away is a legal, political and practical impossibility, I think it's actually a piece of the solution.

The Android fragmentation boogeyman.

What nobody's ever explained to my satisfaction is why I should give a flying f*ck. As far as I can see "fragmentation" is simply the result of users and developers not all being forced to upgrade to the latest and greatest when the platform vendor demands it. This is actually a *good* thing.

It means I can find a $40 Android tablet running KitKat, which is perfectly fine for things I want to use a $40 tablet for. I'm out of the developer business now, but I still dabble to keep up with developments, and far as I can see the Google tools do a really nice job of allowing developers to target a range of platforms and still look up to date on the latest and greatest. So I don't have to shut out people who bought a smartphone last year if I want to use Material Design (which is cartoony for my taste but does a nice job setting out consistent UI guidelines).

If this is fragmentation hell, all I can say is come on in, the the lava is fine. Sure it would be *nice* if the adoption rate for the latest and greatest was higher, but as a long time user and developer I have to say that not being pushed over the upgrade cliff on the platform vendor's orders is nice too.

If Samsung was willing to send upgrades to my not-even-2-year-old devices, I'd be upgraded by now.

Google doesn't have to sell the upgrade features to the end users. Google has to sell the upgrade to the OEMs (especially Samsung) to make them be willing to make the upgrade available for "old" devices (given that, today, 'old' means 9 months or less). Samsung and ASUS are more willing to let these older devices rot, under the expectation that they'll buy something new and get the upgrade then, so what is the point of back-porting it?

Google needs to better market the OS to the OEMs, not to Slashdot.

I am in the midst of building a CarPC right now, as parts trickle in from far-flung regions of the globe, which is to say mostly HK. I'm saving my money for the display so it's a budget build based on a Boxer DA078L motherboard. I downgraded the processor to IIRC a X2 3800+ from a 3900+ because the specific processor model I ordered had almost 30W lower TDP, bringing the total system TDP down well under 100W which meant I could use a PicoPSU 120. I haven't tested my el cheapo 300W (headroom! which I will leave unused) boost-buck regulator yet, that's next. It has 2GB of RAM and I installed Kodibuntu, then installed navit. It comes with chromium and I am running the system on an 8GB CF card, currently in a USB adapter and soon in a SATA adapter. Maybe someday I'll buy it a real SSD but again, this is just a pocket change build based on something I had already. A $8 low-profile AM2/3 cooler is coming.

Why care? I can run Kodi and navit at the same time with no problems, using compiz as my window manager. and it can easily run chromium under LXDE. And I have no swap whatsoever. It would be dog-slow on my CF card (It's a "133X" Transcend, whatever that means) and I don't want to beat up my flash device anyway.

2GB is a lot of RAM. It seems like it isn't because of all the crap we run these days. But 2GB will actually go hilariously far if you use a limited desktop environment, or in fact none at all. If you just put the smallest Linux you can come up with (puppy?) into a partition with chromium, make init keep X running and make X keep chromium running, you'll have what you're looking for. I presume the only reason to want this is to have it as a multiboot option, since as others have said, if you wanted an actual chromebook you would have bought one. To come back around to my long introductory paragraph, I installed Kodibuntu when I wanted automotive navigation. That seems dumb, but it makes sense in the view of trying not to buy stuff. I also wanted more CPU power and didn't care about GPU power, so it made sense to me not to buy a Pi 2 and use a turnkey solution. (That's where I got the pointer to the skin I'm using.)