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Comment Re:WHY!? (Score 1) 614

The same Palin that had quotes miss-attrributed to her that were spoken by a half rate SNL actress...

Admittedly she must have been a reasonable actress if people were quoting her and thinking that they were quoting Palin.

Tina Fey is an excellent actress and her "I can see Alaska from my house!" joke wasn't too far from Palin's actual words.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXL86v8NoGk

Comment Re:Looks great! Except, it needs a hole in its hea (Score 1) 290

I tend to agree with the notion that Google would prefer to see SD cards go away. I upgraded from an EVO 3D with all kinds of bugs related to its micro-SD card. It was constantly running "out of storage space" despite the fact that it's 32GB card was only half full. The problem would crop up constantly when updating apps. Some apps would update happily, including games of more than 1GB in size. But other apps, including newer apps designed specifically to run on Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), would throw up the out of storage space error. (Facebook for example had to be uninstalled and reinstalled with every update once I'd installed more than a few dozen apps.)

Then I upgraded to Google’s own Nexus 4 and all those bugs went away. I now have half the storage of my old phone but none of the headaches. I have a installed a hundred or more apps and my new phone has never once complained about being low on storage. I can't store my entire music collection on my phone but I can stream it with Google Music. And it's so much faster than my old phone! I've yet to experience a moment of lag despite having loaded up my phone with apps. Would I like to have have the option to install extra storage space via an SD or micro-SD slot? Of course! But I'd rather not return to the headaches of my old phone's highly flawed expansion card support.

Comment Re:Oh shit!!! (Score 1) 221

But I didn't use iGoogle, so I didn't speak up....

That was a bit overly dramatic but that's the bottom line, when we're happy with a product, we'll continue to use it and ignore the warning signs about its parent company. It's probably not a good idea but it's the nature of the beast.

Comment Re:I also prefer my principles to mean nothing... (Score 1) 68

It's not just at the developer level. I was referring to the OS itself. Android has changed more over the years than iOS has and this is the case on every level: hardware, software, UI. Look at a T-Mobile G1 (the first Android device ever) and compare it to Nexus 4 or any other Android phone today. The former looks much more primitive compared to its descendant than the original iPhone looks next to an iPhone 5. Similarly, screenshots from Android 1.0 look far more primitive than those from 4.0. The transition from iOS 1 to 5 by comparison is far more gradual. And this is without bringing up the tremendous variation (both good and bad) that comes from the different Android handset makers customizing their individual versions of Android.

While the consistency that iOS has maintained over the years does have its charms it can also be stifling. Don't like how your Android phone looks? There are a million and one different options for reskinning it (and that's without rooting it and installing alternative ROMs) and you can bet that your next Android phone will look wildly different. Don't like how your iPhone looks? There aren't a whole lot of customization options unless you Jailbreak it and your next iPhone will probably look a lot like the current one.

Comment Re:I also prefer my principles to mean nothing... (Score 1) 68

this bit doesn't seem vacuous:
"that emphasizes 'real objects' over buttons and
menus"

But it doesn't seem to describe Android. Given that it has 4 hardware buttons, one of them that brings up a menu.

My Nexus 4 doesn't have any hardware buttons. Well, it does have volume buttons and a power button. But the four software "buttons" at the bottom of my screen right now are a down arrow which collapses the keyboard and turns into into a back button when the keyboard is not in use. Moving on there is also a house button (does that count presented "real object") which brings up the launcher. And there's Window button which brings up my list programs which now appear pear as thumbnails instead of icons as they appeared in previous versions of android.

Finally, there is indeed a menu icon but it no longer looks like the old Android menu button. I always thought that Android menus were pretty weird or rather that the old Android menu button was pretty incongruous. The old Android menu button resembles a traditional menu; a cascading set of lines of text hanging off the menubar. But Android menus are actually little blocks at the bottom of the screen. Worse, sometimes the Android menu button won't open a menu, will open a settings page. So there was a disconnect between the onscreen representation and the results presented to the user. The new Android menu is an ellipses (a set of three dots...). I find that change interesting because it subtly changes the expectations of the user. Instead of a specific type of menu which never really existed in Android, the new button merely suggests that there is more to see or do with your app.

I think a better way to describe what Android's developers are doing is by saying that they're constantly rethinking and refining the UI to make it more logical and accessible to the user. This is in stark contrast to iOS which has largely remained unchanged since the original iPhone. In some ways that is because iOS got a lot more right on its first try than Android did but there also seems to be a genuinely geeky love of experimentation to Android which rightly or wrongly seems missing from iOS.

Comment Re:First strike! (Score 1) 727

I wonder what kind of weirdos would step into the vacuum left by a KJ-U defeat, though.

That's the problem. That population has been living under heavy oppression with extreme brainwashing for so many years that I doubt that they'd even be able to benefit from a free election for a number of years after.

Well it would be pretty hard to top the Kim dynasty in terms of overall weirdness. And the point of free and fair elections is less about their beneficial nature (I can think of a few American elections that were less than beneficial.) than about the notion that democracy is the worst sort of government except for all others that have been tried.

Comment Re:The World is not entirely filled with idiots (Score 1) 582

Sure they are. This is all part of the notion that all government is inherently bad and that they're going to come for your guns any second now and that society is on the verge of collapse and that the only way to survive in the Mad Max future is by arming yourself now. But hey, whatever helps them sleep at night is fine by me so long as they don’t actually go out and try to make that dystopian future happen.

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