Frankly, I'm shocked that they released a Win7-compatible version of Edgium to begin with, especially given that Edgium went "gold" on January 15, exactly 1 day *after* Windows 7 reached official EOL (at least for consumers)! If anything, that release potentially breathed some more life (even if just a smidge) into Win7.

Was it because they wanted to release a supported browser for those enterprises paying for Win7 extended support? That's about the only theory I can manage to make sense...

I'm also tempted to ask why did they bother if they're "only" going to support Win7 Edgium for 1.5 years, but now that I think about it, that's a relatively long time...

Look, first off, I'm totally with you. I hate the trend toward larger and larger sizes. My favorite physical smartphone design of all time was the iPhone 4. I am currently an Xperia Z5 Compact user precisely *because* of the size *and* the fact that at the time of purchase it was the best compact-sized Android phone model.

(un)Fortunately, Sony is still really the only game in town when it comes to this. Nobody else comes close. The XZ2 Compact is a 5" screen in the same body size that previously held a 4.6" screen. Kind of like how the iPhone X has a much larger screen in the same physical body size as the iPhone 6/6S/7/8.

Try not to look just at screen dimensions and look instead at total physical size dimensions.

-- Nathan

This is not so much a recreation of the Nokia 8110 that was in the movie as it is an "homage". It's a completely new, designed-from-the-ground-up piece of hardware (AND software) that just happens to bear a resemblance to the original and takes some design cues from it.

Not only that, but neither the original 8110 nor this new version actually have a button-triggered, spring-loaded release for the keypad cover. That was something designed specifically for the movie, and IIRC the phones in the movie were not even functional: they were props that had been gutted of any real functionality and then fitted with the spring-loaded mechanism which, given the era, was impossible to fit into the phone while leaving the actual phone guts intact.

There was a Nokia model, the 7110, that actually had a spring-load keypad cover that vaguely resembled what we saw in the movie, though it was not as "exciting".

-- Nathan

I'm not trying to speak for turp182, and (s)he can correct me if I'm wrong, but I read the post this way:

I generally have no reason or desire to have filters apply to the movies I watch, but I support VidAngel's right to do what they are doing and I respect them for taking the stand that they have. Therefore, to demonstrate my solidarity, I threw a few bucks their way and rented a movie. When you rent a movie, you are also given the option of donating to their defense fund, and I did that as well. It used to be the case that when you streamed the video content from them, you could elect to apply anywhere between 0 and n filters to the movie, but that has since changed and now you must apply between 1 and n filters. I chose to apply one of the more common filters that is applicable to almost any contemporary movie in order to satisfy the requirement to choose at least one.

-- Nathan

Yes. Can all of it, starting with Slashdot's own mobile site.

AC is correct, and if I could vote up his/her post I would. T-Mobile never called HSPA+ "LTE", they called it 4G. LTE was never enabled on the N4 out-of-the-box; it always required a hack to get running (it has a baseband chip capable of LTE but Google never intended to use the LTE support in the chip). And HSPA+ was never disabled in the Nexus 4 via firmware update or any other mechanism. You are getting the two things confused.

Why not just run / fork (okay, fine, "spork") Darwin?

-- Nathan

Have not RTFA yet, but this sounds a lot like Matt Gemmell's talk on "Making Mistakes Impossible", which is really good and which you can view here: https://vimeo.com/84322659

-- Nathan

Not to put this kid down, but that looks awfully similar to the MindCuber design that David Gilday came up with: http://www.mindcuber.com/

-- Nathan

Ignoring for the moment the question of Are You Human or Are You Troll, that is a terrible analogy. Digital and analog television are encoded and transmitted completely differently over the air; in contrast, from the phone's link layer perspective, any two GSM carriers are indistinguishable from one another, especially if both carriers are transmitting in the same radio band, and ESPECIALLY if both carriers are in fact one and the same from a physical network perspective, as AT&T and the MVNO Straight Talk are!

My situation with the phone would be more like having a digital television set that was programmed by its manufacturer to only allow you to watch specific channels and lock others out, even though the television set is physically and in all other ways capable of allowing you to watch the non-whitelisted channels: it's simply an arbitrary software lockout. The "unsupported" channels aren't doing anything funky or being encoded and transmitted some other way.

Or it might be more like an IP router -- for the sake of this example, let's say it's a boring sub-$100 consumer-grade router/switch/wireless-AP thing -- that will only allow you to use it with certain internet service providers, even if another "unsupported" ISP encapsulates and delivers its traffic to you in exactly the same way the "approved" ISPs do. Let's say the ISP expects the customer's gear to speak direct IP-over-Ethernet to it (and not IP-over-ATM, PPPoE, or any number of other possibilities), and that the "supported" and "unsupported" ISPs both also run DHCP servers. The "unsupported" ISP fails to work with the router, not because it is doing anything out of the ordinary when compared against the set of standards that the router was manufactured to support, but rather because although the router accepts the DHCP responses from both ISPs, it willfully ignores the default route passed to it and overrides it in the routing table with a hard-coded IP address that it knows the "supported" ISP will have a gateway responding on.

That's what's happening here with the phone: it's overriding the APN settings with the AT&T values and not allowing me to change them. Since it is an unlocked phone, I not only consider the fact that AT&T's iOS carrier profile is the agent "doing" (in the loosest sense of the word) the APN overriding immaterial (after all, Apple's the one who handed those keys over to them...AT&T wouldn't have that ability unless Apple engineered it into the system and said "here you go"), but Apple *specifically* shouldn't be giving their carrier partners that kind of control over *unlocked* models.

-- Nathan

You and the other two respondents raise a fair point: console makers have been doing this for a long time. So I guess you could say that in my mind I have made a distinction -- illogically or no -- between "general-use computing" devices and specific-use devices, such as a game consoles. I would also say, though, that I think what the console manufacturers do is just as much BS as what Apple has been doing.

-- Nathan

I'm not sure why you say "they aren't doing MORE than what everyone else in the industry is doing." They were one of the (if *not* THE) first to come up with a general computing platform that has a digital distribution mechanism for client apps full of DRM *that happens to be the only way to install third-party software on the platform*. By Apple's mandate, there is no sanctioned sideloading of apps. And jailbreaking/rooting doesn't count because that's simply people exploiting security holes in the system that Apple constructed to keep non-App Store apps off the platform.

Sure, everybody else is doing it now, but Apple pioneered that trend. The others followed suit after they saw the success of their platform.

Even if you want to develop a little utility of your own to run on your own device and not sell or distribute to anyone else, you *still* have to pay Apple $99/year for the privilege of loading *your own* software on *your own* device.

-- Nathan

Pretty sure he's referring to this:

http://blog.chpwn.com/post/13572216737

-- Nathan

Perhaps this is Richard Stallman already answering my Ask Slashdot question?

https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3278789&cid=42118329

Given what I've been through recently with Apple on my iPhone (http://www.anderson-net.com/~nathan/apple-broke-my-phone), and also recent stories such as this one (http://www.telecoms.com/54319/apple-vetting-operators-on-lte-network-performance/), I'd have to say, "yup."

-- Nathan

I agree with you in principle, which is partially why I asked the question. But note that my question wasn't "how can we get these companies to change their ways while still remaining their customers." I'm not suggesting that I'm looking for a scenario where I can continue to eat the cake that I already have, and I am perfectly willing to end my relationship as a customer with them. My point is that for every 1 of me out there who cares enough to do that, there are 999,999 other people that don't care about my problem, don't have any complaints about the way Apple (or any other company like them) does things because they themselves haven't been negatively impacted by these policies personally yet, and so these people will continue to pour money into Apple's coffers. Thus, me taking a stand and "voting with my wallet" isn't going to amount to a hill of beans, and when other companies see the success that Apple is having and they chalk that success up (either correctly or incorrectly) to some of these (bad) policies that I'm lamenting, those other companies will follow suit and copycat Apple not just in their industrial designs, but also in their policies. And I will be left with 0 alternatives at the end of the day.

In fact, I would argue that we are already seeing this happening now. What percentage of Android manufacturers ship their phones with either easily-unlocked bootloaders or bootloaders that are unlocked by default? ...yeah, exactly. Oh, and how many app stores can you use on Windows Phone? Just the one, you say? These are industry trends that Apple set the tone for, and now inertia has taken over for the entire industry.

Finally, I should point out that voting with one's wallet takes a different form depending on whether you are dealing with a company that sells goods or a company that sells services. If Apple were mostly a services company (like, say, my cell phone carrier), I can vote with my wallet by cancelling my subscription. That act has an immediate effect and sends a clear message. In the case of Apple, though, they sold me an iPhone several months ago, and I was mostly happy with it until this happened. During the time between when I purchased the iPhone and when I saw the harmful effect their policies can have on me as an end-user, Apple was not receiving any additional income from me; thus, I wasn't an "active customer" in the same way that one can be an active customer in good standing of a service provider, and therefore it's not as straightforward to apply your criticism of me "clearly proclaiming that [I] support what they [Apple] do" as you make it out to be. The order of things was that first, I made my purchase, and THEN I recognized the problem when it bit me in the butt AFTER that. It's not like there's anything I can threaten to cut off in terms of my "financial support" of them at this point. I could say to Apple, "hey, I'm not going to buy your phones anymore." And they would come back with, "uh, well, so what? We had no assurance you were going to buy more phones from us anyway...you haven't made a purchase in X months."

-- Nathan