Root Access

12:41 AM

er

I'd lean towards Asus but I think the features you need on the board should be what you use to decide

USB 3.1 support on the MSI looks interesting

someone should put a hold on my banking account and issue a restraining order requiring all Apple, Verizon and Best Buy employees to keep a minimum 50 feet distance away from me... because I'm thinking about buying an iPhone 6s when it comes out

Journeyman Geek

lol

I'm actually pretty happy hardwarewise. I do intend to upgrade my phone early next year, but I'm still waffling on what to get

allquixotic

why? because I can easily install an adblocking VPN on a VPS and have ad-free Safari, and it's got Spotify, Swiftkey, Google apps, Bluetooth that doesn't suck, and 128GB of storage, unlike Samsung's anemic 64GB limit on the Note 5

Journeyman Geek

lol

(I won't judge, promise ;p)

allquixotic

Bob would

judge, that is

Journeyman Geek

12:56 AM

I'm not sure I'd get anything I don't have right now out of a motherboard/cpu/ram upgrade

(monitor? Maaaybe.)

Amusingly the hardware upgrade I need the most is a well planned out desk

(cable management, something that dosen't involve 6 dollars in wood and a sock to hang my headphones...)

allquixotic

the only two things on the horizon for me until mid-year next year are a new phone and the 980 Ti

Journeyman Geek

I have one of those ;p

My current desk is a particleboard thing that was left at my dad's old office

dad was like "You can have it if you can drag it home" and well, lets just say it involved a trolly and me pull-pushing like a bearnese.

its got holes drilled in it for wiring and very jerryrigged things to fix wires to ;p

allquixotic

O_O

Journeyman Geek

Dream desk would be one of these ikea.com/sg/en/catalog/products/30297108/#/50297112 with a pair of these for legs, and a third one to fix wire management stuff to ikea.com/sg/en/catalog/products/40167795

Bob

1:33 AM

@allquixotic Huh?

@allquixotic !!foxno

Then again, you don't root anyway.

And at this point I'd be hard pressed to answer if you asked me if I thought Apple or Google was worse.

allquixotic

@Bob Yeah. It's impossible to tell what's behind the opaque curtain, either on the device or in the cloud.

Are they actually giving everything to the NSA while lying to us that they're not? Google, Apple or both may be doing so.

Or neither, but I consider that the least likely possibility

DragonLord

@allquixotic Don't blame the companies. They may not have had (and probably don't have) a choice.

Gag orders.

Consider that Yahoo would have been fined $250K a day if they didn't comply.

washingtonpost.com/business/technology/…

...and any of these companies' board of directors can be criminally prosecuted under the Espionage Act 1917 if they say anything about government data collection other than denying it, let alone release National Security Letters or other orders that require them to turn over information. They literally cannot say anything about this data collection.

There is literally no choice.

This is one thing a lot of people fail to understand. A lot of people think that the companies can just speak up and say "we're turning your data over to the government as required by law". In reality, this just isn't legally possible.

...lest the executives are put to death for violating the Espionage Act. (Yes, the death penalty applies here!)

No, it's not right. But that's how things work.

allquixotic

1:58 AM

@Bob It comes down to bugginess/stability, build quality, things like that - not so much the software for me. I can always buy a developer account and sideload FOSS onto the device to break out of the apple store.

and it never ceases to amaze me that iOS, despite having much inferior hardware on paper, manages to nearly keep up with Android on benchmarks and such. Android and device manufacturers' devs who have piled software on top of it sure know how to bloat up a device... so much so that they challenge, or even beat, Microsoft for the dubious distinction of being the most bloaty software vendor in the world.

DragonLord

@allquixotic Think optimization, not bloatware.

Apple has tightly integrated hardware and software.

This means Apple can finely tune everything to a degree not possible with any other platform.

Until the Vulkan API is widely adopted, this gap will always be there.

Apple spends serious R&D money on delivering the best possible experience on even low-power hardware.

allquixotic

@DragonLord not only that, but apparently a frame drop (in any of the Apple software; they can't do much about third-party apps) is considered unacceptable to them

DragonLord

It's not like Samsung or other smartphone makers where the emphasis is on features, not performance. Relying on brute force (by using the fastest, hottest SoCs around) is not going to provide the best UX when your software is so non-optimal.

It's much harder for Google, Qualcomm, etc. to optimize systems to anywhere close to the same degree.

When you make both the hardware and software, you can make the most of both.

This very advantage, ironically, applies to Samsung with their SSDs. They're the first to 3D NAND, more than a year ahead of everyone else.

Google has been trying very hard to deliver a silky-smooth Android experience as well. Problem is that they can't make the deep, low-level optimizations for every single SoC and GPU out there.

Each SoC vendor has to optimize its own hardware and provide its own set of drivers.

The tight integration between hardware and software that Apple enjoys simply does not exist on Android.

This is why we need low-level APIs like Vulkan.

Apple has the Metal API, but the benefit is less than what Android can stand to gain with Vulkan because their drivers are already so finely tuned.

DragonLord

2:30 AM

As much as I hate Apple's closed approach, this is one of those things I have to admire: their ability to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the hardware. Sadly, this is only possible precisely because Apple runs a closed platform...

It's an advantage that is literally impossible for Google or any Android device vendor to replicate.

The closest we've gotten to this level of integration in the PC world is the Microsoft Surface family.

The best that can be done about it is Vulkan.

Companies need to give more attention to delivering the best possible user experience.

Microsoft and Google has taken some big strides in the right direction nonetheless.

Oh well. A closed platform is the price you pay for tight hardware-software integration.

Bob

3:18 AM

@allquixotic Windows Phone is actually quite well optimised and performs well on low-end phones. Better than Android from what I've seen. Not sure about the higher end.

allquixotic

@Bob I haven't seen any "high end" Windows phones >_>

doesn't iOS let you deny apps certain permissions, too?

Bob

@allquixotic WP flagships look decent. Permissions, iOS currently ahead but long available in rooted Android and coming to standard soon.

allquixotic

"coming to standard soon"? O.o

wouldn't that break just about every app that doesn't update itself to if(perms.canAccessInternet)?

HackToHell

3:51 AM

Murphy’s take on Moore’s Law http://www.commitstrip.com/2015/08/28/murphys-take-on-moores-law/ http://t.co/lCmiofhrcv

Tweeted by CommitStrip on August 28, 2015 at 5:37 PM

Bob

@allquixotic androidcentral.com/using-app-permissions-android-m

> All apps are going to be forced into disabling whatever permissions you tell them to either way, but apps updated to the most recent API target will be able to do so gracefully. Everything else will have an increased risk of breaking the app when you remove the permission, and in our testing that can happen quite frequently if you aren't careful. The hope is Google have given developers plenty of warning and all of the tools needed to make these changes and ensure their apps play nice with these new rules, but it's entirely up to the developer to actually implement the changes and update …

So probably enabled-by-default if it's an older app.

HackToHell

@OliverSalzburg What do you recommend for storage in Cordava apps ?

HTML5 Web Storage seems to be the one that's present in pretty much every platform

DragonLord

4:30 AM

Does the presence of an 802.11n device slow down 802.11ac devices on an 802.11ac network?

I'm getting conflicting information on this.

Okay, it does, but not exactly in the way people think it would.

If the router uses TDMA (time-sharing) to allow multiple devices on the network, the slower device will need more time to complete each transfer. This will reduce the throughput of 802.11ac devices, but this does not mean that the 802.11ac device will drop all the way down to 802.11n speed.

Bob

5:00 AM

@allquixotic Does your phone do anything other than SBC?

Bob

5:17 AM

Urk... just tried this with a cheapo BT speaker. SBC only.

Ah well, didn't really expect much for the price.

Bob

5:29 AM

> Unfortunately, Bluetooth Share has stopped

:S

@allquixotic Ok, I get what you mean by BT unreliability now :S

Bob

5:51 AM

oh wow

community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Android/…

Spotify was somehow causing BT issues O_O

allquixotic

@Bob apt-X.

Bob

@allquixotic Yea, looks like I'm being restricted by the sink, not the source.

Playing around with a Logitech X100.

Was $18, soooo... whynot

It's... better than the phone speaker.

Oh wow.

5

A: How do priorities work on task-manager and when should/n't I set this?

Suppose you have a "go to the head of the line" card for the grocery store. You go to the store, fill your cart, go to the checkout counters, and find there's no one in line. Does your card help you get checked out faster? Nope. Priorities don't affect processing speed, in that a higher priorit...

I love Jamie's answers.

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