Try $100/month for 3 GB of data (and unlimited talk/text, but still...)

@somequixotic That's not saying much.

Though, we do (DID) have some cheaper.

our voice/text isn't particularly cheap, either, but at least it's unlimited

Kogan had $30/month for unlimited talk/text, 6 GB data.

They were reselling Telstra. They got shut down a few weeks ago.

There's a few mobile carriers here with """""""unlimited""""""" data plans, about $0.50 per day of use... But limited to about 10MB per day (or per month depending on the carrier), after that you get 50kpbs speed. Oh, and the normal HSPA speed is ~300kbps

@JourneymanGeek I was talking about things like this: yatangomobile.com.au

(if you scroll down and set all sliders to zero)

you end up with essentially a free sim card and it's not too expensive if you make a call here or there, or send a text

@somequixotic Did I mention that $100/month one is without a bundled phone?

With a bundled phone is an extra $30pm

Though, that's Telstra.

Most expensive carrier. And the only one with a halfway decent network.

@Bob awwwww, they bundle it all up in a blankie?? that's so cute! :3

Heh.

Wait. That's starting at

...why??

lol

..min cost without phone is $1200. presumably 12 month contract

with phone is $3120

24 month contract

$30/month for 24 months for a phone.

@Bob a plain old cellphone?

@somequixotic onlineshop.telstra.com.au/…

iPhone 5

...Blackberry Q10

a blackberry for $720 over 24 months?

no thanks

no wonder Adobe charges more for Photoshop in Australia -- they have to pay their employees more to afford a phone -_-

@somequixotic what employees

idk, support employees?

(may I remind you that it's still buying from the US site, just a localised version?)

@somequixotic Probably live in India.

Or maybe the US.

I highly doubt they actually have local support employees

a company as big as Adobe surely has some kind of office on Oceania. come on.

what if $FOO_HUGE_COMPANY/AGENCY needs local support for some critical error during production of a film?

they're not going to fly people out from the US. they need a local team

adobe.com/careers/locations.html#sydney-melbourne

as I said

80 people.

Wait. Chatswood. 15 mins from the CBD?

Nawp.

Half an hour by train.

30-45 mins by bus.

Maybe 20 mins by car, depending where you want to go, and the time. If you want to cross the CBD during peak hour, give it 30-60 mins

@somequixotic Then they might do it remotely?

@Bob obviously they meant 15 minutes by jet airplane

@somequixotic Hah! Make that two hours, then! At least!

@Bob "DarthAndroid" was created long before the iPod was released, before the iPhone had been heard of, and well before the idea of Android the phone operating system has been conceived. It is the product of an uninventive middleschooler's mind, and well, it just sorta stuck. :P

@DarthAndroid You could have at least followed your name!

It's sad.

he should be DarthCulinarius since he follows Tim Cook's iPhone

@bob Except that Android for the longest time offered a terrible, terrible user experience. If it had come out the door with what iPhone had, I probably would have been using it by now.

Laggy interface is my pet peeve.

Don't use Ubuntu then. :>

@DarthAndroid Eh.

My dad had an iPhone 3G.

Cool, you're on a slow processor, cool you have an intensive operation to do. Do it on the background thread and accelerate the UI response to show me that you're doing something.

@DarthAndroid and now you're locked into having a huge investment in iPhone apps, right? (not to say that Android is any different; even if I wanted to switch to iPhone, I'd lose hundreds of dollars of apps and an enormous amount of man-hours invested in learning everything)

That was the laggiest piece of shit I've ever touched.

And that was before I ever used Android.

@somequixotic that's the main argument for not switching now, yeah.

That was when I had only just gotten an N8, to replace an E65.

I never had lag issues with my 3G unless I was running a bunch of jailbreak tweaks and in a low memory situation

at the same time, Android couldn't even get smooth list scrolling working

That iPhone was about as responsive as Photoshop and After Effects at the same time on a netbook with a first-gen Atom and 2 GB of RAM.

you'd move your finger up and down, and the list would eventually catch up

It was that bad.

I think you'd see a lot more mobility between platforms if paid app vendors would start adopting a BORA policy (Buy Once, Run Anywhere) where all you have to do is log in using an account that owns the app on either the App Store or Google Play, and you get a key to unlock the paid app on the other platform

people who want to go to iPhone who are locked into Android now could do so, and vice versa

He never did anything on that phone. Except use it as a phone, texting, and web browsing. No rooting. One or two apps.

@somequixotic I really wish devs would do that.

@Bob Defective unit, maybe? Both myself, my mother, and my dad have all used iPhones more or less since they came out, and haven't had lag issues at all.

Want to open the browser? Five seconds in, the icon might show you've touched. Another ten and it might revert to the normal colour.

@Bob That's definately not normal. Did you try restoring the phone?

@DarthAndroid I'm not sure how fast it was at purchase. I only handled it about two years in.

I can agree with Android being laggy until very recently - the first version of Android where scrolling ceased being a horrible experience was, for me, 4.1.2 -- released in 2012

TBH I still rather like Symbian. That was amazing for the hardware it ran on.

I've had some problems with Android, but scrolling was never one of them.

@DarthAndroid Nope. Wasn't mine to mess with.

@somequixotic And arguably it's petty, but yeah, UI response will instantly turn me off on a platform, I don't care if it's giving out free money.

@DarthAndroid I certainly don't perceive Android as being worse than iPhone at this stage in the game, though, as far as UI responsiveness

on the Nexus 7 2 running Android 4.3, or the Galaxy S4, or the Droid Maxx/Ultra/Moto X, it's basically iPhone-equivalent responsiveness

@somequixotic Sadly none of my friends have recent phones for me to see.

@somequixotic And here I am on 4.0.3 on a S2. Started with 2.3.5. Never had scrolling issues.

Most things respond immediately.

Do any of those have decent battery life? 6 hours of games/use and 6 days on a charge?

The camera app is shit, though. That thing lags like nothing else.

@DarthAndroid my Droid Maxx can do about 8-12 hours of games/heavy use (LTE on and streaming, screen on, etc)

if it's just idle waiting for a phone call it can probably go several days on a charge, depends on how much background stuff you have configured (gmail sync, etc)

that's what I like about it: you can, at your option, configure it to do no background syncing, or some background syncing (per-app), or just sync everything and eat battery with hasty abandon

I have a button on my home screen that I can tap to temporarily disable syncing when I'm going to be away from a charger for several hours

I may look into that, then. All I've heard are horrible stories about battery life. I just want LTE / Wifi / push email and not have to worry if 20% charge will get me through the day.

@DarthAndroid 20% charge should get you through the day unless you're watching videos, listening to music, downloading large files or keeping the screen on constantly

Alright, good to know.

and wifi will double the battery life vs. using LTE

I never really got the impression that iPhones had particularly good battery life, though, so I'm not sure how high your standards are

I can't really recommend a true "all-day" Android phone that doesn't have "Maxx" in its name -- owing mainly to the ~33% larger battery capacity of the Maxx variant phones out of Motorola

that leaves the phone I have sitting on my desk, the Droid Maxx (released this past Tuesday), or the Razr Maxx HD, my previous phone, released in '12

I'll send you my battery life graph at the end of today if I remember

I'll screenshot it and ping you

unplugged it from the charger at about 7 AM at 100% capacity

I'm actually curious about the battery life of the higher end Lumia phones

My 520 can last half a week on minimal use, and its battery is tiny.

> I used to think that PHP was the biggest, stinkiest dump that the computer industry had taken on my life in a decade. Then I started needing to do things that could only be accomplished in AppleScript.

I just love that quote.

I'm intentionally trying to run down the battery right now to break it in a little bit, so I'm leaving the screen on while I listen to music

@Bob from codinghorror.com?

oh wait, Jeff quoted it from somewhere.

Ya.

> Just one year ago, legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski had this to say about PHP: Just one year ago, legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski had this to say about PHP:

Jeff handily defeated Quora in one fell swoop on his blog; he's quite pithy sometimes

@somequixotic Hm?

linking to the "What did Jesus farts probably smell like" question did in Quora quite nicely

@somequixotic Max brightness?

Is it LCD or AMOLED?

Have they fixed the AMOLED battery drain on newer phones?

@somequixotic link?

@jokerdino I was just about to ask :P

@Bob I'm letting it automatically set brightness based on ambient light

I believe it's AMOLED, but they did away with PenTile, so it looks way better than the Razr Maxx HD's screen

@somequixotic Inside a brightly lit room, that is battery suicide.

it still drains a good deal of battery if the backlight's driving it hard, but if you turn it down to minimum brightness, it's reasonably efficient

@jokerdino codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/… Ctrl+F for "quora"

@Hennes codinghorror.com/blog/2009/01/…

@somequixotic Yea.

with this large battery, though, you can be as inefficient as you like and you're still going to make it through at least one day

I can read for maybe three-four hours on max brightness, but a full day (six-ten) on minimum.

but if you are really into energy-intensive tasks and do that constantly through the day, you'll still end up charging your phone on a daily basis

don't think any phone is exempt from that rule

not even the Holy iPhone

> it is rare to find threaded discussions of any kind on the web today

cough Reddit cough

usenet :)

@Bob I hate slashdot's threaded comments

Forums still are not as capable as that old thing

> Putting aside Usenet as a relic and artifact of the past, it is rare to find threaded discussions of any kind on the web today

Heh. He does address that further down...

> Reddit (and to a lesser extent, Hacker News) are probably the best known examples of threaded comments applied to a large audience. While I find Reddit so much more tolerable than the bad old days of Digg, I can still barely force myself to wade through the discussions there, because it's so much darn work. As a lazy reader, I feel I've already done my part by deciding to enter the thread; after that all I should need to do is scroll or swipe down.

well yeah, I usually only follow one thread on Reddit.

if it is splitting at the very top, they get collapsed.

btw, the whole premise behind Motorola's "Active Notifications" system on the Moto X / Droid Ultra / Droid Maxx is that the screen, on minimum brightness, is low enough power that it doesn't matter if it comes on once in a while to show you what's going on

(RE: earlier comments about screen power consumption)

@TheCleaner Welcome to Root Access chat for Super Users! Please don't ask if you can ask or if anyone's around; just ask your question, and if anyone's free and interested they'll help.

@TheCleaner interesting idea, but The Powers That Be will probably kill it because it's not a topic that can be discussed in a non-time-sensitive manner

@TheCleaner I decided to chip in anyway; here's my first cut: area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/59278/it-shopping-questions/…

Say, uhm. My friend and I are having trouble with Skype and Pidgin. Messages between me (Skype) and her (Pidgin, using Messenger account) randomly decide not to reach the other, and sometimes I start appearing offline to her. What can I do about this problem ?

@Ariane I don't recall if Microsoft has fully migrated over to the MSN Messenger backend on Skype yet... you may be using the (unreliable) gateway between the legacy Skype messaging system and MSN Messenger

the long-term goal is for 100% of Skype's text messaging to go through the MSN Messenger servers, which are much more reliable, but until that's completed they have a transition in place that isn't that great

Skype's text messaging was terrible to begin with, now add in an interface to an external system (MSN Messenger) and it's even worse

So most likely it's not Pidgin's fault?

to my knowledge they are migrating some users but not others, perhaps depending on geography or your user ID

@Ariane no I don't think it's Pidgin's fault

Probably Skype has trouble contacting any non-Skype client through Messenger, period, I guess.

Anyhow, thanks. Back to class.

[I am looking to replicated the internet.... ](superuser.com/questions/636945/internet-access-icon-internet)

I was temped to come up with an answer containing AOL CD's

How can I see where a flag originates from (which room) ?

GFYS ... googles.... OK, that seems to mean what I think it meant.

[Server] tagged questions are taking a nose dive. Now at 747. :)

Nose dive and 747 in the same sentence? That's a disaster waiting to happen.

Heh. I had to edit an extra tag to get to that number :)

imgur.com/Y6w3r5y

@DarthAndroid See above. Notice decline in battery while screen is on (yellow dots at bottom = screen on). Very very slow drain with screen off.