Posts by BlackBolt

Its Consumer kit....

I agree with the latter half of the sentiment on here, the Sonos range is specifically consumer kit, aimed at making distributed home audio an easy task. I've found a great balance between high end NAS solutions and Sonos management software, so you can combine your techie tendencies but protect your family from the nerdiness and the complexity.

In terms of usage they are super easy and integrate incredibly well. But as others have said, you can't tinker with them, there aren't many options and if you want to turn audio into a 'hobby' then these aren't for you. You just plug them in and walk away (super easy!)

So 'context' is a good thing. I'm more interested in a side by side with the older Play5 model. Whats the difference? This was completely missing from this review.

What did I miss?

Quite proud of the fact that I completely missed this outage, didn't even know it happened. Although it may have been the cause of my baked-in Android Facebook App going haywire for a bit. (Thanks for that uninstall able garbage Samsung)

Its actually quite nice having that ten minutes of my day back, since I ditched FB and mangled my marketing value, sorry I mean 'online profile'.

Nothing to do with 2G / 3G networks

For the slightly confused about it.

The 4G rollout should have no effect what so ever on the existing 2G or 3G networks in terms of 'fixing them'. 4G is a totally different infrastructure. Telco's are 'fixing 2G/3G' by replacing it with 4G.

Its not just about speed, its about contention. The existing 3G network is plenty fast enough, its just that there is an exponentially large number of people using it now, and there isn't any more space in the frequency to cram more people into it. The 3G network is the '3 lane M4'. The 4G network is a 25 lane M4, its just got a lot more capacity.

Also the network edge doesn't dtop off. See those 2 bars you've got on 3G? They have a massive impact on your network handshake. Same case on 4G, no impact at all, its full signal to the edge of the network handoff zone.

Next thing you'll see is that 3G goes altogether. 2G will become m2m (Machine to machine - i.e. your washing machine / boiler / eleccy meter) and 4G will be THE data network.

So thats how they'll fix 2G.....

Not an Apple fan, but this could be interesting

I'm not an Apple fan (I own no Apple devices at all) nor an Ashton Kutcher fan. Saying that I think this might be quite interesting.

Jobs was quite an innovator in the field and had an undeniable presence in the IT industry, over a far greater remit than just Apple. A film that examines his personality and method of approaching a task / problem could be quite a cinematic treat. (...and I love cinema)

Massive misunderstanding about the technology

A few people here have hinted about it but there needs to be a massive shift in how people think about '4G' or '3.5G' as its more likely to be.

Its not just all about the speed. All your services will be different, tariffs will change and data usage will be a different ball game altogether.

Think of that 2mb Youtube video you watched yesterday on 3G, well today on 4G Youtube doesn't care about your bandwidth and auto streams the HD version at 200mb. Can you see the difference on a 4 inch screen? unlikely. This means more data, more connections, more network resilience, more network handshakes (IE way more cost to the provider thus the consumer) and a total change in how you think about data scalability and usage over a network.

'People' don't understand bandwidth. Just look at the USA where people were using their whole months data limits in a day with the new Ipad when it came out, on 4G. I'd love to see any UK network be able to cope with that at the moment.

Agreement on the sensationalist headline

I was pulled in by the sensationalist headline, only to be disappointed by poor facts and a tenuous case. Sure the other manufacturers are growing faster than Apple but it is still spanking them (sad to say coming from a G-Tab owner)

Its all damaging to the customer

I hate this sort of thing. What it amounts to to is that WE will end out paying more for our devices and device research and development will be reduced. If a company is spending a load of money and time on suing another company then they aren't thinking about my next experience on their next device.

In this case I think Apple and Samsung are equally to blame. They both seem very eager to jump to legal proceedings rather than letting consumers decide for themselves. There seems little point in trying to historically decide who sued whom first.

Morally its quite annoying as well. I am not an Apple fan, so I disagree with any statement about them being cutting edge in terms of new product design. I think what they have done very well is take existing elements from other devices and incorporate them into their own. Then market the hell out of them to make them consumer products, not IT products (for me thats the genius part).

Also as an example of Apple's history of 'we invented it' here is a good example of how they tried the same thing against Creative Labs years ago. (better products, less marketing). They claimed they owned the 'wheel' device for navigation, which they didn't.

http://anythingbutipod.com/2005/08/apple-copied-creative-who-cares/

Bring on the Jelly

It was pushed to my Google Nexus handset last week, its a great improvement on all fronts. Only wish the speed up update was across the board as I am still waiting on ICS for my Galaxy Tab 10.1. Which sucks as the new version ships with it and its technically a poorer spec.

Missing the point?

A few points really:

1. Its optional. If you don't like it, don't change to the deal. All the old deals aren't going away, unless you upgrade to this one.

2. European networks are not the owned by the same country, even when they might appear to be to the common man. If you are on O2 here there is no reason at all for you to get lower price access to a Telephonica network in Spain.

3. As mentioned above the prices of roaming usage (I say usage as its not about one aspect this is data/calls/sms) has come down a lot in the last decade. We should be happier that its now cheaper than its ever been instead of cheesed off that its not exactly the same as our home network.

4. Its all about the usage. Sure if you send 1 txt in a two week period it will cost you £3. But its only when you use it, not a persistent cost. If you are a heavy overseas users change your price plan to include unlimited EU roaming for a fixed cost! (That's like complaining to Sky cos they charge you £60+ a month and you only used 2 channels)

Why bother with the Android Tablets anymore?

If the handsets are ramping up in hardware spec, and the screen resolution is also increasing then they are seriously infringing on the tablet territory.

The only thing that the Samsung Tab did that was over and above mobile handsets was hdmi-out, but this handset does that as well.

Development isn't for eveeryone

Development on any platform just isn't going to work "For the masses".

It might be a good lead-in to a career into dev, if you pick it up at school (as mentioned above) but most GUI based editors are quite limiting and really only give you a foundation into a language. IE they might be a good way of learning the code base, but you'll rarely ever produce an application that has a 'magical' user experience with one.

Could be a training tool tho.

Vulnerabilities exist in all server side platforms

I'm a Coldfusion evangelist, I basically think its great. It is a robust extensible scripting language that allows you to build and deploy applications quickly and easily. It also integrates very well with most other web based languages.

I also think that its a great thing that these sort of things are brought out into the open. Then there is more pressure for hotfixes to be built and released.

Coldfusion is relatively mature now (ok not as mature as perl or python) but it makes .net look like an infant in 'Years' out in the wild. I think if you count the historic instances where you've seen an article like this addressing CF security issues you'll find it to be a lot less than some other server side layers.

I strongly agree with other comments made here, installing any software as 'Vanilla' and leaving it in an out-of-the-box configuration is asking for trouble. Learn to secure your environment whatever it is.

Its not perfect, but then what web technology is?

Wonder what Android OS it will ship with

Vodafone do not currently have any Android phones that support anything higher than 1.6 (officially) so fingers crossed they might actually sign off on 2.0 (0 or 2.1! and ship this device with it.

They are decidedly slow in the firmware upgrading dept.

Cheesing off consumers too

I'm not suprised they are struggling. Both of their recent policy changes towards consumers have caused some controversy.

They have shortened the upgrade period before a contracts expiry, and changed the contracts so that you cannot downgrade ever during the life of your contract.

The Vodafone forums are abuzz with annoyed users.

Adobe flogging a dead horse?

I've been developing in CF for years (as well as half a dozen other languages) and its interesting that Adobe are still pushing new functionality to this platform, despite a lot of UK based companies turning their backs on it. Sure its not the newest technology, but it is amazingly quick to develop with, give it a shot if you are new to the web side of IT.