First, I want to note if you are only interested in news, skip this submission. This one is supposed to spawn a discussion about smartphones, some aspects of their dreaded ecosystems, and impact on society. Maybe the discussion could lead to some more specific submissions and discussions.
From a hardware perspective, modern smartphones are fully fledged computers, plus something. Only, this "plus something" (ability to send premium SMS/call premium numbers, often being always online) and the typical use as a personal assistant with GPS makes it makes it a valuable target and a bigger threat financially-wise and to privacy. Simultaneously, since it derived from simple mobile phones, average users perceive it more as a toy than a viable security threat.
Consequences are that either people accept being locked into a golden cage (e.g. iPhone, Google Play, Windows Phone) or take the risk of being victimized by malware (unlocked apps from dubious sources), or to have a very limited selection of applications (SailfishOS, MeeGo, ...).
Software wise, Cyanogenmod with Privacy Guard might be a step in the right direction, while hardware wise the Fairphone or Jolla might be good candidates (although they both lack e.g. dual SIM support, they both are fully accessible; no locked boot manager etc.)
So, what needs to change? Is there a chance to get a community governed app-store for smartphones, like we have for most Linux distributions? Would a simple plug-and-play home-cloud device help privacy significantly, or do we have to assume any data on a smartphone is already compromised? Would a platform-independent notification service be helpful (to make it easier for e.g. TextSecure to support multiple different platforms), and how could it be established and financed? How could producers be convinced to offer free (as in freedom) and up-to-date hardware for reasonable prices? How could we improve customers' risk awareness?
(Score: 3, Informative) by meisterister on Friday June 27 2014, @07:42PM
...only in the sense that keyboards, PDAs, and calculators are "computers" in that they can perform computations. Aside from that, I see all of the previously listed computers more as appliances than computers. They perform their set functions well and everything else very poorly. Keyboards are good at detecting keypresses, buffering them, and sending them to another computer. PDAs are good for limited applications like taking notes, storing contact info, and storing calendars, etc. I'd say that the main difference between a "computer" as we consider it and these appliance-like "computers" is that the non-appliance computers are designed to run a widely variable set of software to match just about any computational need requested by the user, while the applicance-computers are designed to run only a limited set of programs that work well within their form factors. For example, I wouldn't want to run a word processor on a calculator, even though it may be possible.
To sum this up, I see whether or not something is an appliance as a function of the flexibility of the platform. Smartphones are not designed to be flexible devices, and are thus appliances, while desktop computers (without UEFI and DRM and all of that lovely interference) are flexible, and are thus computers.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by evk on Friday June 27 2014, @07:54PM
I mostly agree with your definition, except the conclusion. For me it's not really a phone it is a handheld computer. The size etc. makes it less usefull for some task e.g. writing long texts. But the desktop machine can't be used for everything either. I even write code for the phone on the phone, but since I find it frustrating to use on screen keyboard I ssh into the device.
... posted from my Jolla
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Vanderhoth on Friday June 27 2014, @08:13PM
Completely agree. I'm using a Samsung Note II and I can write code on it quite easily, with a Bluetooth keyboard and a docking station. The phone is more powerful than my PC 15 years ago. I also like the stylus that lets me write as opposed to type. For all intensive purposes my phone is a full blown computer that lets me do almost everything my desktop does. It's more convienent because I can take it with me, but a little less user friendly.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 1) by grammarpolice on Friday June 27 2014, @09:23PM
s/intensive purposes/intents and purposes
(Score: 3, Funny) by bugamn on Friday June 27 2014, @09:30PM
Ah, don't be such a nazi, maybe he wrote that on his phone.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Friday June 27 2014, @09:38PM
grammorpalice, did you know there's THREE slashes in a proper s/// command?
(Score: 2) by chromas on Friday June 27 2014, @09:40PM
whoops; forgot to escape the <> but it wouldn't be right if I 'corrected' someone on the internet without making a missteak of my own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @09:51PM
I see what you did there...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 28 2014, @12:41AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @08:12PM
How are smartphones not designed to be flexible devices? There may be some restrictions on what I can do with my Android smartphone (without rooting), but it is still extremely flexible in how I can choose to use it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meisterister on Friday June 27 2014, @08:37PM
I suppose that I should refine my definition of flexible.
How easily can you poke around in a device's hardware?
How open is the bootloader? Can you install and run any OS you want? Does doing so require extensive modification? (Modern PCs with secureboot fail these tests).
Can you install any program that is compatible with the OS and architecture without using a package manager?
Are you freely allowed to change the filesystem (with appropriate permissions) without modifying the OS?
Are you freely allowed to modify the OS? (with appropriate permissions, ie. sudo when you are in the sudoers file)
Are you allowed to develop and publish applications without using "official" tools? (ie. could you distribute an android program in C?)
(bonus) Is the device readily expandable. (No adapters, that's cheating!)
(smartphone specific): Can your phone work with any carrier?
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 1) by evk on Friday June 27 2014, @09:11PM
That's your requirement for something being flexible enough to be a computer? Looks more like a definition for an open system.
But...
- How easily can you poke around in a device's hardware?
Not very easily, a bit more difficult than a laptop. The thing is rather small after all.
- How open is the bootloader? Can you install and run any OS you want? Does doing so
require extensive modification? (Modern PCs with secureboot fail these tests).
So a modern PC isn't flexible enough to be a computer? Well I haven't played around, since I'm quite happy with the current OS, but as far as I understand the bootloader is openish.
- Can you install any program that is compatible with the OS and architecture without using a package manager?
Yes, no problems.
- Are you freely allowed to change the filesystem (with appropriate permissions) without modifying the OS?
rm -rf /
- Are you freely allowed to modify the OS? (with appropriate permissions, ie. sudo when you are in the sudoers file)
The entire OS isn't open source and I'm not sure where to draw the line between OS and firmware. But I could change the kernel if I'd like to. Is that enough?
- Are you allowed to develop and publish applications without using "official" tools?
Yes
- (bonus) Is the device readily expandable. (No adapters, that's cheating!)
About as expandable as a laptop. But for obvious reasons there's not a lot a physical ports. USB, I2C and and SD-card + wlan, bluetooth and NFC.
- (smartphone specific): Can your phone work with any carrier?
I think there're some frequency problems in the US, but it isn't locked to one carrier.
(Score: 3, Informative) by etherscythe on Friday June 27 2014, @09:34PM
Well, if you think about it, the Windows Installer service and programs list view from control panel is basically a package manager. It's no good at going and installing new packages without explicitly launching it from the installation media, but classifying based on if you need a package manager is kind of silly. I've installed several .apk's directly on my Nexus 7. I understand the SDK lets you do it off of a host machine, too.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Sunday June 29 2014, @12:37PM
All PDA's, smartphones, tablets, MP3 players, wireless routers, printers and calculators are computers by scientific definition, simple as that. Any further labels we place on them denote design decisions and usage intentions resulting in specific variations on form factor, connectivity, human interface and processing capability that do not detract from the original definition of being a computer.
EG: All smartphones are computers, but not all computers are smartphones.
This debate appears to be framed around the fact that society considers the black thing on the desk at work to be "Computer" and is now confused about the definition as various roles performed by various classes of computing device converge or are artificially restricted.
One last thing: Keyboards are input peripherals, not computers you insensitive clod!
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday July 01 2014, @12:07PM
It's even worse than that! There was a time when a 'computer' was a human being who performed calculations. That definition is still perfectly valid, even if it's not as commonly used anymore.
My phone is a computer and so am I!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by skullz on Friday June 27 2014, @08:00PM
Lets not forget the WinningTicket.exe, buffer overflows, macro viruses (thanks, Microsoft!) that have plagued computers forever. Remember the 'finger' exploit? People, especially Joe Computer User, haven't shown that they are capable of securing their devices. Multiplying the computers by making them smaller and pocket sized is only going to scale the problem.
Walled gardens like we see in the app stores are a good idea, not because I like the restrictions but because it seems to be the only way to get a bare minimum of control over consumer computers. And even educated users have issues. To really say you can have a reasonable expectation of securing your device you have to know security and constantly maintain it. For me and for most users this is too much: I bought the device to get things done, not to constantly fiddle with a network filter. A community driven approach is a good idea but it depends on the community (OpenSSL anyone?). At least with the commercial app stores there is the threat of a lawsuit if someone intentionally lets malicious code through. Like with all software (and especially open source) the trustworthiness is dependent on the reputation of the team developing the software (or vetting it, in the case of an app store). I trust the JVM, Python, Apache, GCC, most Linux distributions, Microsoft, Firefox, etc. They make mistakes but their reputation is pretty good. How could you build that in an app store, especially if it is unpaid volunteers?
Regarding the headline (which doesn't really seem to match the rest of the article) yes of course smart phones are computers. They run BSD, Linux, and Windows. The form factor doesn't really matter. Is a blade server a computer? Is a virtual machine a computer? Is a Raspberry Pi a computer? Darn right they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @09:55PM
F-droid is a repository of Open Source apps for Android. Not much high quality stuff there, but I do enjoy having access to an offline capable app to use OpenStreetMaps.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Friday June 27 2014, @08:01PM
The question of smartphones being or not being a computer, doesn't seem to be addressed at all in the posting, (not that such a question needs to be asked, as the answer is perfectly obvious).
Your discussion topic seems more about a truly open source software distribution to run on a wide variety of hardware that is often more than a little proprietary.
Cynaogenmod is more than a "might be a step in the right direction", it is far more than tha, and is currently embarrassing Google/Android with the protections and freedoms that it offers.
The problem is that each phone has a different combination of proprietary drivers, binary blobs if you will, that are closely held by the manufacturers, short lived (next month's model will be totally different) and built into the kernel monolithically.
For this you have to blame Apple and Google. Especially Google, who took linux, and pushed everything into ring 0, thereby locking down the entire OS structure. No longer can you fix things piecemeal, by applying an upgraded RPM to fix an OS problem.
They then compounded that sin by allowing some apps (even unnecessary and annoying ones) to become locked into the OS and non-removable, and they trusted all apps by default, and only grudgingly provided a series of permissions to control them.
But they still allow any app to request any permission, which are organized in broad categories, and dump all of this on the user. So the app that has to know to stop playing sounds when a phone call comes in gets to read the phone state, number calling you, the contacts, your phone number, your sim number, and on and on. Just to allow a phone call to be answered.
Cyanogenmod tries to fix this, but some things are so completely broken by design (and regulation) that they can't do a whole lot to make the complete system open source. They are still obliged to make use of the existing binary blobs for proprietary chip sets.
For example the FCC is not about to allow end user tweaking of software controlled radios in commercial licensed bands. Therefore you will always have the issue of binary blob drivers for radios. Carriers aren't going to allow you on their networks with some generic radio blob either. (Nor should they. This area is horribly complex and more than a little brittle).
The networks and the manufacturers are (for the moment) taking a hands off approach to Cyanogenmod, but they could be bitchslapped into submission at any instant because this this is a very litigious industry, and they are a bunch of (very good) hackers without a shred of legal knowledge.
There are a LOT of app stores out there. (Full of malware, in many cases). Its not hard to fine alternative app stores or download sites. Its hard to find a safe one.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday June 27 2014, @09:26PM
I agree. My submission had a slightly different title: "Smartphones are Computers nowadays - or are they*?" (The asterix was resolved at the end of the submission by a reference to Betteridge's law...) The question is not, if smartphones are as powerful as computers. They are. But they can a lot more on top and serve additional use-cases, which makes them in a way more powerful and dangerous.
A technical solution shouldn't be too difficult here. Usually the baseband stack is quite separated from the "smart" part of the OS, because the baseband part has some very tight realtime requirements. Last time I worked in this area, it had it's own CPU and own system, although a small realtime-OS was planned to be used to run the "smart" part in a lower priority thread and the baseband part with highest priority, to save the second CPU. Still, both parts would be quite separated. For the other blobs there are no technical reasons, and there the question should be justified, how we could get organized to give some incentive to the industry for more openness. I'm not sure how open e.g. Jolla or Fairphone are. I think for Fairphone it is one of the talking points.
That's one of the problems I see. For other open source systems (Debian/Fedora/CentOS) the open source community manages to provide quite secure and complete systems, I never heard of malware in any of the main repositories. Weaknesses like heartbleed, yes. But outright malware, not.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @08:01PM
I'd like to see smartphones fully virtualized. Not just sandboxed but completely virtualized so that each app gets its own completely isolated virtual machine including virtualized microphone/speaker, gps, wifi, cellular link, accelerometers, camera, etc. Fake everything and including filters. Also the ability to transparently migrate the running app off my phone to some "cloud" service (or more likely my own PC/laptop) or to someone else's phone.
(Score: 2) by skullz on Friday June 27 2014, @08:08PM
Looks like these folks are trying to get LVM on their phones:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-s/general/howto-partitioning-nexus-s-using-lvm-t1656794 [xda-developers.com]
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2230748 [xda-developers.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @09:30PM
That's not virtualization, that's disk volumes.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Friday June 27 2014, @08:07PM
Why isn't this an AskSoylent post?
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by skullz on Friday June 27 2014, @08:10PM
Because if it was an AskSoylent the author would have had to phrase the headline as a question and we could jump on with Betteridge's law of headlines, which would be wrong.
Duh.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday June 27 2014, @09:29PM
I considered it. But I raised multiple questions at once and also included my own opinion, hoping for a broader discussion, so it was not exactly a question for which I hope for a good answer.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 1) by Nth_man on Friday June 27 2014, @08:25PM
A basic characteristic of a computer is that is programmable, not limited to the same old program or set of programs, and that makes them very useful. There are more characteristics, of course. Later you can connect keyboards, bigger screens, etc. When smartphones are counted as computers, some interesting data can be seen, as in this report:
Largest Computer Manufacturers when Tablets and Smartphones Are Included
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2014/02/largest-computer-manufacturers-when-tablets-and-smartphones-are-included-this-blog-remains-so-far-th.html [blogs.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday June 27 2014, @09:57PM
One could even ask if a computer is a computer anymore. When they used to compute, they were primarily CPUs. Nowadays, they've evolved along with their users to something that is far more than a 'compute'-'er'. Its use contexts may be more defining and relevant than its architecture, construction, and original intended purpose.
And if that's the case, is it useful (beyond a mostly common parts-list) to use the single term 'computer' to encompass what it's become?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ken_g6 on Friday June 27 2014, @08:35PM
Of course smartphones are computers. They may have grown up attached to a cell phone connection, but they can work without one.
You can take a laptop, attach a 4G modem, and have everything a cell phone has except one thing: a voice-and-texting system. Yes, you can get voice and texting on a laptop through third parties on the Internet, but they don't come with the 4G modem. Why is that? Because the carriers want to maintain control of their voice-and-texting network, and they don't want random people doing random stuff with that network. This is why you can't have a (legitimate) app that texts someone from your phone though the carrier. (Again, third-party stuff through the Internet doesn't count.) It's possible the FCC has some blame in this too; I'm not sure.
Anyway, because the stupid carriers insisted on controlling part of smartphones, they needed those smartphones locked down. Which led to walled gardens, which software companies (Microsoft, Apple, even Google) have discovered is very profitable. If it weren't for users' existing experience with freely installing software, I'm sure they'd push their walled gardens to Windows and OS X if they could. Without as much user experience with freely installing software, Google has almost completely locked down Chromium and Chrome OS. With an existing justification to lock down their OSes, the carriers have also added more locked-down stuff for their own private services.
So, could an open OS, e.g. from the desktop, migrate to a smartphone? Maybe. The main engineering obstacles to desktop OSes on smartphones are processor instruction set and touch. Theoretically, some versions Windows could overcome both issues, but they are basically in a walled garden now for touch. Linux could go as-is, but doesn't have touch support - you'd need to attach a keyboard and mouse somehow. Firefox OS and Android are both fairly open and designed for smartphones; CyanogenMod even more so.
But, again, the problem is the carriers, locking down even the relatively unlocked OSes. Just recently, Google announced Android One, stock Android on smartphones. But American carriers won't allow it, so for now it's only in India. Nothing will change until the carriers allow full and open access to their networks.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Friday June 27 2014, @08:45PM
Several years ago a friend of mine bought a first or second generation iPhone. He called me and said, "I've bought my first computer". He'd never owned any sort of computer before, having been content to use school computers or work computers to satisfy his needs. When he told me he bought an iPhone I understood immediately that he was referring to the iPhone as being a first computer, and that he understood that it was a real computer.
When you think about it, an iPhone is a pretty sophisticated little computer. It's running a stripped down version of MacOS X, both of which use a Mach-based Unix kernel. If that is not enough to make it qualify as a computer I don't know what does. The machines Unix ran on 25 years ago are what I called a computer, and a modern iPhone today probably would run circles around such ancient machines today. But it does much more, even more than the PC's of twenty years ago. So, is it really a computer? In my estimation it is.
But in the end, a computer is in the eye of the beholder.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by everdred on Friday June 27 2014, @09:39PM
Interesting story.
I think there's a very important distinction between whether it was the first- or second-gen iPhone: the App Store didn't appear until about a year after the launch of the first-gen model (coinciding with the launch of the second-gen model). Once the App Store launched, both models could then make use of apps, but it's largely been forgotten that third-party apps didn't exist for a whole year. Apple spent that year (via Steve's Reality Distortion Field) telling people that they really didn't want native apps on their phone, that to develop for the iPhone they should make a touch-friendly web app for Mobile Safari.
This is important because when the iPhone launched, it seemed dumber than the "smartphones" that had existed for about a decade, and really had more in common with featurephones than computers.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday June 27 2014, @11:44PM
If someone else decides whether or not you can run a specific piece of software on your phone it's more a console than a general computer.
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Saturday June 28 2014, @07:18PM
A console is a computer device dedicated to gaming. It is not the opposite of "open".
GPS's don't tend to allow you to choose your own software. They are not consoles either. Neither are ebook readers.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 1) by Frost on Monday June 30 2014, @08:35PM
Can it compute? Yes? Then it is a computer.
Can it perform computations on information stored digitally, that is, as sequences of discrete values (digits)? Yes? Then it is a digital computer.
Can it be reprogrammed to perform various different such computations? Yes? Then it is a programmable digital computer.
Is its programmability Turing-complete? Yes? Then it is a general-purpose programmable digital computer.
Is it a rectangular box with keyboard, mouse, display monitor, and standard I/O ports, capable of running commercial boxed software packages? No? Then according to the common person it is not a computer. The common person is an idiot and should not be consulted on technical matters.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday June 27 2014, @09:02PM
A calculator computes. Yes a cell phone with a calculating functionality is a computer.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0x663EB663D1E7F223
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday June 27 2014, @09:55PM
Indeed. Not to mention:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/turing-machine-simulator/id303032123?mt=8 [apple.com]
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dez.ch.turingmachine&hl=en [google.com]
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday June 27 2014, @11:46PM
Yet a computer is not a cell phone. Hence the distinction.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @09:06PM
I don't own any wireless device.
When I'm not doing something useful or educational on my desktop computer with keyboard, mouse, two monitors (all wired) I turn it off and do other things like ride my bicycle, vist my local bike shop and have a chat and a cup of tea, visit friends, kick a soccer ball against a wall, play vinyl records, read a book, wash the dishes, clean the house, cook something tasty from scratch such as spaghetti bolognaise or a spicy indian curry, go to a bar and have a pint of Guiness, etc etc.
As far as I'm concerned, smart phones and the brainwashed masses who rely on them can all get fucked. When I stand back and observe the behaviour patterns of most people immersed in this mobile lifestyle, they look and act like morons.
A few weeks ago I was riding my bike on a busy main street in my city and I see this woman up ahead walking across the road; our paths were going to converge; I had right of way and quite a bit of forward momentum; she was holding a smart phone in front of her face totally oblivious to any other thing she was doing. Just as our paths crossed, I made a quick change in direction without slowing down and with one of my free hands I slapped her phone out of her hands and it flew like a baseball up the road......end of phone.....I didn't even bother looking back to see her reaction; I just kept moving.
Another time I was riding down a quiet street and a car driver slowly converged straight into my path from a side street; he was completely oblivious to my presence right in front of his nose; I took premptive evasive action to avoid being run over; if I had held my ground he was going to slowly turn into my lane and drive straight over the top of me!
Another reason I cannot accept owning a smartphone is because I cannot live with the fact that nobody can guarantee me of 100% privacy. People in positions of power and authority reserve the right to secretly monitor my movements and my communications any time they want. That is just not acceptable to me. As far as i am concerned, I reserve the right to ignore such a technological solution and I reserve the right to not accept it as a mandatory part of modern existence.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 27 2014, @09:32PM
Excellent post. Seems at least one person here can pull his or her ass off the blinken-lighty bullshit and make it out into the real world. What's most notable is your mention of people being so trapped in their own little bubble that they are dangerously oblivious to the dangers around them as well as the danger they pose to others.
And -- Grrr... -- those fucking assholes who play music on their phones, out loud, in public. They should be dragged into the town square at high-noon and savagely buggered up every orifice by well-hung African men.
Anyway, what you brought up raises a question -- Ignoring the case of needing a smartphone for work purposes, is it even healthy for people to use phones as personal computers, (meaning to browse the net, check Facebook etc.) given that most people likely already spend too much time on a desktop or laptop?
Finally, if you have an account, you should be posting things like that under your username. A post like that isn't something to be ashamed of.
Disclaimer: I recently got a contract-subsidized smartphone, and now I'm wondering why the hell I even got it, and would downgrade if backing out of phone contracts wasn't such a bitch in America. Yeah, I'm a filthy whore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @09:46PM
My SoylentNews username is number6
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 28 2014, @01:01AM
Does those music playing zombies require a radio connection to continue doing so? or is it cached enough that it's independent of the radio link?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 28 2014, @12:59AM
Why isn't this moderated 4 - Insightful ..?
The content still have strong standing regardless if the poster wrote as Anonymous Coward.
The approach is a sensible one. When one need to accomplish productive tasks one use computers that can do this effectively without fuss. The rest of the time one can let the brain rest and interact with real-life(tm). A phone with computer abilities on the move might still be useful but the usefulness isn't correlated with more time spent. Rather with quality time spent.
As for phonezombies walking around and causing dangerous traffic situations. Make them suffer. We call it LART (Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool). Where being ignorant hurts until you stop doing bad things. And the causer of bad things get the resource usage billed back in some form so that it won't pay.
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Monday June 30 2014, @01:51AM
Probably because of the wanton destruction of property, with no attempt being made to explain (nor warn them, going by the anecdote).
Think about it from the pedestrians perspective: You're walking along reading something, and suddenly somebody knocks your $600 phone out of your hands and it smashes to the ground. They cycle off without slowing down.
do you:
a) Realise that it's your fault, resolve to be move attentive in future, and accept the loss of your phone
b) Miss the connection between 'not paying attention' and 'stranger purposefully breaking your phone', and decide you're the victim of a cyclist with anger issues?
People not paying attention is a problem, but destroying their nice things is not the answer. I sometimes get lost in thought while walking. What's the suitable punishment for that, and how is it better than letting me know I should be paying more attention?
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Friday June 27 2014, @09:23PM
A computer can run any arbitrary software, not just the OS it shipped with or a different flavor of Android.
If I can't get whatever fucked up strange OS I want's kernel to boot (hardware support doesn't matter), then it's not a computer.
So no, smartphones are not computers. They are plastic junk appliances used to enslave the masses, and that's why I don't own one.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday June 28 2014, @05:48AM
So C64, Amiga, AtariST, Amstrad CPC... They all weren't real computers? I disagree. If I install Linux to my laptop, lock the bios and disable booting from external media, for my son it's still a computer. althoug he's not able to install a different OS. Same goes for smartphones, although I'm not the one locking the phone down, but the vendor does. Still it does not disqualify the phone as a computer; it rather raises the question if I actually bought the phone or if the vendor somehow asserts ownership by locking *my* hardware down.
Aside, there are smartphones like Fairphone, Neo1974 and others which are not locked down.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 28 2014, @11:29AM
For Commodore 64 one can put code in the RAM shadowed by the ROMs and then disable ROMs. Then the machine runs whatever OS you can think of. With enough RAM on Amiga you can put a new kickstart in RAM and boot it (softkick). I assume the same can be done with AtariST and Amstrad CPC.
As for the laptop it's a impaired computer from the users point of view.
(Score: 1) by kaganar on Friday June 27 2014, @09:26PM
There's two separate issues to this. The first is getting the device to be allowed on existing wireless carriers' networks. They have to agree to it. And IIRC, their networks' "security" relies on some specifications of the device not being open to the public. So, there goes a fully "free" implementation (for varying definitions of free). But assuming you're content with these restrictions and you get your devices access on the existing networks somehow (possibly by starting your own MVNO [wikipedia.org]), then you've got to attract people who care.
At first this will be "nerds". The Soylentnews type. But if you want it to be extremely successful you're talking about your brother, aunt, and grandfather.
Such people are going to need a self-sufficient reason to care about your "phone" (computer). What do people care about? In the US this likely looks like:
Notice how these concerns don't have any mention of security, which operating system, or what freedom it allows me. You're expecting the same people (which includes me) who get duped into giving away their private information to Facebook and Twitter on an hourly basis to think further ahead than the next week?
No, this is a issue of marketing bullet-points and making corporate-level deals to put it in the hands of the consumers who aren't capable of or willing to make informed decisions. And once you've done that, make it: easy to buy, inexpensive, available at the carrier's store, good looking and feeling, easy to figure out, with all the available services people want, and requiring no complex nerd-level configuration. (Otherwise, I'll just continue to buy "Samsung" or whoever -- their last phone seemed okay.)
But damn, that's really hard to do and really expensive.
And that's why it's not Linux's year of the desktop -- er, opensource's year of the phone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @10:16PM
The summary is wrong. The fairphone in my hand right now has dual sim support.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday June 27 2014, @10:55PM
Thanks for the information. Apparently I assumed too much: I don't have a fairphone, but I knew it was Android and some weeks ago I checked for Cyanogenmod and Dual SIM support. At that time I found that Cyanogenmod wouldn't support it yet because there wasn't any official open source support. Since Fairphone uses Android and was supposed to be completely open, the conclusion would be it can't support dual sim.
Apparently it was wrong to assume that Fairphone is totally open:
https://fairphone.zendesk.com/hc/communities/public/questions/200648718-Open-source-support [zendesk.com]
Hope it will be soon...
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 28 2014, @01:45AM
It would be better to call these kind of phones - computerphones. It's a fully fledged computer. In essence current models are as fast [roylongbottom.org.uk] as Pentium III [wikipedia.org] desktop machines from circa the 1999-2001 period.
But they are also missing essential features like freedom of software to be installed, decent screen and especially a keyboard worth anything. Security is also a general farce with p0wned radiomodem, kernel that spies and application software that just steal your personal data. So they can't qualify as generic computers like clean desktop computers unencumbered with bullshit like UEFI and TPM.
And people are smart or dumb but machines just execute instructions. They are an extension of the user. Not an agent of intelligence them self.
(Score: 1) by islisis on Saturday June 28 2014, @01:56AM
in one it is enslaved by their marketers. Both have the potential for the user to do what they wish with them, but only one enjoys OS installing standards and awareness of modularity.
Both have been subverted by investors to wall off the concept of user programmability, so it's not a black and white difference of freedom. However, the toll of mass marketisation of smartphones and tablets on their design culture has become heavily engrained.
There is wide trend for disregarding options, like key input hooking, that will seal these devices to manually-driven interfaces for a long time to come. The mass market does not want to be reminded of their potential for productivity, only that for being entertained.