mdm_

Where I work, over the past 2-3 years we've used B+, Pi 2, and Pi 3 (all running Raspbian) for public display screens and browser performance is terrible on all of them. Even the Pi 3 is unable to play YouTube videos without freezing for 10-30 seconds while it buffers and skipping a ton of frames throughout.

If you have video files or use e.g. youtube-dl and then play video back with omxplayer it's nice and smooth (although using the --loop option seems to make the video freeze after several hours/days; memory leak?). Our solution was a 2-line bash script to start a new omxplayer instance when the previous one finishes ad infinitum until you Ctrl+C, and that's run for 7 or 8 months now without a hitch.

I'm not sure how that would change things. If the phone in question had been a BlackBerry, wouldn't the FBI be making the same demands of that company?

Sports. Depending on who you ask, they're the first[1] or second[2] most popular sports website in the world.

[1] http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/sports-websites

[2] http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/Sports

His comments about his previous phone, the LG G3, are interesting to me. That happens to be the phone I have, and I think it works great. I'm using a stock-based ROM (rooted, of course, with TWRP), performance is excellent, very little bloat, and the battery easily lasts me the day, even when I play a little GTA:SA, watch some YT/Twitch, do some video calling with Hangouts, and Chromecast some Dora The Explorer for my kid. I use Viper4Android to do DSP on Spotify and get some pretty nice sound out of my $10 earbuds. I'm not on Facebook, and one of my New Year's resolutions was to stop reading the news[1] and using Twitter and Reddit, so that's probably saving me loads of battery.

As far as expense, yes, it's more than $129, but it's currently being pushed heavily by MVNOs where I live as a $0 budget phone ($400 in subsidy). Currently flagships from Apple, Samsung, etc are in the $850-1100 range. IMHO the G3 is a perfectly serviceable mid-range phone.

[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

I picked up a PS Vita and it's fantastic. So far through various sales I've picked up 35 physical and digital games, so, quite the backlog to last a long while. I don't play any games on my phone anymore. I heartily recommend Persona 4 Golden, Superbeat XONIC, Sparkle Unleashed, OlliOlli, Lumines Electric Symphony, and Mortal Kombat (basically the PS3 version with scaled-down graphics).

BlackBerry Passport with Javascript enabled here, I get the same thing.

I see elsewhere in this thread you mention you live near Hamilton. Well, I work in Hamilton and commute from Niagara, and that puts you and I south of the following: Washington, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Maine, 2/3rds of Oregon, Idaho, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Vermont, and New Hampshire, 1/2 of Wyoming, Michigan, and New York.

Now I haven't worked too many places, so I may be naive and/or ignorant, but it's my feeling that most software jobs outside SV and the startup culture are also the wrong environment for "move fast and break things".

I'm just finishing up a first-year course at McMaster University where we learned basic CS concepts (divide and conquer, state machines, recursion, algebraic data types, FRP, etc) using ELM. It's the first time I've ever put an honest effort into learning a pure functional language, and although it was initially frustrating to a self-taught programmer with a background in several procedural languages and SQL, it's growing on me, and I'm probably going to look for a side project (maybe a small game or a simple CPU simulator) to build with ELM when the course is over.

I only wish the "Improved error messages" and "Catching more bugs" features had been introduced about three months ago, probably would have saved me hours!

My wife and I both own Mitsubishis: me, a 2013 Lancer, and her, a 2012 RVT because she wanted a crossover/SUV with "more space". We're able to fit significantly more in the Lancer. The RVT is basically a hatchback on a higher suspension and bigger tires.

I have a 2008 MBP 17" that's also gone through two swollen batteries. Most of the time now I use my work-provided Lenovo, but every now and then I need a big screen and Adobe Creative Suite (with a still-kicking Wacom Graphire2 tablet, circa 2003), so out comes the Macbook.

I'm on my phone and honestly at first thought the "cover" page was just broken on mobile. When I realized what it actually was, I backed out of it and will likely never go back. I do most of my browsing/reading on a mobile device, and pages like this are just brutal.

I've noticed, at least here in Canada, there's been this real push with avacado over the last two years. Subway seems to be the biggest pusher, but I've seen all kinds of other advertising about avacado, which previously had been this sort of weird fruit they'd stock in small quantities at the grocery store, and which I'd never seen anyone eat.

My favorite is Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford. It's clear, concise, the railroad diagrams are super helpful, and from what I've seen of Crockford's lectures on YouTube, it also really captures his voice.

One multi-million dollar business franchise gained illegal access to the computer network and private data of another multi-million dollar business franchise. Sounds right up the FBI's alley to me.

Another Netflix annoyance: if I watch the pilot episode of a series, then weeks and months pass, and I never watch another episode of that series, it's probably safe to infer that I didn't like it and you can stop recommending stuff to me based on my "interest" in that series. I feel like there's a few of these really common-sense things that Netflix doesn't pick up on and probably don't require some fancypants algorithm to detect.

>as interesting as the Hub concept is, in practice I don't prioritize Foursquare updates the way I prioritize SMS or work email!

A couple things to try: in the Hub, click the menu button in the bottom right corner "..." and select "Settings". Turn on "Priority Hub" and you'll get an additional folder in the Hub for messages that match your priority criteria. Also, under "Hub Management", you can set each account integrated within the Hub to display notifications exclusively in the main Hub folder, the account-specific folder, or both.

FYI BlackBerry is releasing a 16x9 slider phone later this year, which has fed into the Android rumors. The only glimpse BlackBerry fans have seen of that device so far looked like a Galaxy S6 Edge with a slide-out keyboard.

Maybe you had a defective unit? I've been using BB10 for over two years and have never experienced any of the issues you describe. Cut and paste and text editing in general are one of the biggest "wow" features when I show people my Passport.

I've just recently switched back to Firefox as part of an effort to eliminate as many Google products from my life as possible, and it's a really nice browser. I had no idea Firefox's market share had fallen so far.

Does anyone know if the QML mentioned is the same QML used to construct BlackBerry 10 apps?

There's been significant (to put it mildly) turnover at BlackBerry since it was in a position of strength, so IMHO it's not exactly fair to call the company hypocritical. I should hope all the new people have some new ideas and maybe a different philosophy.

For some context, read BlackBerry COO Marty Beard's blog post[1] from a few weeks ago. I don't think Chen or anyone else at BlackBerry thinks the government should compel anyone to write apps for their specific platform, in fact that's the very mindset they're criticizing. What they're getting at is that services should leverage open technologies so that nobody's platform gets shut out, which I believe is also a core value of Mozilla and Firefox OS, for example. It's not just a matter of BlackBerry vs. the world; how many apps are iOS-first or iOS-exclusive, despite the market domination of Android? I think Chen and Beard are advocating for the tearing down of the "walled garden" world of mobile platforms.

I use a BlackBerry Passport as my daily driver, and although I have both native apps and sideloaded Android apps via Amazon App Store and Snap, a lot of my most regularly used items are mobile websites. Many companies have excellent mobile sites, you can save them as bookmarks to your homescreen, they pull in the favicon and look just like apps. You don't have to install updates for them or worry that they'll stop supporting your OS version or particular hardware, and a lot of times they're a better experience than the corresponding native (or sideloaded) apps.

[1] http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/surprising-winner-of-htm...

I think this app: http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/38050888/?la... allows you to do just that.

My Samsung tablet runs 4.4.2 and since I rooted it, it tells me "this device has been modified and cannot be updated". Sounds like I'm not missing out on much!

I recently opened an Outlook account because I'm finding Google's business model creepy and so far it's been pretty nice. It integrates well with my BlackBerry Passport (switched from Android) and two-factor auth was pretty straightforward to set up. I've moved my entire calendar to outlook.com and I'm forwarding my GMail there for now and hopefully will migrate completely over the next year.

When I started to think about how Google was privy to just about all of my online and some of my real-life activity, it occurred to me they could build a disturbingly accurate profile on me, and while I'm just a boring 30-something middle-class white guy, I still found that creepy. Now I spread my data out between Google, BlackBerry, Outlook, and Yahoo and it's not really any less convenient than having it all integrated (the phone does integrate it all I suppose, but BlackBerry is not trying to use that data to show me ads).

Follow-up: AT&T will be carrying the Classic and a carrier-exclusive Passport with rounded corners[1].

[1] http://crackberry.com/blackberry-classic-and-passport-confir...

Blackberry Passport (previously Q10) user here. BB10 is not a "minimal phone OS". Maybe this was true for older BBOS phones (don't know, never used one), but BB10 converted me from being a longtime Android user, and I've yet to feel like I'm missing out on anything (it does run Android apps too).

Also, Blackberry sells the Classic unlocked in the US through it's online store[1] and Amazon[2] and you can also get one on contract through US Mobile[3].

[1] http://shop.blackberry.com/store/bbrryus/en_US/pd/productID.... [2] http://www.amazon.com/dp/product/B00OYZZ3VS/?_encoding=UTF8&... [3] https://www.gousmobile.com/blackberry-classic

I'm not familiar with Amiga and the surrounding culture, but I was surprised to learn there is modern PowerPC hardware and an updated OS. What can you do with an Amiga in 2014? Why would someone pay $3000 for an AmigaOne X1000 workstation? Is it purely nostalgia?

My work desktop is FreeBSD 10.1 running WindowMaker and I personally love the "dated" look. Reminds me of my teenage years, running Redhat 6.x, listening to nu-metal with XMMS and spending way too much time on IRC.