Lollipop is just a bad, bad update. Tap the square button and close two apps at the same time. If you did everything right, now your phone says that Android UI failed. This has been going on since day one. Day one. Which was sometime in November.
Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard to do the main function. But not to worry, they made Messenger too. So, if you're a sane person, you disable Hangouts, install Messenger and all is good, right? Of course not. Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory. And by the way, why do they feel the need to make two or three different apps for doing the same thing? Photos and Gallery? Why not. What about Email, Gmail and Inbox? Sure, my app drawer was a bit too empty anyway...
There's so much more that could be said about Google "products" (I hate this word) and their problems, but my blood pressure is already acting up, so I better leave it for another day.
Bad is an understatement. Problems with Lollipop I've experienced so far:
* Calls don't work. Had to reinstall OS a couple of times. Known Google bug that they refuse to fix on their own Nexus 4 phone. Bug also exists in Android 4.x. Yay!
* Contacts didn't show names. Had to reinstall OS.
* Bluetooth skips, sometimes fails to connect, and after disconnecting, always reconnects with no sound (though the song metadata is transmitted) - no solution that i've found so far
* Calls and texts sometimes do not alert, even when not in the quiet period - no solution / unable to replicate
* For a long time google apps just crashed, but I was able to finally solve that after reinstalling the OS and google apps a few dozen times
* Hangouts will not let you delete more than one conversation at a time
* No silent mode (speaks a lot to the idiocy of Google's product team)
* The new maps interface is incredibly slow and unusable at times (the article gets this one spot on), especially without a very fast connection (not limited to Android of course--the new slow, downgraded experience is available on all platforms from Google)
I'm pretty certain I won't buy any more Google hardware due to their lack of support (which seems to span all of their product divisions) and likely will avoid Android in general if at all possible. It's ironic because the Nexus 4 hardware seems to be quite excellent and well built--I haven't been able to break the phone yet even when intentionally smashing it into the ground as hard as I could multiple times because of the above (the bumper helps a lot, I think). The only reason I haven't made the switch yet is that a $649 starting price (really closer to $800 for a decent model after tax) for an iPhone is simply atrocious for a phone and worse than the horrific problems described above. For now ...
> Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory.
The only thing that makes Android usable in a sane way for me is custom ROMs and Titanium Backup's app freezing.
To continue the parent link's sentiments, it's like someone built an operating system at a company that employed such talented people that no one wanted to work on usability minutia. (Note: design is NOT usability)
Am I just desensetized to quality or, do I put up with a lot more issues than I should, or do I not have the same high standards as everyone else? As far as I can tell, Lollipop (aka Android 5.0) works brilliantly, and everyone thatI recall speaking to who has it is also similarly pleased. To call it a failure seems to be vastly overstating the viewpoints of a minority of customers. My Sony Z3 Compact and LG G Watch R work great, and that seems to be the general experience of other with modern devices. I get that it's fun to hate and rage, but this seems nitpicky - nothing is perfect, and Googla has great track record for pushing bugfixes and updates for Android and Chrome. #satisfied
> Am I just desensetized to quality or, do I put up with a lot more issues than I should, or do I not have the same high standards as everyone else?
Hard to say. My best guess is that you put up with a lot more issues than you should. The mobile is so utterly broken that we all have to get used to it to stay sane.
But from my personal experience, and I'm not saying that it applies to you personally, I've noticed that many people just don't give a fuck about the looks. Go and look at how majority of people write letters, or even how they write on the Internet. The amount of typos and overall lack of style is so big that 60 years ago a typical reader would get a heart attack.
Looking at the world as it is today, I start to feel that it's me who has insanely high standards because I want things to look and feel nice, not just barely work.
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Oh, and about Lollipop - I've seen so many cases where something utterly broken on my device worked fine on everyone elses and reverse, that I learned to appreciate that things just really don't work the same even on the same brand of hardware. It's entirely possible that you and your friends have a good experience while for some reason, GPs device-software combination is broken. Hell, I personally never had any issues with Windows Vista, and almost no one believes me it's possible.
The Sony Z3 Compact is a VERY powerful device, and also pretty expensive (U$ 400 or so). On slightly older or less powerful devices, Lollipop is INCREDIBLY bad.
It's so bad I'm recommending a switch to Windows for users that haven't bought into the ecosystem too much - basically U$ 100 Windows/Nokia phones outperform U$ 100 Android phones by a huge margin, so are a better buy for casual users, plus Microsoft is subsidizing phones over here.
My Google Nexus 7 tablet was unusable with the Lollipop update. My LG G3 Mini also performs extremely badly. OTOH my iPad 1st generation is still going strong (though I've seen iPhones go bricky with iOS updates).
Edit: note that I had badmouthed Windows phones previously after an incredibly frustrating experience with older Nokia phones.
me neither, but a bug I've only seen on my Nexus 5 is that my timestamps on recent hangouts messages say "now" for hours. This is a problem if I mix hangouts and SMS because SMS runs on a normal timestamp, so essentially all of my texts appear above my hangouts. For a while it just seemed like my texts weren't actually coming in at all.
On my Note 4, I get the same (possibly related) date/time issues manifesting in Google Maps; "Driving distance 37 miles. Drive time estimated 72 hours" :)
More than a year ago I skipped the page that asked me to enable the two-factor authentication, as I didn't want to give Microsoft my phone number. One day I found myself completely locked out of my account. Long story short, I've never been able to access my email account again, since that day. The instructions to unblock the account [1], say, I shit you not:
If I try to enter my number, I get an unspecified error and I'm still locked out. Obviously. But not to worry, the page says:
>"If you can’t unblock your account with the security code and changing your password, customer support can still help you get your account back. To contact customer support, you’ll need to sign in to your account, and fill out an online form."
...
I really don't know what kind of brain-dead monkeys they put in charge of these things. And while it's hard to believe that a functioning human being could ever come up with such a bullet-proof procedure to unblock an account blocked for "security reasons", what really baffles me is that this has been going on for almost two years. This should give you an idea of how much Microsoft cares about their consumer products.
So, consider yourself lucky to have gone past the login, which, apparently, isn't something to take for granted with Microsoft.
https://account.live.com/resetpassword.aspx doesnt seem to require my password. I was able to select "I know my password, but can't log in" then chose "I don't have any of these" at which point I was given a form to fill out to have a CS rep contact me.
Give it a try, it might give you access to your account again.
It's what I did at the time, and I did it again now, but it doesn't work. I can change password as many times as I want, but the account is still blocked for no reason.
So you didn't get to the big contact form? Did you select the same things I did? I just tried it again on another account, and got the same page as before.
>Curtis Green was at home, greeting the morning with 64 ounces of Coca-Cola and powdered mini doughnuts. Fingers frosted synthetic white[...]
>Green waddled to the door, his two Chihuahuas, Max and Sammy, following attentively.
How do the authors know any of these (useless) details? They weren't there. Is this a factual recount or fiction?
I hate it when these failed novelists try to make a run-of-the-mill story sound like an Hollywood movie. Next time, just stick to the facts and save me a couple of pointless pages of unsubstantiated claims. Is is that hard to do?
It's not that it's hard to do, it's that the author and the publication decided not to write it that way.
This is what's called a feature story, it's the classic form in which long form monthly magazines tell stories. If you don't like this form of writing there are many other styles available to you, such as the very neutral and factual NY Times or AP style, or the more conversational style popularized by blogs, for example.
Sometimes I think I'm bonkers because I want things like this to be an ordered, bulleted list of what happened and that's all. Have you ever been in a group where someone is telling a story and wished you could hear it without all the dumb narrative flourishes, instead just "this happened, then this, then this"?
>I don’t see Go as something that is going to serve as a “better C”, so I’m waiting for something new.
This surprised me a bit. I think most people who tried Go would agree that it is, in fact, a better version of the C programming language. It follows many of the same UNIX-y principles and it's a pleasure to work with, mostly because the syntax just gets out of the way. I'd like to know more about his point of view if he's reading here :)
And while I'm at it, I want to thank Salvatore for giving us redis, which is also a pleasure to work with.
The C programmers whom I know don't like Go because it doesn't have pointer arithmetic, and the runtime does some "magic" stuff like the goroutines. A lot of C programmers don't really like encapsulation as much as people who are used to object-oriented languages.
C++ and Java programmers see Go as an intentionally crippled language without inheritance or generics, which they can't quite wrap their heads around. Java programmers have a very hard time accepting the lack of dependency versioning, and the Go team's insistence that it is not important is mind-boggling to anyone who has been using Maven for years.
Ruby and Python programmers see Go as a step back in usability and syntax, and those who have not used a statically-typed language see a lot of boilerplate.
On top of all of that, any of the aforementioned ecosystems have a large set of libraries that are widely known and standard in the industry.
I like Go, and I think most programmers would like it if they gave it a chance, but I think it challenges too many peoples' preconceptions. Compare that to Scala, which you can sell as "better Java" and get people on board immediately.
> I don’t see Go as something that is going to serve as a “better C”, so I’m waiting for something new.
Go probably would not be a good candidate for something like Redis, as performance and memory use could become worse. As pointed out elsewhere, Go has become a better replacement for scripting languages is some circumstances, more than it has been used to replace C.
> I’m not a big fan of new things in IT when they have the smell of being mostly fashion-driven, without actually bringing something new to the table.
Assuming this still refers to Go, I can't think of a new yet less "fashionable" language [1], which is in part why I like it.
I think the Go compiler, runtime, and GC would need to mature a lot before it could be used to create something competitive with Redis. But it is moving in that direction. A pauseless GC[1], a numa-aware scheduler with lower overheads[2], more efficient atomic operations[3], all these are/have been discussed by the Go team and are actual goals AFAIK.
I'm building a database in Go, keeping the data off-heap (which solves the GC problem for now.) The performance will lag C currently, but I do think it will eventually get close.
My impression (and I wish I could find the article I'm thinking of that talks about why this is) is that Go has largely failed at being a better C, but has convinced some people that it's a better Python.
As a Python developer, I don't think many Python people consider it a "better Python". It's much less expressive than Python. Python developers are sacrificing a lot of things, but they're keeping simplicity and extreme readability, and gaining massive performance gains.
A "Python-y modern C" would be a better description.
"I was asked a few weeks ago, "What was the biggest surprise you encountered rolling out Go?" I knew the answer instantly: Although we expected C++ programmers to see Go as an alternative, instead most Go programmers come from languages like Python and Ruby. Very few come from C++."
The syntax of go feels a little "expert", while the syntax of C seems more friendly and easy to grasp. I doubt anything will replace C if it's not as easy and simple.
System languages need to be stupidly simple and lack complexity.
One thing that could improve on C, might be very simple things like (immutable?) string as a native type, hashmaps, lambdas, etc. I would love to see some pythonic stuff into C.
Languages NEED to be simple if you want students to be able to learn them. That's what makes the success of C and makes it irreplaceable.
Although I would gladly something like Rust become relevant, if it's backward compatible with C ABIs, why not. But since ecosystems are already divided, I would like to see language dividing things even more.
> The syntax of go feels a little "expert", while the syntax of C seems more friendly and easy to grasp. I doubt anything will replace C if it's not as easy and simple.
I think C is a lot harder to grasp. e.g. manual memory management, dangling pointers, unchecked casts, etc.
> One thing that could improve on C, might be very simple things like (immutable?) string as a native type, hashmaps, lambdas, etc. I would love to see some pythonic stuff into C.
This is totally out of my domain so forgive me if I'm completely wrong here, but my guess is that for such performance-critical, heavily-optimized things as Redis the garbage collector and runtime overhead of Go are too large.
"One of these, Genia, is commercialising a process called nanopore sequencing that Dr Church first devised in 1988. Distinct polymer tags are attached to each of the four nucleotides poised to contribute to a single molecule of replicating DNA. As they react, the tags are released near a protein layer full of tiny holes called nanopores. Each tag blocks the flow of electrical ions across the layer in a different way. Because it relies on electronics rather than optics, nanopore sequencing promises faster, cheaper sequencing. Dr Church holds up a fingernail-sized chip containing 128,000 nanopores that he reckons will bring the cost of sequencing down to $100. In June, Genia was acquired by Roche, a Swiss pharmaceuticals giant."
The language isn't everything, in fact, it's the least important part of the package. Android has horrible online documentation, iOS has stacks of nicely formatted PDFs and a great online reference. Android tools (Eclipse/Android Studio) are simply horrible, while XCode and related tools are really great. Add to this the performance hit you have from having your code run on a vm and the bloat that comes from using Java itself, and you have yet another reason as to why Android developers are few and far between.
I'll take Android Studio over Xcode any day of the week. I've been working with the Xcode 6 GM for the last few days and it crashes hard on me at least once an hour. I think Android Studio, despite being in beta status, has crashed on me once in the entire time I've been using it. And Xcode's refactoring and code management tools are a joke compared to Android Studio's.
And I'll take Android's layout schemes over managing the house of cards that is auto layout in Interface Builder. If you're lucky you can get auto layout to do what you want with a ton of pointing and clicking but good luck maintaining that mess when you come back to it a few weeks from now. WYSIWYG tools have no place in a professional developer's toolkit, IMO. Leave that stuff to the designers.
Merging xibs and Xcode project files is another hell lying in wait for anybody doing Mac or iOS development on a team.
I'll grant you that the iOS documentation is generally better and certainly the APIs for dealing with multimedia on a lower level are far better on iOS. But for the typical listview-hitting-a-json-api kind of app life is generally easier in Android, in my experience.
I never heard of this game, but a quick search shows it's an 80s looking video game with very basic graphics (maybe there's another game with the same name?). Anyway, I can't understand what could possibly justify that price.
Try Google'in it for half a second and come up with 10 million hits. Of course its not the game they're buying; its those millions of enthusiasts' attention and buying power.
Right. It's a bit disappointing in the context of a page with the lead-in "What if every soldier could run a four-minute mile?" but I trust this research is still a work in progress and adding an 11lb weight + helmet and taking those times off is a significant achievement.
