Android!

[KallDrexx]

Yeah dunno.  The extent of my Android experience is an original Motorola Droid, Samsung Galaxy S3, and this.  All of which were not totally smooth, clunky, and not very polished UI wise.

[NowhereMan]

From what I've heard Nvidia has actually not done much to Lollipop, they rolled it out very quickly and it's more or less just stock. That said Lolipop has had some real issues with performance and radically changing design and some features. I think everyone who's installed it has commented on a noticeable performance hit compared to Kitkat, hopefully something they'll fix.

My current issue with it is how they've implemented the silent mode, you can choose to either have all sounds off (including alarms and reminders) or priority mode. In theory priority mode would be great, allowing you to choose what can interrupt and what can't, but Google have implemented it so that apps need to use their updated API in order to be flagged as non-priority. So any app (like Whatsapp currently and Gmail when it first rolled out) that doesn't will come through in priority mode. This is a pain in the ass when you want to use your phone as an alarm clock and friends in another timezone are having a group conversation you're in at 3am  Hopefully they'll get the performance issues and other bugs sorted out in the next month or so.

[KallDrexx]

Yeah, I'll note that since I just got my Shield it was immediately upgraded to Lollipop, so I don't have any idea how it ran with Kit Kat.

[MahrinSkel]

Yeah dunno.  The extent of my Android experience is an original Motorola Droid, Samsung Galaxy S3, and this.  All of which were not totally smooth, clunky, and not very polished UI wise.

UI in Android is one place where it's always very uneven. Between Google insisting on reinventing the wheel for each and every piece of their OS, and not following their own rules for their own apps, apps being written for different version's UI convention, and the stuff that manufacturers and carriers do, you just have to get used to everything doing things differently.

In my experience, jittery/chunky performance is usually either running too recent a version of the OS for the hardware (usually because they want to compete with something in the same price range but a few months newer), or bloatware.  My T-Mobile MyTouch was a freaking slideshow in Maps, turned out that T-Mobile's proprietary navigation software was mucking it up. And my old tablet had some "GetJar" alternate app market that was making Google Play and Amazon's app market crash randomly, as well as occasionally refusing to let apps I had installed from one of those run. Thought I had uninstalled it, had to restore it to a factory image, edit that to get rid of GetJar, then over-write the original factory image backup and "restore" again, before I finally managed to get all of it's hooks out.

Look up some tips for stripping down the Shield, and check out ATK or another task manager.  Look at your memory profile too, even if you have 2gb, doesn't mean that it's not over-filling. My G2 was at 90%+ RAM usage out of 1gb on a cold reboot even before I loaded any apps (after stripping out bloat, I got that down to 40%). It's basically the Android version of pagefile thrash if you're filling the memory with stuff that insists it's part of the OS even when it isn't.

--Dave

[Yegolev]

This unlikely tech is the rarefied atmosphere that I work in.

Interesting.  How much trouble would you get in if you gave a handwave in the direction of how long before it's consumer-ready, in terms of price (IOW, no more than $10/gb for RAM replacement, and $2/gb for storage)?

Very little since it's really a guess.  HP is working hard on memristors, which isn't a secret.  I believe the latest estimate for a commercially-viable product is 2018 but I'm not sure if that means consumer-grade or enterprise-grade.  HP is very interested in flat memory since it is intended to play a big part in The Machine.  Perhaps not at all coincidentally, The Machine will have an all-new or mostly-new OS but based on what you are telling me I can see why they are using Android for this flat-memory presentation.

Now, as for the contents of the presentation, that most likely would be confidential.

[Quinton]

Android definitely requires a system with a MMU and hardware virtual memory and memory protection -- it's the basis of the entire app sandboxing and security model.  Android doesn't trust the runtime libraries to provide security and isolation -- it relies on the Linux kernel to do that and that depands on the underlying hardware.  With a sufficiently large address space (48-64bit) you could conceivably run in a unified flat address space provided there was memory protection, but I see no advantage to doing so.

But I don't see why you'd disable those features in order to use some new NVM storage system... the issues seem orthogonal to me.

Android does not "page out" or swap dirty (modified) memory to storage today, as flash a limited resource with limited write cycles, and relatively slow to write (and due to implementation of most emmc flash, write overhead impacts read performance, leading to more severe thrash should you try to use it as swap.  If you have another class of memory that's faster and/or more robust to flash to write to, that could be worth reconsidering.

[Yegolev]

I'm not really talking about swap since if we are doing that at the enterprise level then we have some tuning to do, or we have a budget problem.  Besides, that concept wouldn't exist on a true flat-memory machine.  Which doesn't yet exist really, unless maybe you go overboard on RAM, disable swap, and create all filesystems on ramdisks.

The lofty goal isn't just RAM-fast non-volatile storage, but fast NV storage that costs about the same (or less!) than equivalent SAN: in the future, all storage will be Tier 1.  In that future, your database would live on NVM instead of obfuscated spindles or slow solid-state LUNs.  It would look more like mainboard CPU-RAM designs with tiered cache and main memory.  So, if your Oracle DB is resident on 5TB of RAM-fast storage, what does that do to your RDBMS storage/computing design?

The thing that I'm most curious about is what addressing would look like when most storage is the same (discounting processor cache and such).  Addressing including filesystems as well as memory, which makes me think that someone will perhaps design a new addressing system.  This is about where I get out of my depth.

[Quinton]

Well, 64bit addressing allows you to address 16M terabytes, but since you could have say main memory and some number of storage devices, call that up to 1024 devices of up to 16384TB each (16 exabytes should be enough for anyone, right?)

The "Numbers Everyone Should Know" from a Jeff Dean talk about building large scale systems (what they're calling "datacenter scale" these days), are a few years old, but the rough orders of magnitude still stand (SSD doesn't have the seek cost of HDD, but still some transaction cost and isn't much more than 10-20x faster):



So the thing I'd be interested in knowing about any new storage technology is:
- where does it sit in that hierarchy (2-10x slower than RAM is still way faster than disk but would probably still be treated more like disk than RAM)
- are access costs asymmetric (write more expensive than read, for example, similar to flash, or limited write lifecycles or whatnot)

Definitely as the gap closes with RAM you might start reorganizing your data structures look a bit different than your filesystems look now.

As they say, memory is the new disk and disk is the new tape...

[KallDrexx]

Holy fuckballs I finally got an SD card to work.  

So when you try to give an app permission to a folder, Lollipop's APIs show you some Documents application that allows you to pick storage type (internal, or sd card) then shows you folders to allow you to pick a folder to give access to it.  In an ideal world you can then say "just grant access to the whole god damn card" and be done with it.

However, I had a really old 16gb sd card and every time I selected the sd card, the Lollipop documents app would crash and ES file explorer would pretty much just say "you're fucked".  I ordered a 64Gb fast sd card cause it was cheap on amazon ($24) and put it in.  Same good damn problem.  Reformatted it as exFat, nothing.  Reformatted it as NTFS, nothing.  Reformatted it from the god damn Android settings screen, nothing.

Turns out, the Android OS crashes if your SD card doesn't have a Label on it when you format it.   I randomly entered gibberish when I formatted it on my laptop and now everything works, and I can grant apps access to the card.  

I'll bet $10 that it will allow me to put applications on the card now as well (previously I would click the Move to SD Card button, it would spin a few minutes then say "haha sucker, I didn't do shit").

In other Android is not well thought out and Google needs to learn how to UX, I loaded videos onto my tablet and it took me forever to figure out how to play them.  Why?  Because apparently there's no videos app.  After much flailing I realized I have to go into the Photos application to play videos    God forbid they make it an application name that makes sense, like "multiimedia" or even Gallery that they named it way back when.

Not to mention that the Photos application doesn't remember where you were in your videos when you leave.  So if you toss the app card away, or go in fresh in the middle of a video (because these are 2 hour long programming videos that I don't want to watch in one go) I have to remember where I was and manually seek back to that spot.  

The more I play around with this the more I appreciate my Windows Phone, and wish the gaming capabilities were on iOS or a Windows Tablet....

*edit:* Oh yeah and I like how I *MUST* sort my photos by the date it was put on my system.  Not by more useful metrics by folder or even name.  Oh yeah and the photos app doesn't tell you the actual name of the video file, which makes sense for photos (since you know it's in the photos app) but that's why you don't create a photos app and force that to be used to watch videos.

[MahrinSkel]

stuff

Listen to Quinton, Yego. I play with this stuff at a hobbyist/apps level, mucking around trying to find new and interesting ways to break it, for him it's the air he breathes.

--Dave

[NowhereMan]

In other Android is not well thought out and Google needs to learn how to UX, I loaded videos onto my tablet and it took me forever to figure out how to play them.  Why?  Because apparently there's no videos app.  After much flailing I realized I have to go into the Photos application to play videos    God forbid they make it an application name that makes sense, like "multiimedia" or even Gallery that they named it way back when.

Well at least they've finally changed People back to Contacts so it's not like they can't learn from bad changes 

I'd seriously consider just using MX player or some other app to handle videos in Android and open the files direct from some folder app. Using the official Android Photos thing is unintuitive and obnoxious.

[Yegolev]

stuff

Listen to Quinton, Yego. I play with this stuff at a hobbyist/apps level, mucking around trying to find new and interesting ways to break it, for him it's the air he breathes.

--Dave

Yes, I agree with all of that and he's definitely someone who would know!  Numbers may or may not be accurate in any specific situation but the tiering is the important part.

I don't know what the various access times would be for any yet-to-be commercialized storage but it's hard to imagine things will ever be truly flat.  Performance tuning of POWER systems would be a hobby of mine if I had a poorly-performing one to fix, but as it is I mostly educate myself on the ins-and-outs of NUMA, NUCA, affinity, and so on.  All of this happens on the POWER mainboard so even without considering disk storage, there's a lot to work with.  This will be the same in the future when it comes to computational memory, I expect.  I've been wrong before, though.

[eldaec]

HTC m9 launch a bit disappointing. Especially as there was no model above 5" after all.

My m7 us still going strong but really would prefer a larger screen.

[Sky]

So I've been pretty much digging my 4.4.x Galaxy S5. It's handy, I'll admit.

But my 128GB sandisk card died on me :( Reeally not happy about that, lost lots of pics, movies and song ideas.

Anyway, VZ wants to push 5.0 tonight. How skeered should I be?

[Trippy]

Very.

[Yegolev]

Into the breach!

[KallDrexx]

Welp, Windows phone finally pushed me to the edge.  I'm tired of shitty mapping software, the software incompatibilities, and the oddities of the system after 4-5 years of dealing with it. 

Ended up buying an off-contract Blu Studio Energy.  5000mah battery ftw, with a lot of reviews saying they have gotten 6 days with light usage (which is all I really need).

So far it seems pretty well (especially for a $150 price tag).  We shall see after a few days of use though.

[01101010]

Welp, Windows phone finally pushed me to the edge.  I'm tired of shitty mapping software, the software incompatibilities, and the oddities of the system after 4-5 years of dealing with it. 

Ended up buying an off-contract Blu Studio Energy.  5000mah battery ftw, with a lot of reviews saying they have gotten 6 days with light usage (which is all I really need).

So far it seems pretty well (especially for a $150 price tag).  We shall see after a few days of use though.

Really? I heard they are now playing nice with android and Apple apps (read: you can install those apps now and the windows app store is going away). Most of my buddies around here are actually looking more closely at the windows phones now that that has occurred.

[KallDrexx]

Lol, no.

First of all, that is a Windows 10 feature, so we still have a good 4-5 months until that's a possibility. 

Second of all, I'll be shocked if anything that's not an iOS game is ported over, since any app that relies on native iOS UI functionality definitely won't work for Windows 10.  It's also going to be trivial for Apple to add in new APIs that will be difficult for Microsoft to re-implement and it'll be the same game of catch-up that the Palm Pre tried to do with keeping iTunes compatibility, just on a much wider scale.  It's also not totally clear how cleanly Android apps will be able to be ported with little effort and what API compatibility Microsoft is supporting (or if it'll be like Amazon Fire phone where it's a crap shoot on if your app will work or not without sideloading the Google Play store).    I will be shocked if the iOS and Android compatibility work nearly as well as they are advertising, and the apps that *do* work well are going to require manual effort to be ported for incompatible pieces, and I doubt that Windows 10 is going to make the windows mobile/phone marketshare go up enough for that to be worthwhile.

Furthermore, the apps that I really want are waze and google maps.  Waze, while available on Windows Phone is terribly out of date and buggy and once Google bought them they publicly stated they have no intention of updating it for windows phone ever again.  The second that someone finds a way to run that and google maps on Windows Phone MS will find a way to block it, just like they did when Google flat out refused to help Microsoft create a Youtube app, so MS created one without them and Google went above and beyond to make sure it would not function (as well as threaten to sue MS iirc). 

There are just too many unknowns for me to sit and wait and hope things get better with the platform.  In the meantime I'll make use of having access to apps I never had access to before (like ADT Pulse to remotely arm/disarm my alarm) and if Windows 10 becomes awesomesauce I can easily just purchase one of their $100-150 low/medium end phones they are blasting the marketplace with. 

Only thing I'm missing is my phone worked *really* well with my car, reading out text messages and allowing dictation through my car speakers.  So far I havent' figured out how to get that working but I'll be shocked if there's not a way to have the same level of interactivity.

[Rendakor]

So my phone automatically updated to Lollipop this morning, and I hate it. I can't seem to have it vibrate differently for a call or text; is that still an option? If not, is there a decent third party app I can use for texting?

[RhyssaFireheart]

So my phone automatically updated to Lollipop this morning, and I hate it. I can't seem to have it vibrate differently for a call or text; is that still an option? If not, is there a decent third party app I can use for texting?

The husband's and my phones (S4s) updated to Lollipop a couple of weeks ago and I'm not entirely pleased either.  It took about a week for things to settle down but for the first few days, my phone was chewing through the battery like it was going out of style.  It's better now but that was a pain.  I'm not happy that the lock screen notifications are different.  Now I either have to have a bar show up (that I can click to goto whatever is being notified) or I see nothing.  I used to be able to see the icons in the taskbar at the top of my screen but now it helpfully tells me the name of my carrier, which is worthless.  Just an annoying little change that bugs me.  And why do I want everything to be teal and white?  What was wrong with black for a background color?

[NowhereMan]

Is that update to 4.0.1 or whatever? The first iteration of Lollipop? That's got some issues with battery life and the mandatory change to the colour scheme is a bit of a pain. The way it handles alerts is also seriously  but most of those issues are solved in the next release of it (however long your carrier takes to update to that). The alerts are actually much better now than they were in terms of silence settings.

My phone never had any issues with continuous vibration for calls and single vibrate for texts. I use Google Hangouts for text messaging now, not sure if that would make a difference. Check the settings in your SMS app to see if you've got alert options there.

[Bungee]

Is that update to 4.0.1 or whatever? The first iteration of Lollipop? That's got some issues with battery life and the mandatory change to the colour scheme is a bit of a pain. The way it handles alerts is also seriously  but most of those issues are solved in the next release of it (however long your carrier takes to update to that). The alerts are actually much better now than they were in terms of silence settings.

5.0.2 for my Moto G and I got exactly the same complaints as Rhyssa... This sucks.

[Rendakor]

I think I'm on 5.0.1; Note 3 on Vzw. We didn't get the new Interruptions option yet; no options in my messages app for notifications other than on/off.

[01101010]

5.0.1 also chewed through my battery for 2 days after I updated. I haven't rooted my Note4 or done anything to it, but that made me gather all the stuff to do so. After the second day, I reset the phone entirely, and the battery has been actually better than when it came outta the box. I am still going to root at some point, but I am ok with things for the moment.

I will say this, I get strange stutter lag from time to time with no app or pattern to figure it out. I'll tap a button and 3 seconds later the app will open. Most of the time it is instantaneous but every so often... I've got Odin ready to go, but am just not that motivated, yet.

[NowhereMan]

Oh yeah 5.0, 5.1 seems to have fixed most of the battery issues and I no longer get the weird lag but yeah... 5.0 has some real issues. I found myself having to reboot my Nexus 5 every few days to try and fix performance issues. I guess the good news is that when your carrier/Samsung gets round to it things will get better?

[MahrinSkel]

I'm pissed that I lost my face recognition for unlocking, the fact that my battery lasts 20 hours (when it was routinely reaching 100 before) is a close second. Not seeing notifications for texts and missed calls from the lock screen (combined with the loss of face recognition) is serious "Who the FUCK thought this was a good idea?" territory.

It also broke my Weather app and my flashlight app. How the fuck do you break that? Why?!

--Dave

[NowhereMan]

Have you checked the permission settings for apps? I know you can set it to private so notifications won't show up on the lock screen, or have notifications appear but not the contents or have things show up normally. Although I'm not sure if those settings are 5.0 or 5.1.

[Rendakor]

I got my text notifications showing on my lock screen. Settings > Sound and Notifications > Application Notifications > (Your texting app). Then flag it as priority. Also Settings > Sound and Notifications > Lock Screen Notifications > Show All Content.

[RhyssaFireheart]

I got my text notifications showing on my lock screen. Settings > Sound and Notifications > Application Notifications > (Your texting app). Then flag it as priority. Also Settings > Sound and Notifications > Lock Screen Notifications > Show All Content.

That shows a card on the lock screen, which I don't want really.  I mean, I can deal with them if that's the only way to see notifications, but I used to just have the app icon show up at the top of the screen where the task bar is and instead, now I get my carrier name there on the lockscreen.  That's stupid.

[Rendakor]

Oh, that. Yea that's fucking stupid and I don't know how to fix it.

[Sky]

My morning ritual: "Update is ready" click later "Schedule a time" 1am click ok.

For weeks. How about a "fuck off" button? Phone works fine, don't want update, kthx.

Going to get the fiancee an s5 soon and jump onto VZ's 10GB shared data promo...wonder if her phone will be 5.1 or wat.

[schild]

I updated my Galaxy S6 yesterday. Whereas my battery would typically be at about 30% or lower this time of night, it is now at 66%.

I approve of this update.

[Rendakor]

Is it possible to transfer an app from one phone to another, if said app is not on the Play store anymore? If so, how? Googling gives me a bunch of sites telling me to install their proprietary app-transferring software and all of them look shady.

[MahrinSkel]

In essence, you need to find or create an APK file for that app, then load it on the new phone. There are a lot of apps that can do it (create the APK), the only one I've actually used is the 'Backup' functionality of Astro File Manager.

--Dave