There has been speculation that Google will eventually make its Advanced Protection model, currently optional, mandatory in a future Android version. A consequence of that will be that sideloading will only be possible if you connect to the phone over ADB and install the app from the command line that way. Obviously only a tiny, tiny amount of techies like us will every know how to do that. So, I don't think Google can so easily be held up as an example of user freedom.
You don't particularly have to learn to "use the shell", however. If you only want to sideload apps it's just a matter of copying simple commands from the internet. This is well within the capabilities of most people who are technically competent enough to sideload apps now.
Users are certainly very reluctant to drop into a command line, but in my experience if it is a true necessity for something they want to do, they don't actually have that much difficulty with it.
No, the vast majority of Android phone owners are not going to open the command line. The very prospect of it will daunt them, or it may even be unfamiliar to them (a lot of Android users, especially in the developing world, rarely or never use a traditional computer and are unfamiliar with the full range of its features). Even those users who would copy and paste into the terminal are a niche more comparable to us here than the average phone owner.
Yes, of course sideloading may still remain possible in such a scenario, but it would not be mainstream enough to sustain any kind of mainstream ecosystem of apps outside of the Google Play Store. Even F-Droid supporters have been worried that clamping down on sideloading could marginalize F-Droid even further than it already is.
The vast majority of Android users are also not going to sideload illegal apps currently.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that trying to restrict users from installing software of their choice on their own computing device is user-hostile, but in this specific scenario, users sideloading apps banned by their government, I don't think having to open a command line to do it would significantly shrink that userbase, which is already comprised of a small minority of particularly committed people.
But all of this is moot regardless, because AFAIK this doesn't extend beyond the realm of speculation.
> I had one of the super light and compact sleeping pads develop a leak after literally about three days.
Therm-a-Rests are a dependable brand in this regard, as while a leak may happen from time to time (I have had two punctures in about one year of sleeping outdoors), it is usually very easy to find the hole and patch it yourself, just like you do with a bicycle inner tube. I think Therm-a-Rest even includes the patch kit with some of its models now.
This was Synmat. Should probably have had a repair kit with me but as I recall there were multiple leaks. And have several older Thermarest products. But there are definitely tradeoffs between weight and durability.
In my experience the repair kits are of marginal utility because the leaks always develop along the seams. Making a successful patch on a seam is near impossible.
Hilleberg tents do seem nice in terms of the fabrics they use and the design. However, as the long-haul cyclist community has found, the zippers give out appallingly early for such an expensive, artisanal product. (By the end of the Carretera Austral there seemed to be more Hilleberg owners with broken zippers than with working zippers.)
I owned a Hilleberg Nallo GT-class tent that did seem like the five-star hotel of tents, but when the zipper gave out after less than five months of use, I decided in future to simply go with an MSR Hubba-class tent that doesn’t feel much of a step down in comfort, and is less than half the price, so I can replace it if need be and still have spent less than I would for one Hilleberg.
I wonder how much of the zipper failures are due to lack of maintenance. I use a tooth brush to clean them after each long trip and lubricate them with a little silicone grease. I bought my Jannu in 2007 and haven't had a problem with any of its zippers, ever. I've only had my Keron for 5 years so I can't attest to its longevity yet :)
In my entire life, I’ve never heard of the need to clean and lubricate a zipper. Heck, I’ve got decade old jeans with a zipper than can be washed in harsh detergent, survive an accidental off in a bike, and still open and close.
If your zipper needs maintenance every time you use it, you need a different zipper.
I do this after the tent has been out in the desert dust for a few weeks. Debris will accumulate in the zipper and will increase friction and grind down the plastic (tent zippers aren't made out of metal like you jeans zippers, for weight reasons).
Spending a few hours after a long trip to care for my gear is a great way to ensure it won't fail on the next trip. Especially with tent zippers, you don't want a failure in a storm as that could be unpleasant or even life threatening.
Instructions how to do this are in the owners manual in the maintenance section (although they recommend not using any grease, which I ignored).
Or bagpipes. Many pipers these days use a synthetic bag with a zipper, those need maintenance often. Much easier than the maintenance hide bags need though!
This website isn't really about etymology as traditionally understood, but only about the evolution of characters. Etymology would be connecting modern Chinese forms to the reconstructed Middle Chinese and Old Chinese pronunciations, and linking them to their cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages. (This field, incidentally, has made huge strides in the last two decades, but even for linguists it is hard to keep up with the flood of scholarship, and you should take anything on an amateur enthusiast-run website with a grain of salt.)
You probably know more about linguistics than I do (disclaimer: very little), but I suspect you might not fully appreciate that "etymology" here is probably just a mere translation of the very well established discipline of studying the history of Han characters in East Asia...
Alternatively, would you have a better suggestion on what to name this in English, if it shouldn't be called "etymology"?
Also, what specifically would you recommend taking with a grain of salt from the website -- that the data might be wrong? Or are you implying that, notwithstanding a possible name confusion, that the study of evolution of characters is somehow not a worthy exercise for "serious" scholars?
(Disclaimer: I'm an amateur Chinese fan for one year.)
I understand and respect the difference between the two definitions of etymology given. I also agree that tracking the actual changes in character composition and contemporary usage, as etymology, is the better definition. But having no academic experience with Chinese yet, and relying only on the Internet and natives to explain "the meaning behind the symbols", I find that this looser definition, which could perhaps also be called pictographic decomposition, is an adventure into the web of meaning. This is perhaps not the exact history of a word or a character, but perhaps like the 90s JPEGs, you get a certain resolution by knowing the literal meaning of a single character or word's components, and then later on, track the full extent of Chinese etymology.
I would refer to the subject of this website as the history of writing systems, which is an established field of linguistics alongside etymology.
Yes, there is a risk that data here might be wrong, though maybe not so much from this website because of the author’s limited concerns. (The author himself has always been upfront about being an amateur enthusiast in this domain.) But my comments were meant very generally: wherever one reads about Chinese etymology, be aware that the claims may be out of date and superseded by new research, because the field has been so productive since the 1990s.
There's a material difference between Han character writing systems and pronunciation based writing systems -- a Han character carries roughly the same amount of "meaning" as a "word" in European languages, and the written form is standardized and persistent, so it doesn't evolve the same way as European/pronunciation-based languages do (in which spelling evolves over time).
The relatively unique way Han characters work may explain the difference in the focus between traditional etymology that you refer to, and the etymology in the website. I'm not sure "history of writing systems" is a good way to capture what the site is doing... Anyway it's more of a issue of translation (of a traditional area of study in East Asia that might not quite exactly exist in the West)
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I suppose one thing about "Chinese etymology" is that every native speaker of Chinese seems to feel entitled to dabble in it every once a while. In recent years Hong Kong has seen a resurgence of interest in written Cantonese, and there has been no shortage of self-proclaimed amateur etymologists who put forward the most ridiculous claims that even a high school student could debunk... I contribute to a cantonese dictionary and we have a general policy of disregarding and excluding any etymology claims unless there are strong reasons to add it.
In Classical Greek, it isn't just the position of the accent that matters but the kind of accent there. You are right that the Greeks themselves did not need the accents notated, but students of Greek today often rely on the accent to tell e.g. the eta or eta+nu words apart.
Sure, I took 6 full-time terms of Classical Greek so I'm familiar with the different accents.
But my Greek studies took place 20 years ago so I do wonder what you mean by eta and eta + nu words? Are these different subtypes of the third declension?
Eta alone can mean ‘the’, ‘she who’, ‘either/or’, ‘indeed’, ‘than’, or ‘I was’, with the accent helping to narrow it down. Eta+nu is ‘her who’, ‘he/she/it was’, etc.
Also, for example, tau+iota is either an interrogative or an indefinite pronoun, and it is the accent which tells you which without having to scan further through the sentence.
Ok, I thought you were talking about word endings.
Well sure, there are minimal pairs, but most of the time it’s immediately clear from the context, and we have to keep in mind that the accents were added much later by modern philologists, so they have de facto been deduced from the context.
But sure, there goldilocks zone where it’s not obvious to the lay reader, but the scholars are pretty certain what it should say, and then it helps. I wouldn’t say it’s a major struggle when reading Greek though.
> What do you mean? All phone have GPS chips, they don't depend on google for that.
In many everyday instances, the phone won't quickly get a signal from GPS satellites, rather it relies on network-assisted GPS. Even the open-source Android distribution (AOSP) uses Google's servers. It used to be straightforward for phone owners to switch to a different location assistance service like Mozilla's just by installing from F-Droid and then changing a setting. However, in a subsequent Android version Google made a change to require location-assistance services to be installed as a system package, not a user package. That requires connecting to the phone over ADB and using the shell, which means that only a tiny, tiny minority of techies will ever do it. That is just one example of how, over time, Google has made design changes to Android to benefit itself at the expense of privacy and competition.
> I also think there are injustices in palestine and the with Uyghurs etc, but we are going to end up with most of our Readme filed with political statements at that rate.
I brought this same point up in a discussion once, but the response was that BLM is the number-one pressing sociopolitical issue in the world today, and it was offensive that I would even suggest that other examples of oppression in the world are comparable to the greater oppression that African-Americans face.
Unfortunately, Anbox isn’t a longterm solution for non-libre Android apps. The problem is that more and more Android apps require passing SafetyNet. It started with banking apps, then spread to games, and Google may one day simply encourage every app to require it. Even Android ROMs stripped of Google services like LineageOS are finding it a challenge to pass SafetyNet, let alone Anbox.
Even Linux desktop suffers from a lack of contributors. Even many core-infrastructure projects are shockingly dependent on 1–2 devs who have been unsuccessful in attracting more contributions.
One example of where the manpower just isn’t there for both Linux desktop and the PinePhone is a solid maps app. All solutions are little more than tech demos compared to OSMAnd on Android. Yes, OSMAnd itself has grown through contributions from the community, but it basically soaked up already what little manpower there is. There are other examples where running Android apps on the PinePhone under a compatibility layer is seen as a necessity to get around the PinePhone's lack of manpower.
I don’t think Anbox is not so much about man power. It’s for proprietary services or services that don’t have a decent Linux app. I recall the early days of Android very well [0], it had a similar lack of apps (then compared to Symbian and Windows Mobile). I don’t think it’s wise to say “this is not going to happen” one year after the first Community Edition PinePhones were delivered.
For an overview of the current PinePhone app landscape I suggest a look at https://LINMOBapps.frama.io – contributions welcome!
[0] I recently brought back old posts to my blog https://linmob.net that I wrote 1.2 years after the G1’s initial US release.
Sure, Purism puts in a lot of effort. But after a year of the PinePhone drawing on Purism's effort, the community can plainly see that it a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done.
Everyone I know working on something PinePhone-related is concerned about the small size of the dev community.
