Originally Posted by Mentalist Traceur

Google has always done odd version numbering. And yes, it's becoming the norm to have the first device ship with OS 1.x~ instead of 1.0. I personally don't like it - if you want an actual sociological explanation for why, I can't really give you one, other than the fact that over time, 1.0 has become associated with the 'done' version, and so people are more eager to call things 'done' based on their own internal markers, and then they look at it and say - this could really use improvements before we market it - and keep on releasing other versions. But numbers to mean something, the same way that Extras, Extras-Testing, and Extras-Devel means something. That something is sometimes vague, and sometimes people ignore it, but devs do pick their version numbers for reasons that mean stuff. (Sometimes not completely strictly consistently or not with a public explanation for their reasoning, but if you know anything a bit of software, and its growth is documented in forum chats and the like, it's pretty easy to figure out the gist of it.)

But ultimately, that's not really the issue, so I could concede you this point, and still have the core of my point stand. The core point being:


I can see why people would be mad, yes. I don't think it's right for them to be, because to get mad over if, you have to have the audacity to feel that you're entitled to it. It's understandable to get excited about something, and hope for it and feel disappointed afterwards. And it's not like I can't get in the mindset of a person who would feel mad over it. But I do reject it from the realm of ethically acceptable mindsets. If you had paid, let alone paid in advance, then you could be upset - even then there's a question of how upfront the seller was about what doesn't work, and how much you had to pay - but you could be upset.

When the developer spent extra time out of his life porting an OS onto hardware for which half the drivers and software stacks are closed (actually, last I checked, things like Android's telephony stack aren't exactly open either, nor are that many open drivers, if any), when he could be using the formidable programming skills that that takes to, say, make himself money selling iPhone apps, and puts forth the time right before Chrismas to make people at least somewhat happier, no, it is not okay to feel entitled about it. It's understandable the way any other unethical act is 'understandable' - if you're good enough with simulating other people's psychology within your own mind, you can understand why they feel the way they do, and why they'd act the way they'd act. You can, if you're compassionate enough, even sympathize with just about any act in that way. But sympathizing doesn't mean accepting as right, at least the way I mean it in context. By the same token, when you feel entitled to get some feature because someone released a new version of a program, yeah, I can understand feeling that way, but I challenge the notions on which feeling that way was founded upon.


So updates to other features, code optimizations and things that make everything work better in the background or more stably get to sit in the dark of your code repository until you have some much desired feature working flawlessly enough for the masses? Masses that for some reason assumed that the next version had to have feature X, and will become upset when their never-justified hopes are dashed? It's like if the next time Apple pushed an update to iOS, suddenly everyone flipped out and started being angry at Apple because it didn't have, oh, I don't know, support for a 9 digit lock code instead of a 4 digit one. Why? No reason, other than the masses suddenly felt like the rest of the operating system was complete enough, and it was time for a new feature.

I get that you, yes, may have waited to release the next feature until you had X or Y working. But that doesn't mean the developer felt that this next version was the time to do it, or that they hadn't developed other updates that made it worth it to push the next update out. And unless there was an announcement to the effect that that feature was coming, there's no reason to expect it to come.

As for no other reason, well, that may be true for you, but then don't use it until voice support is announced. NITDroid offers 10.1 Flash, access to apps of which most work and of those, some are only unusable due to lack of multitouch, and 3G connectivity, last I checked, worked fine.

Would phone sound working be wonderful? Yes. But the point isn't that - it's that people got it in their heads that that had to be in the next version just because it had some ofono updates, and got angry with a completely-volunteer team of developers for not meeting their expectations.


More like, "A-bunch-of-****-works-just-fine, and some-stuff-that-no-other-phone-can-do-can-be-done-easily, but confirmation bias means many of the people in the community will focus on the parts that don't work".

I write essays on this thing, with a reasonably full featured FreOffice I don't have to pay for, which, if there's a Debian driver for my printers, I could probably hack into printing from the N900 itself, now that host-mode is available. We have at least three, if not four or five by now, open source mapping solutions with voice navigation. I SSH, FTP, Remote Desktop and VNC into my computers all the time. I am able to put a kernel image onto my N900, combine it with a u-boot image and/or run mkimage on it, straight from the N900, flash if necessary, reboot the phone and have that kernel bootable from u-boot - I don't personally do this yet mostly for the same reason you don't see the use for NITDroid yet - it's not capable of calls yet - but I can. I can reflash my N900 from the N900 itself, at least the kernel alone or the fiasco image part, and if I didn't have to occasionally recover a non-booting N900, I'd never have needed Flasher on my computers for what I do. And while people like to complain about things not working, all the basic stuff - emails, web browsing, messaging and phone calls, they do work, and pretty well. Media Player isn't the best, but it plays stuff. Yeah, it's got problems, the closed buggy thing that it is, but it's not like it routinely has problems - never did for me, and I know there's plenty of people who are satisfied with it.

There are bugs, they are annoying, and they are mostly in the closed components Nokia doesn't bother fixing. They're a pain in the ***, and some necessitate writing our own replacements/clones to make the damn things work. But it's not even close to the majority.

Can't argue with the "you make the apps part". It's definitely been up to the community to implement most of the things the N900 does well that other phones don't at all. But at least we can do them.

Originally Posted by x61

This is probably one of the longest thread response I have ever encounter.

Originally Posted by Psycho

ahaha i think he writes columns or something.. for the new york times.. i really dont want 2 read it cuz its toooo long