Editorials

It looks like the world of the smart phone, tablet, and the digital “media” players are finally getting past the “good enough” trend that they were heading into. Well, at least where audio is concerned. One of the biggest issues that we have had with many phones and even top end media players is that while they spend money on the display to give richer visuals you are often left with audio that is very bland.

A second Linux Distro has joined the Microsoft Secure Booth party. You see Microsoft has come up with what they are calling the UEFI Secure Boot. UEFI Secure boot is somewhat controversial in that once set up it will only allow signed versions of an OS to be installed. This means that if a computer is shipped from an OEM with Windows 8 and UEFI Secure Boot on you could not install a generic version of Linux or indeed any other OS including Windows 7 etc. This would effectively lock someone into using Windows 8 only on these devices. This block would include even downgrading your new system to Windows 7.

One of the things that has always bothered us is the continual lack of improvement in the smartphone market in the US. Although we get to read about new technologies for “world” phones and drool over the latest products from companies like Samsung and HTC which sport quad core SoCs (System on Chip) under their screens when they finally reach the US market they are shadows of what people are getting in other markets.

Hey, it’s still a Beta. These are words that we hear all the time whenever we run into issues with pre-release software. This comment is used as a defense against bugs, missing features and even performance problems no matter the (Pre) release version. This is also used regardless of the number of statements made by the companies PR machine claiming that it is ready to go. “Hey, it’s still a Beta” is also used in almost equal measure to “it just came out”, “this is new technology”, and many other statements that all amount to one thing. No program or product can cover every potential issue.