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Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 still getting security patches four years after release

In recent years: Samsung has done well to resolve the one problem I actually had with their firmware updates: the lack of security patches.

Generally, I found upgrades to knew versions of Android were nearly a year behind their phones. Perhaps a small price to pay given they were largely stable releases and the tablet builds cut most of the bloat from their phones while keeping the useful features.

Android has also evolved into such a state that I don’t really care about getting the latest version of the OS anymore. By the time Google does something user facing that worth while: it’s almost time for a new device. Kind of like a certain other operating system: the previous version or two still runs most of the apps.

The part that’s bothered me is the security updates. Most of my tablets didn’t get squat for that, as security was bundled with the OS upgrades and the occasional patch.

Meanwhile the Tab S2 and Tab S3 have been a very different experience versus the other Samsung Tablets I’ve owned over the years. Pretty much every quarter the security patches rolls out. Seeing security patches every 3-4 months is a lot better than every 8-16 months or so. On the flip side my Motorola on Google Fi gets monthly patching.

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Don’t think I’ve ever had yellowfin tuna before, but the combination of sales and coupon clipping made me decide to experiment. It was definitely a success.

Along with the fish, a Knorr side of Mexican rice and sauteed peppers, onions, chickpeas, and mushrooms probably aren’t a normal combination: so much as what I was in the mood for, lol.

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Nebo 2.3.

Gotta admit: the new support for keyboard input is kind of nice. MyScript’s handwriting recognition is pretty damned good, probably the best you can expect today. But I’ve generally found that the times it gets things a little off, thanks likely to the quality of my handwriting, it’s usually an idiosyncrasy that’s a pain to connect. If it’s not in the apps correction list, odds are retyping the letters or word in question is faster than fixing it by pen.

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My plans for the weekend are quite imaginative: eat, drink, and be merry.

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ZDNet: Android Google Play app with 100 million downloads starts to deliver malware.

Other than for the app’s users, I fail to see how this isn’t a win for the community as a whole.

The problem inherent with using someone else’s software is that it is just that—someone else’s software! You’re trusting them with access to your stuff. Often all of your stuff.  When your getting the software through a third party repository: you’re also trusting the distributor to not do anything nasty.

Rather than bitch and moan: we should celebrate that it was detected and dealt with, and decry those who violated that trust from their users.

People often underestimate the trust that running other people’s stuff on your machine means. One of the great things about modern operating systems like Android and iOS is they tend to silo data from applications behind permission brokering. Traditionally the applications you run on a computer have the same access to it that you do. That made sense when computers were few and rarely networked beyond multiple serial terminals. Increasingly less so when you can just download a .exe file and it can do whatever you could.

Trust matters! Respect your users.

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A few small goofs nearly threw the world into nuclear war.

Personally, I think we’re more likely to see misunderstandings snowball and jump start the apocalypse than we ever will be because some evil bastard decided on a first strike.

For the most part I like to believe that most people default to good, for lack of an inherent belligerents. We’re more likely to nuke^H^H^H^H kill our neighbors because of misscommunication or cascading failures than because we’d like to see them all wiped out. Most people have dampers on the level of crazy, if nothing else because they want to keep living more than they hate folks.

I rather like the comparison the article makes to Damocles Sword. Because at best, the risk of going to thermonuclear war over a 49¢ part failing may depend on someone not wanting to end the entire world without being pretty darn sure it was with their last breath. And between the major powers we’ve got more than enough nuclear weapons to keep the fallout going.

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One of the many problems with a night of long, hard questing: when real life says time for bed, and your brain is still in a far away land rather than drowsy.

On the flip side, FF14’s Conjurer class is proving much better than I had expected. Before the week is out, I’ll probably have hit the same level that I managed to get to via Gladiator in a Sunday of questing. Primary difference being the gap between available time.

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Passing thought: values per year.

The Galaxy Tab S3 launched at about $600, and I got $100 off thanks to the trade in promotion that Samsung and Best Buy like to do around launch.

Come March the device will hit the three year mark since release. For me the only reason for upgrading from the previous model, which was awesome, was they added the stylus and kept the awesomeness.

That works out to about $166~year at this point, which isn’t bad for the life of an Android tablet if it’s any good. If it wasn’t for the inch long crack in the screen from earlier this year, I’d probably aim to get another year (4) or two (5) out of the device for how well it’s held up.

My main worry is that damned crack 😂

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A few random reflections and personal biases:

Things that I like about Android as my getting it done OS:

  1. Appliance like: it stays out of my way.
  2. I can have my terminal, e-mail, browser, and notes client software all on the same machine.
  3. Aqua Mail beats the crap out of every GUI mail client I’ve used.

The main negatives of using Android over the years has been that terminal apps don’t make copying text to the Android clipboard a decent experience and Chrome for Android sucks ass compared to a desktop. Would also be nice if the support for an external monitor was more like PCs than simply screen mirroring but hey, can’t have it all. By in large a very nice experience but I’m weird and you can’t stop people from sending hypertext ladden emails 8-).

Things that I like about Chrome OS as my getting it done OS:

  1. Appliance like: it stays out of my way.
  2. Good support for Android apps.
  3. Excellent web browsing experience.

The main negatives of using Chrome OS over the years has been the shift into speed over quality. Releases come pretty frequent to the stable channel but you’ll find yourself living with minor grumbles for long periods of time. Be that bull like having to re-open the notification menu before being able to close other notifications, glitchy handling of application windows, or other things. It’s cheap, simple, and disposable but you’ll have plenty of papercuts if you move past the browser window. If it wasn’t for how far NT has come, I’d probably buy a higher end Chromebook for the performance boost.

At this point most people are probably best off with a Chromebook unless they’ve got a real reason to do otherwise.

Things that I like about Debian as my getting it done OS:

  1. Easily loaded on beefcake hardware.
  2. Debian is largely stable and easily maintained.
  3. My work is off a Linux box anyway.
The main negatives of using Debian over the years has been the sore spots I hate about desktop centric PCs to begin with. Crappy notifications, shitty mail and calendaring clients outside of terminal land, donating most of my memory to a web browser, etc. Considering that most of the fucks I have to give about the PC as a platform revolve around an X-Terminal and unix command line environment, I find it a fair price to pay.

Things that I like about Windows 10 as my getting it done OS:

  1. Desktop experience sucks less than W7.
  2. Android style mail/calendar sync built in.
  3. Userspace ABI has been pretty stable for decades.
The main negatives of using Windows 10 over the years tend to cross paths with many of the grumbles I desktop centric PCs but a few unique to NT are traits that have always been there. W10 has made the experience of the desktop suck a lot less when it comes to window and notification management, a process that arguably began in Vista and has kept growing. But the fastest way to make me groan at NT remains talking to things. I can load programs on my NT machine that are several times older than the hardware and expect them to just run but once device drivers enter the picture my anger likely will as well, whether they were written for the current OS or not. Somethings just piss me off less in Linux.
Personally, W10 is the first iteration of NT to not piss me off as a standard. But much as Debian gives me that groans at the evolution from tube terminals to X, NT has loads of its own baggage. I’m just glad it feels less archaic and evolves more rapidly than once a lustrum or decade.
General disclaimer: I’m weird :P.
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The Verge: Google and Dell team up to take on Microsoft with Chromebook Enterprise laptops.

As someone fond both of Android tablets and of Dell’s Latitudes, I’d be a lot more tempted by this if it wasn’t for two problems:

  1. My Chromebook is a lot more buggy than my Android, Linux, and NT devices.
  2. Chrome’s “Stable” channel prefers rapidly pushing versions over Q/A.
Or as I like to think of it: there’s really two reasons I’ve been using my Latitude running Debian ore than my Chromebook the past few reasons. A Core i5 smokes a Celeron, and I’m tired of OS upgrades that leaves me grumbling over quality, both at the Android support and native Chrome OS.
In practice these days I’ll usually have Stark and Scarlett at my sides during the work day; with my Chromebook relegated to a spare machine. That’s after using the Chromebook as my main workstation for a year and after a lot of years using an Android tablet as a workstation replacement.