If you have a small budget and moderate reliability requirements, I'd suggest looking into building a couple Backblaze-style storage pods for block store (5x 180TB storage systems, apx $9000 each), each exporting 145TB RAID5 volumes via iSCSI to a pair of front-end NAS boxes. NAS boxes could be FreeBSD or Solaris systems offering ZFS filestores (putting multiples of 5 volumes, one from each blockstore, together in RAIDZ sets), which then export these volumes via CIFS or NFS to the clients. Total cost for storage, front-ends, 10GbE NICs and a pair of 10GbE switches: $60K, plus a few weeks to build, provision, and test.
If you have a bigger budget, switch to FibreChannel SANs. I'd suggest a couple HP StorServ 7450s, connected via 8 or 16Gb FC across two fabrics, to your front ends, which aggregate the block storage into ZFS-based NAS systems as above, implementing raidz for redundancy. This would limit storage volumes to 16TB each, but if they're all exposed to the front ends as a giant pool of volumes, then ZFS can centrally manage how they're used. A 7450 filled with 96 4TB drives will provide 260TB of usable volume space (thin or thick provisioned), and cost around $200K-$250K each. Going this route would cost $500-$550K (SANs, plus 8 or 16Gb FC switches, plus fibre interconnects, plus HBAs) but give you extremely reliable and fast block storage.
A couple advantages of using ZFS for the file storage is its ability to migrate data between backing stores when maintenance on underlying storage is required, and its ability to compress its data. For mostly-textual datasets, you can see a 2x to 3x space reduction, with slight cost in speed, depending on your front-ends' CPUs and memory speed. ZFS is also relatively easy to manage on the commandline by someone with intermediate knowledge of SAN/NAS storage management.
Whatever you decide to use for block storage, you're going to want to ensure the front-end filers (managing filestores and exporting as network shares) are set up in an identical active/standby pair. There's lots of free software on linux and freebsd that accomplish this. These front-ends would otherwise be your single-point-of-failure, and can render your data completely unusable and possibly permanently lost if you don't have redundancy in this department.
If I were involved with space exploration, I'd say the Voyager 1 space probe. Launched 1977, still receiving commands and sending back data from interstellar space, 0.002 light-years away, and expected to run until 2025 with no hope of getting any upgrades or even a recharge.
It costs money to upgrade and stabilize the power grid. It costs money to stay ahead of the failure curve.
The current infrastructure sucks mainly because it's unpredictable and takes too much effort to synchronize disconnected sections of the grid before connecting them. You can't just "route around" a dead transmission line if there are generator stations active on both sides of the break. You must wait for the two sides to synchronize in phase before connecting them, which can take several seconds to a minute. If you don't, you'll cause even more breakers to trip.
None of this would matter if we switched distribution to HVDC. We have the technology, but again, the cost to convert everything to employ DC-DC switching converters is prohibitive. The biggest upside to switching everything to DC (all the way to the end-user) is that you could add standby capacity by simply connecting batteries to your mains circuit between the main breaker and load panel. The more people in a neighborhood using batteries to buffer their power source, more aggregate protection the neighborhood has against blackouts.
Another study suggests people tend to only believe what they see happen before their own eyes, or that which their elders can explain to them in less than 20 words.
(Note, this is more of a stream of consciousness than an actual comment, so I apologize in advance if this sounds ADD-ish)
Get rid of the bulky, loud transformers and phase shifting coils and cap banks. Run -12KVDC to -20KVDC over the residential feeder lines down to neighborhood-located equipment with switchmode buck converters to give -240VDC and -120VDC to homes via their usual 3 mains wires, and a fourth wire for homes who wish to feed power back into the local grid via switchmode boost converters. The power transformer boxes on the corner of every block will contain high-frequency switching equipment and a few batteries (for keeping the block lit during upstream switching events and outages) instead of 2000-pounds of copper and laminated steel. The neighborhood substations will have their giant transformers and oil-filled breakers and phase compensating equipment replaced with IGBT-based switch stacks and intelligent converters that quickly compensate for changing load and back-feed conditions completely silently. Managing connections between substations and the high voltage grid will be an order of magnitude simpler and safer when all you have to worry about is matching the voltages within a few percent and measuring static currents after connections are made, rather than comparing frequency, phase angles, and power factors. With today's "modern" AC grids, you're liable to blow fuses/breakers/transformers if you connect two independently-fed parts of the grid together without first matching phases and frequency.
I know it's just too late for the change from AC to DC in the home to be practical. The biggest, most power-hungry devices just don't have an "upgrade path" to DC: Air conditioning and refrigeration compressors, fan/blower motors, fluorescent lights would all need complete replacement with DC-compatible equivalents. It would have been better if appliance manufacturers had designed their devices to be run off either types of mains from the start... Large, high-torque brushless DC motors are quite cheap now, and switchmode power supplies are now smaller and cheaper than 60HZ AC power transformers, and many of them will actually work equally well being fed by 120-240VDC.
Automatic transfer switches eliminate any danger of locally generated power being fed back into the grid if there's any sort of danger in connecting the two. The electric company would only have to tell home owners to employ transfer switches in order to stay connected to the grid (with the only side effect being that they can't contribute excess power back to the grid)
My local utility company actually employs smart meters that can monitor both grid-side and home-side circuits for dangerous conditions in cases where there's a grid-tie inverter in the home. The smart meter instantly disconnects the home from the grid if there's an excessive surge in current being fed back into the grid (by analyzing the voltages, transfer current, and phase angles of both sides). The same meters also communicate with the utility company over a combination RF and powerline-based data transmissions, eliminating the need for guys to be dispatched monthly to read everyones meters.
In other news, you can buy a good charge controller, a 50KWh bank of deep-cycle batteries, a 2KW inverter for lights and outlets, and a 12-KW inverter for air conditioning, all for about $12K. This setup can run A/C for 5 hours a day and your only reliance on the grid would be to top-off the batteries on dark days.
If you have the means to get off the grid, by all means, you should, because most electric companies don't care about anything but profits.
Does DJB insist that his crypto library gets installed under/var/lib? He's always insisted that his qmail binaries get installed under/var/qmail, and had everyone I know in the unix admin/engineering field shaking their heads, knowing that having executables and libraries on the/var filesystem is retarded and dangerous.
Regarding your statement, "But this is typical of the Progressives, they don't mind when it is THEIR guy mucking up the politics."
It's typical of _everyone_ in politics, _everyone_ in the media, and _everyone_ with an agenda. Don't blame just one party when _everyone_ is doing it. It's human nature to deny the guilt of yourself and the people you associate with when the goal is to discredit or disarm a group with opposing views.
At what scope/scale of time or range of values does it really matter if a PRNG is robust? A PRNG seeded by a computer's interrupt count, process activity, and sampled I/O traffic (such as audio input, fan speed sensors, keyboard/mouse input, which I believe is a common seeding method) is determined to be sufficiently robust if only polled once a second, or for only 8 bits of resolution, exactly how much less robust does it get if you poll the PRNG say, 1 million times per second, or in a tight loop? Does it get more or less robust when the PRNG is asked for a larger or smaller bit field?
Unless I'm mistaken, the point is moot when the only cost of having a sufficiently robust PRNG is to wait for more entropy to be provided by its seeds or to use a larger modulus for its output, both rather trivial in the practical world of computing.
Spoken like a true Libertarian. I'm surprised you didn't pull "authoritarian", "fascist", or "statist" out of your hat.
Society prospers when individuals work towards the prosperity of the societal unit, as well as their own being. When you stop caring about the greater good, what good are you to your country?
Would you rather just be an isolationist and give the rest of the world the finger?
As an IT manager who oversees deployment and maintenance of about 60 desktops and laptops, some of which are shared among multiple employees, consistency in OS availability for the end user is key. We upgrade one or two machines per month, and we started using Windows 7 three years ago, so about 15 systems still run XP. We're not touching 8.1 until there are no more XP systems on our network, AND people show interest in actually using 8.1, AND at least one service pack has been released to address outstanding issues since its public release, AND we discover a way to disable the "Tiles" start screen. Supporting systems with two different desktop interfaces is a serious pain in the ass, especially for non-technical users. So far, only two people have shown interest in using Windows 8 (techie geek types), and the vast majority of our employees are averse to changing their OS at all.
I've had to customize Windows 7 a bit to make it "comfortable" for the lowest common denominator: Long-time XP/2000 users.
Everyone who hates the US is loving this news, just like they cheered when they heard we all have to take off our shoes and have our nuts inspected at airports.
Does this mean developers might actually implement 'MUTE', 'FORCE STOP', or 'RESTART' context menu items for shockwave apps? I despise going to read a page with ads and other shockwave sidebar widgets that make noise or chew up CPU cycles and have no way to pause/mute/stop them. It also bugs that you must reload the entire page to get a flash app to restart.
It's beyond me why Macromedia/Adobe never wanted us to have those essential controls. The only thing we get, in some rare cases, are the ability to prevent the app/player from looping, or to turn down rendering quality.
I think that until _all_ TVs have 16:9 screens and _all_ studios broadcast unmodified/uncropped/un-letterboxed content, we'll have the following two problems:
The disparity in video formats and whether they "letterbox" a high-def program for standard-definition channels is frustrating. Most modern studios and news stations in the US are recording in HD, then either letterboxing it for SD broadcast (adding black bars on top and bottom to make it 4:3 aspect ratio), or cropping the left and right side of the image to get the 4:3 image. The former is horrible for people with HD sets that can't overscan (scale up the side of the image so it fills the screen, eliminating the black bars) and you lose effective image resolution... I wish someone would drill it into their heads that letterboxing HD content is BAD for SD broadcasts. Your camera crew should try to capture actors and action within the central 4:3 area of the image so you can crop and scale your HD content for people with SD TVs or receiving SD channels.
Even more frustrating is when I go to a public place with widescreen TVs showing standard-def channels (in 4:3 format), S-T-R-E-T-C-H-E-D to 16:9, so everyone looks fat and square-shaped graphics become rectangles. Half the widescreen "HD" TVs sold now are able to overscan properly, and the other half can't at all (they just stretch the image). A few good brands can do a "panorama" transform, which is a compromise, but makes diagonal lines look curved. There really is no legitimate reason for a TV to stretch a broadcast image horizontally, yet everyone thinks they NEED to do it to "fill" their wide screens with a 4:3 SD image. It boggles me that so many people purposely distort the image just so it can appear "widescreen".
Can a state elect to locally invalidate the federal mandate that states that bills issued by the US Treasury are "Legal tender for all debts public and private"? This may be something that can be easily challenged in federal court, and I truly hope someone does challenge it.
The worst part of this state bill is that every transaction, along with the verified identity of both parties, be recorded and submitted to law enforcement on demand.
Re:Is there a technical reason for no OTA updates?
on
iOS 5 Update Available
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When Android became decent: When more than 5 major players in the mobile communications market realized they have a strong, extensible, customizable platform to build a phone on (Samsung, Motorola, LJ, HTC, Sony-Ericsson, etc) When Android became stable: From personal experience, I've only had to hard-reset my phone twice in the last year. The OS has a few minor inconsistencies, but they're specific to my model and Sprint-customized release of the OS, thus caused by something other than just "being Android"
When Android became something people desire on their phones: Years ago when people realized they could buy a very capable smart phone with features Apple doesn't offer, and not be locked into one carrier or one manufacturer.
Crappy screens: You must have only experienced a small screen on an old phone. At least half the Android phones sold now have resolution and screen size equivalent or better than iPhone's, and some even offer 3D (Which I've played with, and is quite cool)
Netflix must have taken "years" because, like many other vendors, Netflix may have had an exclusivity agreement with Apple for a while, or they're just a slow adopter of technology that's outside of their primary distribution path (Personal computers). I don't remember having any problem using Netflix from within my web browser, anyway, so it's not like the system was completely unreachable from Android users.
5% of the games available for iOS? This is quite subjective. iOS may have 20 times as many games on the iTunes store, but there are still only 50 or so games that dominate both markets, the other 10,000 games get buried in the noise and never take off, so your point is moot.
Most Androids have talk times of 2 hours? [Citation Needed] I've experienced talk time over 3.5 hours on my Samsung, because I was close to a cell tower and had GPS/Bluetooth/WiFi disabled. Conversely, I've known people who've complained that their iPhones had short call times, due to either old batteries that they've been unable to replace, or due to being far from the cell tower. "Most Androids" is subjective and depends on the experiences you've exposed yourself to.
The back button on the Android has completely random behaviour because you must have been using an app that randomly changed its function. In my experience, and the experience of most Android users, the back button does what it needs to do. At worst, it serves exactly three functions: 1) Previous screen within an app, 2) previous page in the web browser, or 3) previous page in a settings dialog. If that's too many functions for you to handle in one button, I'm sorry.
Any changes in behavior caused by the vendor is something you should bring up with the vendor. I happen to enjoy having the choice of what vendor to buy from or what OS version to use. Last I heard, if something in iOS didn't do what you liked or what you expected, you have absolutely no choice to change it or choose another OS vendor. Sorry that you're so bitter about this.
Why the hell would iToonz require a system reboot?
What the hell is it tying itself into? Kernel drivers? OS integration?
I don't remember having to reboot at all after installing or updating any of the following: Microsoft Security Essentials, KLite Codec Pack, Wireshark, Photoshop, VNC, all of which integrate with the OS in some way. What the hell is iTunes doing to my computer?
Re:Is there a technical reason for no OTA updates?
on
iOS 5 Update Available
·
· Score: 1
Why did Apple take so long to do this, after Android has been doing it for years?
They're not glass. They're usually highly polished aluminum alloy or ceramic plates deposited with the magnetic material. The ceramic platters still wont shatter unless they experience over 1000G of shock.
Whoever did this must have willfully wanted to destroy the website and its content. Deleting data in this manner is far beyond vandalism or criminal mischief.
I hope the perps get served by a judge who recognizes just how severely malicious this was, and that enough of the people who used the site can provide the files back to the owners and the community.
I beg to differ. I put a Rage 128 Pro (with capture) in my shuttle/athlon box, because the on-board S3 save sucked ass and used shared memory. XP SP3 recognized it without a hitch, and I just had to install ATI's older catalyst software to use the capture and enable the advanced video control panel tabs.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a small budget and moderate reliability requirements, I'd suggest looking into building a couple Backblaze-style storage pods for block store (5x 180TB storage systems, apx $9000 each), each exporting 145TB RAID5 volumes via iSCSI to a pair of front-end NAS boxes. NAS boxes could be FreeBSD or Solaris systems offering ZFS filestores (putting multiples of 5 volumes, one from each blockstore, together in RAIDZ sets), which then export these volumes via CIFS or NFS to the clients. Total cost for storage, front-ends, 10GbE NICs and a pair of 10GbE switches: $60K, plus a few weeks to build, provision, and test.
If you have a bigger budget, switch to FibreChannel SANs. I'd suggest a couple HP StorServ 7450s, connected via 8 or 16Gb FC across two fabrics, to your front ends, which aggregate the block storage into ZFS-based NAS systems as above, implementing raidz for redundancy. This would limit storage volumes to 16TB each, but if they're all exposed to the front ends as a giant pool of volumes, then ZFS can centrally manage how they're used. A 7450 filled with 96 4TB drives will provide 260TB of usable volume space (thin or thick provisioned), and cost around $200K-$250K each. Going this route would cost $500-$550K (SANs, plus 8 or 16Gb FC switches, plus fibre interconnects, plus HBAs) but give you extremely reliable and fast block storage.
A couple advantages of using ZFS for the file storage is its ability to migrate data between backing stores when maintenance on underlying storage is required, and its ability to compress its data. For mostly-textual datasets, you can see a 2x to 3x space reduction, with slight cost in speed, depending on your front-ends' CPUs and memory speed. ZFS is also relatively easy to manage on the commandline by someone with intermediate knowledge of SAN/NAS storage management.
Whatever you decide to use for block storage, you're going to want to ensure the front-end filers (managing filestores and exporting as network shares) are set up in an identical active/standby pair. There's lots of free software on linux and freebsd that accomplish this. These front-ends would otherwise be your single-point-of-failure, and can render your data completely unusable and possibly permanently lost if you don't have redundancy in this department.
If I were involved with space exploration, I'd say the Voyager 1 space probe.
Launched 1977, still receiving commands and sending back data from interstellar space, 0.002 light-years away, and expected to run until 2025 with no hope of getting any upgrades or even a recharge.
It costs money to upgrade and stabilize the power grid. It costs money to stay ahead of the failure curve.
The current infrastructure sucks mainly because it's unpredictable and takes too much effort to synchronize disconnected sections of the grid before connecting them. You can't just "route around" a dead transmission line if there are generator stations active on both sides of the break. You must wait for the two sides to synchronize in phase before connecting them, which can take several seconds to a minute. If you don't, you'll cause even more breakers to trip.
None of this would matter if we switched distribution to HVDC. We have the technology, but again, the cost to convert everything to employ DC-DC switching converters is prohibitive. The biggest upside to switching everything to DC (all the way to the end-user) is that you could add standby capacity by simply connecting batteries to your mains circuit between the main breaker and load panel. The more people in a neighborhood using batteries to buffer their power source, more aggregate protection the neighborhood has against blackouts.
Another study suggests people tend to only believe what they see happen before their own eyes, or that which their elders can explain to them in less than 20 words.
(Note, this is more of a stream of consciousness than an actual comment, so I apologize in advance if this sounds ADD-ish)
Get rid of the bulky, loud transformers and phase shifting coils and cap banks. Run -12KVDC to -20KVDC over the residential feeder lines down to neighborhood-located equipment with switchmode buck converters to give -240VDC and -120VDC to homes via their usual 3 mains wires, and a fourth wire for homes who wish to feed power back into the local grid via switchmode boost converters. The power transformer boxes on the corner of every block will contain high-frequency switching equipment and a few batteries (for keeping the block lit during upstream switching events and outages) instead of 2000-pounds of copper and laminated steel. The neighborhood substations will have their giant transformers and oil-filled breakers and phase compensating equipment replaced with IGBT-based switch stacks and intelligent converters that quickly compensate for changing load and back-feed conditions completely silently. Managing connections between substations and the high voltage grid will be an order of magnitude simpler and safer when all you have to worry about is matching the voltages within a few percent and measuring static currents after connections are made, rather than comparing frequency, phase angles, and power factors. With today's "modern" AC grids, you're liable to blow fuses/breakers/transformers if you connect two independently-fed parts of the grid together without first matching phases and frequency.
I know it's just too late for the change from AC to DC in the home to be practical. The biggest, most power-hungry devices just don't have an "upgrade path" to DC: Air conditioning and refrigeration compressors, fan/blower motors, fluorescent lights would all need complete replacement with DC-compatible equivalents. It would have been better if appliance manufacturers had designed their devices to be run off either types of mains from the start... Large, high-torque brushless DC motors are quite cheap now, and switchmode power supplies are now smaller and cheaper than 60HZ AC power transformers, and many of them will actually work equally well being fed by 120-240VDC.
Automatic transfer switches eliminate any danger of locally generated power being fed back into the grid if there's any sort of danger in connecting the two. The electric company would only have to tell home owners to employ transfer switches in order to stay connected to the grid (with the only side effect being that they can't contribute excess power back to the grid)
My local utility company actually employs smart meters that can monitor both grid-side and home-side circuits for dangerous conditions in cases where there's a grid-tie inverter in the home. The smart meter instantly disconnects the home from the grid if there's an excessive surge in current being fed back into the grid (by analyzing the voltages, transfer current, and phase angles of both sides). The same meters also communicate with the utility company over a combination RF and powerline-based data transmissions, eliminating the need for guys to be dispatched monthly to read everyones meters.
In other news, you can buy a good charge controller, a 50KWh bank of deep-cycle batteries, a 2KW inverter for lights and outlets, and a 12-KW inverter for air conditioning, all for about $12K. This setup can run A/C for 5 hours a day and your only reliance on the grid would be to top-off the batteries on dark days.
If you have the means to get off the grid, by all means, you should, because most electric companies don't care about anything but profits.
Does DJB insist that his crypto library gets installed under /var/lib? He's always insisted that his qmail binaries get installed under /var/qmail, and had everyone I know in the unix admin/engineering field shaking their heads, knowing that having executables and libraries on the /var filesystem is retarded and dangerous.
Regarding your statement, "But this is typical of the Progressives, they don't mind when it is THEIR guy mucking up the politics."
It's typical of _everyone_ in politics, _everyone_ in the media, and _everyone_ with an agenda. Don't blame just one party when _everyone_ is doing it. It's human nature to deny the guilt of yourself and the people you associate with when the goal is to discredit or disarm a group with opposing views.
At what scope/scale of time or range of values does it really matter if a PRNG is robust?
A PRNG seeded by a computer's interrupt count, process activity, and sampled I/O traffic (such as audio input, fan speed sensors, keyboard/mouse input, which I believe is a common seeding method) is determined to be sufficiently robust if only polled once a second, or for only 8 bits of resolution, exactly how much less robust does it get if you poll the PRNG say, 1 million times per second, or in a tight loop? Does it get more or less robust when the PRNG is asked for a larger or smaller bit field?
Unless I'm mistaken, the point is moot when the only cost of having a sufficiently robust PRNG is to wait for more entropy to be provided by its seeds or to use a larger modulus for its output, both rather trivial in the practical world of computing.
Spoken like a true Libertarian. I'm surprised you didn't pull "authoritarian", "fascist", or "statist" out of your hat.
Society prospers when individuals work towards the prosperity of the societal unit, as well as their own being. When you stop caring about the greater good, what good are you to your country?
Would you rather just be an isolationist and give the rest of the world the finger?
As an IT manager who oversees deployment and maintenance of about 60 desktops and laptops, some of which are shared among multiple employees, consistency in OS availability for the end user is key. We upgrade one or two machines per month, and we started using Windows 7 three years ago, so about 15 systems still run XP. We're not touching 8.1 until there are no more XP systems on our network, AND people show interest in actually using 8.1, AND at least one service pack has been released to address outstanding issues since its public release, AND we discover a way to disable the "Tiles" start screen. Supporting systems with two different desktop interfaces is a serious pain in the ass, especially for non-technical users. So far, only two people have shown interest in using Windows 8 (techie geek types), and the vast majority of our employees are averse to changing their OS at all.
I've had to customize Windows 7 a bit to make it "comfortable" for the lowest common denominator: Long-time XP/2000 users.
Everyone who hates the US is loving this news, just like they cheered when they heard we all have to take off our shoes and have our nuts inspected at airports.
Does this mean developers might actually implement 'MUTE', 'FORCE STOP', or 'RESTART' context menu items for shockwave apps? I despise going to read a page with ads and other shockwave sidebar widgets that make noise or chew up CPU cycles and have no way to pause/mute/stop them. It also bugs that you must reload the entire page to get a flash app to restart.
It's beyond me why Macromedia/Adobe never wanted us to have those essential controls. The only thing we get, in some rare cases, are the ability to prevent the app/player from looping, or to turn down rendering quality.
I think that until _all_ TVs have 16:9 screens and _all_ studios broadcast unmodified/uncropped/un-letterboxed content, we'll have the following two problems:
The disparity in video formats and whether they "letterbox" a high-def program for standard-definition channels is frustrating. Most modern studios and news stations in the US are recording in HD, then either letterboxing it for SD broadcast (adding black bars on top and bottom to make it 4:3 aspect ratio), or cropping the left and right side of the image to get the 4:3 image. The former is horrible for people with HD sets that can't overscan (scale up the side of the image so it fills the screen, eliminating the black bars) and you lose effective image resolution... I wish someone would drill it into their heads that letterboxing HD content is BAD for SD broadcasts. Your camera crew should try to capture actors and action within the central 4:3 area of the image so you can crop and scale your HD content for people with SD TVs or receiving SD channels.
Even more frustrating is when I go to a public place with widescreen TVs showing standard-def channels (in 4:3 format), S-T-R-E-T-C-H-E-D to 16:9, so everyone looks fat and square-shaped graphics become rectangles. Half the widescreen "HD" TVs sold now are able to overscan properly, and the other half can't at all (they just stretch the image). A few good brands can do a "panorama" transform, which is a compromise, but makes diagonal lines look curved. There really is no legitimate reason for a TV to stretch a broadcast image horizontally, yet everyone thinks they NEED to do it to "fill" their wide screens with a 4:3 SD image. It boggles me that so many people purposely distort the image just so it can appear "widescreen".
mod up, please!
Can a state elect to locally invalidate the federal mandate that states that bills issued by the US Treasury are "Legal tender for all debts public and private"?
This may be something that can be easily challenged in federal court, and I truly hope someone does challenge it.
The worst part of this state bill is that every transaction, along with the verified identity of both parties, be recorded and submitted to law enforcement on demand.
When Android became decent: When more than 5 major players in the mobile communications market realized they have a strong, extensible, customizable platform to build a phone on (Samsung, Motorola, LJ, HTC, Sony-Ericsson, etc)
When Android became stable: From personal experience, I've only had to hard-reset my phone twice in the last year. The OS has a few minor inconsistencies, but they're specific to my model and Sprint-customized release of the OS, thus caused by something other than just "being Android"
When Android became something people desire on their phones: Years ago when people realized they could buy a very capable smart phone with features Apple doesn't offer, and not be locked into one carrier or one manufacturer.
Crappy screens: You must have only experienced a small screen on an old phone. At least half the Android phones sold now have resolution and screen size equivalent or better than iPhone's, and some even offer 3D (Which I've played with, and is quite cool)
Netflix must have taken "years" because, like many other vendors, Netflix may have had an exclusivity agreement with Apple for a while, or they're just a slow adopter of technology that's outside of their primary distribution path (Personal computers). I don't remember having any problem using Netflix from within my web browser, anyway, so it's not like the system was completely unreachable from Android users.
5% of the games available for iOS? This is quite subjective. iOS may have 20 times as many games on the iTunes store, but there are still only 50 or so games that dominate both markets, the other 10,000 games get buried in the noise and never take off, so your point is moot.
Most Androids have talk times of 2 hours? [Citation Needed] I've experienced talk time over 3.5 hours on my Samsung, because I was close to a cell tower and had GPS/Bluetooth/WiFi disabled. Conversely, I've known people who've complained that their iPhones had short call times, due to either old batteries that they've been unable to replace, or due to being far from the cell tower. "Most Androids" is subjective and depends on the experiences you've exposed yourself to.
The back button on the Android has completely random behaviour because you must have been using an app that randomly changed its function. In my experience, and the experience of most Android users, the back button does what it needs to do. At worst, it serves exactly three functions: 1) Previous screen within an app, 2) previous page in the web browser, or 3) previous page in a settings dialog. If that's too many functions for you to handle in one button, I'm sorry.
Any changes in behavior caused by the vendor is something you should bring up with the vendor. I happen to enjoy having the choice of what vendor to buy from or what OS version to use. Last I heard, if something in iOS didn't do what you liked or what you expected, you have absolutely no choice to change it or choose another OS vendor. Sorry that you're so bitter about this.
Why the hell would iToonz require a system reboot?
What the hell is it tying itself into? Kernel drivers? OS integration?
I don't remember having to reboot at all after installing or updating any of the following: Microsoft Security Essentials, KLite Codec Pack, Wireshark, Photoshop, VNC, all of which integrate with the OS in some way. What the hell is iTunes doing to my computer?
Why did Apple take so long to do this, after Android has been doing it for years?
They're not glass. They're usually highly polished aluminum alloy or ceramic plates deposited with the magnetic material. The ceramic platters still wont shatter unless they experience over 1000G of shock.
He should stick to farming and leave the radio vs radiation science up to the smart people.
Someone go point him to the definitions of "Microwave Radiation" and "Ionizing Radiation"
Whoever did this must have willfully wanted to destroy the website and its content. Deleting data in this manner is far beyond vandalism or criminal mischief.
I hope the perps get served by a judge who recognizes just how severely malicious this was, and that enough of the people who used the site can provide the files back to the owners and the community.
ah, you must not buy many AMD or VIA motherboards.
I beg to differ. I put a Rage 128 Pro (with capture) in my shuttle/athlon box, because the on-board S3 save sucked ass and used shared memory. XP SP3 recognized it without a hitch, and I just had to install ATI's older catalyst software to use the capture and enable the advanced video control panel tabs.
Can't we just let it die? How many people still must do mundane file management and don't have access to a GUI and whom don't use the commandline?