Yet another math fail. It's actually 966% per year, never compounded, because (1 + 3×9.66) ~= 30. It's incredible how many people make this simple off-by-one mistake.

Furthermore, non-compound interest has no bearing on any real-world financial or scientific calculation. It's a simplification that's just used to introduce students to the power of exponential growth and compounding, by way of comparison with linear growth.

Can you imagine a bank that offered 10% interest per year on savings accounts, but non-compounded? The clients would withdraw all their money every few days, and then re-deposit it and... boom! It's compounding all over again.

Funny indeed, but you've made the same off-by-one error as nearly every other posters here. 1000% growth every 2.031 years... what does that give us in 3 years?

(1 + 10) ^ (3/2.031) = 11 ^ (3/2.031) = 34.5

30x in three years is actually 1000% every 2.115 years, because:

(1 + 10) ^ (3/2.115) = 30

As far as I can tell, when I entered this thread, the number of people who actually understand that percentage growth represents the difference between the initial and final values rather than a multiplicative factor... that increased by 50%. (Previously, it was bunratty and some AC.)

WTF are you talking about? This is a trivial exponentiation problem and you're coming up with some crazy, imprecise and dead wrong solution.

Growth rate of 115.5% per year gives growth over 3 years of: (1 + 1.1155)^3 = 9.46

We want 30-fold growth in 3 years. That's 211% per year, since (1 + 2.11)^3 = 30.

Growth rate percentages over 100% are often confusing, because it's ambiguous whether they refer to the change from the original value or the total final value.

In the usual convention, 310% growth per year would mean a quantity that increases by a factor of (1+3.10)=4.10 per year. So 30x growth in 3 years would actually be an annual growth rate of 210% per year (because (1+2.10)^3 is about 30).

For this and other reasons, percentages are a horribly confusing and unintuitive way to describe high growth rates. It seems much clearer to me to say that AT&T's data traffic is approximately tripling every year.

Indeed. If something grows 30-fold in 3 years, it's growing at an average rate of about 211% per year, because (1+2.11)^3 = 30.

Apparently the author doesn't understand the difference between linear and exponential growth or the terminology used to describe them. I think that percent-per-year growth is almost always a confusing way to describe growth when the percentage is more than 10-20%. That's because people assume x% growth in one year corresponds to 2x% growth in two years. Which is pretty close to the mark for a small growth rates (say 5%), but way off for larger growth rates. It's easily seen in the Taylor expansion of the exponential function, e^x = 1 + x + (x^2)/2 + (x^3)/6 + ..., which is nearly linear for values of x1 but highly nonlinear for larger values.

Too hot? Have you been to Western North Carolina?

It's a mountainous, heavily-forested region. Snow in the winter, sometimes heavy snow. The Carolina coast can really roast in the summer, but it stays pretty cool in the mountains. I was born in North Carolina but mostly grew up in Michigan, and prefer cold to warm areas. Western Carolina is certainly warmer than mid-Michigan, but it has a rather pleasant climate in my opinion.

... is not data. The singular of anecdote is also not data.

Basically, one guy used one computer with flash on a few times, and with flash off a few times. What web sites was he looking at? How many did he have open at once? Why couldn't he just use an ad blocker rather than kill Flash altogether?

I think Adobe Flash sucks as much as the next FLOSS fanboy, but this is just an insubstantial anecdote. Couldn't the author at least run PowerTOP or some Mac equivalent, and try to figure out how much the processor is waking up with/without flash, how much disk is being used, etc?

Microsoft encouraged companies to build in-house web apps on top of IE6, using its many poorly-documented proprietary features. Many of those features were so poorly documented and maintained by MS that they won't even work with newer versions of IE!

Obviously, this was a poor decision on the part of a lot of IT departments and corporate web app developers, but I do think Microsoft deserves a good part of the blame for encouraging such departures from web standards.

(Writing this from Chrome, while I wrangle a recalcitrant IE6 web app in another window... )

... on the edge of my seat, waiting to find out what this wondrous new device is called.

Will it be the iPad Mini? The iPod Maxi? The iTouch Macro Pad? Or what???

Strange... this IEEE paper describes eFuses as synonymous with laser-cut fuses, which are also used for processor binning, disabling cores, serial numbers, etc.

In any case, that also means they're one-time-programmable... which is the most significant difference from how they're described in the Wikipedia article. But it means that they're "programmable" via laser, not electrically.

Clearly there's no agreement on the terminology for these things.

You sure about that? The 2005 article that I linked, while short on details and clearly pushing a product, describes a process that's apparently economical for embedding 32-4096 bits of flash into a CMOS process.

Sure, there's got to be a way to do it. I know from playing with PIC microcontrollers that most of these have a way to "permanently" disable read/write access to the onboard flash program memory. There are ways to unlock some of them, but they ain't pretty. Presumably the manufacturer has an undocumented way to do it electrically.

According to the wikipedia article, it can be tripped in a non-volatile fashion, meaning that power-cycling won't fix it. But it can also be reset electronically if an appropriate electronic interface is provided.

Does that remind you of anything? As far as I can tell, it's just marketing-speak for one bit (literally) of embedded flash memory.

While I can imagine some interesting and useful applications for flash embedded in CMOS logic, this seems like a technology that's ripe for abuse by lockdown-happy vendors. It's annoying enough to brick a computer by flashing the wrong BIOS, or to brick a router by flashing the wrong firmware, but at least in those cases the flash memory is on a separate chip. Either the chip is socketed (removable), or there are usually test points or a JTAG interface, allowing the flash to be rewritten to a correct state.

But with tiny amounts of flash deeply embedded into CMOS logic, there's no way to alter or even to find the non-volatile memory. Yech...

Whoops... I did know that. Thanks for the correction!

LG is Korean too. Panasonic, Sharp, and Sanyo are Japanese. Sony Ericsson is a Japanese-Swedish joint venture. HTC is Taiwanese. Any other major Asian phone manufacturers that I'm missing?

Agreed on the ugliness. There's a reason that phones that look like this always suck:

What's the point of making it slide out at all??? When you're using it, it's bigger, uglier, and more awkward than a regular non-sliding Slate phone. When you're fumbling for it in your pocket, it's roughly squarish, so you never know which way is up. Humans like non-square aspect ratios (photos, display screens, book pages) for a reason... what a dumb design.

Also, what does this phone do that the way-less-hyped messaging phones from Japanese makers like Samsung can't do?

Precisely. There's no reason for anyone to want a phone OS built on the Microsoft philosophy. Their phone OSes have been bloated, buggy, with unexciting UIs, and with a tendency to be rolled out before they were really ready. In the mobile OS market, Microsoft has no head-start or brand recognition like they've had in the PC market for decades. Sure, there have been Windows Mobile phones for yeaaaaars, mostly aimed at the business market, but none of them have been exciting enough for business users to want to use at home or tell their kids about.

I have a 2-year-old Motorola Q smartphone which runs the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS. This phone is practically a microcosm of what's wrong with Microsoft's mobile offerings. It looks great on the outside, like a thinner, more angular, "edgier" Blackberry. The QWERTY keyboard, which stubbornly refuses to wear out, is better than any I have ever used on a phone. I get people asking me about it all the time, and this is a piece of hardware that's been out for 4 years.

The internal specs aren't bad for its age, either: CDMA/EV-DO, Bluetooth 2.0, 1.3 megapixel camera, 312 MHz XScale (ARM) processor, MiniSD card slot, very bright QVGA screen, good sound quality. So far, so good, right?

The problem is the OS: it's static and half-open and half-locked-down and Microsoft-centric in every imaginable way. Almost everything you could want to do is possible, but almost everything is also a huge pain in the ass. Some examples:

• The mail client can do IMAP and POP mail, but the interface is infuriatingly quirky (can't sync the Drafts folder... why???) and lacking in options and keyboard shortcuts (for example, you can quickly switch accounts, but not folders). It can also do Exchange Mail, slightly better. For no good reason, the Exchange configuration is handled via a completely different mechanism than regular mail accounts... and a very unintuitive one at that. You can only have one Exchange account, and it's always named "Outlook Express" ... why??
• The mobile browser is outdated. It can't do any JavaScript, Flash, etc. It keeps a history list, but is dog-slow to navigate it with even a few hundred entries. There's no reliable way to download links, rather than open them immediately, which is totally maddening. There are no consistent forward-and-back shortcuts. It's impossible to have more than one instance running at a time, and there are no tabs, so you can't really multi-task on the web.
• Unlike the iPhone, Windows Mobile phones have a normal-ish filesystem which you can navigate with a file manager, in order to copy and manipulate files. You can copy files to and from an SD card easily. Unfortunately, it borrows nearly all the bad features of Windows on the Desktop: weird deep hierarchies with impenetrable UUIDs for directory names. All the important files which you might want to back up (mail, text messages, contacts) are stored in weird opaque formats and the files are permanently locked so you can't copy them... unless you use some custom ActiveSync software. Why couldn't they make it so I couldn't back up my text messages with a simple copy command?
• Parts of the OS are totally "bolted-on", like the Bluetooth support. Bluetooth works well, but the Bluetooth UI is totally different-looking from everything else.
• The registry. Yech. Seriously, it's the most-hated feature of the Desktop OS. Did they have to copy it for the mobile OS? Naturally, the phone in its stock state has a lot of annoying quirks that can only be fixed via the registry, which requires a third-party registry editor.
• It has a camera and a rudimentary music player, but the software is so unwieldy and slow as to make both unusable. Pressing the "quick" camera button takes 10+ seconds until it's ready to snap a photo. Want to organize photos?... forget it. Want to play MP3s into a playlist?... forget it.
• The OS isn't locked-down at all like iPhone: it can run unsigned code. The problem is that writing code for Windows Mobile is a pain: there are a whole bunch of different versions to target, and Microsoft has never made a big aggressive push for developer mindshare, like Apple and Google have. As a result, there are very few apps for this thing. Amusingly enough, all the good ones are from Google: a Google search plugin for the home screen, Google Maps, YouTube, and a Google server which mimics Exchange server so you can use Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and GMail. Basically, all the stuff that Microsoft broke, Google has fixed (partly) on this phone :-p

By far the worst thing about the OS is that it's totally static. After launch, there were only a few minor updates, and nothing at all since 2007. WTF? iPhones keep getting new OS updates (even the original model), Android phones have been upgraded from 1.5 to 1.6 to 2.1 and soon 2.2, but as soon as Microsoft releases an OS it's practically set in stone. There's no way to upgrade the Moto Q to Windows Mobile 6+, though the hardware could probably handle it.

Microsoft's big problems in the mobile arena are fragmentation and lack of follow-through. If you poke around WIndows Mobile forums, you'll find massive confusion between different versions of the OS (5, 6, 6.1, etc.), different variants (WM, Smartphone, Windows CE, etc.), and different development frameworks (.NET? .NET Compact Framework? Straight C apps?). Microsoft's habit of releasing half-baked OSes is bad enough, but when they don't follow up with updates to improve the software, it's totally awful. I've gotten used to my desktop OS (Ubuntu) getting better and better with progressive updates, but my smartphone has just stayed the same. Lame. If they had kept improving Windows Mobile 5 in a way that benefited me, I might be buying a new WM phone... instead I'm going with Android.

Overall, I get the picture that Microsoft is frantic about mobile. They have no idea how to regain a foothold, so they keep throwing out new stuff, and hoping it sticks. When they don't get the desired result quickly, like with the Kin, they abandon it straightaway. Somehow, Microsoft seems to realize that this strategy is entirely part of the problem rather than the solution. They seem to have absolutely no coherent picture of what a Microsoft mobile OS should be. Apple has a vision of tightly-integrated, tightly-controlled, user-friendly devices with lots of eye candy from a single manufacturer. Google has a vision of an open source OS, easily to upgrade, easy to develop for, easy to customize, with devices from many vendors but a core of killer apps from Google (Search, Maps, Voice, Contacts, Picasa, etc.).

If I were in charge of mobile OS development at Microsoft, here's what I'd do: I'd stop worrying about our rapidly-eroding market share, and stop looking for ways to plug the leaks. Instead, I'd take things back to the drawing board to develop a completely new OS totally unconnected to the desktop products, but instead integrated with some of Microsoft's better online offerings (Hotmail, Bing... anything else that doesn't totally suck?). I'd give it as long as it takes to come up with a good product. If Microsoft's mobile market share falls to zero before they get a new good OS out the door... so be it. Their current offerings in the mobile space are of absolutely zero advantage, and in fact a detriment, to building future market share. I don't know how they can't see that.

Hey, nice! I'm really glad to see that feature included in HTML5.

Now I can't wait until Costco's photo printing website supports it or zip file upload... they have incredibly good and fast and cheap photo printing, but with a sucky website that only works properly with Internet Explorer. >:-(