If it makes you feel better, that would consolidate two posts per week into one!

That's one part of it. Single point of failure is always bad, and trusting someone else to manage it is worse.

But then... It's fricken' MegaUpload. It's always seemed sketchy. Who trusts important stuff to them?

I took a look at the website. From what I can tell, anything beyond partial phone number, possible street-level addresses and bogus value, possible relatives probably just to confirm the match... pretty much everything else is a sample of what a report would look like. The interests, for example, all have question marks. The random names I typed in have very similar interests to yours.

Unless you gave the bastards money?

Actually, it seems to be more than that.

I glanced over the original Oatmeal blog post. He mentions a bunch of other comics that are being ripped off. I followed a link from the blog post to the website, which is a query for "the oatmeal." No results found. So I tried a couple others - Cyanide and Happiness, Calvin and Hobbes... No results. Then I tried just "Calvin." Bunch of results, many of them Calvin and Hobbes, many of them with the name "calvin and hobbes" verbatim in the title and text.

Unless their search index is just behind from the scrubbing, it looks like they didn't even scrub. They're just gaming the search results.

Oh, and forgot to mention - they're comparing to an AOSP source. While it doesn't sound like the vendors are making all of the changes and optimizations these guys are, it still adds a few more unknowns and makes comparisons difficult. Not sure what the board they're demonstrating this on is actually intended for either.

So... they're demonstrating these gains, running a graphical benchmark, which they state is largely CPU bound, and their build has no improvements to the GPU code. Why choose that benchmark? The results are about as clear as mud for me. Why choose a graphical benchmark to test the CPU? Is it running the graphics on the CPU instead of the GPU? Android 4 is designed to offload all UI elements to the GPU, so it's not shocking to me that the code is not optimized for a graphical benchmark. I didn't look at the whole video because it was honestly a little painful, and I'm not a software developer, but the video and TFA mention code fixes relating to an compile flag related to aliasing. Which just makes it sound more and more like they're optimizing graphics operations for the part of the device which is not intended to do those operations in normal use.

Apparently there's some benefit, as the CyanogenMod team is supposedly implementing some of the changes. That's a good sign. Maybe they're actually fixing/optimizing how the systems interact? But there's still no information about what is actually faster and if it matters.

iWork seems to be pretty decent for most things. I don't have much experience myself but I know others who use it regularly, except when needing something with the power of Excel.

Many, if not most people.

Times have changed. Perceptions of technology and the internet have changed. Concerns of trust have waned.

It's not the power grab your seem to think it is. Google isn't forcing anyone to do anything (except "real" names on Google+, which is more like, can't use things that are obviously psuedonyms). It's a sign of a wider cultural shift.

Too late, Google took steps to fix it before the exploit was widely announced, according to TFA.

Fair point. That was a pretty stupid oversight. I, obviously, have been driving through these areas, not trying to navigate within them.

True, I have had that issue - my old Droid (the original) would occasionally lose its mind while navigating. But it also struggled if you tried to make it do anything more than navigation at one time, and got very hot regardless.

How old is your phone? I suspect the GPS chips being used have improved, as well as bugs in the implementation. I've had no problems with my current phone (Samsung Galaxy Nexus), other than that it can be a little slow to get a lock. That seems to be endemic in Samsung phones, though.

It's been a while so I don't remember in particular. I'll have to check it out again.

But what I was referencing is SMBC Theater.

Google maps is free.

Yes, there are trade-offs between the two. For me, at least at this point in time - my phone does a good enough job that I can't justify the cost of another unit.

Or rather - if they do, they deserve exactly what they get.

Maps on Android doesn't fetch data just in time, it caches ahead a little ways. You can also specifically tell it to pre-cache whatever section of map you like ahead of time.

I find it doesn't matter anyway, because the places were you find you've know data are usually the same areas that you don't need detailed instructions in - e.g., highways through rural areas. And it doesn't matter, because it will still have the instructions to get to get off on to a different highway.

I've driven all around the east (mountains of WV suck for coverage, esp. data), the midwest, and out to the west coast (Wyoming doesn't have good coverage either), and it's never once affected me.