Great news indeed! Except for all those poor bastards who just bought one of the many HTC devices making the rounds, such as the Thunderbolt or the Incredible II.

Samsung, as much as they do wrong, got an early start. The Galaxy S and Galaxy S II are both unlocked, and they also make the Nexus line of Google's official phones.

What's odd is that HTC's early phones are all unlocked. The G1 and Eris are both easily hacked, with one-click root apps being openly available on the Android market, and ROM flashing as simple as a reboot. I find it mind-numbingly hilarious that my discontinued HTC Droid Eris is running the latest Gingerbread (Android 2.3.4) release, while brand new phones from HTC, Motorola, and LG, are all saddled with 2.1, or 2.2 if they're lucky.

I know one of the features is "me not using it anymore." 10.10 is probably the last version I'll ever use, and I've been looking at Mint or just going straight Debian.

I love apt, otherwise I'd consider an RPM based distro.

About ten years ago on Slashdot when the anti-MS sentiment was probably at its pinnacle, quite a few articles were posted that prompted this quote:

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

It almost always followed some ridiculous reaction or FUD from Microsoft. Now with Android (Linux) bum-rushing the cellphone market and MS seemingly haven given up on fighting Open Source, it's almost as if there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

And his sentiment reflects my own recently. I used to be one of those guys who hated the word Microsoft. Now I just think they're a bad joke. They're not even worth making fun of anymore. I keep looking back and wondering just when that happened, and I can't. It was a gradual thing.

So there ya go, guys. We won. :)

I hear you on "can't be disabled", but "resource hogging"? Come on. In these days of TBs of HD space and GBs of RAM, do you honestly think that the improved location bar is gonna have any noticeable effect on your browsing? Please.

Owners of netbooks will say "yes." I stopped using Firefox three years ago because the XUL rendering causes all the menus to be hilariously slow. I can wave my mouse up and down my bookmarks in Firefox and drive my CPU up to 100%. Opera and Chrome absolutely obliterate Firefox on slow hardware.

Considering the Phoenix project was started back in the stone age to remove all the Mozilla bloat and make a speedy browser, I think they failed miserably. Every time a major new version comes out, I try it again, and end up going back to Opera and Chrome. I really want to love Firefox. It represents one of the most major successes in open source. But I chose to use minimal portable hardware and not have a huge desktop or giant laptop anymore, and that means I have to make sacrifices.

But just throwing memory or CPU at something is pure laziness. I shouldn't need a quad-core Intel i7 and the latest Nvidia card to browse the web. My puny netbook can handle Compiz just fine, but Firefox beats it with a crowbar. Go figure.

Masterful trolling. I really must congratulate you. This, folks, is what a 9/10 on the Troll Scale actually looks like. It's not obvious, but clearly an opinion not even a sanctimonious blow-hard could possibly justify with a straight face.

Note how he carefully shrugs off people who are tagged by friends and family, and forgets that Facebook will make an account for you, even if you never sign up. Then consider that he doesn't consider the rich prospects of lurking. Then of course, the hypocrisy of posting on a public forum, his personal distaste of... public forums.

This is one of those rare trolls that actually deserves a +5 funny. The only reason I docked a point from a perfect 10/10 score, is that you'll never get me to believe anyone with an account number that high is such a self-important rube. Nice try, though!

Who could blame them. My wife has stuck it out for ten, $Deity bless her heart. I wouldn't do it for any amount of money with all the headaches involved, and that's just experiencing it peripherally.

That's odd, because my wife teaches in Illinois, has been teaching for ten years, and has a Masters degree. She's the department head of a statewide educator's journal and has dozens of published articles in the field. She knows the names, special educational needs, and legal requirements for every single one of her 800+ students. She puts in 10-hour days every day doing lesson plans, volunteer work, etc., and yes, that includes summer. She makes less than that "average," wherever those stats came from.

I have a mere BA in Math and CS. I'm a DBA at a financial institution in Chicago. I interact with a couple small teams, have published nothing of consequence, contribute nothing to the future of our children, and work as little as humanly possible.

I make twice as much as she does.

She's worked harder than me in almost every measurable way for the last decade, and has always been "rewarded" with more work. The state just pulled her school's funding because they're bankrupt. The last few local funding initiatives to make up the difference were all voted down. They've cut back so much, they'll lose busing next year, and probably the remainder of the extra curricular activities. Teacher pensions, the equivalent of our 401k's, are constantly raided to fill budget gaps, and yet people complain about teacher pensions. It's likely she'll never actually get any of it by the time she retires.

Yeah. Teaching's awesome. It's so easy. No sweat. Free money for no work. Nine months, then it's all gravy. Nothing to it. While in the real world, I would rather work in fast food than be a teacher. Nothing is worth the years of extra schooling, extra stress, extra work, and less pay on top of it all.

If not for the kids, and her love of teaching them, she'd have quit so long ago. She's not stupid, just sentimental. What she's doing for the world is worth orders of magnitude more than what I do, but she just gets shit on for it. I would never, ever be a teacher, for any amount of money, especially half what I make now. This is how we encourage the best and brightest to pass along their gifts to our future generations?

Right. Yeah, they're just rolling in cash.

I think he's talking about EnterpriseDB. They don't own PostgreSQL in any way, but Bruce Momjian and Dave Page, two of the top developers aside from Tom Lane, both work there. Ironically, their schtick is Oracle compatibility, complete with a compatible implementation of PL/SQL they call edbspl, date-format, data types, you name it. They've also contributed several modules and projects to the PostgreSQL project (GridSQL, several admin tools, etc).

Of course if you lack the patience, attention span, or ability to read not more than two paragraphs of only mildly-technical, perhaps you shouldn't be installing an OS to begin with.

It is exactly this kind of condescending elitism that is actively damaging the reputation of the Linux community. Click download. Burn download to disk. Insert the disk. Reboot. Click OK on a bunch of dialogs. Done. Canonical has its issues, but at least they understand that much. Your accusation cuts both ways:

"If developers lack the patience, attention span, or ability to produce an easier to use operating system or even proper download instructions, then perhaps they shouldn't be writing an OS to begin with."

Does that sound both obnoxious and arrogant? That's because it is.

Just because someone doesn't see something the same way as you, does not make them stupid. And before you accuse me of being some ignorant n00b for defending those who would dare to tarnish Debian's hallowed name, I've been exclusively using Linux as my main desktop OS since 1997, and yes, at one point that included Debian. Debian was easily the messiest install I ever encountered, and that includes Slackware. If Debian cleaned up their act a decade ago, there would be no need for Ubuntu. As it is, they're the same as the makers of DomainOS, probably one of the best UNIXs out there that died a horrible death because its developers were excellent at coding, and terrible at marketing. Ubuntu is the marketing Debian needs to remain more than a tinkerer's OS, and I'd say it's working so far. How many people cut their teeth on Ubuntu and then moved on to Debian because it's "real" Linux?

People don't just dive into using a new operating system, they need handholding at first and then can develop their skills as they grow into the system. But that'll never happen if they're belittled and ranted at the second they offer a difference of opinion or confusion at an admittedly counter-intuitive interface. Grow up. Or are you getting too old for that, too?

Oh God, you just reminded me of my Mathematics Analysis class. This professor was a well known evil overlord in the 300-level courses. He usually made the homework so hard, it forced the class to work together to even finish say, 70% of it, after working on it until 2am.

And the final? Excuse me... finals? Yes, there were two. One of them was take-home, and looked suspiciously minuscule. Two pages. Two pages of questions for a take-home final? Ha! Easy. I'll have it done in a couple hours.

NO! For the love of God and all that is holy, NO! This is a 300-level Math course, buddy! Each question was a proof. Effectively the test took us through the steps of proving frigging calculus. I think I turned in 26 pages of proofs . . . three days of constant work later.

It was simply not possible to cheat in that class. That sadistic bastard is still my favorite professor; he even went to my wedding. :)

Actually, my point was to address the idea that upgrading without a dump/restore was something new to 9.0. You didn't have to read the article for that part. ;)

If you'll read the section I have on rebuilding the RPMs from source, you'll notice I say this:

The Official RPMs supplied by Postgres are insufficient for our needs. For pg_migrator to work, we'll need to build new ones.

Followed closely by:

. . . will disable integers from having datetimes assigned . . .

And later, you'll notice my configuration/build flags:

./configure --prefix=/opt/postgres-8.4 --disable-integer-datetimes

That last one, '--disable-integer-datetimes' is required for pg_migrator to work. This flag is, unfortunately, not set in the default binaries distributed by PostgreSQL.

Actually, there's a utility that works on 8.3 and above: pg_migrator, and isn't really that new. I wrote a long article on it a while ago that covers how we used it, and most of those instructions are not especially specific to our use case. Of course, before 8.3 you'll have to rely on a parallel restore (8.4's pg_restore client has a -j flag much like make, that will load several tables simultaneously, which drastically cuts migration time except for the initial dump.)

All in all, it's a much better DB than it was in the 7.x days, and that's after the drastic improvements in the 8.x tree. I can't wait for 9.0.

I actually thought this was a good idea, at least for heavy users of Facebook, as we all know is awash in Flash games of all description.

Unfortunately it's easily the crashiest Chrome beta I've tested. In fact, it's very easy to replicate!

1. Open Google Chrome.
2. Find a Flash-driven game/page.
3. Right-click to try and pull up the settings menu.
4. Get a "kill this unresponding page" dialog.

I'll call this a reversion, because a similar bug was supposedly fixed back in December.

I've really wanted to like Chrome. It really is much faster on my netbook, but right now it's just a curiosity.

The problem with having a vendor-added enhancement like SenseUI is that it's vendor added. Any enhancements to Android have to be filtered through the vendor before you'll see the upgrade. Unfortunately, they're always developing new phones, moving on to bigger and better things, and may abandon or at least only pay partial attention to the phone you love. The Incredible is "The Shit" now, but what about when Android 2.2 comes out? What about 2.3? If HTC decides to call it a day, you're stuck with no recourse but to maybe do a firmware hack and hope for the best.

The major benefit in the Nexus One, is that it's just Android, straight from the lion's mouth. Provided Google doesn't get all crazy dropping backwards compatibility, you could keep upgrading the firmware almost indefinitely because you don't have to wait for the manufacturer or vendor to port all of their tweaks to the new version.