Mod parent up. When I read the book I was still very young, and I thought at the time I was reading something that was specially crafted for my age because it was so clear and easy to read even if it was talking about a topic that was hard to comprehend. Now that I think about it, and having read so many worse books in the meantime, I can't help but think it was a masterpiece.

You messed up your terminology. Xen is paravirtualization by default. OpenVZ and VServer are OS-level virtualization.

Every guy you laid in the US? I'm not sure the topic here is supposed to be sexual experience? :)

Speak for yourself - in the (European, seaside) village where my mother was raised, mass electrical power distribution first appeared in 1961. I assure you that their world of 1960 was quite significantly different to their world of 2000.

Am I the only one who read this title and immediately thought of Frau Farbissina yelling "Fire the laser"? :)

Uh, I don't think "nobody can do anything" is really true here. Remember the 1999 bombing of FR Yugoslavia? Although, hopefully this time they wouldn't be ten years late to the party and yet still manage to cause 500 civilian casualties on the ground. Nevertheless, if you ask those protesters in Libya, they might find this risk an acceptable compromise compared to what's going on there now.

OTOH, if people changed these things more frequently, things in general would become less likely to break down, because everyone would become more accustomed to it. We would then be able to relegate those people who allow it to break down to the same caste we today relegate the "what do you mean someone can insert random SQL in my obviously numeric GET parameter?!" people. They would still exist, but nobody would really pay attention to their screams :)

Yes, well, all that is something "design by movie" could come up with. Minority Report - 2002 -> five years -> iPhone - 2007 Clearly the fact that they achieved these features in an attractive format and with a bearable price tag is an important milestone. But let's not get too excited about these ideas being devoid of design by committee, because it doesn't really take a wizard to figure out that emulating a human-to-machine interface that was successfully shown all over the big screens, all over the world - is a potentially very profitable idea.

Have you actually tried using a Symbian kernel in a similar setting? I used a Nokia E72, and its OS behavior seems worse than what I see on a Froyo phone - the whole thing rebooting without warning is pretty much a regular occurence with non-trivial use. And that's with a much smaller app selection. I honestly can't imagine it would magically improve if subjected to the breadth of apps from the Android Market (which is a major part of "Android UI" the way most people use it).

Yeah, look what the proliferation of PCs in 1990s did to the computer market. [...] Wait, what?

Dammit, you can't claim saturation *at least* until everyone has at least a handful of them. :)

To continue on your line of thinking, the response to this is - fine, let's not be naive, let's simply allow for a long cold winter. If people over there want that, let them have it. That's democracy - if the majority decides that the country should jump off a cliff, that's what the country should do. Foreign powers propping up dictators for their own interests usually only delays the winter, in one form or another.

You do have control over the software! A vendor-locked-down Android phone compared to a normal phones such as those you described is basically what a branded PC on a restricted AD domain is compared to a consumer electronics appliance such as a TV. You can obtain root access, detach from the vendor, and then tinker with it endlessly, and there's Google and a bunch of other people online who provide various tools for it.

As it happens, I used a K750i and a N95 myself, and I can tell you from personal experience that an Android phone is a completely different cup of tea from those.

Actually, I don't think that was the point. The point is that when you make anything by the million, it's not obvious why you'd nevertheless post a loss. (It's possibly to occupy a relatively small part of a market and still make a decent living. Indeed, it's also possible to do that and make a lot of money - see Apple.) I guess the answer to this naive question would be - RTFA :)

But the GP was complaining about an Android phone. If you didn't use that, rather you used WM and BB, how is your iPhone experience relevant to his? He could just as easily switch to a better Android phone, rather than go through all of these hoops to get to an iPhone ;)

Do you also own Apple stock by any chance? ;)

Yes, exactly. The reason they call them weasel words is because you can tack on such a statement on practically anything and make it sound vaguely authoritative without actual corroboration.

"Geographers find a new way to determine that the earth is round. They also found it was 40,000 km at the equator, which renews questioning by some whether we can actually be sure they can keep doing the experiments that debunk the flat earth theory."

Amusing, isn't it?

Anyway, since the issue here is advertizing, I'd guess these "some" might actually be just your typical astroturfers employed by the various ad-related businesses, who would just love to get a chance at advertising at such a large and popular site, simply because it could make them big money. The incessant desire to monetize all those hits is not based on a genuine concern for the well-being of Wikipedia, but on plain old self-interest.