Sigh. I'm shit at math but I can easily recognize many places where more math would improve my life, especially since I like to make things and customize them. By the same token I never got any chemistry (it was not required, and by the time I got to college I had other interests) but I can recognize that it would be cool to have more of it. Even cooking is chemistry, and a lot of that fancy-pants "molecular gastronomy" (what, other food doesn't have molecules?) stuff is applicable to more mundane foods. Or looking at the back of the shampoo bottle and knowing the difference between one thing and the next.

A lot more deeply, odds are, if they're programmers. That's the point of teaching them young.

Yeah, but you could do that without learning a whole lot about programming, simple if-then-else and pattern matching will cover most needs there. But programming is still very valuable. On the flip side, not all the kids will take to it, so spending a lot of time on it is probably a bad idea. They only make you spend a year or so on a foreign language (if that) in school, programming probably ought to receive about the same amount of mandatory attention.

Nonsense. In places with competition, it costs much less.

Karmashock, you ignorant twink

I don't. I indirectly enjoy the benefits: I am running SOKP on my Moto G. Before that, I ran similar AOKP-based Android releases on my Nexus 4 (before its digitizer and radio went tits up.) And before that, various community releases on my Xperia Play. In every case the rewards have been many and varied. These days I run ordinary kernels (no overclocking) and try to keep things simple.

The argument was over which phone was more like its desktop counterpart. Your argument applies equally to both platforms.

Actually having a nice userland means being able to use your phone as a troubleshooting tool. You can actually do pretty well just by installing busybox (from the app, it's free, or there's some features you don't strictly need which won't cost you very much... or do it manually) and android terminal, as well as anysoftkeyboard plus the ssh layout, which you're going to want very much. But having the option to go Wayland one day means being able to recycle the phone, use it for other purposes. My oldest phone is now a clock and occasionally plays me some MP3s. It's not really worth selling.

Hahahaha more powerful than having the source code, and being able to rip out any parts of it you don't want lurking in there to begin with? Tell me another one.

Modern SoC GPUs have scalers, they can scale for free and look pretty good while doing it.

You can buy a laser cutter, complete, for around two grand on ebay. Or you can build one for around two grand, if you can get lucky with your laser tube. So why should I be excited about another one in the same price range?

I like SOKP, the Sonic Open Kang Project.

I am shocked that in the hours since you wrote this comment, no Microsofties have showed up to tell us how wonderful their Windows Phone is. I literally only ever see those comments on Slashdot, but normally they are as reliable as the sunrise.

Oh? So you have the source code? Snicker snort.

A jailbroken Android device, on the other hand, really is a small Linux box. You can trivially install a more complete userland on most interesting phones. You can install an X server. You can get the sources to everything but the Google Play stuff, and you can use the phone without that stuff. In theory you should even be able to throw away the GUI and all the apps from Android and switch to Wayland someday, at least on relatively modern phones whose graphics drivers will be usable by Wayland.

Now, tell us again how much your iOS phone is like a computer, please. We're fascinated.

What? No. They are all motivated by profit.

That doesn't actually preclude our doing it, although we won't be able to do it with a robot arm any time soon. (Would love to be wrong.) It might be possible to do it with biotech, though.

If you're using somewhere near the inverter's peak output, then you can get as much as 90% efficiency. Inverters are getting smaller all the time, which makes it more feasible to gang modules instead of using monolithic units which will provide very low conversion efficiency for low outputs.

It's still unfortunate to leave 10% on the table. But a lot of DC-DC power supplies are also not very efficient. Best-case, they are only around 95% efficient, and you can easily lose another 10-15% if you execute them poorly. So yes, optimally they have half the peak loss, and even bad ones are likely to be better, but we can make better inverters and we will as the demand increases.

Well, we could argue about that all day, but I argue that it doesn't really matter: no matter what it means, they're more likely to use Android. If it just means they are going to want to use a broad variety of apps from disparate sources, that's Android. If it means they want to customize their phone as much as possible, even just bling-bling style, that's Android. If it means they want to tinker with the internals, obviously that is Android. If they care about security and controlling what apps can do on their phone, that's also Android, albeit one of the cooked-down versions and without Google services — but you can do that if you want to.

You could argue that any of these desires makes you a "power user", but clearly any of them will also lead you to Android. If you took some of them to extremes you might end up someplace else, but it wouldn't be iOS or Windows Phone.

I don't even remember there being a pay-for version of CDE for Linux. I'm not saying it didn't happen. I just remember you could buy a Motif tarball from Metrolink that would get you Motif and mwm, not like you would ever use mwm when you had fvwm. And then later you could buy Caldera Network Desktop, which came with Metrolink Motif. You could also buy AccelX, which got you a substantially faster X server back in those days, with meaningful support for your video card's 2d acceleration features... something that XFree eventually achieved, of course. Apparently you can build CDE for Linux these days, but I haven't tried. (why...)