The standard OPLC deployment includes a school server.

The model used for reference material such as Wikipedia, text books or this is to put the material on the school server. All the XOs in the area have fast wireless access and the school server has the hard drive space to store and serve all the data.

It's cheaper. Cost is the God in consumer electronics upon which everything else is sacrificed. The could be saving up to $5 per phone doing it this way. Ship 20 million phones and that's $100 million dollars in the bank. The effort made in consumer electronics to save four cents (over 10 million units) would probably make your head spin.

The difference in the two approaches isn't as much as you are making out to be. The dedicated radio chip is still running a microprocessor written in software. By combining the two processors in the single package you save cost and space (more cost).

The major downside to this is debugging the radio processing where it's interfered with by other actions on the phone, having two cores probably helps a lot with this. That said, assigning three engineers full time for a year to figure it out is trivial compared to the savings you get.

(I spent a year of my life fixing a 'creative' electronic circuit that saved us 8 cents per board).

You are assuming perfect knowledge and rational behaviour. Which is a nice theoretical approximation but the rest of us live in the real world.

The problem is that the power usage is not a factor most people consider compared to screen size, trim colour and brightness level. Even if you do care about the power usage there have been deceptive practices such as ultralow idle levels which aren't used 90% of the time.

A compulsory minimum will get rid of the dodgy TVs and people won't have to worry about it. As a nice added bonus the standards will mean most manufacturers will comply and the rest of the world will also benefit (see the way RoHS has been adopted world wide).

There's still a few of them out there though.

I've heard some amusing stories of people who had pacemakers implanted in the 80s and never had to have them maintained, so they were never recorded. Now you have a very dead body in the morgue who still has a heart beat and "no pacemaker". Shortly followed by the guys with geiger counters and plastic suits.

I would expect that every US president would be nominated. Possible by standard US policy, having nobel prize winners is good PR.

Just because the nomination closes on the February 1st doesn't mean that's when the decision is made or that they don't examine his actions after that date.

Dvorak was and still is a better layout to QWERTY to type with.

The fact that it hasn't become commercially successful doesn't make the concept incorrect.

A large scale trading system like this one is one of those circumstances. The latency has to be low, the throughput is high. They are spending enough on hardware that having a programmer optimize a few functions is very worthwhile. Certainly enough that they wouldn't think a 20% performance decrease was "very reasonable".

There are ways of optimizing .NET further, like writing chunks of the code in C. But one really has to consider how much of the application you want written in this way. Clearly in this case the optimizations weren't sufficient.