My nick is because I played Half Life on a Pentium 133 over a 28.8k modem and I wanted people to know that if managed to kill them through my slideshow of a computer, they truly sucked.

I probably got maybe 5 kills per deathmatch. 3 frames per second, probably.

Amen, brotha!

It's also hilarious when some programmers try to write in Verilog as if it were C. :)

The first 2 examples do look pretty darn similar.
The Rambler and the Armada look nothing alike.

Maybe nobody thought to do design patents back then cuz they were such crappy cars, haha.

Intel was shipping their own controllers for the low end, and using Marvell's for the high end with the 510.

Then Sandforce for the 520.

Not quite correct either.

It's not the controller hardware dying, it's the controller firmware crashing and burning.

A few days ago, my Crucial C300, a drive I've been running like mad for 2 years, finally critically failed to read back a sector. And instead of returning an disk error, the entire drive froze. After waiting 15 minutes to see if it'd come back, it didn't. Rebooting, then rereading resulted in the same drive crash. Overwriting the sector with dd made it force a remap and allowed me to fully image my drive.

What does this tell us?

1) A 2nd controller doesn't help. It'll just do the same thing.
2) In the normal block failure mode, it'll return a disk error and we can overwrite it.
3) There exists bugs in the firmware where the block tracking metadata gets into a state where the controller can't handle it anymore. My guess is that maybe it ran out of memory trying to clean itself up or something. Whatever the case, if you hit something like this, there needs to be a way to escape without losing the entire drive. Perhaps a debug mode or memory-optimized read-only mode toggled by a jumper or something.
4) I should have noted the rare occasional stutter in the past month as a sign that things were not great.

Anyhow, I backed everything up, issued an ATA secure erase to hope the drive cleans its metadata too, and then loaded everything back on from the disk image. Works perfectly.

(relavent equipment: OSX 10.6, no TRIM enabled, ~2.5 year old drive, primary build/dev environment, all firmware updates have been loaded)

I actually asked a person who worked in Intel's storage research about this.

It boiled down to this: Intel Research made the X25, and pushed it over to Intel's product teams who basically just put them in boxes and shipped it. And people loved it.

Then Intel's product design teams tried to design a follow on controller and sucked entirely at it. So they got the research group to rev the x25 a few times, while they contracted with Marvell for controllers since they needed a SATA 6G controller for their own firmware.

At that time, they hadn't switched to Sandforce, but judging by the fact that Sandforce has been quite dominant even back then, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel did almost no firmware customization now.

I wouldn't have believed that Intel had sucked in SSD controller design had I not heard it from a Intel researcher (although they might have been biased given that the story make their peers look good) but looking back again, we're talking about the company that brought us Netburst and FBDIMMs.

apt-get is a easy way to kill my machine in my experience.

Apple's App Store has got the right idea. Carry the dependent libraries with the app that needs it. Storage is cheap, time is not. Better to not deal with dependency hell at all and just waste a hundred megs instead. All your configs are still in your home directory, in property lists. Better ordered than the old unix config files, not obscure like the registry, and easily convertible in-place into something that resembles JSON if you want to use a text editor, but also easily loadable into in-memory data structures if you want to programmatically manipulate them.

The vast majority of users don't want Linux on the desktop because it get them nothing they find useful. That's pretty close to dead in my opinion.

The common user don't understand how to use it. They won't understand the difference between Linux and a Linux distro. They don't have anybody to hand hold them through their tasks, and most of their software won't run on it without arcane bash incantations. Plus the community in general treats them like idiots.

But that's not even the real problem. What makes it dead in my eyes is actually people like myself.

I've ran Gentoo, YDL, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, amongst other smaller distros. I used to be a fan. Now I'm completely indifferent. I simply just don't care enough to pick Linux.

Why? Because as far as it has come, Linux holds itself back. No stable ABI's? Come on, every other OS can upgrade kernels without recompiling every driver. KDE/GNOME/Unity/etc infighting and all that is ugly to watch. The last straw was Ubuntu software updates on a dev machine years ago. Bog standard Dell Precision 370. Pentium4. Intel board. No extra accessories. It's the stereotypical P4 box.
I clicked update on Ubuntu and Ubuntu made itself unbootable. (This wasn't a major update either, it was simply the typical package updates from the repos.) After fixing it manually, it did it again a month later. Then I transferred all my work to a Mac and that was that.

Since then, all my machines run OSX, OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana, WinXP, or FreeBSD. (in that priority)
Shit just works... and more importantly, stays working.

If somebody told me that Linux has fixed all that in the past 4 years, that'd be nice. But it wouldn't convince me to go back and try it again.
I feel I'd gain nothing from using Linux.

As for the people who buy a Mac to run Linux because the hardware is better supported, it's just a matter of time before they switch to OSX.

To their credit, when I used a Samsung Captivate, Touchwiz was way more responsive than ASOP on the same class of hardware.
It still feels unnatural and laggy, but it was definitely an improvement over stock 2.1

The Nexus line sucks.

The N1 is deprecated.

The NS has at least 4 different hardware versions, where most of them don't even get all the features. (Google Wallet). Plus the hardware for the NS is crap. I hate how the on/off switch is opposite the volume buttons. It blasted my ears every time I want to go change the music if I don't hold it carefully.

The Galaxy Nexus is a mini-tablet; it's too big, and LTE burns batteries. Oh, and the GPU is already a generation or two behind the iPhone 4S.

I think he's talking about Galaxy S phones having shitty GPS when he meant "AntennaGate"...

Given that OpenSolaris is already deployed all over the place, it's the least adventurous of the options.
I'm using snv_130 for my personal media server and it works fine for me.
6 drives: 2 on ICH, 4 on sil3124. Pentium Dual-Core Mobile 1.73 on a Mini-ITX board with dual-gigE.

If people are unhappy about the lack of a support community, there'a Illumos/OpenIndiana.
Or just download the free Solaris 11 Express install DVD from Oracle's site for the latest and greatest.

I'm almost tempted to make a 2nd server entirely out of old drives with bad sectors and load it with data from optical media just to see how much life can ZFS get out of drives that should already be recycled for scrap metal.

Of course there is a uniform "Android Phone Design" sanctioned by Google.
There's three of them.

1) blackberry look alike. (Android 1.0 SDK and test devices like in that picture)
2) iphone look alike. (g2)
3) iphone look alike with sliding keyboard. (g1)

Requirements for #2 and #3 include a touch screen and 4 buttons on the front corresponding to back, home, preference, and search.

#1 was actually banned for a while. Remember the Kogan Agora? Only HTC has managed to bring back this form factor in the form of the facebook-focused android phone.

From the picture, no. But that's like saying a tricycle and a Abrams Tank don't really look all that different, just evolved.

But it was different enough that Google had Kogan cancel the Agora because of potential compatibility issues.

The way I see it is that Apple isn't claiming ownership of the technologies they combined, but rather they are taking offense to somebody copying them and not only failing to make it better, but making it a half-assed copy.

Take a WinMo6 Smartphone, WinMo PocketPC, PalmPilot, Newton 2000, Blackberry (traditional, not the Storm), WinPho7, webOS, iOS, and Android device.

Lay them out next to each other. Then arrange them into groups or spectrum based on how similar they are.
What do you get?

If you've owned all these devices at some point in time, (and with the exception of the WinPho7 device, I have) you'll end up with the following:

1) pager slab devices (WinMo6 Smartphone, traditional Blackberry) The pre-iPhone Android protos would go in this category too.
2) stylus-based PDAs (Palm, Newton, PocketPC)
3) multitouch touchscreen devices (WinPho7, webOS, iOS, modern Android)

There's actually one more category between 2 and 3 which would be the transitional devices. Single-touch like resistive, but using capacitive screens. LG Prada, and a whole boatload of touchscreen feature phones fit in here.

Why do these categories matter? Because they fundamentally dictate the way that a person uses the device. Fanbois on both sides shout out "yeah but xyz copied ijk from insert-some-picture-here," but neglect that in most cases, the device screenshot they're showing is superficially related to some point they're actually failing to make.

In my opinion, Steve's problem is this: Apple established the multitouch touchscreen mobile device category by creating their own design, partly evolved from the Newton and partly brand new. Palm released their contender, webOS, by evolving from the PalmPilot and bringing in new ideas. And Google, started with a platform which was a copy of the Blackberry category, simply started making it into a copy of iOS instead of making a unique and innovative platform.
For those who've seen a broad spectrum of mobile device history, it was clear that Android has no originality and on top of that, it's a half-assed copy. That is why Steve was angry.
Had Google released something like webOS or WinPhone7, I doubt Steve would have been pissed. He'd probably be pretty pleased because both the webOS and WinPhone7 platforms take the multitouch mobile device concept and improve on it in some new way.

If anybody here gets the chance to pick up a WinPhone7 device and play with it, I highly recommend it.
Even go out to an AT&T store just to try it. You will learn one of two things:
1) You'll find that it's unique and interesting. You'll have a certain appreciation for how different it feels compared to other devices of the category. Whether you actually like the device or not is unimportant. Hell, you might even hate it and think it's the ugliest thing ever. What is important is that despite being totally hosed in the market, that Microsoft took the time and effort to bring out something unique.
2) Or you'll be completely uninterested, thereby learning that you have no industrial design sense whatsoever.