I bought a HTC Magic. The Magic was released roughly the time when the 3GS was introduced, and has comparable hardware.

I am on contract with NTT Docomo. Officially the Magic is stuck here at 1.6. By flashing Cyanogenmod, I could get up to 2.2.1. Some at XDA have made 2.3.3. available, but it is slow and unstable. Updating has the risk of bricking the device. Very like, it will never see 4.0.

Considering the price, I did not even save any money.

The update experience on Android is simply a joke. My next smartphone will be anything but Android. Windows Phone 7, iOS, heck even Blackberry will give me less trouble.

That's because they are competing on an unfair market. The Chinese government is highly corrupt and is trying to support chinese companys where they can. They do not only block youtube, twitter, google and the like for political reasons, but also to support domestic companies. If you cannot reach youtube due to the firewall, of course you will change to a chinese alternative. Same goes for twitter, google, and all the other google services...

I am very happy that it worked out nice for her. But from my personal experience, a) your gf, unless she's very into high-tech and gadgets, rooting her phone and installing Rom-Manager alone is quite exceptional and b) I wonder what've happened if there was even the slightest problem, let alone bricking her phone - which still is a possibility in a lot of cases.

I updated a non-US HTC Magic (both new radio and the T-Mobile US-Froyo-Image) and found the process far from trivial. And I do have a CS degree. Maybe I should've gone for history instead.

The sad fact is that while of course, the iPhone 3G won't get iOS5, you can roughly expect at least 2 years of updates for an iPhone. Whereas some (but not all) Android devices are given up much quicker.

Steve Ballmer's FUD is insofar correct in that if you want to update your Android-phone after the maker and/or carrier abandoned you, you indeed almost need a CS degree to update it on yourself.

The update process is indeed quite well-done on WP7

There were at least third party tools, like GSynaptics that worked. Of course nobody cares about backward compatibility, so that doesn't work anymore. GSynaptics was continued into GPointingDeviceSettings, which was quite powerful. I am not sure whether it was part of the official gnome-project. But then again, it is not available for Gnome 3. Of course neither the Gnome-folks nor the distribution makers actually care about those things. After all, who needs a working touchpad, if instead I can get the _latest_ version of Gnome, right?

> what they do when they come home after work???? if you come home from work at 11pm, maybe you just want to sleep? Japanese folks are required to do long hours a lot, not matter if the overtime actually makes sense or not.

Number one. In fact, Deutsche Telekom has an incredible huge debt they want to get rid off.

definitely not. At that time, ppl were really waiting for a usable and affordable Unix system for x86. BSD was sort of blocked due to the legal battle, commercial Unices were not affordable, and the development model of minix didn't allow it to become a "real" OS, it was just a tool for teaching. GNU at that time had an excellent track record - maybe not timewise, but then again, they were producing real results (all the gnu commandline tools, the gnu c compiler, emacs etc.). Back then, it really seemed that it was just a matter of time until we all would see a full GNU system... well... history told another story...

this "airlifting some generators" has been mentioned again and again. But it is quite questionable whether a suitable replacement for the diesl generators could have been airlifted at all. I mean these things are _huge_ and generate _massive_ amounts of power.

What is however questionable is that the emergency circualtion system failed so fast, the one that is mainly powered by steam generated from the reactor, and basically circulates water (steam) from the reactor pressure vessel to the torus, where it cools down, and is then pumped into the rpv again. Of course this can not go indefinitely, but this stopped way too fast imho. Especially since there is only a small amount of energy for some electric controls, as most of the system is powered by the steam from the rpv.

In any event, there are _a lot_ of questions concerning how this accident happened, and so far this has not been explained at all neither by Tepco or the Japanese government, despite promises to finally give out more information.

I agree that this is a really nice from Microsoft, but why not go for the "original", i.e. Ocaml?

hm. Does the kanji for "turtle" really come up so often? Whenever I saw the name (kame), it was usually written katakana anyway... I really wonder how many of these added kanji are of _real_ importance...

all theoretical free-market models make certain assumption: 1) The participants act rationally and 2) the cost of information is free.
If you take out these assumptions than the free-market model is theoretical on a weak basis, and, scientifically, not "better" or "worse" than fascism or communism or whatever.

Think of this: If you have two types of orange juice, one is cheaper and high on dioxins due to improper processing of the manufacturer and one is more expensive. Otherwise they are mostly the same. Is it rationally to buy the poisend one?