Symbian on Nokia is goddamn awful; as the owner of an E72, I know.

Illogical and bizarre menu layout and options, features not working out of the box (SIP support, anyone? good luck with that), neutered hardware (128MB of RAM, same as its predecessor from two years prior), miserably broken connection management (use wifi when available, cellular when not... that should NOT be hard, nor should it be something I have to configure on a per-application basis), an inbox/outbox/sent/drafts folder system for SMS messages (like phones had ten years ago), no meaningful app development from anyone but nokia themselves... I could go on.

Suffice it to say that Symbian is a handset OS dating back to monochrome displays and the original GSM spec, hacked and hacked to look, superficially, like something modern.

The only positive thing I can say about my phone is that it's a bluetooth cellular modem right out of the box.

It doesn't even do properly the things it was advertised as doing, to say nothing of the impressive things that third party software lets android or even apple phones do.

Nokia got it's last dollar out of me with the E72; I don't care what they make after this, pure spite will keep me from ever buying it.

Never. Not unless the cost of energy drops an order of magnitude below what oil costs today... and not just any kind of energy, but energy in a transportable, reasonably safe, high-density carrier.

It's not happening. All signs point to a future of ever-increasing liquid fuel prices. Electricity still has the potential to be cheap if we could achieve a significant reduction in the cost of nuclear or concentrated solar power through type-certification and mass production, but that's not going to help fly aircraft unless it's paired with an electricity storage device an order of magnitude denser than the best chemical batteries.

Part of the reason why investors demand constant growth from a company is that so many - Dell included - don't pay dividends. In the absence of those, the only reason to hold shares in a company is the expectation of higher future value.

Dell has been around for over two decades. At some point it became obvious that they weren't going to take over the world: their growth had peaked. They weren't going to completely crush the consumer / business desktop computing competition, and they weren't going to enter other markets in a meaningful way... so why didn't they start disbursing the profits of their business to the owners of the company?

This has only tangential relevance to the whole bad-capacitor issue: I'm more taking issue with your assertion that companies have to compromise their core values and strengths in search of endless growth. There's another option.

So you find some porn on a guy's computer, or rather, files that look like they might be porn. You then open a bunch of these, make a judgement about what might be illegal, and call the authorities.

Then you boast about it.

If you're not just another IT drone spinning a story to inflate your apparent importance, then you're the kind of asshole who ruins a man's life for having the wrong kind of video on his laptop and then feels good about what you've done.

Get fucked.

My observation: a real laptop computer will not get more than 2.5 hours on a standard six cell 55Wh battery.

You can do better - sometimes much better - if you use some pathetically underpowered Atom or ULV Core2 processor, but then you get performance comparable to a midrange machine from three years ago.

If you actually want to do real work with a machine - half dozen apps open, including a browser with a dozen tabs and some flash - it will use about 20W. All those threads mean your CPU won't power down. 20W... I challenge anyone with a non-neutered CPU to do better.

55Wh / 20W = 2.75h.

The problem is that a nuclear power plant costs something like six billion dollars to build, and that "whole lot" of water it could desalinate isn't actually very much. It's a lot by the standards of residential and even some industrial users, but it's mind-boggling how much water is required for agriculture.

Modern agriculture is completely dependent on water too cheap to meter. If farmers had to pay even a tenth of a typical residential rate, food prices would rise dramatically.

The executives running those companies are probably MBAs. If they know anything about computer hardware, programming, or tying their own shoelaces, it'd be a goddamn miracle. MBAs are, for the most part, some of the stupidest people you'll ever meet.

1) Workstation class hardware is exactly the same as desktop hardware. Same CPUs except with more cores, same FSB architectures, same memory busses. The days when there was a big schism between the capabilities of consumer-class CPUs and server-class CPUs ended years ago: they're almost one and the same now. There are differences in I/O architecture, which is exactly the sort of thing that gaming doesn't really stress.

2/3) I did in fact watch the video, though I'll admit that I didn't have the patience to watch more than the first question in the Q/A session. OK, so there's custom hardware involved... score one for the technical viability of the idea I suppose, while taking one from the economic viability of it. Now you're expecting me to believe that not only will they have high-end GPUs in every machine (which, as others have mentioned, aren't virtualizable in any useful sort of way) but they'll also have custom-fabbed video accelerator boards? Technically possible, perhaps: economically sensible, hardly.

Wow. Just wow.

Kids, don't drink and post.

I still maintain that this simply can't work, and that it's an absolutely braindead money pit of an idea if it's not a total scam.

Idea: let's take the most latency sensitive, computationally demanding, and visually intensive thing you can do with a modern computer and try to apply the thin client model to it.

A single instance of the application in question will demand the full resources of the most powerful PC you can throw at it, but we'll just wave our hands and mutter something about virtualization to convince stupid investors that we have magic at our disposal. Because they are morons and because we put on a good show, they'll believe that you can somehow run many instances of a game on the equivalent of a single PC. We'll also be encoding 720p video in realtime at a quality / bandwidth ratio that no codec today can deliver; this will presumably happen on the same computing hardware that's already running multiple instances of cutting edge 3D games.

Finally, we'll throw in some shit about the iphone, because people can't stop fellating apple lately.

Anyone who believes this is technically feasible, much less economically viable, is fucking *retarded*.

Your .sig is fucking stupid. You're doing an absolutely shit job of paraphrasing a line that someone much more clever than you thought of ten years ago.

It went something like "Outlook not so good. Neat, next I'll ask it about Exchange Server."

I've never seen a baseless anti-Microsoft sentiment so badly expressed as the steaming little turd you call a .sig.

gb2hugbox, aspie.