Yes, yes, "I liked a machine that comformed to me, not the other way around." But still, as the artcle points out:

Palm understood that instead of "how to get natural handwriting recognition to work", the real problem was "how to input text on a handheld". To solve this problem, you really didn't need natural handwriting recognition at all - a simple, single-stroke alphabet that was easy to learn was a far better solution, since it required far less processing power and RAM, which in turn meant better battery life and smaller devices. Since the recognition system only had to work with a small set of possible variations, it was also a lot faster and more accurate.

Palms could last for a month of heavy usage on two AAA batteries. Compare to today's Li-ion monsters...

I don't carry one around, but I keep a TRG Pro in my computer closet. My kids actually started playing with it a week or two ago - they think it's pretty cool, even if it's grayscale and all. And two AAA batteries power the thing for a month, easy.

I stuck with Palm all the way through a Treo 650, but after that it was time to move on.

I've got a Galaxy S3, which is ~4.8 inches diagonal and 1280x720. I don't notice individual pixels - and I checked carefully since I hate the very idea of Pentile. But I really can't tell, and I'm up close to the screen probably more than I should be - long bus rides, etc.

1080p would be a complete waste on something less than five inches, so far as I can see.

Jetpacks. Tricksy holograms. Shrink-rays. I mean, there are entire games based on individual Duke features. Timed detonators! It’s like they had access to a different alphabet, and somewhere they are still hoarding those secret letters. Why are all of those ideas in the same game? It’s from 1996, and it still comes up in conversation. The Subway. The Bank. Virtually unlimited levels to play on, 20k or less in most cases. I shot Gabriel once with a shrink ray, and he used his jetpack to fly out the window like an insect. Fifteen years ago. Still talking about it, about scenarios that to this day no game has managed to top.

Does everything I need and doesn't waste a bunch of resources.

I made my own software that just runs fixed scripts. Handles typical things without needing full ssh, and when I do need ssh, I have a script to unlock it temporarily.

The screen is the biggest power consumer, but that doesn't mean that the power consumption of other components shouldn't be paid attention to.

That's not what I said. There's a cost-benefit tradeoff here. What is the benefit in performance that the extra RAM gives versus the cost of the chip and the power drain? That's why I asked for data sheets. Let's calculate just how many extra amp-hours we'd be drawing here.

Note, again, that they're using a titanium case with a sapphire screen. This thing, as TFA says, already weighs more than average. Tossing in a slightly bigger battery to power the extra RAM isn't the hit it would be in more commodity phones.

Amount of RAM has a significant effect on battery life.

Do you have data sheets or something to support that? From everything I've seen, that would be peanuts compared to the screen.

My old Droid was RAM-limited (256MB), but I haven't run into any isues with my S3 with 2GB of RAM. I've got "889MB used, 705MB free" - of course, I don't run a bunch of stupid background apps.

When you're using titanium for the case and sapphire for the screen, you cant spring for a 2GB chip instead of 1GB? Seriously?

To be fair, though, one of Dawkins favorite activities is not inferring the logically-required inferences demanded by his worldview premises

Dawkins isn't perfect, and has exaggerated at times. But it's still amazing just how big a gap there is between what people say Dawkins says and what he actually says.

But then there's the (at least) equal and opposite error, which I call Haldane's Error - the belief that anything not currently explained by science must perforce be supernatural and can never be explained by science.

It was a real blow when Wöhler was able to synthesize urea from 'inorganic' chemicals. It was held that the substances in living things were special and followed different rules. There was a very sharp - and allegedly impassible - boundary between 'organic' and 'inorganic' chemicals. The former appeared in living things and had some special 'vital force', but inorganic chemicals were 'just stuff', not living nor could they ever be living. Wöhler upset that paradigm rather dramatically.

But that didn't mean that there wasn't a difference between organic and inorganic chemistry - now organic chemistry is understood to be chemistry that involves carbon. (Though a few chemicals containing carbon are still called 'inorganic' because of that historical quirk.) But just because there isn't a magic difference between life and nonlife doesn't mean there's no difference between them.

Similarly, one can be a naturalist and still think both of the forks you propose are wrong.

Much of modern biology seeks to emulate physics by reducing the human organism to a complex machine: thinking becomes merely chemical potentials and electric bursts, interest and motivation become mere drives to perpetuate the genome, and love becomes little more than an illusion.

Um, what? Nobody - not even Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" - claims that "interest and motivation" are "mere drives to perpetuate the genome". Or that love isn't real. (Hell, Dawkins explicitly argues the opposite.)

I'll grant that thinking - consciousness and awareness - is still a 'Kuhnian anomaly' that a lot of people are working on. But just because we understand molecular biology much better now and don't need to posit some elan vital to account for life doesn't mean that we can't make any principled distinctions between life and nonlife. Similarly, if we found out precisely how the brain gives rise to consciousness, that wouldn't mean thinking per se didn't exist.

"Girls" and "boys" actually have overlapping ranges with different peaks. And only in some areas are the peaks and/or ranges all that different - upper-body strength being an obvious example.

Intelligence, however, doesn't seem to be one of them. For example, there's a reason why there aren't so many female chess grandmasters, but it's not native ability.

Note that this is radically different from "plenty of exceptions"; especially in the case of intelligence that you cited.

And so long as we're trading useless anecdotal impressions... back when I was taking engineering classes, I tried to get partnered with the female students for projects - because I noticed they worked hard and tended to actually be good at engineering. Given schmuck attitudes like yours, the selection pressure was pretty damn high.

https://www.xkcd.com/732/. Especially the alt-text.

Mac SE/30 (1989) as my home webserver. But it's running NetBSD.