I'm not sure about Palm, but neither Symbian nor Windows Mobile were anywhere near so locked down as iOS. You could install whatever apps you wanted, tweak almost everything, run as whatever the OS's equivalent of "root" was easily, and in some cases even build and custom install custom ROMs quite easily. iOS has none of that.

Given the antenna troubles, by that argument they should have removed the ability to place phone calls in the first update to the iPhone 4!

Yes, voice recognition with background noise is a problem... but claiming that the new processor is *the* reason for its exclusivity is quite ridiculous.

This is actually a good point. I don't know about the FBI, but some friends of mine work for Boeing and have filters on their laptops' screens that massivle narrow the viewable angle (so somebody sitting behind and to one side of you can't read the screen).

The reason? They have security clearance, and might accidentally have confidential info on their screen for a moment when they log on in a public place. The filter screen helps keep their display private... but it's exactly the kind of thing that is being suggested to be suspicious.

The up/down is for people who are different hights, or for games which are better played sitting/kneeling vs. standing. I don't know, maybe everybody who uses your kinect are all the same hight and always use it from the same position, but for the rest of us that motor is pretty important.

The spacing on the visual sensors doesn't require such a wide sensor bar, but the spacing on the microphones (for effective direction-sensing and noise-cancelation) does. People always focus on the optical portion of the sensor, and ignore the highly-focused microphones (possible because they're harder to see).

Actually, there is some quite compelling argument for this issue. Since long before Nokia started selling WP7, it's been extremely widely reported by customers that even when they walk into a store and specifically ask for a WP7 device, the salespeople refuse to show it or sell it. Yes, you read that right - the salespeople actively refused to sell the customer a product that the customer asked for by name.

The most common reason, apparently, is actually the same Windows Mobile you mention. Compared to modern smartphone platforms (including WP7), it was at best a niche platform and at worst a piece of shit. The salespeople remember that, and apparently can't even tell the difference between WP7 and WinMo (which is blatantly obvious to anybody who tries using them both for 60 seconds, and I'm talking about the stuff that's more than "skin" deep).

Hell, this was mentioned on Slashdot in June of last year: http://www.mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/06/10/1936237/Windows-Phones-Getting-Buried-At-Carriers-Stores
There's plenty of other coverage of this issue, if you do a search for things like "WP7 carrier store" or similar. Another example right from the mouths of customers: http://forums.wpcentral.com/general-discussion/186449.htm

I'll second this. I started coding before finishing high school, and got my first "real" (summer-long, paid hourly and a damn good rate for a credential-less 18-year-old) job before starting university. The reason? A hobby project I'd developed, and could quickly describe to the manager. That let me break into the world of paid summer internships, which ended up paying for my entire education without requiring me to work during the school year (not an easy task, in the US).

Now, I'm looking to switch jobs or the first time since graduating. My past experience, both before and after graduating, is certainly valuable... but since I'm likely switching fields as well, there's a limit to how useful that other experience will be. Instead, the thing that got a friend-of-a-friend very excited about bringing me into his company was a demonstration (using my phone) of a hobby project relevant to the new area.

TL;DR: Hobby projects show both passion and experience, and that's a big part of what employers want to see.

How the <REDACTED> did this get modded up??

Is that what's happening?

Yes, in countries that meet the criteria specified in the post you responded to, and even quoted: places where there are "*no* [effective] laws against copying somebody else's work" such as many of the Asian nations I've been to (Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Indonesia, etc.), and a lot of Africa as well. Also certain parts of South America, though it's slightly less widespread there (in my experience).

Do you see pirated DVDs and CDs on the shelves at Best Buy?

Well, they don't have Best Buy in those countries, but everywhere that you can buy a CD or DVD, from a streetside vendor's cart to a chain of media retailers with a presense in most large malls, is selling mostly if not entirely pirated CDs and DVDs, yes.

Can you tell me which theaters are showing pirated films?

In those countries? (Almost?) all of them. The hard part would be finding one which *isn't* doing so. The better ones will use copies that were made with something better than a handheld video camera pointed at the screen, but it will still have stupid things like subtitles in a language nobody in the country speaks (not English).

You'll also find photocopied "books" printed on standard-size paper and bound with plastic rings, CDs/DVDs listing 5 different popular pieces of software plus cracks and/or keygens, and copies of well-known photos or other graphical art (either in printed form or in bulk on a CD).

The interesting thing about all this copyright-ignored media is that, aside from a few pieces from successful "locals" (literally, fewer than ten per nation), it's produced elsewhere in the world - in the US, Canada, the EU, NZ, or Australia, typically - because in such countries it's feasible for people to actually make a living creating such content.

Why do the apologists for the ridiculous "intellectual property" laws always have to go to imaginary scenarios to try to make their case?

What do you have to smoke that you can quote somebody's post, including the conditions under which it is stted to apply and still completely fail to understand that it is not being stated to apply universally? Are you one of those idiot Americans (I'm a US citizen myself, for the record) who thinks that the USA is the entire world, or are you simply completely deluded?

Hell, there are artists who got their start by distributing their work on bittorrent sites. Without that "illegal copying" those artists would never have gotten a record contract.

You can't even construct a logical argument out of your own words, never mind when using anybody else's. If the copyright owner is putting the content online for redistribution, it's hardly "illegal copying" anymore. Copyright law allows for the owner of the copyright to distribute their works however they like.

Umm... no. You've apparently completely failed to notice the part where this CPU *has* no cache, at least certainly no L2 or L3. Instead, it talks directly to main memory (which it's embedded in, at least in a portion of, and has extremely fast access to). More accurately, any given gigabit (128MB of RAM) is the cache for one of these CPUs.

I don't know how quickly they can communicate across the DIMM (each 2GB has 16 CPUs, so some intercommunication is critical) - maybe that's more akin to traditional memory access speed - but it's still a ludicrous amount of "cache" and eliminating the multiple levels of caching greatly simplifies the memory controller logic.

That said, I wonder how useful a CPU core with so few transistors (and apparently a low clock speed) will be. It's certainly not going to have all the peripheral interfaces you mention - not even close.

Actually, there's a reasonably active hacker community working on WP7. Nobody has yet found a universal full-unlock (the closest was the ChevronWP7 Unlocker, which let you developer-unlock a device without buying a Marketplace Developer account), but certain types of low-permission homebrew are available for all phones. Some phones (HTC gen1 and some gen1.5, Samsung gen1) have ways of getting full "root" access, and the developer of one of the tools has promised support for more HTC and LG devices in his next release (he's apparently already found the holes that will give sufficient permissions). Nothing very eciting for Nokia yet, but not as many hackers have access to them yet.

The key point in all cases is that it requires the device be unlocked and the user be interacting with it. You can "unlock" your phone, but you can't use the same hacks to steal data off a phone you stole from somebody or something like that, and you certainly can't use them for a drive-by attack.

Meh... talk to some of the engineers who were actually working on OS/2. IBM were demanding absurd things of it, and making MS shoulder the risk if those orders from on high didn't work out. Early versions of OS/2 were pure-16-bit (in the days when even pre-NT Windows was starting to go 32-bit) and had a very poor software ecosystem. Microsoft said "We can do better" and started the NT project, which was originally going to be the "new technology" version of OS/2. However, when the Windows API started becoming much more popular with third-party developers, Microsoft told IBM to that if they wanted that much control over OS/2, they could develop the next version themselves. They changed the primary API for NT to Win32 and sold it as "Windows NT", though they maintained an OS/2 subsystem for some years.