Whatever Nokia did was going to be a rough transition. Their market position had a good deal of S60 inertia behind it - app installed base and user familiarity and the like - that would've gone out the window no matter what the switch was to, Meego, Android or Windows Phone. It's hard to say that Nokia's killer hardware with Meego would've done much better - or worse - than what the Windows stuff did. I think it would've gone better but not great for them, personally. (having owned and enjoyed an E71, an N97 and an N800) That's the beauty of the memo, and the strategy. You can construct a plausible argument that Elop actually believed it and was acting in good faith. He wasn't, of course, but it'd be hard to prove that he didn't really believe WP7 was somehow the way to go.

If I remember right, it's MUCH worse than MS getting the patents. Nokia keeps the patents, licenses them to MS, and has a warchest of billions to go help their friends Microsoft with suits from their patent portfolio, without the encumbrance of all the cross-licensing MS has done. It has the look of Nokia now being a supersized turbo SCO with enough of a warchest that you can't stop them by merely running them out of money. The extent to which Nokia has been destroyed as a company, then turned into a marketing vehicle for the otherwise worthless Windows Phone, and now into *both* a captive hardware unit and possibly the biggest 'independant' mobile patent weapon ever... It's just stunning. And the board just let it happen.

A high-volume system vendor locally told me that there have been a bunch of companies hoarding RAM all year, which is not helping the prices. Same's happening with enterpriseish SSDs (with Amazon getting the blame most frequently, it's believed for AWS rather than retail). Said vendor is using his own hoard of cheaply-bought ram to score contract wins, since he doesn't need to cover the current inflated prices.

Every brake I've heard of has a mechanical connection, and I'd bet the car they were attacking there had one too. They're probably attacking the ABS system, which has (obviously) the ability to dump the pressure in the system, or else it wouldn't work. The noise it's making during this would be consistent with an ABS pump going off. Get a car without ABS? That's tricky for a new car, since stability control is now mandatory, and ABS is usually integrated with that. Could pull the right fuse, I guess, if there's nothing else on it.

lirc+ an MCE6 receiver is the way to go with my Harmony setup. If you don't need integration, as the other reply says mythmote and the like are excellent alternatives to IR.

As well as the 'here's what I'm doing and the current time' OLED screen. That was always great. I need to recreate that with my Myth frontend.

One thing that really needs to be said, just in general: I bought an i7-920 new, going on *five* years ago and it was still going strong when I replaced it for a 3770k, not because I felt that I would get massive performance benefit, but because I ran out of slots trying to support new buses (USB3, SATA III, etc, etc). I've never overclocked one, but I hear they're great for that, too. If everything from that era this long-lived, or is this just quietly a really great CPU?

I would submit, that 'he's not a reliable source', being something that could well be backed up by facts and used as a predictor of probable veracity, would not be an ad hominem arguement, even. And in this case, you could fairly easily back that up with some of the things he's said. To get into true ad hominem territory, you'd have to get into politcs or percieved intelligence or anything less relevant, really.

With good but not great hardware, I more than saturate gigabit on my 8-drive setup using ZFS on Linux. ZFS-FUSE would putter about at 20-40 MB/sec but this version zips right along. Saturates the gig link, scrubs at 450MB/sec... Good enough to keep me happy anyway.

...was that it must be an old RCA plant and it's annoying to see it go.

Humor value noted, but for those wondering, he's talking about Extended Attributes, the big database of stuff about files, stored on HPFS. Kind of like a Resource Fork on a Mac file. EA corruption was one of the more annoying things you'd have to deal with on an OS/2 system. Examples of EA data would include the file's icon, data type (which would refer back to which program to open it), etc. Without it, a lot of the system would get really unhappy. There was even a hack IBM came up with to let you have EAs on FAT volumes, but that was a little less nice.

It's actually a very nice SACD player, using the Cell to decode the DSD streams into high-rate PCM. I have a 'real' SACD player and end up using the PS3 most of the time...

RCA was also bizarrely good at dropping the ball on technologies they had. RCA's Lancaster, PA plant made picture and TV camera tubes. My dad told me they had engineers come to the local ham radio club in the 70's and show off this tiny (for the time) CCD-based video camera they'd come up with, showing how it could take pictures by candlelight. If they'd commercialized that quickly, they could have extended their dominance of the TV station camera market into the 80's. The same plant was also home to the research group that commercialized the heat pipe concept, which was discarded by them, then bought out by the engineers involved and turned into a company that's still going today. They even had a very workable VCR prototype in the early-mid 70's that they dropped as 'too expensive' rather than try to develop into something affordable. That decision alone, if they'd controlled the US videotape format, could've let us have RCA around as a real company today.

In '97ish I was maintaining a system that ran an inventory database on a Pick emulator running on top of AIX. Boy that was interesting. Took a lot of the neat 'database OS' idea out of it though.