Phht, it obvious you've never experienced the sadness that is the Nexus 4 in Northern California.

1) When my apps fail to connect to the internet, I can't tell if it's the latest OS is bad, or it's the hardware, or if it's T-mobile. Or if it's all of them.
2) Charging via microUSB and inductive will fail from time to time. There appears to be multiple problems. One of which is the phone draining more power than some 3rd party inductive chargers can provide, causing the battery icon and charging dialog to flash on and off rapidly (and not charge). Another friend who uses the official Nexus 4 inductive charger found and filed a bug where after you use it, power management breaks itself and the OS refuses to return to low power states until you reboot.
3) Other mystery bugs in Android: notifications for some apps never show up in the drop down. Stock messaging app sometimes never notifies you of new SMS messages. MMS sometimes refuse to download. This sort of outage continues for days, and all of a sudden fixes itself only to rebreak later. (it's not T-mobile's fault as opening the app will reveal the un-notified message)

Given my experiences, a Nexus 4 is most definitely a crappier phone than an iPhone 4.

In all seriousness, the most important thing out of these "liberation kits" appears to be the screwdriver, not the screws.
There is no warranty problem if there wasn't any unnecessary change to the phone.
Keeping the phone as-is simply seems the most reasonable thing to do.

Lemme try this witty comeback thing! It looks fun!

That warranty card happens to be phone itself because it's got the serial number they can look up to see if there's a warranty left. So when we store the pentalobe screws in the phone, we're all good! Look, there's even two little holes at the bottom of the phone to keep them in! How thoughtful! Oh wait....

Uh... did you realize that page doesn't have the word "patent" anywhere?

Samsung's modified micro USB connector does 1080p.... at 30fps.
In fact, almost every Android device with MHL I've looked at is limited to 1080p30..... or 1080p24.... or 720p60.

This adapter does 1080p at 60fps if the device attached to it can provide the stream. (ipad mini can't, iphone 5 can)

My nick is because I played Half Life on a Pentium 133 over a 28.8k modem and I wanted people to know that if managed to kill them through my slideshow of a computer, they truly sucked.

I probably got maybe 5 kills per deathmatch. 3 frames per second, probably.

Amen, brotha!

It's also hilarious when some programmers try to write in Verilog as if it were C. :)

The first 2 examples do look pretty darn similar.
The Rambler and the Armada look nothing alike.

Maybe nobody thought to do design patents back then cuz they were such crappy cars, haha.

Intel was shipping their own controllers for the low end, and using Marvell's for the high end with the 510.

Then Sandforce for the 520.

Not quite correct either.

It's not the controller hardware dying, it's the controller firmware crashing and burning.

A few days ago, my Crucial C300, a drive I've been running like mad for 2 years, finally critically failed to read back a sector. And instead of returning an disk error, the entire drive froze. After waiting 15 minutes to see if it'd come back, it didn't. Rebooting, then rereading resulted in the same drive crash. Overwriting the sector with dd made it force a remap and allowed me to fully image my drive.

What does this tell us?

1) A 2nd controller doesn't help. It'll just do the same thing.
2) In the normal block failure mode, it'll return a disk error and we can overwrite it.
3) There exists bugs in the firmware where the block tracking metadata gets into a state where the controller can't handle it anymore. My guess is that maybe it ran out of memory trying to clean itself up or something. Whatever the case, if you hit something like this, there needs to be a way to escape without losing the entire drive. Perhaps a debug mode or memory-optimized read-only mode toggled by a jumper or something.
4) I should have noted the rare occasional stutter in the past month as a sign that things were not great.

Anyhow, I backed everything up, issued an ATA secure erase to hope the drive cleans its metadata too, and then loaded everything back on from the disk image. Works perfectly.

(relavent equipment: OSX 10.6, no TRIM enabled, ~2.5 year old drive, primary build/dev environment, all firmware updates have been loaded)

I actually asked a person who worked in Intel's storage research about this.

It boiled down to this: Intel Research made the X25, and pushed it over to Intel's product teams who basically just put them in boxes and shipped it. And people loved it.

Then Intel's product design teams tried to design a follow on controller and sucked entirely at it. So they got the research group to rev the x25 a few times, while they contracted with Marvell for controllers since they needed a SATA 6G controller for their own firmware.

At that time, they hadn't switched to Sandforce, but judging by the fact that Sandforce has been quite dominant even back then, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel did almost no firmware customization now.

I wouldn't have believed that Intel had sucked in SSD controller design had I not heard it from a Intel researcher (although they might have been biased given that the story make their peers look good) but looking back again, we're talking about the company that brought us Netburst and FBDIMMs.

apt-get is a easy way to kill my machine in my experience.

Apple's App Store has got the right idea. Carry the dependent libraries with the app that needs it. Storage is cheap, time is not. Better to not deal with dependency hell at all and just waste a hundred megs instead. All your configs are still in your home directory, in property lists. Better ordered than the old unix config files, not obscure like the registry, and easily convertible in-place into something that resembles JSON if you want to use a text editor, but also easily loadable into in-memory data structures if you want to programmatically manipulate them.

The vast majority of users don't want Linux on the desktop because it get them nothing they find useful. That's pretty close to dead in my opinion.

The common user don't understand how to use it. They won't understand the difference between Linux and a Linux distro. They don't have anybody to hand hold them through their tasks, and most of their software won't run on it without arcane bash incantations. Plus the community in general treats them like idiots.

But that's not even the real problem. What makes it dead in my eyes is actually people like myself.

I've ran Gentoo, YDL, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, amongst other smaller distros. I used to be a fan. Now I'm completely indifferent. I simply just don't care enough to pick Linux.

Why? Because as far as it has come, Linux holds itself back. No stable ABI's? Come on, every other OS can upgrade kernels without recompiling every driver. KDE/GNOME/Unity/etc infighting and all that is ugly to watch. The last straw was Ubuntu software updates on a dev machine years ago. Bog standard Dell Precision 370. Pentium4. Intel board. No extra accessories. It's the stereotypical P4 box.
I clicked update on Ubuntu and Ubuntu made itself unbootable. (This wasn't a major update either, it was simply the typical package updates from the repos.) After fixing it manually, it did it again a month later. Then I transferred all my work to a Mac and that was that.

Since then, all my machines run OSX, OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana, WinXP, or FreeBSD. (in that priority)
Shit just works... and more importantly, stays working.

If somebody told me that Linux has fixed all that in the past 4 years, that'd be nice. But it wouldn't convince me to go back and try it again.
I feel I'd gain nothing from using Linux.

As for the people who buy a Mac to run Linux because the hardware is better supported, it's just a matter of time before they switch to OSX.

To their credit, when I used a Samsung Captivate, Touchwiz was way more responsive than ASOP on the same class of hardware.
It still feels unnatural and laggy, but it was definitely an improvement over stock 2.1

The Nexus line sucks.

The N1 is deprecated.

The NS has at least 4 different hardware versions, where most of them don't even get all the features. (Google Wallet). Plus the hardware for the NS is crap. I hate how the on/off switch is opposite the volume buttons. It blasted my ears every time I want to go change the music if I don't hold it carefully.

The Galaxy Nexus is a mini-tablet; it's too big, and LTE burns batteries. Oh, and the GPU is already a generation or two behind the iPhone 4S.