I don't think anyone would want an airliner to fly through their balls.

Sad. I wonder how this thread would have differed (not just the parent's post but some of the other replies) if the GP had said 'I was talking to my 23 year old brother'.
Sorry, off-topic I know, and no I'm not new here (just lurked for years before signing up).

Someone mentioned the phone's ability to receive OTA firmware updates... I guess that means that in future they could decide to implement the ability to install other applications. As it is, from the start, having a load of functionality out of the box that you wouldn't normally have does seem like a plus. But with the ability for the firmware to be updated, nothing is set in stone.

You could always, y'know, just turn that feature off.
I love Visual Studio, but I always spend a minute or two configuring a fresh install to how I want it. However I like the fact that I have those options available to me.

You are correct though, give some coders notepad/emacs/vi/cat and a compiler rather than their usual fully-featured IDE and they're completely lost. But one thing I've noticed (especially recently, working with EEs who often write firmware but don't consider themselves developers) is that not having the time/experience to completely memorise the entire set of library functions available doesn't make someone less of a skilled developer.

When someone says they want complete control over the locations of bits on a drive that could be taken to mean the actual magnetic domains (which aren't simply digital values anyway) or it could just mean the logical digital values that are seen by the OS and filesystem drivers. I wonder if by using phrases like 'magnetic hard drive platter' and mentioning Reed-Solomon encoding, kidcharles has made people think of the lowest level meaning of 'location of bits', whereas in actual fact he just wants something like /dev/sda.
'A free and open source solution' is mentioned.. but theres no mention of what form this solution might take. In the case of a custom HDD controller (which people have suggested as a solution) this would mean something like a VHDL or Verilog implementation (but it would be highly vendor and model specific, plus there'd probably be IP issues). But when people say 'a free and open source solution' they tend to mean software running on a common desktop OS. Oh and I guess there's the question about 'any good utilities' which suggests that kidcharles isn't after an entirely programmatic approach.

So, if I'm correct, any decent disk editor will supply the required level of control. I can't be bothered to look any up (Google will help out here) but I know there are plenty (open source, free or proprietry) for Linux, DOS and Windows. Hell, you could possibly do it all with shell scripting under Linux if you so desired :-)

Alternatively, maybe kidcharles wants to make spirograph like artwork for creatures that can see in the magnetic spectrum.