To me, the biggest drawback is its popularity: the hardware is insanely fragmented. Want to write a Symbian app? Browse the device list http://www.symbian.org/devices

App developers have to support:
1) mix of touch and non touch screens
2) Insanely different display resolutions
3) Crazy list of hardware buttons (some have keyboards, some none, some have the 10 digit numeric, etc.)
4) Different form factors (clamshell, block, etc.)

Basically, writing a very good, elegant app that people WANT TO PAY FOR in Symbian is a disaster. Best to write for iOS and Android. Although both hardware platforms are fragmented they are not nearly as bad to deal with as Symbian. That, and there's a culture of "It's OK and normal to buy apps" (much more so on iOS than Android, of course) that doesn't appear to exist on other platforms (yet).

Why, in this day and age, are we talking about NUMBERS? Do we address websites via IP address? No, we have DNS.

Why isn't there a DNS for phones? I pick a name, perhaps even something as simple and unique as MY EMAIL ADDRESS, and then anyone who knows my email address can contact me. Or, just like DNS, I can set up any number of unique names for various things (my-recruiters@gmail;) that point to some sort of numeric based phone.

You could even call it Phone Name System.

Indeed, if they breach his cannon, it will likely backfire the next time he tries to use it. He could be seriously injured.

Wait, seriously? Sitting next to fat people is more inconveniencing than having your airways close off and going into shock because the airline decided it was clever to serve the food item with the most potentially deadly allergic reaction in a small cabin with recycled air?

Oh, wait. You mean inconvenient to you. Right. I suppose other people potentially dying isn't a problem then. Carry on.

The difficulty with including oncall pay in the base salary of the position is that oncall time and difficulty can vary greatly depending on circumstances, and there's no way to reflect that in one's salary in a timely manner. If one member of the team gets ill and another has to cover two 24/7 shifts, he is not going to be happy if he's not getting compensated. Extra comp time would help, but that's more or less identical to paying a bonus, except that you're getting less productivity out of the department.

There are also longer term issues. If an employee is promoted, quits, or dies (it's happened =(), the oncall rotation can change a lot, and in addition to the extra work required of the team to make up for the missing position, it can brew discontent fairly quickly. People can talk about salaries and agreements and sucking it up and such, but if you have a good team they probably realize it as much as you do, and screwing them over with extra work that they were not expecting when they were hired and without appropriate compensation is not a good way to keep people around.

Crucial's M225 (I own the 128GB version) 1711 firmware had significant bugs and was quickly yanked. In order to upgrade to the latest 1819 you have to downgrade back to 1571.

http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

Seems as if most consumer SSD products are still a bit in the "beta" stage.

No, not really.

RAID-5 allows for disk failure via distributed block parity. ECC recovers single bit error.

The "Memory RAID" design should prevent a larger issue (multi-bit/DIMM failure/etc. that ECC cannot prevent) from taking the whole system out.

I would imagine that ECC memory would be used in conjunction with higher-level striping or mirroring to prevent and recover from both failures.

RAM is dirt cheap and most server systems support significantly more RAM than most people bother to install. For critical systems, ECC works but that doesn't prevent everything (double bit errors etc.). Is it time for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive DIMMs? Many HA servers now support Memory Mirroring (aka RAID-1 http://www.rackaid.com/resources/rackaid-blog/server-dysfunction/memory_mirroring_to_the_rescue/) but should there be more research into different RAID levels for memory (RAID5-6, 10, etc?)

See, I read it as "Bugger," which is a great name for the channel.

Self-documenting code is ideal, as long as it also includes comments.

Don't underestimate the power of the re-org. Someone moves into a position above you, decides everyone needs a fresher approach, and suddenly there's a contractor in, documenting the code for you, and you're replaced by a cheaper or more friendly face.

Watching it happen from the outside, the transition can be painful, but nobody is as irreplaceable as they think.