I guess I agree with you there, though I miss my old iPhone. My G1 seems like a Model T in comparison hardware-wise, but I don't think I can go back to the no-keyboard situation. My old eyes just don't work well enough to find those small keys.

I looked at all the photos of the new phone. Here's some insights from a G1 owner:

- The screen is *exactly* the same model. It's nice, but only 2.5". Every time I hold an iPhone, what really strikes me is that huge 3.5" screen.
- They *still* don't have a headset jack. This is possibly the dumbest lack of a feature ever in a smart phone, and they kept it! The non-standard headphones HTC ships suck, you have to have a bulky dongle to use anything else, and you can't charge while listening to music. Sucks, sucks, sucks!
- The camera lens appears larger, possibly meaning that HTC decided not to ruin all photos with a crap lens like on the G1. Of course, it could just be the same lens with a new style case.
- Being HTC, there's no way this phone has a bigger battery than the G1, and battery life will suck.
- The slot for the speaker looks identical the the G1. On the G1, it fills up with lint, and you can't hear calls when there's background noise, like while driving or at a restaurant (much to the pleasure of everyone else).

Until someone fixes the damned headphone issue, the speaker, the camera, and increases the screen size on an Android phone, I'll stick with my crappy G1.

I've had an iPhone, and currently own a T-Mobile G1. In short, Android is a solid competitor (the only competitor IMO) to the iPhone OS. The actual G1 phone however, sucks big time, as GP suggests, though he didn't get close as to why:

- The speaker slot gets clogged with lint, and now I have trouble hearing the phone
- While the camera has auto-focus and more pixels than iPhone, HTC screwed up with a crappy lens that ruins all photos
- There's no headphone jack. Instead, HTC provides crappy headphones using a non-standard extension to the micro-USB jack
- The phone is too thick, and not nearly as sleek or well designed or packaged as the iPhone
- The battery is tiny in comparison to the iPhone.

Basically, some US company (Qualcom? T-Mobile?) must have said "Here's the specs for you, HTC", and then HTC delivered on the specs, but screwed up the phone.

While there are fewer users of the G1, there are proportionally fewer developers. Many of the best application spaces are already dominated on iPhone, while they're still open on Android. I believe that future Android phones will gain in market share vs iPhone, making development for Android a wise choice.

Diane has been technology illiterate for her entire career. In general, her heart is in the right place, but as Silicon Valley's senator, she's shamefully lacking in any sort of reasonable understanding of the issues.

Quite seriously, she hears, "let's protect our children", and "let's protect intellectual property", and that convinces her to support Trojan legislation designed to allow telcoms to put toll roads on the Internet.

Thanks for the links. Did you forget Fly the Road?

Here's the skinny on EEStor, so far as I can read.

Their new patent is a clean-up version of their old patent. Unfortunately, it's still a piece of marketing BS. Look at claim 1. It has 15 steps! If you avoid any one of them, you do not infringe. The rest of the patent is similar - not designed to protect, but designed to market an idea.

The physics of EEStor seems to have been replicated by half a dozen other companies, so we can probably begin to believe that the EEStore ultra-capacitors are possible in principle. However, a fully charged EEStor capacitor will explode on impact with about the force of 100 sticks of dynamite. I've thought about this problem for two years, without any solution. Hopefully the guys at EEStor are wiser, but no one else on the Internet has a solution either.

In short, don't bother believing this until you see it.

It turns out that this is not the first time geothermal energy plants have drilled into hot magma. They had a similar experience decades ago in Iceland. Unfortunately, it was a story told to me by a professor at Berkeley in 1985, so I'm not able to google any info on it.

Good point. With solid-state drives coming down the pipe, even that bottle-neck will be somewhat relieved for what most people do (lot's of disk reads, few writes). I write programs to help designers place and route chips. The problem size scales with Moore's Law, so we never have enough CPU power. I'm part of a shrinking population that remains focused on squeezing a bit more power out of their code. I wrote the DataDraw CASE tool to dramatically improve overall place-and-route performance, but few programmers care all that much now days. On routing-graph traversal benchmarks, it sped up C-code 7X while cutting memory required by 40%. But what's a factor of 7 now days?