Wednesday, October 08, 2008

HTC Diamond

I just picked up an HTC Diamond from Sprint. It's by far the best mobile phone I've owned. The display is just jaw-dropping. It's pretty speedy, and the TouchFlo 3D interface is a nice step forward. It's not as good as the iPhone, and every now and then Windows Mobile 6.1 rears its ugly stylus-head, but most things tick along with just my thumb.

A few tweaks I've made:

  • Remove the Sprint Music link from the music player. Frees up more screen space for album art. Also while you're editing that XML file, delete the Sprint TV. There's no need for that in the quick-launch.
  • A few registry tweaks. Turn on a geo-tagging camera (though I've only had it report 0,0 in flickr...wonder if they turned it off for a reason?).
  • Of course I installed S2U2 to lock the screen. Also remapped (#31) the "Manila" (internal name for TouchFlo 3D) home key to have a "Lock" softkey.

Economics

From Wikipedia:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. [Emphasis in original.]

Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

-Marriner S. Eccles, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from November 1934 to February 1948, detailed what he believed caused the Depression in his memoirs, Beckoning Frontiers (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1951).