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.

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?)

No worries -- the concept is right :)

"Obviously the best way of accomplishing such a database is to denormalize any value that might be null"

That's normalizing -- the table in this example is de-normalized