[Droid Eris Android Development] bftb0:
I think there is a phenomenon that everybody needs to be aware of.

We're all agreed that this seems to happen rarely (at the moment), right?

We're all probably agreed that we are looking for a way to make it happen more frequently, right?

Well, let me draw an analogy. Suppose you ride the bus sometimes, and about 1 in 100 times when you ride the bus, a pretty girl gets on board.

Let's suppose you were drinking Pepsi the first time it happened. You might be tempted to conclude "every time I drink a Pepsi on the bus, a pretty girl gets on board.". And, given your observed data - that would be true; every time you drank a Pepsi, a pretty girl got on the bus. But it is only a single sample.

Now suppose you want to meet more pretty girls on the bus. You start drinking Pepsi and riding the bus, and after about the 50th time without meeting a pretty girl, you say to yourself, "Crap, I don't think it's the Pepsi after all!"

Now I picked "50" because we started out with the presumption that the odds were 1 in 100. So, in fact, after "testing" the Pepsi theory 50 times, there really was only about a 1 in 2 chance that you would have met a pretty girl anyway. So... really ... you didn't test things well enough to find out if the Pepsi really had any effect at all. To validate that something has an effect when the desired outcome happens rarely - you need to measure the behavior over lots and lots of trials.

But, you still want to meet pretty girls on the bus, so you come up with a new hypothesis: "I was riding the bus close to 6 pm; perhaps more people are coming and going at that time, and I should ride the bus more often near 6pm". Let's suppose you are in fact correct about this hypothesis, and indeed the odds quadruple - from 1 in 100 to 4 in 100 (or 1 in 25).

How many times should you ride the bus at 6pm to check out your new theory? Once? Twice? Three times?. A simple calculation shows that riding the bus only three times, there's only about 1 chance in 8 that a pretty girl would get on the bus - so even though the odds have improved substantially - they are still poor ... and you haven't tested enough to prove anything, frankly

Now compare the above hypothetical case to all the reports here. Folks claiming that you need to be in a dark closet with a live chicken in a paper bag to root your phone - or that you need to have a music video on your SD card of Jay-Z, and that only videos of Jay-Z on your SD card will work.

Well of course nobody is insisting that those things are necessary to root the Eris; they are insisting that things that sound far more plausible, but are backed up by evidence which is no better: a single occurrence of something that happens rarely..

Now I'm not trying to be a negative Nelly here - but what I am trying to say are that you should not put much faith in any "method" you read here which is based on a single occurrence. The fact that it worked might be nothing more than random chance which were not affected by the "rituals" the practitioner went through.

And, more importantly - if anyone is going to deserve praise for improving the situation (making it happen more reliably), they are going to need to do a lot of testing.

So, If you think you have a "winning method", then test it out repeatedly, and report how many trials you made in total, and how many "wins" you got out of those trials. And slowly, over time, the truth of the matter - and improved methods - will emerge.

DC_striker, are you listening?

That's really the only way we are going to be able to move forward, until a method can be put together that allows people to get their phones rooted in a reasonable amount of time - maybe one hour, not several days or weeks.

bftb0