The situation is really pretty dire. Even back when PocketPC devices were in their 'best case' period for hobbyist tinkering(ie. fairly current, available either new or nice and cheap used), the Linux ports were rough.
The onboard flash was usually eccentric enough that you could only run Linux from CF or SD, some devices you still had to boot to WinCE every time and use a program that did some clever memory twiddling to kick the device over to Linux(something like the DOS Linux loaders that had their uses back in the day, though I'm not nearly qualified to discuss the details; but the concept and use were similar).
Peripheral support(especially graphics) was also generally atrocious, makes today's proprietary-blobs-for-one-antique-android-version mobile GPU situation look like some kind of Stallman Valhalla. With the right witchcraft, some models could at least display stuff on screen, some 'ran linux' in the sense that a linux kernel running on the device could be made to chat over the USB dock or a serial header; but not much else.
Since that time, the sites, documentation, writeups, tools, and projects have substantially rotted. With the hardware supply dwindling and Android devices cheap and common(or expensive and fairly classy, if you prefer) virtually all the developer, tinkerer, power-user, and other useful people have moved on. At best, you might still be able to dig up copies of files and docs that aren't just broken links; but that's about it.
WinCE software (while that has its own limitations, like being WinCE software) is actually likely to be markedly less painful. It's not exactly still on the market; but the value of used/new-old-stock/not-yet-linkrotted/etc. WinCE software is close to zero, so you can probably score some with sufficient scrounging. Plus, while MS certainly doesn't give a damn about supporting you anymore, 2005-2007 wasn't all that long ago, so you can probably get a full WinCE dev environment, exactly as MS would have recommended, with nothing more than a bit of piracy and an XP VM with USB passthrough.
Lest this all seem doom-and-gloom; I do have one useful recommendation: Pocket Putty. Exactly what it sounds like. Everyone's favorite Windows SSH client; but for Pocket PC. There's also a VNC Viewer. Never could find any X11.
At this point, pretty close to useless as standalone devices(and yes, the batteries are probably shot in any case, Li-ion is born to die); but between Putty and VNC you might actually be able to get some nice little 'dashboard' style display screens tethered to a more capable computer(possibly even use them as 'heads' for the routers, NASes, etc. that run Linux properly and have USB ports; but don't have graphics output: even something with no physical graphics hardware can, if it has the RAM, run xvnc, which would allow you to use a pocket PC with VNC client as a 'monitor'. Not something you'd want to do video playback on; but a nice little bandwidth graph, or some alerts or something? Sounds fun.
(Also, you mentioned SIRFStar III GPS units: you didn't say if those were built in, CF/SDIO expansion, or some proprietary 'cradle' thing: in any case those are very, very, well supported by practically everything, common, reasonably well regarded, spit NEMA strings over something that looks like a serial port, sometimes 3.3v, sometimes 5v, sometimes actual RS-232, sometimes USBTTY. Assuming that you can crack them out of their packaging and get the pinout right before you fry something, you should be able to use SIRFStar IIIs with damned near anything, with at most a serial level converter or suitable USB/serial adapter. Even if you have to junk the Pocket PCs, those might be handy to have.)
You don't...exactly...strike me as somebody who would use marxist economic formulations; but a considerable majority of CS workers are kidding themselves if they think that they map to anything other than 'proletariat' or 'petite bourgeoisie' in a marxist economic formulation.
Obviously, if you reject such a thing entirely that doesn't much matter; but the point remains in that context.
If anything, we've gotten worse on standardization over time.
Back in ye olden days, it was actually reasonably likely that the entertainment system was a DIN-mount box with some obnoxious-but-more-or-less-functional bundle of wiring harness that connected it to to the vehicle. Less so today, and(even when that's still physically the case) more likely that it isn't just power and analog audio; but a whole bunch of actively hostile and undocumented CAN chatter that disables a bunch of random cabin systems if you aren't using a suitably blessed device.
What I find puzzling is that (unless somebody needs to be fired yesterday, and hard) the 'Ford Sync' component isn't really something that a good realtime OS would be an obvious choice for. It's the infotainment/navigation/non-essential cabin control widget; and had better not be scribbling all over the ECU over CAN.
That doesn't make QNX wrong, you can put a GUI on top of it just fine; but it makes it a lot less obvious why MS got the boot. WinCE is kind of old and nasty; but the NT kernel is respectable enough, and all reports are that (thanks to the fact that your phone is now more powerful than the workstations it ran on in 1993) it actually delivers fairly peppy performance on the distinctly midrange hardware that most WP8 devices ship with.
Apparently MS and Ford had some sort of togetherness problem, and one or both of them screwed up such that the resulting product isn't good enough; but I'm guessing that the problem wasn't "We need a better real time OS". This 'Ford Sync' is a consumer electronics UI problem.
I'm definitely no Russia wonk; but their activity with respect to the internet looks fairly similar to the Chinese playbook: a mixture of making domestic surveillance easier(mass surveillance is much more practical if you can just subpoena the results, rather than tap the endpoints, so having Russians using American services hosted in places where getting the good stuff is either impossible or at least impossible to do silently isn't desirable for the local authorities) and quasi-mercantilist support for (Putin-friendly) local businesses. American internet companies(though not ISPs) have some very potent offerings compared to many of their international competitors(lest you accuse me of flag-waving jingoism, those offerings are often built with good old American know-how provided by talented foreigners that we attract or buy out; but the products are still good and still owned by American companies), if you wish to support local businesses(for a mixture of economic reasons, cultural considerations, and surveillance purposes); basically any dicking-with-foreigners that you can get away with is to your advantage.
In relatively minor ways, even mostly-friendly European states do it(eg. mandates and subsidies to preserve local, local-language film production vs. Hollywood, various 'Google Tax' initiatives designed to give cover to incumbent publishers with pitiful or nonexistent internet presence). The Chinese are more aggressive and more experienced(the various mandatory 'joint ventures' that end up being tech transfers, using the Great Firewall to mess with external services and make internal services more reliable by comparison, etc.)
The Russians will likely have a harder time of it because they aren't populous enough, and on an economic upswing, to be treated as an 'absolutely must expand into this market, even if the terms are blatantly unfair!'; but their strategy looks fairly similar: mess with the foreigners enough to improve the prospects of local companies, move more Russian internet activity onto servers in Russia that can easily be subpoenaed or equivalent, add a variety of obnoxious measures that can then be used as 'carrots' in diplomacy (we'll totally remove the restrictions on some of your major internet companies that we just pass if you overlook our activities in X!".
It's not exactly nice, and Putin isn't dumb, so I wouldn't just dismiss it; but it looks like a fairly familiar playbook.
Fair enough. Now if we could just get broadcasters to stop succumbing to the temptation to turn TV into legovision because turning up the MPEG-2 compression until the video cries means you can have more channels...
I am not a subject matter expert; but the swift divergence of typical resolutions on small-screen devices with typical resolutions on larger monitors makes me suspect that manufacturing technique has improved substantially at fabricating very small pixels; but less dramatically at avoiding flawed pixels cropping up often enough to hurt yields of large and high resolution screens.
I mean no disrespect to the (likely substantial) engineering effort and cleverness that goes into cramming 2560x1440 into some teeny little phone screen; but it does have the advantage that, if the glass is being cut into a large number of small screens you can limit your defect-related losses to a relatively small percentage of the total area, even if an unacceptable defect or two shows up in every sheet produced. With larger screens, you need much larger areas of zero unacceptable defects or you'll be scrapping substantial amounts of material.
Less important; but still an issue in a few cases(eg. 'retina' iMacs) is that external display interconnects have to hew quite closely to standards because they'll otherwise not work at all(or work erratically depending on sheer luck and generate a huge number of returns), or have to be sold as (wildly expensive) specialist-vendor-validated-and-guaranteed card/monitor pairs(I assume that the absurdly high resolution zillions-of-greys monitors used for reviewing radiology data have already gone down this road at least at the high end). With an embedded display, doing something nonstandard costs more than doing something supported by every cheapo SoC vendor on the pacific rim; but you otherwise have total freedom to do whatever you want, as long as you can deliver a product that works when the customer pokes it. They will never know, and never care, exactly what you did between the logic board and the LCD panel.
You will pay for the privilege(and your ears won't thank you); but is the scaling of SLI/Crossfire good enough to save you? A quick look shows that you can get motherboards with up to 7 GPU slots without recourse to any terribly specialist vendors(they aren't cheap; but they are perfectly normal motherboard brands that you could have from Newegg by Monday, not some specialist display wall vendor who might get you a quote in the same amount of time), so you can throw a lot of GPUs at the problem; but that only helps if performance actually improves at something vaguely approaching a reasonable multiple of how many cards you add.
Arguably, that depends on how large the display is. In the tablets and smartphones market(and, at least to an extent, smaller TVs and monitors) higher resolutions are mostly about aesthetic improvements. Between the limits of human dexterity on input devices and the limits of human vision you can't use the extra pixels to actually make UI elements smaller(it still has to be a certain minimum size for the user to see it, click it, or touch it, regardless of how many pixels fit in that physical area); but you can use them to make things look buttery smooth and more or less eliminate visible jaggies.
In larger panels, there is still a good deal of room(at least for users with decent eyes) to use additional pixels to add additional effective 'space' into a monitor of the same size. No longer being able to see the nasty huge pixels that result when some terrible person smears 1920x1080 over a 27 inch screen is nice(seriously, guys, WTF is up with the increasing sizes of 1920x1080 monitors? Used to be you could get 19.5/20-inch ones quite easily, now the market is rotten with 22 inch and higher); but it's the increase in work room that really makes the difference.
I'll add, the only downside was getting used to the dpi change when using a mouse. You have to move a noticeable amount more to clear the width of your desktop. I adjusted the mouse sensitivity up a little, but you don't want it too much or it feels unprecise. Its partly just a matter of accepting the increase in real estate you have:)
I wonder if it would become natural/intuitive enough to be essentially unnoticeable after a week or two of practice to have a knob or something mapped to adjust mouse sensitivity on-the-fly? If it didn't become intuitive, such an arrangement would really be no better than just using the usual OS adjustment dialogs; but if a little practice caused you to stop even having to think about the fact that you are using it such an arrangement(doesn't need to be that specific peripheral, it's just sort of the iconic USB-attached-knob) it could actually be pretty handy to be able to smoothly move between sweeping-but-imprecise zooming around your giant screen(s) and then upping the sensitivity as you approach the target and need to get some precise clicking done.
Perhaps if you are buying your LCDs just to watch TV the 'content' argument is a serious problem; but c'mon, essentially all modern 'TV's are just big monitors with built in ATSC/DVT-B tuners and severely questionable EDID data.
Especially when the resolution is an integer multiple of what the existing 'content' was designed for, and a PC with suitably punchy GPU (which actually isn't much punch these days unless you are gaming, where things can admittedly get damned expensive at high resolutions, this isn't the bad old days when you had to buy some freaky Matrox unit to get a VGA out that didn't turn into blurryvision when it met a real monitor) can drive a seriously enormous screen, who cares?.
Quit carping about how Sony hasn't yet graced us with Premium Ultra HD Content on Blu-Ray 2.0 and embrace the fact that you can buy a terrifying pixel-battery of your very own at surprisingly attractive prices. Still a few kinks to work out at very high resolutions that currently available displayport or HDMI standards can't drive properly; but that's really the remaining issue.
I confess to being a bit baffled at how these power cord defects keep happening. Your basic AC power cord is ancient by the standards of electronic gizmos and by far the simplest thing going into a modern laptop. Does that simplicity attract a tendency to live dangerously with the low bidder? Is strain relief just ugly enough that people who don't know better keep trying to cut it out of the design?
The rootkit was far worse than this. The only reason it wasn't a huge PR disaster is that most non-techies have no idea what it was.
That and the invidious notion that 'consumers' really don't need or deserve control over their devices is fairly alarmingly entrenched. Even when the system in question isn't one that you 'licensed and not sold' to the sucker, you can have your merry way with them in ways that you'd never get away with in the context of real property.
If infiltration and covert execution of a rootkit were treated even as seriously as, say, physical trespass, Sony would have had a problem. As it was, the response was along the lines of "Well, yes, you have a trespasser; but we can hardly make a case out of it unless you can prove that he is otherwise making a nuisance of himself or something."
With Sony sensors leading the camera market their imaging division isn't going anywhere.
True; but shareholders tend to have...finite...patience for using the proceeds of an actually profitable division to engage in an open ended clusterfuck somewhere else in the company.
If you can make a strategic case for it, or it promises to be temporary, they can usually be made to suck it up; but it's not a blank check, even if the other division is all kinds of healthy.
"Some cybersecurity experts even feel that the Second Amendment can be interpreted as applying to 'cyber arms'." - Name names of these idiots please.
Perhaps more importantly, even if that were true how would it be relevant?
It is, in fact, the case that (aside from one or two idiot jurisdictions that tried to ban 'hacker tools', an attempt that either bans absolutely nothing or bans all security research and every security and diagnostic utility right down to 'ping') possession of some fairly potent dual-use tools is downright white-hat, and even shameless sale of ready-weaponized exploits is done without legal risk(looking at you, Vulpen).
However, the second amendment usually doesn't come into it, the fact that it's all just software (which just isn't something most people get viscerally worked up about) and so much of it is at least as useful for playing defense as for playing offense does.
Even if, in some weird fringe corner of survivalist grey hats or something, it was treated as a second amendment issue, so what? The Second Amendment protects your right to keep and bear arms, not your right to use them on anyone who pisses you off without any legal niceties. If you are dishing out the vigilante justice, it doesn't much matter what basis you found your right to possess the weapons you are using; you still have a fairly serious legal problem. Even among its most enthusiastic proponents, the 2nd only protects possession, it doesn't magically make all uses lawful.
Does Displayport 1.2 do '4k' without multi-stream-transport hacks? I've been given the impression that that...sometimes...works as expected and is largely untrustworthy. At least it's possible.
I can't really disagree with you(and this is why I bought some VGA/DVI to LVDS converters and rescued some old 1400x1050 laptop panels); but the one somewhat mitigating factor is how absurdly cheap the things have gotten.
If I had an unlimited budget then and an unlimited budget now I'd probably be bemoaning the industry; but without an unlimited budget I find it hard to deny that, while I don't much like this 16:9 nonsense, I've never owned more pixels in my life.
This, obviously, didn't precisely demand 4:3 (and a variety of different ratios and even shapes were available at various times, I still covet one of the circular ones); but the manufacturing and structural demands of relatively cheaply building big glass tubes full of nothing and electron guns likely constrained some of the more extreme variations that occasionally crop up with flat panels. Aside from some really old or odd circular units, being square came about by customer demand; but I suspect that it would not have been a cost-saving measure to switch from 4:3 to 16:9 if they had to build CRTs to suit.
I'm a bit surprised that the plummeting cost and increasing availability of giant monitors hasn't given any impetus to some sort of decent tiling window manager(even just as an option lurking where only the power users would find it). Sure, in Linux, basically every permutation of Window management is possible(and might even be maintained); but pickings are slimmer in Windows and OSX.
Setting a system so that 'maximize' only expands a window to fill half of your giant wide screen, or dividing a single physical screen into multiple logical screens(the reverse, however, is often possible), or even 'snap-to' for manually tiling multiple application windows without annoying gaps or overlaps, surprisingly uncommon.
I always wince a little when I see somebody wasting a huge swath of screen space on the whitespace on the right side of a poorly designed web page or the like; but I can't really blame them when non-guru support for partitioning giant monitors is so poor.
It leads to a little bit of weirdness at either the top or bottom of the transition, since there aren't any (common) monitor sizes that are 1920 pixels tall; but given the absurd cheapness of more-or-less-adequate 1920x1080 displays, I've become fond of a 'triptych' style arrangement where I have the nicest monitor I can reasonably afford in landscape orientation in the center(2560x1440 is pretty reasonable these days, 2560x1600 if the premium isn't too bad, one of the '4k' resolutions once the necessary displayport and HDMI revisions to run them above 30Hz settle down) and then have two 1920x1080 cheapies in portrait, one on each side, for additional room.
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The situation is really pretty dire. Even back when PocketPC devices were in their 'best case' period for hobbyist tinkering(ie. fairly current, available either new or nice and cheap used), the Linux ports were rough.
The onboard flash was usually eccentric enough that you could only run Linux from CF or SD, some devices you still had to boot to WinCE every time and use a program that did some clever memory twiddling to kick the device over to Linux(something like the DOS Linux loaders that had their uses back in the day, though I'm not nearly qualified to discuss the details; but the concept and use were similar).
Peripheral support(especially graphics) was also generally atrocious, makes today's proprietary-blobs-for-one-antique-android-version mobile GPU situation look like some kind of Stallman Valhalla. With the right witchcraft, some models could at least display stuff on screen, some 'ran linux' in the sense that a linux kernel running on the device could be made to chat over the USB dock or a serial header; but not much else.
Since that time, the sites, documentation, writeups, tools, and projects have substantially rotted. With the hardware supply dwindling and Android devices cheap and common(or expensive and fairly classy, if you prefer) virtually all the developer, tinkerer, power-user, and other useful people have moved on. At best, you might still be able to dig up copies of files and docs that aren't just broken links; but that's about it.
WinCE software (while that has its own limitations, like being WinCE software) is actually likely to be markedly less painful. It's not exactly still on the market; but the value of used/new-old-stock/not-yet-linkrotted/etc. WinCE software is close to zero, so you can probably score some with sufficient scrounging. Plus, while MS certainly doesn't give a damn about supporting you anymore, 2005-2007 wasn't all that long ago, so you can probably get a full WinCE dev environment, exactly as MS would have recommended, with nothing more than a bit of piracy and an XP VM with USB passthrough.
Lest this all seem doom-and-gloom; I do have one useful recommendation: Pocket Putty. Exactly what it sounds like. Everyone's favorite Windows SSH client; but for Pocket PC. There's also a VNC Viewer. Never could find any X11.
At this point, pretty close to useless as standalone devices(and yes, the batteries are probably shot in any case, Li-ion is born to die); but between Putty and VNC you might actually be able to get some nice little 'dashboard' style display screens tethered to a more capable computer(possibly even use them as 'heads' for the routers, NASes, etc. that run Linux properly and have USB ports; but don't have graphics output: even something with no physical graphics hardware can, if it has the RAM, run xvnc, which would allow you to use a pocket PC with VNC client as a 'monitor'. Not something you'd want to do video playback on; but a nice little bandwidth graph, or some alerts or something? Sounds fun.
(Also, you mentioned SIRFStar III GPS units: you didn't say if those were built in, CF/SDIO expansion, or some proprietary 'cradle' thing: in any case those are very, very, well supported by practically everything, common, reasonably well regarded, spit NEMA strings over something that looks like a serial port, sometimes 3.3v, sometimes 5v, sometimes actual RS-232, sometimes USBTTY. Assuming that you can crack them out of their packaging and get the pinout right before you fry something, you should be able to use SIRFStar IIIs with damned near anything, with at most a serial level converter or suitable USB/serial adapter. Even if you have to junk the Pocket PCs, those might be handy to have.)
This is the Harper regime we are talking about. Did you need any additional hints?
You don't...exactly...strike me as somebody who would use marxist economic formulations; but a considerable majority of CS workers are kidding themselves if they think that they map to anything other than 'proletariat' or 'petite bourgeoisie' in a marxist economic formulation.
Obviously, if you reject such a thing entirely that doesn't much matter; but the point remains in that context.
If anything, we've gotten worse on standardization over time.
Back in ye olden days, it was actually reasonably likely that the entertainment system was a DIN-mount box with some obnoxious-but-more-or-less-functional bundle of wiring harness that connected it to to the vehicle. Less so today, and(even when that's still physically the case) more likely that it isn't just power and analog audio; but a whole bunch of actively hostile and undocumented CAN chatter that disables a bunch of random cabin systems if you aren't using a suitably blessed device.
What I find puzzling is that (unless somebody needs to be fired yesterday, and hard) the 'Ford Sync' component isn't really something that a good realtime OS would be an obvious choice for. It's the infotainment/navigation/non-essential cabin control widget; and had better not be scribbling all over the ECU over CAN.
That doesn't make QNX wrong, you can put a GUI on top of it just fine; but it makes it a lot less obvious why MS got the boot. WinCE is kind of old and nasty; but the NT kernel is respectable enough, and all reports are that (thanks to the fact that your phone is now more powerful than the workstations it ran on in 1993) it actually delivers fairly peppy performance on the distinctly midrange hardware that most WP8 devices ship with.
Apparently MS and Ford had some sort of togetherness problem, and one or both of them screwed up such that the resulting product isn't good enough; but I'm guessing that the problem wasn't "We need a better real time OS". This 'Ford Sync' is a consumer electronics UI problem.
And get new ones. What's so difficult about that?
How about tattooing 'Dirty Cop' on their foreheads(Snow Crash style) and then introducing them to the general prison population?
The janitor will need a nice bonus and a hell of a stiff drink; but the problem will likely be solved.
I'm definitely no Russia wonk; but their activity with respect to the internet looks fairly similar to the Chinese playbook: a mixture of making domestic surveillance easier(mass surveillance is much more practical if you can just subpoena the results, rather than tap the endpoints, so having Russians using American services hosted in places where getting the good stuff is either impossible or at least impossible to do silently isn't desirable for the local authorities) and quasi-mercantilist support for (Putin-friendly) local businesses. American internet companies(though not ISPs) have some very potent offerings compared to many of their international competitors(lest you accuse me of flag-waving jingoism, those offerings are often built with good old American know-how provided by talented foreigners that we attract or buy out; but the products are still good and still owned by American companies), if you wish to support local businesses(for a mixture of economic reasons, cultural considerations, and surveillance purposes); basically any dicking-with-foreigners that you can get away with is to your advantage.
In relatively minor ways, even mostly-friendly European states do it(eg. mandates and subsidies to preserve local, local-language film production vs. Hollywood, various 'Google Tax' initiatives designed to give cover to incumbent publishers with pitiful or nonexistent internet presence). The Chinese are more aggressive and more experienced(the various mandatory 'joint ventures' that end up being tech transfers, using the Great Firewall to mess with external services and make internal services more reliable by comparison, etc.)
The Russians will likely have a harder time of it because they aren't populous enough, and on an economic upswing, to be treated as an 'absolutely must expand into this market, even if the terms are blatantly unfair!'; but their strategy looks fairly similar: mess with the foreigners enough to improve the prospects of local companies, move more Russian internet activity onto servers in Russia that can easily be subpoenaed or equivalent, add a variety of obnoxious measures that can then be used as 'carrots' in diplomacy (we'll totally remove the restrictions on some of your major internet companies that we just pass if you overlook our activities in X!".
It's not exactly nice, and Putin isn't dumb, so I wouldn't just dismiss it; but it looks like a fairly familiar playbook.
Fair enough. Now if we could just get broadcasters to stop succumbing to the temptation to turn TV into legovision because turning up the MPEG-2 compression until the video cries means you can have more channels...
I am not a subject matter expert; but the swift divergence of typical resolutions on small-screen devices with typical resolutions on larger monitors makes me suspect that manufacturing technique has improved substantially at fabricating very small pixels; but less dramatically at avoiding flawed pixels cropping up often enough to hurt yields of large and high resolution screens.
I mean no disrespect to the (likely substantial) engineering effort and cleverness that goes into cramming 2560x1440 into some teeny little phone screen; but it does have the advantage that, if the glass is being cut into a large number of small screens you can limit your defect-related losses to a relatively small percentage of the total area, even if an unacceptable defect or two shows up in every sheet produced. With larger screens, you need much larger areas of zero unacceptable defects or you'll be scrapping substantial amounts of material.
Less important; but still an issue in a few cases(eg. 'retina' iMacs) is that external display interconnects have to hew quite closely to standards because they'll otherwise not work at all(or work erratically depending on sheer luck and generate a huge number of returns), or have to be sold as (wildly expensive) specialist-vendor-validated-and-guaranteed card/monitor pairs(I assume that the absurdly high resolution zillions-of-greys monitors used for reviewing radiology data have already gone down this road at least at the high end). With an embedded display, doing something nonstandard costs more than doing something supported by every cheapo SoC vendor on the pacific rim; but you otherwise have total freedom to do whatever you want, as long as you can deliver a product that works when the customer pokes it. They will never know, and never care, exactly what you did between the logic board and the LCD panel.
You will pay for the privilege(and your ears won't thank you); but is the scaling of SLI/Crossfire good enough to save you? A quick look shows that you can get motherboards with up to 7 GPU slots without recourse to any terribly specialist vendors(they aren't cheap; but they are perfectly normal motherboard brands that you could have from Newegg by Monday, not some specialist display wall vendor who might get you a quote in the same amount of time), so you can throw a lot of GPUs at the problem; but that only helps if performance actually improves at something vaguely approaching a reasonable multiple of how many cards you add.
Arguably, that depends on how large the display is. In the tablets and smartphones market(and, at least to an extent, smaller TVs and monitors) higher resolutions are mostly about aesthetic improvements. Between the limits of human dexterity on input devices and the limits of human vision you can't use the extra pixels to actually make UI elements smaller(it still has to be a certain minimum size for the user to see it, click it, or touch it, regardless of how many pixels fit in that physical area); but you can use them to make things look buttery smooth and more or less eliminate visible jaggies.
In larger panels, there is still a good deal of room(at least for users with decent eyes) to use additional pixels to add additional effective 'space' into a monitor of the same size. No longer being able to see the nasty huge pixels that result when some terrible person smears 1920x1080 over a 27 inch screen is nice(seriously, guys, WTF is up with the increasing sizes of 1920x1080 monitors? Used to be you could get 19.5/20-inch ones quite easily, now the market is rotten with 22 inch and higher); but it's the increase in work room that really makes the difference.
I'll add, the only downside was getting used to the dpi change when using a mouse. You have to move a noticeable amount more to clear the width of your desktop. I adjusted the mouse sensitivity up a little, but you don't want it too much or it feels unprecise. Its partly just a matter of accepting the increase in real estate you have :)
I wonder if it would become natural/intuitive enough to be essentially unnoticeable after a week or two of practice to have a knob or something mapped to adjust mouse sensitivity on-the-fly? If it didn't become intuitive, such an arrangement would really be no better than just using the usual OS adjustment dialogs; but if a little practice caused you to stop even having to think about the fact that you are using it such an arrangement(doesn't need to be that specific peripheral, it's just sort of the iconic USB-attached-knob) it could actually be pretty handy to be able to smoothly move between sweeping-but-imprecise zooming around your giant screen(s) and then upping the sensitivity as you approach the target and need to get some precise clicking done.
Wow "Lack of VESA mount" on something that isn't a sub $100 pack-in piece of shit? What the hell were they thinking?
Perhaps if you are buying your LCDs just to watch TV the 'content' argument is a serious problem; but c'mon, essentially all modern 'TV's are just big monitors with built in ATSC/DVT-B tuners and severely questionable EDID data.
Especially when the resolution is an integer multiple of what the existing 'content' was designed for, and a PC with suitably punchy GPU (which actually isn't much punch these days unless you are gaming, where things can admittedly get damned expensive at high resolutions, this isn't the bad old days when you had to buy some freaky Matrox unit to get a VGA out that didn't turn into blurryvision when it met a real monitor) can drive a seriously enormous screen, who cares?.
Quit carping about how Sony hasn't yet graced us with Premium Ultra HD Content on Blu-Ray 2.0 and embrace the fact that you can buy a terrifying pixel-battery of your very own at surprisingly attractive prices. Still a few kinks to work out at very high resolutions that currently available displayport or HDMI standards can't drive properly; but that's really the remaining issue.
Sounds like you got burned...
I confess to being a bit baffled at how these power cord defects keep happening. Your basic AC power cord is ancient by the standards of electronic gizmos and by far the simplest thing going into a modern laptop. Does that simplicity attract a tendency to live dangerously with the low bidder? Is strain relief just ugly enough that people who don't know better keep trying to cut it out of the design?
The rootkit was far worse than this. The only reason it wasn't a huge PR disaster is that most non-techies have no idea what it was.
That and the invidious notion that 'consumers' really don't need or deserve control over their devices is fairly alarmingly entrenched. Even when the system in question isn't one that you 'licensed and not sold' to the sucker, you can have your merry way with them in ways that you'd never get away with in the context of real property.
If infiltration and covert execution of a rootkit were treated even as seriously as, say, physical trespass, Sony would have had a problem. As it was, the response was along the lines of "Well, yes, you have a trespasser; but we can hardly make a case out of it unless you can prove that he is otherwise making a nuisance of himself or something."
With Sony sensors leading the camera market their imaging division isn't going anywhere.
True; but shareholders tend to have...finite...patience for using the proceeds of an actually profitable division to engage in an open ended clusterfuck somewhere else in the company.
If you can make a strategic case for it, or it promises to be temporary, they can usually be made to suck it up; but it's not a blank check, even if the other division is all kinds of healthy.
"Some cybersecurity experts even feel that the Second Amendment can be interpreted as applying to 'cyber arms'." - Name names of these idiots please.
Perhaps more importantly, even if that were true how would it be relevant?
It is, in fact, the case that (aside from one or two idiot jurisdictions that tried to ban 'hacker tools', an attempt that either bans absolutely nothing or bans all security research and every security and diagnostic utility right down to 'ping') possession of some fairly potent dual-use tools is downright white-hat, and even shameless sale of ready-weaponized exploits is done without legal risk(looking at you, Vulpen).
However, the second amendment usually doesn't come into it, the fact that it's all just software (which just isn't something most people get viscerally worked up about) and so much of it is at least as useful for playing defense as for playing offense does.
Even if, in some weird fringe corner of survivalist grey hats or something, it was treated as a second amendment issue, so what? The Second Amendment protects your right to keep and bear arms, not your right to use them on anyone who pisses you off without any legal niceties. If you are dishing out the vigilante justice, it doesn't much matter what basis you found your right to possess the weapons you are using; you still have a fairly serious legal problem. Even among its most enthusiastic proponents, the 2nd only protects possession, it doesn't magically make all uses lawful.
To get the Keurig Genuine Advantage, obviously.
Does Displayport 1.2 do '4k' without multi-stream-transport hacks? I've been given the impression that that...sometimes...works as expected and is largely untrustworthy. At least it's possible.
I can't really disagree with you(and this is why I bought some VGA/DVI to LVDS converters and rescued some old 1400x1050 laptop panels); but the one somewhat mitigating factor is how absurdly cheap the things have gotten.
If I had an unlimited budget then and an unlimited budget now I'd probably be bemoaning the industry; but without an unlimited budget I find it hard to deny that, while I don't much like this 16:9 nonsense, I've never owned more pixels in my life.
This, obviously, didn't precisely demand 4:3 (and a variety of different ratios and even shapes were available at various times, I still covet one of the circular ones); but the manufacturing and structural demands of relatively cheaply building big glass tubes full of nothing and electron guns likely constrained some of the more extreme variations that occasionally crop up with flat panels. Aside from some really old or odd circular units, being square came about by customer demand; but I suspect that it would not have been a cost-saving measure to switch from 4:3 to 16:9 if they had to build CRTs to suit.
I'm a bit surprised that the plummeting cost and increasing availability of giant monitors hasn't given any impetus to some sort of decent tiling window manager(even just as an option lurking where only the power users would find it). Sure, in Linux, basically every permutation of Window management is possible(and might even be maintained); but pickings are slimmer in Windows and OSX.
Setting a system so that 'maximize' only expands a window to fill half of your giant wide screen, or dividing a single physical screen into multiple logical screens(the reverse, however, is often possible), or even 'snap-to' for manually tiling multiple application windows without annoying gaps or overlaps, surprisingly uncommon.
I always wince a little when I see somebody wasting a huge swath of screen space on the whitespace on the right side of a poorly designed web page or the like; but I can't really blame them when non-guru support for partitioning giant monitors is so poor.
It leads to a little bit of weirdness at either the top or bottom of the transition, since there aren't any (common) monitor sizes that are 1920 pixels tall; but given the absurd cheapness of more-or-less-adequate 1920x1080 displays, I've become fond of a 'triptych' style arrangement where I have the nicest monitor I can reasonably afford in landscape orientation in the center(2560x1440 is pretty reasonable these days, 2560x1600 if the premium isn't too bad, one of the '4k' resolutions once the necessary displayport and HDMI revisions to run them above 30Hz settle down) and then have two 1920x1080 cheapies in portrait, one on each side, for additional room.