Desktop processors don't have the necessary logic for synchronization of more than one CPU. (The CPUs have to talk to each other so that the on-chip caches don't cause data inconsistency between them.) Server-class processors (Xeon and Opteron CPUs designed for multiple-socket motherboards) have it, and adding that extra circuitry increases the manufacturing cost. Intel and AMD are probably overcharging for that logic because they can, but it certainly does add to the complexity and cost of the chip.
And that 2009 Mac will probably only be able to run the current OS X version for a year, until OS X 10.10 comes out and support for it is dropped. The average lifetime these days for Macs to stay in OS support is five years, though some models get a little more and some a little less.
They have already done this starting with Windows 7; only systems that can run Aero acceptably have it enabled by default. (Just about any current system can, even ones with Intel integrated graphics.) Vista, alas, always defaulted to having Aero on (it could be turned off in preferences), and many of the GPUs of the day were woefully inadequate to the task.
Vista was also a memory hog compared to XP (partly because of Aero, partly because it liked to use a lot more RAM for disk cache, and partly just because), and lots of people were still using systems with amounts of RAM that are pitifully small by modern standards. Some XP systems had as little as 256MB, and few systems from the XP era shipped with more than 1GB. (I'm not counting systems that shipped with XP after Vista was available; those often had more RAM.) Each new version of Windows since Vista has improved memory efficiency (the jury is still out on Windows 10 since it's still a long way from RTM), so systems from the Vista era often run better with Windows 7 or 8 than they did with Vista. (The exceptions are ones with hardware that never got drivers for the later versions.)
Although high end laptops continue to get faster, the mainstream has been stuck at the same level of computing power for a few years now. (The average GPU has improved somewhat since 2014 integrated graphics are better than 2007 integrated graphics, but with a few high end exceptions they are still pitiful.) Instead of more computing power, people have been buying lower price, lower weight, and longer battery life. And some of the latest crop of Windows tablets only have 1GB of RAM because they're pushing for the $100 price point. (Not quite there yet but the Microsoft Store is selling a Toshiba tablet for $119; we'll probably hit $100 by Christmas.)
Another factor is the corporate market. Most enterprises prefer to run the same version of Windows on all their computers; if they make the decision to upgrade they upgrade everybody, except perhaps some specialized systems that can't be upgraded. (I still have one Windows XP system for that reason; it is used to drive a chip programmer that never got drivers for any version of Windows after XP, and never had support for any non-Windows OS. It is now disconnected from the Internet.) They want to be able to install the new OS on their installed base as well as on new systems.
A final factor is the push for improved battery life. Even if your system has a GPU that is capable of rendering fancy visual effects, it will use more power doing that than it will doing flatter rendering. Microsoft has quietly brought back some of the Aero look in the Preview (the taskbar uses semitransparent rendering), but they will likely disable it by default on tablets, and Aero can be done without DX10 in any case. Even if Microsoft were to introduce some fancier transitions that used DX10, those transitions would surely be optional and normally off on systems with power limitations.
Microsoft could ratchet up the system requirements to dual core and DX10 without losing too many people. But the benefit of doing that would be minimal. So long as things like dual core Bay Trail Atoms with 1GB are part of the computing landscape, they can't significantly increase the system requirements. But they can continue to make improvements that will help people with fancier systems; I haven't seen much sign of that in the Technical Preview but Microsoft may be working on things that haven't surfaced yet.
What the current Preview is about is bringing back most of the Windows 7 interface with a few of the best things from 8 mixed in, plus improved tablet and touch support and some under-the-hood work. In my so far limited experience they have succeeded; it's already faster than Windows 7 on a 2007 laptop and it will probably be better still by the time it reaches RTM.
There has been misogyny in gaming (and in society) for years. There have been feminists for years, and anti-feminists who object to them. No news there.
The news is that Intel bowed to pressure from a group of anti-feminist gamers and withdrew its support from a site that published some feminist criticism of gaming culture. That makes me very sad. I would have preferred to see Intel stand up for the feminist gamers, or perhaps even increase its support of Gamasutra in response to the blackmail. That they chose to pull their ads shows that they care about the bottom line more than they care about social justice.
Mars is as good a hedge as we can build right now. Interstellar ships would be a better hedge but we will need more in-space infrastructure before we will be able to build them.
Voice recognition that runs locally will not be nearly as good as the cloud version. Your phone has neither the processing power nor the storage space to do it well. Recent versions of local applications like Dragon work well but they use three gigabytes of disk space, a large chunk of RAM, and more processor power than your phone probably has to do it. (And even then they aren't as good because they don't get the benefit of crowdsourcing the learning of the kinds of queries that people make to millions of people.) You probably aren't going to want to give that many resources to a local text to speech program on your phone, and if you do it is going to make everything else that runs on your phone behave sluggishly.
To sum up, there is a reason that you can't get what you're looking for. It won't work. It will probably not work any time in the foreseeable future, because the cloud version will always be better and it will ratchet up people's expectations of what is "good enough".
That 80% share includes the Chinese AOSP devices that don't include any Google services. If you leave those out of the picture, iOS and Android are in a much tighter race.
Everybody bundles browsers now. They should have remained separate applications; I wanted Netscape to get an antitrust judgment against Microsoft, and my preferred remedy would have been to require Microsoft to discontinue IE. But that ship has sailed.
Everybody on mobile has always bundled some core apps. Nothing new there. Google is now pushing a larger collection of them, but it's no more extensive than what Apple bundles with an iPhone or Microsoft bundles with Windows Phone. Again, we might have a better world if none of those companies bundled apps, but fighting it is another lost cause at this point.
I am running CM on my Galaxy Nexus because Google stopped doing updates for it; if Google had brought KitKat to it I would have just stayed with the stock software. I suspect a lot of people who have older Nexus devices are using third-party builds for the same reason.
My Xperia Z Ultra still has the standard Sony build on it, which is a fairly lightly skinned Android plus some Sony apps. I'm waiting to see whether Sony brings Android L; if they don't I'm likely to switch to a third-party version of Android.
A good explanation of the limits of current interplanetary flight. Basically, once you leave low earth orbit you're committed.
Returning to Earth assumes that the craft carries a landing module capable of Earth landing. A Mars lander would be built differently (and less substantially) because of the lower gravity and lack of atmosphere on Mars. Mostly likely the aborted mission would have to wait in LEO until another craft could launch from Earth to bring the people down.
Yes, the C64 had a separate processor for its floppy drive. So did Atari. But that's because both manufacturers chose to put peripherals like floppy disk drives on a serial bus rather than interfacing them directly to the main CPU.
I know that Atari did that to make RFI compliance easier. Signal radiation from a low speed serial bus is less of a problem than radiation from a parallel bus, and they didn't want to integrate the floppy drive into the main unit to keep the price down. (Some users chose less expensive tape drives or only used cartridge-based software.) At the time, the FCC had just adopted its first RFI standards for personal computers, and many manufacturers were griping that the new standards were impossible to meet. But Atari was able to point to their 400 and 800 models, which passed the tests with flying colors, and say that the standards were not impossible at all, they just required more attention to shielding than computer makers had been accustomed to.
Most modern personal computers are actually less well shielded than those old Ataris were. (Even Atari's own later models, the XL and XE series and the ST series of 68000-based systems, were not; they were only built as well as they had to be rather than as well as they could be.) Current day PCs depend in part on a bit of technical trickery to comply; spread-spectrum master clocks. Instead of using a single stable frequency, the master clock is intentionally varied over a small range; this makes the noise peaks smaller.
Another cause for selling chips as less costly models is thermal. A given chip might have all its cores working, but if you run them all at full speed the chip consumes more than its rated power. So you turn off some of the cores and/or lower the clock speed and sell it as a lesser model.
Nothing new under the sun here; as you point out, CPUs and RAM are also graded that way. The top performers get sold as expensive models, the ones that can't reach the top speed or consume too much power at that speed are downgraded. Sometimes one or more CPU cores are disabled, like the three core processors that AMD sold at one time; they actually had four cores on the die. Some 486SX chips from Intel were actually 486DX chips with floating point units that didn't work. (They also made 486SX chips with no FPU on the die; if you bought one you had no way of knowing which type you would get.) The difference with GPUs is that their large core count makes a much wider range of degrading possible; you can turn off 5%, 10%, 25%, or even 50% of the cores.
Late in the life of a product line, companies may sell fully functional parts as lesser models. If production has improved to the point where nearly all your chips work completely, you may have to cut the price on some of them because there are customers who aren't willing to pay the higher price.
In some cases, the modded boards will work properly. The customer might be lucky enough to get one of the boards with a fully functional chip, or may plan to use the board with an aftermarket cooling system. But there are no guarantees. Any reseller who puts up modded boards for sale is committing fraud. But individual customers should have the right to experiment with equipment that they own, and NVidia's action is also causing collateral damage to the open source movement. I don't think NVidia is actively hostile to Nouveau, they are just indifferent about it.
They would end up having to charge more than $1, but Tesla could partner with existing rental companies to place some Teslas in key markets. An especially appealing model would be to get by-the-hour rental companies like Zipcar to offer them.
It's not surprising that a Moto was sturdier. Handheld public safety radios are a big part of Moto's history, though the part of the company that makes the phones (Motorola Mobility) was spun off from the base company (which was renamed Motorola Solutions when the separation happened) in 2011. They are accustomed to dealing with the need for rugged design.
Carbon fiber would be stronger. But it has downsides: it's more expensive and it fails catastrophically rather than bending. It doesn't dissipate heat nearly as well, which would be a problem on the iPhone 6 because the aluminum case is a key part of the thermal design.
Pinning this on Bill Gates isn't fair. He hasn't been involved in the running of Microsoft for many years, though he is still a significant stockholder. (He is no longer the largest stockholder; that would be Steve Ballmer. But Gates's own shares plus the ones held by his foundation are probably still the single largest chunk.)
Some toilets will flush really poorly if you do that; they will no longer clear the bowl properly. Go ahead and try it - you won't damage anything - but be prepared for the possibility that you will need a new toilet if you want to save water.
Toilets designed for low water use are supposed to be designed to flush well with the reduced volume; many do, some do not. Expensive European designs seem to be the best flushers on average.
To address one thing RabidReindeer said: in my experience with my dimmers the Cree bulbs dim smoothly and linearly, it's just at a different rate (more slowly) than incandescent bulbs dim. YMMV depending on what kind of dimmers you have or if you use other models of dimmable LED bulbs.
I had tried some dimmable CFLs and found them totally unsatisfactory for two reasons. One, they flickered badly when dimmed, and two, if you had more than one in the same fixture their brightnesses didn't track. That is, they were the same brightness when on full, but when dimmed some bulbs would be brighter than others.
The Cree dimmable LED bulbs (the ones that are now under $5 each at Home Depot, at least here in MA - that pricing may include an energy conservation subsidy) fix both problems. No visible flicker and multiple bulbs track correctly. They do behave differently from incandescent bulbs in three ways: the color temperature remains constant, they don't dim at the same rate as incandescents, and they don't get as dim at minimum. None of these are deal breakers so long as you replace all the bulbs in a multi-bulb fixture and don't try to use a mixture of Cree and incandescent bulbs. Mixtures of different LED bulbs are also likely to track incorrectly in dimmers, so don't do that; buy a full set for a fixture at the same time.
So far, zero LED bulb failures other than the one I dropped.
Yes... but 18 months is significantly less than the useful life of the device, especially now that we have picked all the low hanging fruit of smart device innovation and the upgrade cycle is stretching out. I'd like to see a three year commitment to updates for Nexus devices in the future, which would put them at parity with Apple's policies.
Texas is currently the largest producer of wind power in the US (reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) and likely to remain a leader because it has lots of wind and lots of wide open spaces. The state lags in solar power, despite also being an excellent location for it (southern latitude and lack of cloud cover), because the high capital cost of solar plants is hard to justify in a state where fossil fuels are cheap, and because investors have mostly preferred to fund wind projects. Small-scale solar (home installations) also lags in Texas because there is no statewide program of net metering, resulting in it being unavailable to most residents of the state. (Reference: http://www.nationaljournal.com... )
Renewable power generation is growing rapidly everywhere in the US. Although it will never reach 100% of electricity production unless we also build very large scale energy storage facilities (necessary because of the unsteady output of wind and solar installations), it can certainly become a major source of electric power. And Tesla's batteries can make it possible for renewables to be a larger part of our electric grid.
The one Microsoft store that I have visited more than once (Prudential Center in Boston) always seems to be busy. I've never seen crazy crowds like the Apple Store gets on launch days, but I didn't go there the day the Xbox One came out. One factor is that they only do anything special for the launches of Microsoft's own products (the Surface and XBox lines), not for any of the laptops made by other manufacturers that they sell.
The Microsoft Stores I have visited don't look all that much like Apple Stores, but they did copy a lot of other things. One is that all the computers are set up so you can actually try them out; they have network connections and are logged in on accounts that aren't locked down, so you can even download applications and try the computers out with your favorite software. And the sales people are low pressure, perhaps because they are paid a flat salary rather than commissions, just like Apple.
But why shouldn't Microsoft adopt those things? Apple has shown that they work. And Microsoft wanted to create a different environment than the other stores selling their products are offering.
Part of the problem may be the lack of memory in many Windows Phone models. The popular Lumia 520, for example, has a measly 512MB, and even the new Lumia 630 is hobbled by that same small amount of RAM. In contrast, nearly every Android phone has at least 1GB now, with high end phones having 2GB or 3GB.
The browser on an old Android phone with 512MB will also choke quickly. It's true that the iPhone 4 and 4s only have 512MB (the iPhone 5 and later have 1GB), but they also have an OS that is somewhat more memory-efficient and that doesn't do true multitasking - well, it didn't until iOS 7 and people have been disappointed with the performance of that on older iPhones.
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Desktop processors don't have the necessary logic for synchronization of more than one CPU. (The CPUs have to talk to each other so that the on-chip caches don't cause data inconsistency between them.) Server-class processors (Xeon and Opteron CPUs designed for multiple-socket motherboards) have it, and adding that extra circuitry increases the manufacturing cost. Intel and AMD are probably overcharging for that logic because they can, but it certainly does add to the complexity and cost of the chip.
And that 2009 Mac will probably only be able to run the current OS X version for a year, until OS X 10.10 comes out and support for it is dropped. The average lifetime these days for Macs to stay in OS support is five years, though some models get a little more and some a little less.
They have already done this starting with Windows 7; only systems that can run Aero acceptably have it enabled by default. (Just about any current system can, even ones with Intel integrated graphics.) Vista, alas, always defaulted to having Aero on (it could be turned off in preferences), and many of the GPUs of the day were woefully inadequate to the task.
Vista was also a memory hog compared to XP (partly because of Aero, partly because it liked to use a lot more RAM for disk cache, and partly just because), and lots of people were still using systems with amounts of RAM that are pitifully small by modern standards. Some XP systems had as little as 256MB, and few systems from the XP era shipped with more than 1GB. (I'm not counting systems that shipped with XP after Vista was available; those often had more RAM.) Each new version of Windows since Vista has improved memory efficiency (the jury is still out on Windows 10 since it's still a long way from RTM), so systems from the Vista era often run better with Windows 7 or 8 than they did with Vista. (The exceptions are ones with hardware that never got drivers for the later versions.)
Although high end laptops continue to get faster, the mainstream has been stuck at the same level of computing power for a few years now. (The average GPU has improved somewhat since 2014 integrated graphics are better than 2007 integrated graphics, but with a few high end exceptions they are still pitiful.) Instead of more computing power, people have been buying lower price, lower weight, and longer battery life. And some of the latest crop of Windows tablets only have 1GB of RAM because they're pushing for the $100 price point. (Not quite there yet but the Microsoft Store is selling a Toshiba tablet for $119; we'll probably hit $100 by Christmas.)
Another factor is the corporate market. Most enterprises prefer to run the same version of Windows on all their computers; if they make the decision to upgrade they upgrade everybody, except perhaps some specialized systems that can't be upgraded. (I still have one Windows XP system for that reason; it is used to drive a chip programmer that never got drivers for any version of Windows after XP, and never had support for any non-Windows OS. It is now disconnected from the Internet.) They want to be able to install the new OS on their installed base as well as on new systems.
A final factor is the push for improved battery life. Even if your system has a GPU that is capable of rendering fancy visual effects, it will use more power doing that than it will doing flatter rendering. Microsoft has quietly brought back some of the Aero look in the Preview (the taskbar uses semitransparent rendering), but they will likely disable it by default on tablets, and Aero can be done without DX10 in any case. Even if Microsoft were to introduce some fancier transitions that used DX10, those transitions would surely be optional and normally off on systems with power limitations.
Microsoft could ratchet up the system requirements to dual core and DX10 without losing too many people. But the benefit of doing that would be minimal. So long as things like dual core Bay Trail Atoms with 1GB are part of the computing landscape, they can't significantly increase the system requirements. But they can continue to make improvements that will help people with fancier systems; I haven't seen much sign of that in the Technical Preview but Microsoft may be working on things that haven't surfaced yet.
What the current Preview is about is bringing back most of the Windows 7 interface with a few of the best things from 8 mixed in, plus improved tablet and touch support and some under-the-hood work. In my so far limited experience they have succeeded; it's already faster than Windows 7 on a 2007 laptop and it will probably be better still by the time it reaches RTM.
There has been misogyny in gaming (and in society) for years. There have been feminists for years, and anti-feminists who object to them. No news there.
The news is that Intel bowed to pressure from a group of anti-feminist gamers and withdrew its support from a site that published some feminist criticism of gaming culture. That makes me very sad. I would have preferred to see Intel stand up for the feminist gamers, or perhaps even increase its support of Gamasutra in response to the blackmail. That they chose to pull their ads shows that they care about the bottom line more than they care about social justice.
Mars is as good a hedge as we can build right now. Interstellar ships would be a better hedge but we will need more in-space infrastructure before we will be able to build them.
Voice recognition that runs locally will not be nearly as good as the cloud version. Your phone has neither the processing power nor the storage space to do it well. Recent versions of local applications like Dragon work well but they use three gigabytes of disk space, a large chunk of RAM, and more processor power than your phone probably has to do it. (And even then they aren't as good because they don't get the benefit of crowdsourcing the learning of the kinds of queries that people make to millions of people.) You probably aren't going to want to give that many resources to a local text to speech program on your phone, and if you do it is going to make everything else that runs on your phone behave sluggishly.
To sum up, there is a reason that you can't get what you're looking for. It won't work. It will probably not work any time in the foreseeable future, because the cloud version will always be better and it will ratchet up people's expectations of what is "good enough".
That 80% share includes the Chinese AOSP devices that don't include any Google services. If you leave those out of the picture, iOS and Android are in a much tighter race.
Everybody bundles browsers now. They should have remained separate applications; I wanted Netscape to get an antitrust judgment against Microsoft, and my preferred remedy would have been to require Microsoft to discontinue IE. But that ship has sailed.
Everybody on mobile has always bundled some core apps. Nothing new there. Google is now pushing a larger collection of them, but it's no more extensive than what Apple bundles with an iPhone or Microsoft bundles with Windows Phone. Again, we might have a better world if none of those companies bundled apps, but fighting it is another lost cause at this point.
I am running CM on my Galaxy Nexus because Google stopped doing updates for it; if Google had brought KitKat to it I would have just stayed with the stock software. I suspect a lot of people who have older Nexus devices are using third-party builds for the same reason.
My Xperia Z Ultra still has the standard Sony build on it, which is a fairly lightly skinned Android plus some Sony apps. I'm waiting to see whether Sony brings Android L; if they don't I'm likely to switch to a third-party version of Android.
A good explanation of the limits of current interplanetary flight. Basically, once you leave low earth orbit you're committed.
Returning to Earth assumes that the craft carries a landing module capable of Earth landing. A Mars lander would be built differently (and less substantially) because of the lower gravity and lack of atmosphere on Mars. Mostly likely the aborted mission would have to wait in LEO until another craft could launch from Earth to bring the people down.
Yes, the C64 had a separate processor for its floppy drive. So did Atari. But that's because both manufacturers chose to put peripherals like floppy disk drives on a serial bus rather than interfacing them directly to the main CPU.
I know that Atari did that to make RFI compliance easier. Signal radiation from a low speed serial bus is less of a problem than radiation from a parallel bus, and they didn't want to integrate the floppy drive into the main unit to keep the price down. (Some users chose less expensive tape drives or only used cartridge-based software.) At the time, the FCC had just adopted its first RFI standards for personal computers, and many manufacturers were griping that the new standards were impossible to meet. But Atari was able to point to their 400 and 800 models, which passed the tests with flying colors, and say that the standards were not impossible at all, they just required more attention to shielding than computer makers had been accustomed to.
Most modern personal computers are actually less well shielded than those old Ataris were. (Even Atari's own later models, the XL and XE series and the ST series of 68000-based systems, were not; they were only built as well as they had to be rather than as well as they could be.) Current day PCs depend in part on a bit of technical trickery to comply; spread-spectrum master clocks. Instead of using a single stable frequency, the master clock is intentionally varied over a small range; this makes the noise peaks smaller.
Another cause for selling chips as less costly models is thermal. A given chip might have all its cores working, but if you run them all at full speed the chip consumes more than its rated power. So you turn off some of the cores and/or lower the clock speed and sell it as a lesser model.
Nothing new under the sun here; as you point out, CPUs and RAM are also graded that way. The top performers get sold as expensive models, the ones that can't reach the top speed or consume too much power at that speed are downgraded. Sometimes one or more CPU cores are disabled, like the three core processors that AMD sold at one time; they actually had four cores on the die. Some 486SX chips from Intel were actually 486DX chips with floating point units that didn't work. (They also made 486SX chips with no FPU on the die; if you bought one you had no way of knowing which type you would get.) The difference with GPUs is that their large core count makes a much wider range of degrading possible; you can turn off 5%, 10%, 25%, or even 50% of the cores.
Late in the life of a product line, companies may sell fully functional parts as lesser models. If production has improved to the point where nearly all your chips work completely, you may have to cut the price on some of them because there are customers who aren't willing to pay the higher price.
In some cases, the modded boards will work properly. The customer might be lucky enough to get one of the boards with a fully functional chip, or may plan to use the board with an aftermarket cooling system. But there are no guarantees. Any reseller who puts up modded boards for sale is committing fraud. But individual customers should have the right to experiment with equipment that they own, and NVidia's action is also causing collateral damage to the open source movement. I don't think NVidia is actively hostile to Nouveau, they are just indifferent about it.
They would end up having to charge more than $1, but Tesla could partner with existing rental companies to place some Teslas in key markets. An especially appealing model would be to get by-the-hour rental companies like Zipcar to offer them.
It's not surprising that a Moto was sturdier. Handheld public safety radios are a big part of Moto's history, though the part of the company that makes the phones (Motorola Mobility) was spun off from the base company (which was renamed Motorola Solutions when the separation happened) in 2011. They are accustomed to dealing with the need for rugged design.
Carbon fiber would be stronger. But it has downsides: it's more expensive and it fails catastrophically rather than bending. It doesn't dissipate heat nearly as well, which would be a problem on the iPhone 6 because the aluminum case is a key part of the thermal design.
Pinning this on Bill Gates isn't fair. He hasn't been involved in the running of Microsoft for many years, though he is still a significant stockholder. (He is no longer the largest stockholder; that would be Steve Ballmer. But Gates's own shares plus the ones held by his foundation are probably still the single largest chunk.)
Some toilets will flush really poorly if you do that; they will no longer clear the bowl properly. Go ahead and try it - you won't damage anything - but be prepared for the possibility that you will need a new toilet if you want to save water.
Toilets designed for low water use are supposed to be designed to flush well with the reduced volume; many do, some do not. Expensive European designs seem to be the best flushers on average.
To address one thing RabidReindeer said: in my experience with my dimmers the Cree bulbs dim smoothly and linearly, it's just at a different rate (more slowly) than incandescent bulbs dim. YMMV depending on what kind of dimmers you have or if you use other models of dimmable LED bulbs.
I had tried some dimmable CFLs and found them totally unsatisfactory for two reasons. One, they flickered badly when dimmed, and two, if you had more than one in the same fixture their brightnesses didn't track. That is, they were the same brightness when on full, but when dimmed some bulbs would be brighter than others.
The Cree dimmable LED bulbs (the ones that are now under $5 each at Home Depot, at least here in MA - that pricing may include an energy conservation subsidy) fix both problems. No visible flicker and multiple bulbs track correctly. They do behave differently from incandescent bulbs in three ways: the color temperature remains constant, they don't dim at the same rate as incandescents, and they don't get as dim at minimum. None of these are deal breakers so long as you replace all the bulbs in a multi-bulb fixture and don't try to use a mixture of Cree and incandescent bulbs. Mixtures of different LED bulbs are also likely to track incorrectly in dimmers, so don't do that; buy a full set for a fixture at the same time.
So far, zero LED bulb failures other than the one I dropped.
Yes... but 18 months is significantly less than the useful life of the device, especially now that we have picked all the low hanging fruit of smart device innovation and the upgrade cycle is stretching out. I'd like to see a three year commitment to updates for Nexus devices in the future, which would put them at parity with Apple's policies.
Texas is currently the largest producer of wind power in the US (reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) and likely to remain a leader because it has lots of wind and lots of wide open spaces. The state lags in solar power, despite also being an excellent location for it (southern latitude and lack of cloud cover), because the high capital cost of solar plants is hard to justify in a state where fossil fuels are cheap, and because investors have mostly preferred to fund wind projects. Small-scale solar (home installations) also lags in Texas because there is no statewide program of net metering, resulting in it being unavailable to most residents of the state. (Reference: http://www.nationaljournal.com... )
Renewable power generation is growing rapidly everywhere in the US. Although it will never reach 100% of electricity production unless we also build very large scale energy storage facilities (necessary because of the unsteady output of wind and solar installations), it can certainly become a major source of electric power. And Tesla's batteries can make it possible for renewables to be a larger part of our electric grid.
The one Microsoft store that I have visited more than once (Prudential Center in Boston) always seems to be busy. I've never seen crazy crowds like the Apple Store gets on launch days, but I didn't go there the day the Xbox One came out. One factor is that they only do anything special for the launches of Microsoft's own products (the Surface and XBox lines), not for any of the laptops made by other manufacturers that they sell.
The Microsoft Stores I have visited don't look all that much like Apple Stores, but they did copy a lot of other things. One is that all the computers are set up so you can actually try them out; they have network connections and are logged in on accounts that aren't locked down, so you can even download applications and try the computers out with your favorite software. And the sales people are low pressure, perhaps because they are paid a flat salary rather than commissions, just like Apple.
But why shouldn't Microsoft adopt those things? Apple has shown that they work. And Microsoft wanted to create a different environment than the other stores selling their products are offering.
Part of the problem may be the lack of memory in many Windows Phone models. The popular Lumia 520, for example, has a measly 512MB, and even the new Lumia 630 is hobbled by that same small amount of RAM. In contrast, nearly every Android phone has at least 1GB now, with high end phones having 2GB or 3GB.
The browser on an old Android phone with 512MB will also choke quickly. It's true that the iPhone 4 and 4s only have 512MB (the iPhone 5 and later have 1GB), but they also have an OS that is somewhat more memory-efficient and that doesn't do true multitasking - well, it didn't until iOS 7 and people have been disappointed with the performance of that on older iPhones.