This is one of the few things that Motorola has gotten right recently. First they had the Droid RAZR, which was super thin and modestly successful. Then they made the Droid RAZR MAXX, which was the same phone except it was thicker and heavier and had a bigger battery - and it outsold the original version. There are also third party battery replacements available for a number of phones where you get a new thick battery and a replacement back to accommodate it.
The Galaxy S4 could get a battery replacement of this type since it has a removable battery. It IS a bit trickier for phones with NFC capability because the NFC chip is usually in the battery, but NFC replacement batteries are now readily available.
It's not the first 1080p phone; that would be the Droid DNA (built by HTC). It's not even the second 1080p phone; that would be the new HTC One.
The Galaxy S4 is leading edge in other ways (eye tracking, octa-core processor), but it's following HTC on screen resolution. It is the first 1080p OLED screen on a phone; the two HTC-built phones both use LCDs.
The division of labor between the left and right buttons is sensible in most Windows programs. The left button gives you global choices; things that go across the entire application. The right button gives you context sensitive choices; things that pertain specifically to the thing you are pointing at, and where the available choices will change depending on what you are pointing at.
Steve Jobs claimed for many years that people would find having more than one mouse button to be confusing. The experiences of Unix users disproved that, but he could claim that they were geeks rather than typical users. But once Windows proved that the user interface could be improved by well planned use of a second button, and that ordinary users could make use of that improvement without confusion, Apple had to concede and start offering mice with more buttons. And a scroll wheel (though Apple used a small ball instead), another UI innovation that had shown its worth on Windows.
It would be an awakening that what we have here in America is not exactly a democracy
Exactly so. What we have in the US is a constitutional democracy, not a pure one. We have a judicial branch, and one of its important roles is to protect people from actions by the majority. We guarantee certain basic rights to everyone, and depend on the courts to protect those rights even for minority groups that may be unpopular.
The Pentium II, which was Intel's lead product during the heyday of the Alpha, didn't scale to today's clock rates either. If the Alpha line had continued there would have been new chip designs that retained software compatibility with the old ones, just has there have been for x86.
The 7" size is more purse-friendly than a 10" tablet, something most of the male/. readers wouldn't have thought of. A 7" tablet also weighs about half as much, which is a factor both for carrying and for holding for significant periods of time.
Those are off the original topic of NOTEBOOK drives. The optimized-for-DVR use WD drives are 3.5" drives. They're a nice idea if the tech actually works.
ATSC has been updated, but it's won't be feasible for broadcasters to switch for a long time because of the large installed base of TVs without H.264 support.
The real truth: the FCC should have accepted Sinclair's 2000 petition to scrap 8VSB (and the existing ATSC standard) and adopt COFDM instead; 8VSB is a flawed standard that has cut off many urban residents from OTA reception because of its horrible lack of resistance to multipath. The simplest way would have been to simply adopt DVB-T, which would have come with MPEG-4 support. The cost of the change at the time would have been minimal, as there were almost no HDTV receivers in existence.
The Windows version of Safari never caught on, and Apple has now given up on it. The OS X version is the dominant browser on that platform, but it's a minority platform so desktop Safari is a small percentage of web use. As you point out, mobile Safari for iOS is another matter entirely, but that didn't happen until after Google was funding Mozilla.
I disagree that feminists, as a class, are intolerant. I will accept that there is a branch of feminism - a dysfunctional one to my mind - that is intolerant. Please don't tar everybody who believes in equal rights for women with that brush.
The Galaxy Nexus from carriers is a different beast from one bought directly from Google. The carrier versions may have added software and updates are often delayed by the carriers. The unlocked Galaxy Nexus from the Google Play store, like the current Nexus 4, is the one where you're guaranteed to get the pure Android experience and timely updates, and thus there is less reason to mod it.
Should anybody care about alternative platforms, the recent unlocked Google phones (Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4) will probably also be the first testbeds for Ubuntu Phone and Firefox Phone, because of their ready availability and ease of modding.
One thing that many analysts miss is that the music industry was already in a decline during the 90s. Sales of new music were dropping but the effect was masked by all the sales of CDs to people who were replacing their vinyl. By 2000 most of the replacement that was going to happen had already happened, and that was one reason that sales numbers began to drop.
It's true that hardly anything runs up the kinds of mass sales numbers that top releases once did. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_best-selling_albums and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_best-selling_singles ) But that says more about the fragmentation of the music market (there is no longer ANYTHING that everybody or nearly everybody listens to) than about decline of the overall business. Nowadays the sales are spread across more titles than was once the case; just look at how little intersection there is between the various Billboard charts.
Unless you work in HR. Then hiring me IS your job. The thing that people are complaining about is that so many HR departments are doing a bad job of it.
RAM disks are no longer so useful for database engines because the modern engines can use multiple gigabytes of RAM natively. (You'll want to use a 64 bit OS to take full advantage.) If you're still using some kind of old database that can't use lots and lots of RAM a RAM disk might help.
Putting a swap file on a RAM disk is silly. Just have the additional RAM as RAM and your system won't need to swap.
Browser cache on RAM disk could make sense.
WordPerfect wasn't excellent, but it did have strengths. The biggest were the broad printer support (which was a nightmare in those days, but WordPerfect managed to get useful results out of just about everything on the market) and the technical support. In any case, the UI wasn't any worse than other DOS products, and those strengths were enough to make it the dominant word processing program.
The thing that so many people hold up as a feature - reveal codes - instead points out to me one of the biggest WEAKNESSES of WordPerfect. If a word processor is doing things right you should never need to see the formatting codes, it should just always do the right thing. But none of the DOS programs did.
The early versions of WordPerfect for Windows were terrible. Part of it was that they were just slow and buggy, but the biggest problem is that the company just didn't understand that Windows was a paradigm shift. What they did was implement something that acted as much like WordPerfect for other platforms as possible, but running on Windows. But Windows users wanted something that would be compatible with Windows UI conventions, which in a number of cases conflicted with the ones that WordPerfect users were accustomed to. WordPerfect needed to break backward keystroke compatibility and embrace Windows immediately; eventually they did but it was too late.
The best word processor for Windows was neither WordPerfect nor Microsoft Word; it was Ami Pro. But because it came out of a small company with no marketing clout it never caught on in a big way. Later the company was bought by Lotus, which didn't understand the value of what they had on their hands; instead of updating Ami Pro as 32 bit code for Windows 95 compatibility, they completely changed it; the result was Word Pro, which was a slow, buggy clone of Microsoft Word instead of the fast program with a superior UI that Ami Pro was.
Windows ME was just like Windows 98, except slower, buggier, and more RAM-hungry. There was no good reason for it to exist. Microsoft should have simply continued selling Windows 98 to the people who weren't ready to make the leap to the NT-based Windows 2000.
People just aren't replacing their desktop computers as often as they used to. Mobile is to blame, but not just in the way you think it is (people buying smartphones and tablets instead of PCs). Another reason is the shift to ultralight laptops that usually contain CULV processors; the Macbook Air started the trend and Ultrabooks continued it. These ultralight systems are less powerful than desktops and full size laptops, but people expect their applications to work well on these shiny new computers, which means that application developers haven't been able to continue to ratchet up system requirements as they did in the past.
Why would this slow down desktop sales? A five year old desktop is just as powerful as a brand new Ultrabook; at most it will need an inexpensive RAM upgrade. All those new applications will work just fine on that five year old desktop computer. There is no compelling reason to replace it, and people aren't replacing them. Individuals and businesses are stretching out the replacement cycle for PCs and that means fewer sales of new computers.
No smartphone approaches that level of battery life. No smartphone ever will in the near future because smartphones do too much.
A dumbphone can have batteries that last for days because it doesn't do much while it's standing by; just monitors the radio in a low power mode that checks for incoming calls. A smartphone does more; it downloads your email and calendar data in the background, sends location updates, checks for software updates (and perhaps downloads and installs them automatically depending on your settings), etc. Doing all that stuff - and having the processing power to do all that stuff - uses power from the battery. "You can't escape the laws of physics, laws of physics, laws of physics captain."
If you go to the business computer section of online computer vendors like HP and Dell, you can find laptops that can be ordered with Windows 7 Professional rather than Windows 8. Technically they're being sold with Windows 8 Professional, with the downgrade right to Windows 7 Profession already exercised for you, so you will have the right to switch back to Windows 8 should you ever want to do that (like, after SP1 restores the ability to have the Start menu).
If you live anywhere that is served by Verizon FIOS they can also be the same company. So far as I know, none of the other cable companies have any presence in wireless, though some have cross-marketing agreements with wireless carriers.
Management cluelessness about software development is a real problem. If you have a supervisor who didn't come up through the development ranks, he's likely to be uncomfortable with seeing those moments when you are staring at the monitor apparently doing nothing, or (even worse) staring off into space or fiddling with a desk toy. As any real developer will tell you, those thoughtful moments are important; they are when the architecture of the project comes together in your mind.
Java and computer science are not necessarily antithetical. When I was getting my degree a few years ago, most of the CS and computer engineering classes were using Java for the practical reason of cross-platform compatibility; no matter what kind of computer the student owned, she could use Java to write code that the TAs would be able to run. We were writing command line programs so Java was just a programming tool much like C or C++ would have been, not a complex environment like J2EE or the like.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of the few things that Motorola has gotten right recently. First they had the Droid RAZR, which was super thin and modestly successful. Then they made the Droid RAZR MAXX, which was the same phone except it was thicker and heavier and had a bigger battery - and it outsold the original version. There are also third party battery replacements available for a number of phones where you get a new thick battery and a replacement back to accommodate it.
The Galaxy S4 could get a battery replacement of this type since it has a removable battery. It IS a bit trickier for phones with NFC capability because the NFC chip is usually in the battery, but NFC replacement batteries are now readily available.
It's not the first 1080p phone; that would be the Droid DNA (built by HTC). It's not even the second 1080p phone; that would be the new HTC One. The Galaxy S4 is leading edge in other ways (eye tracking, octa-core processor), but it's following HTC on screen resolution. It is the first 1080p OLED screen on a phone; the two HTC-built phones both use LCDs.
http://makerlove.com/Free-3D-Sex-Toys/index.html
The division of labor between the left and right buttons is sensible in most Windows programs. The left button gives you global choices; things that go across the entire application. The right button gives you context sensitive choices; things that pertain specifically to the thing you are pointing at, and where the available choices will change depending on what you are pointing at.
Steve Jobs claimed for many years that people would find having more than one mouse button to be confusing. The experiences of Unix users disproved that, but he could claim that they were geeks rather than typical users. But once Windows proved that the user interface could be improved by well planned use of a second button, and that ordinary users could make use of that improvement without confusion, Apple had to concede and start offering mice with more buttons. And a scroll wheel (though Apple used a small ball instead), another UI innovation that had shown its worth on Windows.
It would be an awakening that what we have here in America is not exactly a democracy
Exactly so. What we have in the US is a constitutional democracy, not a pure one. We have a judicial branch, and one of its important roles is to protect people from actions by the majority. We guarantee certain basic rights to everyone, and depend on the courts to protect those rights even for minority groups that may be unpopular.
The Pentium II, which was Intel's lead product during the heyday of the Alpha, didn't scale to today's clock rates either. If the Alpha line had continued there would have been new chip designs that retained software compatibility with the old ones, just has there have been for x86.
The 7" size is more purse-friendly than a 10" tablet, something most of the male /. readers wouldn't have thought of. A 7" tablet also weighs about half as much, which is a factor both for carrying and for holding for significant periods of time.
Those are off the original topic of NOTEBOOK drives. The optimized-for-DVR use WD drives are 3.5" drives. They're a nice idea if the tech actually works.
ATSC has been updated, but it's won't be feasible for broadcasters to switch for a long time because of the large installed base of TVs without H.264 support. The real truth: the FCC should have accepted Sinclair's 2000 petition to scrap 8VSB (and the existing ATSC standard) and adopt COFDM instead; 8VSB is a flawed standard that has cut off many urban residents from OTA reception because of its horrible lack of resistance to multipath. The simplest way would have been to simply adopt DVB-T, which would have come with MPEG-4 support. The cost of the change at the time would have been minimal, as there were almost no HDTV receivers in existence.
The Windows version of Safari never caught on, and Apple has now given up on it. The OS X version is the dominant browser on that platform, but it's a minority platform so desktop Safari is a small percentage of web use. As you point out, mobile Safari for iOS is another matter entirely, but that didn't happen until after Google was funding Mozilla.
I disagree that feminists, as a class, are intolerant. I will accept that there is a branch of feminism - a dysfunctional one to my mind - that is intolerant. Please don't tar everybody who believes in equal rights for women with that brush.
The Galaxy Nexus from carriers is a different beast from one bought directly from Google. The carrier versions may have added software and updates are often delayed by the carriers. The unlocked Galaxy Nexus from the Google Play store, like the current Nexus 4, is the one where you're guaranteed to get the pure Android experience and timely updates, and thus there is less reason to mod it.
Should anybody care about alternative platforms, the recent unlocked Google phones (Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4) will probably also be the first testbeds for Ubuntu Phone and Firefox Phone, because of their ready availability and ease of modding.
One thing that many analysts miss is that the music industry was already in a decline during the 90s. Sales of new music were dropping but the effect was masked by all the sales of CDs to people who were replacing their vinyl. By 2000 most of the replacement that was going to happen had already happened, and that was one reason that sales numbers began to drop. It's true that hardly anything runs up the kinds of mass sales numbers that top releases once did. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_best-selling_albums and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_best-selling_singles ) But that says more about the fragmentation of the music market (there is no longer ANYTHING that everybody or nearly everybody listens to) than about decline of the overall business. Nowadays the sales are spread across more titles than was once the case; just look at how little intersection there is between the various Billboard charts.
Unless you work in HR. Then hiring me IS your job. The thing that people are complaining about is that so many HR departments are doing a bad job of it.
RAM disks are no longer so useful for database engines because the modern engines can use multiple gigabytes of RAM natively. (You'll want to use a 64 bit OS to take full advantage.) If you're still using some kind of old database that can't use lots and lots of RAM a RAM disk might help.
Putting a swap file on a RAM disk is silly. Just have the additional RAM as RAM and your system won't need to swap. Browser cache on RAM disk could make sense.
WordPerfect wasn't excellent, but it did have strengths. The biggest were the broad printer support (which was a nightmare in those days, but WordPerfect managed to get useful results out of just about everything on the market) and the technical support. In any case, the UI wasn't any worse than other DOS products, and those strengths were enough to make it the dominant word processing program.
The thing that so many people hold up as a feature - reveal codes - instead points out to me one of the biggest WEAKNESSES of WordPerfect. If a word processor is doing things right you should never need to see the formatting codes, it should just always do the right thing. But none of the DOS programs did.
The early versions of WordPerfect for Windows were terrible. Part of it was that they were just slow and buggy, but the biggest problem is that the company just didn't understand that Windows was a paradigm shift. What they did was implement something that acted as much like WordPerfect for other platforms as possible, but running on Windows. But Windows users wanted something that would be compatible with Windows UI conventions, which in a number of cases conflicted with the ones that WordPerfect users were accustomed to. WordPerfect needed to break backward keystroke compatibility and embrace Windows immediately; eventually they did but it was too late.
The best word processor for Windows was neither WordPerfect nor Microsoft Word; it was Ami Pro. But because it came out of a small company with no marketing clout it never caught on in a big way. Later the company was bought by Lotus, which didn't understand the value of what they had on their hands; instead of updating Ami Pro as 32 bit code for Windows 95 compatibility, they completely changed it; the result was Word Pro, which was a slow, buggy clone of Microsoft Word instead of the fast program with a superior UI that Ami Pro was.
Windows ME was just like Windows 98, except slower, buggier, and more RAM-hungry. There was no good reason for it to exist. Microsoft should have simply continued selling Windows 98 to the people who weren't ready to make the leap to the NT-based Windows 2000.
People just aren't replacing their desktop computers as often as they used to. Mobile is to blame, but not just in the way you think it is (people buying smartphones and tablets instead of PCs). Another reason is the shift to ultralight laptops that usually contain CULV processors; the Macbook Air started the trend and Ultrabooks continued it. These ultralight systems are less powerful than desktops and full size laptops, but people expect their applications to work well on these shiny new computers, which means that application developers haven't been able to continue to ratchet up system requirements as they did in the past. Why would this slow down desktop sales? A five year old desktop is just as powerful as a brand new Ultrabook; at most it will need an inexpensive RAM upgrade. All those new applications will work just fine on that five year old desktop computer. There is no compelling reason to replace it, and people aren't replacing them. Individuals and businesses are stretching out the replacement cycle for PCs and that means fewer sales of new computers.
I've had to reboot my Android phones occasionally. But worse case, it's once or twice a month; I can live with that.
No smartphone approaches that level of battery life. No smartphone ever will in the near future because smartphones do too much. A dumbphone can have batteries that last for days because it doesn't do much while it's standing by; just monitors the radio in a low power mode that checks for incoming calls. A smartphone does more; it downloads your email and calendar data in the background, sends location updates, checks for software updates (and perhaps downloads and installs them automatically depending on your settings), etc. Doing all that stuff - and having the processing power to do all that stuff - uses power from the battery. "You can't escape the laws of physics, laws of physics, laws of physics captain."
If you go to the business computer section of online computer vendors like HP and Dell, you can find laptops that can be ordered with Windows 7 Professional rather than Windows 8. Technically they're being sold with Windows 8 Professional, with the downgrade right to Windows 7 Profession already exercised for you, so you will have the right to switch back to Windows 8 should you ever want to do that (like, after SP1 restores the ability to have the Start menu).
If you live anywhere that is served by Verizon FIOS they can also be the same company. So far as I know, none of the other cable companies have any presence in wireless, though some have cross-marketing agreements with wireless carriers.
Management cluelessness about software development is a real problem. If you have a supervisor who didn't come up through the development ranks, he's likely to be uncomfortable with seeing those moments when you are staring at the monitor apparently doing nothing, or (even worse) staring off into space or fiddling with a desk toy. As any real developer will tell you, those thoughtful moments are important; they are when the architecture of the project comes together in your mind.
Java and computer science are not necessarily antithetical. When I was getting my degree a few years ago, most of the CS and computer engineering classes were using Java for the practical reason of cross-platform compatibility; no matter what kind of computer the student owned, she could use Java to write code that the TAs would be able to run. We were writing command line programs so Java was just a programming tool much like C or C++ would have been, not a complex environment like J2EE or the like.