....No one has actually _built_ a wind power turbine setup that operates at well above the ground. I mean, consider the issues involved:
Nobody has built a setup that's able to deliver grid power yet, but there has been considerable work done on the problem. There are flying wind harvester prototypes such as KiteGen.
1. How are we going to keep those turbines up at altitude? 2. What are the costs of tethering these high-flying wind turbine installations?
The wind keeps them flying as long as the wind is blowing and when it's not blowing there's no need for the harvester to be at altitude because there's nothing to harvest. The costs involved with building and installing a device are likely to be considerable, but the labor costs involved in running the thing could potentially be virtually zero. I think airborne wind harvesting might become competitive with natural gas, but probably not with solar power.
3. Will these installations become hazards to migratory birds flying at high altitude, let alone passing airplanes of all sizes?
I'd rather build hundreds of nuclear reactors based on the safe liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology instead in the short to medium term, and in the longer term build space-based solar power arrays parked in geosynchronous or near-geosynchronous orvbit.
Of course they will, but the right question to ask is how big a hazard compared to other hazards. We can't build commercial LFTR plants in the short term, but I share some of your optimism in the medium to long term. We don't know if the space junk problem is solvable, which means that we don't know if it's even physically possible to do orbital solar harvesting on a large scale. It looks like what would happen is there would be a chain reaction of space junk destroying stuff, giving rise to more space junk until there's so much junk that a new satellite is destroyed immediately.
My personal crystal ball projection is that solar power will be the cheapest form of power within 15 years, but it's going to have poor availability because of clouds and winter. Nuclear and gas (methane) will compete, and perhaps cooperate, to fill those gaps.
Well, I wasn't exactly on the edge of my seat with a bowl of popcorn, but I kept this page open in a tab during the presentation. I love how they've created and tailored a web interface that flips through the photos in synchronization with their commentary of what's being said.
I was also surprised that they didn't announce a smaller version of the iPad. Maybe they ran into difficulties with the display, or maybe they don't think there's a market for one.
I've long thought that there must be a tremendous market for a tablet roughly the size of an average paperback novel (only thinner of course). It's a size and format that everyone is used to handling and carrying.
Samsung jumped the gun with that one. Apple wisely waited for the key breakthrough, the one that makes the ocean look bluer and your kids look happier.
As a matter of objective fact, the nerdiest thing you can do with a TI-83 is to write assembly programs for it on your PC, send them to the calculator through the proprietary* cable (if you've got one) and run them. If you don't have time to do it then maybe you have a student who has time. Challenge your students to write a simple program that draws something on the screen!
*It goes without saying that it would be nerdier if you built your own cable and used that.
True, I don't have kids. I'm still too young to know a lot of people my age who have kids.
So are you saying that they teach elementary and middle school kids to use relatively complex specifics such as Word templates and Power point layouts (or whatever they're called)? I feel sorry for them...
I think a lot of the appeal that computers had on me and many of my friends when we were kids came from the pleasure of having something that you were allowed to use without being dragged through a 30-minute lecture or a 10-step tutorial. It's sad to hear that schools are ruining computer education in much the same ways that they far too often ruin the other subjects.
It would take about 80 years to run a company with $2.5 billion in the bank to the ground with 300 employees, even if they never ever sold a single product from now on until 2092...
Perhaps you should read less Ayn Rand and concern yourself more with reality.
I don't know if you're trolling, but assuming you're not, why do you think that the specifics of a current popular OS is going to be useful by the time a 7-year old is old enough to get complex hand-in assignments? He's not gonna need to use the complex features of something like Word or Excel until he's 13, at least. Who knows what he's going to do that on? Windows 10? Windows 11? New Mac OS? Ubuntu 18.04? It doesn't matter, it's all point and click and type anyway. Kids have pliable minds.
By the way I just tried Tux Paint for a laugh and I swear if I was 8 now I would be firmly glued to that until my parents physically removed me from it, which leads us to a much greater problem than the specifics of one OS or another. Computers can be incredibly addictive to kids and adults alike. Proceed with caution.
Why not buy yourself a new computer and let your son inherit the one you're using now, unless it's a brand new shiny one, of course. Minor caveat: You need to know how to transfer your files from your current to the new one for this to work.
Don't worry about the learning about it. By the time he's 9 he will probably be teaching you to do stuff. Speaking of that, you will want to remove anything interesting that you have on it before you hand it over...
Well, you can already get an Android 4.0 device for $199 this autumn and I can get an Android 4.0 phone (no contract, no lock-in, just the hardware) for the equivalent of $149 plus VAT where I live.
Of course Google is going to try to pass on as much as possible of the growing pains to the device manufacturers who in turn will try to pass as much of it as possible on to third-party developers and customers. I hope they've gotten things right this time, things like mixing audio streams from different apps which 2.3 seems unable to do, but like you I remain somewhat skeptical. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a new incompatible Android 5.0 API two years from now.
In order to make money the phone makers need to focus their efforts where the profit is and most of the profit is at the top of the price range. You can't be at the top of the price range without Android 4.0, which means that companies like HTC have no other choice than to develop their proprietary fluff for Android 4.0. Once they've done that, which they already have so it's sunk cost, they're going to want to roll that out to all their phones. I bet a lot of their developers had hoped they would gradually improve on their 2.3 stuff, but there's no profit in doing that now that you can't sell a top of the line phone with 2.3.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Go to wherever you usually buy phones and look for yourself. They might still sell expensive phones with 2.3, but you'll notice that those are on their way out and that the newly released phones sell with Android 4.0. The market share for Android 4.0 in terms of end profit for the phone makers is probably close to 100% at this point.
The phone manufacturers have nothing to gain by prolonging the life of legacy software once all the phones that roll off their production lines support the new. Legacy software add complexity and cost to their business. The real question is why they haven't switched already, and the answer is likely that it takes time to design and produce entry-level phones (you can't burn tens of millions of dollars on speedy development) that have what it takes to run Android 4.x satisfactorily.
You should already be able to get an HTC Desire C with Android 4.0 at a reasonably low cost now. Sony Ericsson has switched completely to 4.0 even on their cheapest phones. Those are two signs that the market is about to be flooded with cheap 4.x phones.
Speak for yourself. I like a having a hackable smartphone or tablet that lives outside the Apple walled garden. I do not like that developers are being forced to code to an API that Google froze as obsolete almost two years ago. Nor do I like the fact that a few braver developers are writing cool apps for the current API, but IU can't run them because phones I can afford are stuck on Gingerbread.
Android phone sales may be fine now, but technology is a grow-or-die marketplace. No matter how well it's doing now, Android doesn't have a future if it's stuck like this.
Okay, but your first and second paragraph seem to be in opposition to one another. The reason why there are two popular API:s, one which you can't afford to buy hardware for, is that technology is a grow-or-die marketplace. Growing pains are growing pains.
You'll probably find cheap 4.x phones in Q1 2013. If you're more than a hobby developer and you can't get your hands on the latest tech then it's your boss who's to blame, or your own planning if you're freelancing.
It's not Joe Sixpack who decides which social networks succeed and which fail. It's more like Jane Freshman OMG-where-do-the-cool-people-hang-out? who decides, and she's an unpredictable and fickle character, at least seen from the perspective of your average developer or entrepreneur. One thing we can be sure of is that she views the Facebook blue design with the same mix of familiarity and contempt that she views a McDonald's plastic tray. Creating an attractive, fresh, daring yet easy to use user interface design is going to be an important factor.
Yes, exactly. Nintendo was the first company to make motion control both cheap enough and good enough at the same time, much like Apple was with music players and touch smartphones (granted it took Apple a bit of trial and error to get the pricing right for the iPods and the iPhone). The idea for the iPhone did not originate inside Steve Job's head. Remember how we knew approximately how the iPhone was going to look and function two years before Apple revealed it?
The companies that set out to revolutionize the motion control market, the music player market or the touch phone market in the 1990's did not create products with anywhere near the lasting impact as the companies that perfected those products. Some of the people who worked on them probably did go on to get hired by companies like Apple and Google, though. I understand that was the case with Google and Android at least.
"Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years. There's a real void in the marketplace, and opportunities to create compelling user experiences are being overlooked"
Yeah, aside from the Wiimote and Kinect and every other product that has changed the input in a meaningful way.
It sounds to me like Valve is interested in developing a gaming laptop with Kinect-like functionality built in. That is an interesting idea, but it's nothing particularly revolutionary. Successful products are seldom revolutionary, so that's not a bad thing. Good luck Valve, with whatever it is you're doing!
I'm on Ubuntu and I find that the simplest way to do that is to use the Archive manager GUI. The Gnome Archive manager is a lightweight and snappy app, by far my favorite extraction app of those that I've used, so I guess YMMV depending on what you use.
Then you're probably doing something very specific over and over.
Perhaps you're moving a downloaded file from your downloads folder to a different folder, device or other location? That should really be handled by the app that initiates the download, i.e. the web browser, but AFAIK nobody has solved it in a really elegant way yet so for now we're stuck with the file manager.
Another thing that rocks with Windows is if say you download something and you right click and select "see file in folder", when the file manager opens, the file is already selected so you don't have to hunt around for it. This is a small thing but it makes a huge difference by eliminating extra work.
That is a nice touch for those rare occasions when you want to both open the folder and the file, but most of time you either want the file or the folder and not both.
An important long-term goal of virtually every active UI project is to rely less on folder structures and more on tagging and search, so it's understandable that developers don't spend their limited time on polishing folder-oriented tasks. I agree though that it's a shame that they're apparently spending their limited time on removing features. It would be better to leave Nautilus in the shape it was in it's prime. I mean, why bother to change something that we're going to gradually switch away from anyway?
Unity and Gnome Shell are alright. They were released too early and that was a mistake, but they're okay now. They're no harder to use than Windows 8 is. The UI is not the problem.
There are basically two showstoppers, both of which have to be solved if Ubuntu or another similar project is ever going to take off:
1. Most people can't buy a computer with Linux in your computer store of choice. (Actually, you can and lot's of people do, but I'm guessing this discussion is about Ubuntu and not Android.) 2. Apps take to long to reach Ubuntu and they tend to be behind their Windows and Mac versions, which means that even if you could buy a computer with Ubuntu most people wouldn't. You have to have the latest version of Itunes and Skype with all the latest bells and whistles.
If Canonical can solve these two problems at the same time, then they could start to eat into Microsoft's market share. (Slashdotters and other nerds would probably begin to complain about Canonical's (€anonical's?) evil market behaviours.)
I think it's pretty well established that that Apple's hardware-software combo has been superior to everything else on the market for about five years now aside for niche markets such as gaming. If Apple released a $300 laptop tomorrow Microsoft's Windows business would be destroyed within a matter of years.
Why is Apple not doing that? Well, I'll tell you why. Apple cares about profit, profit margin and market share counted in dollars (and not in users or units shipped). They've probably concluded that they make more money by growing their user base slowly with premium products than they would by producing billions of cheap plastic Macbooks with tiny profit margins.
Yeah, I know. I think that part of Gnome Shell is great, but the thing is that Unity works well enough for me now that I can't be bothered to install Gnome Shell.
I recently did a fresh installation of Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit which I'm planning to install Gnome Shell on and remove Unity. Or rather I was planning to. Unity works well enough that I can't really be bothered to. I'm gonna install Gnome Shell 3.6 some day when I'm bored and have time to spare, but I have to say that I'm pretty happy with Unity for now.
But seriously Canonical, fix the workspace switcher. The thing literally goes to hide in a stack of icons. It's near-impossible to hit with a single mouse stroke. (Can the person who designed that hit it more than 50% of the time? I doubt it.) I've created a hotcorner in Compiz config settings manager that triggers the switcher and I'm happy with that solution for now, but if you're serious about putting Ubuntu on 100+ million laptops you're going to need stuff that doesn't play hide and seek with the user.
You should probably enable zoom desktop by default too. I keep it set to Alt+Mouse Wheel. Fullscreen zoom is one of the features that I really mis whenever I'm in front of a Windows 7 or Windows XP desktop. It sounds stupid when you first hear about it, but it's a lot faster and smoother than physically leaning forward and squinting whenever some web designer throws something tiny at you.
Wikipedia says there's 3.3 mg uranium per m^3 of seawater and the volume of the world's oceans adds up to 1.3*10^18 m^3, which means that there's 4.4*10^12 kg of uranium in the oceans, or roughly 400 kg per human in a world with 10 billion humans. That's a lot of uranium...
I don't suppose much is known about the rate at which it replenishes, but I bet scientists will be able to find out about that long before we begin to see measurable depletion of seawater uranium on a global scale.
Yep, and that's basically Apple's MO ever since Jobs took over. Go down to the store, buy some stuff, figure out why it sucks and then design one or two devices that just work (and look good doing it).
The only slight variation on the pattern is the iPad which they released years after the tablet marked had died on arrival.
Slashdot Mirror
....No one has actually _built_ a wind power turbine setup that operates at well above the ground. I mean, consider the issues involved:
Nobody has built a setup that's able to deliver grid power yet, but there has been considerable work done on the problem. There are flying wind harvester prototypes such as KiteGen.
1. How are we going to keep those turbines up at altitude?
2. What are the costs of tethering these high-flying wind turbine installations?
The wind keeps them flying as long as the wind is blowing and when it's not blowing there's no need for the harvester to be at altitude because there's nothing to harvest. The costs involved with building and installing a device are likely to be considerable, but the labor costs involved in running the thing could potentially be virtually zero. I think airborne wind harvesting might become competitive with natural gas, but probably not with solar power.
3. Will these installations become hazards to migratory birds flying at high altitude, let alone passing airplanes of all sizes?
I'd rather build hundreds of nuclear reactors based on the safe liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology instead in the short to medium term, and in the longer term build space-based solar power arrays parked in geosynchronous or near-geosynchronous orvbit.
Of course they will, but the right question to ask is how big a hazard compared to other hazards. We can't build commercial LFTR plants in the short term, but I share some of your optimism in the medium to long term. We don't know if the space junk problem is solvable, which means that we don't know if it's even physically possible to do orbital solar harvesting on a large scale. It looks like what would happen is there would be a chain reaction of space junk destroying stuff, giving rise to more space junk until there's so much junk that a new satellite is destroyed immediately.
My personal crystal ball projection is that solar power will be the cheapest form of power within 15 years, but it's going to have poor availability because of clouds and winter. Nuclear and gas (methane) will compete, and perhaps cooperate, to fill those gaps.
Well, I wasn't exactly on the edge of my seat with a bowl of popcorn, but I kept this page open in a tab during the presentation. I love how they've created and tailored a web interface that flips through the photos in synchronization with their commentary of what's being said.
I was also surprised that they didn't announce a smaller version of the iPad. Maybe they ran into difficulties with the display, or maybe they don't think there's a market for one.
I've long thought that there must be a tremendous market for a tablet roughly the size of an average paperback novel (only thinner of course). It's a size and format that everyone is used to handling and carrying.
Samsung jumped the gun with that one. Apple wisely waited for the key breakthrough, the one that makes the ocean look bluer and your kids look happier.
As a matter of objective fact, the nerdiest thing you can do with a TI-83 is to write assembly programs for it on your PC, send them to the calculator through the proprietary* cable (if you've got one) and run them. If you don't have time to do it then maybe you have a student who has time. Challenge your students to write a simple program that draws something on the screen!
*It goes without saying that it would be nerdier if you built your own cable and used that.
True, I don't have kids. I'm still too young to know a lot of people my age who have kids.
So are you saying that they teach elementary and middle school kids to use relatively complex specifics such as Word templates and Power point layouts (or whatever they're called)? I feel sorry for them...
I think a lot of the appeal that computers had on me and many of my friends when we were kids came from the pleasure of having something that you were allowed to use without being dragged through a 30-minute lecture or a 10-step tutorial. It's sad to hear that schools are ruining computer education in much the same ways that they far too often ruin the other subjects.
It would take about 80 years to run a company with $2.5 billion in the bank to the ground with 300 employees, even if they never ever sold a single product from now on until 2092...
Perhaps you should read less Ayn Rand and concern yourself more with reality.
I don't know if you're trolling, but assuming you're not, why do you think that the specifics of a current popular OS is going to be useful by the time a 7-year old is old enough to get complex hand-in assignments? He's not gonna need to use the complex features of something like Word or Excel until he's 13, at least. Who knows what he's going to do that on? Windows 10? Windows 11? New Mac OS? Ubuntu 18.04? It doesn't matter, it's all point and click and type anyway. Kids have pliable minds.
By the way I just tried Tux Paint for a laugh and I swear if I was 8 now I would be firmly glued to that until my parents physically removed me from it, which leads us to a much greater problem than the specifics of one OS or another. Computers can be incredibly addictive to kids and adults alike. Proceed with caution.
Why not buy yourself a new computer and let your son inherit the one you're using now, unless it's a brand new shiny one, of course. Minor caveat: You need to know how to transfer your files from your current to the new one for this to work.
Don't worry about the learning about it. By the time he's 9 he will probably be teaching you to do stuff. Speaking of that, you will want to remove anything interesting that you have on it before you hand it over...
Well, you can already get an Android 4.0 device for $199 this autumn and I can get an Android 4.0 phone (no contract, no lock-in, just the hardware) for the equivalent of $149 plus VAT where I live.
Of course Google is going to try to pass on as much as possible of the growing pains to the device manufacturers who in turn will try to pass as much of it as possible on to third-party developers and customers. I hope they've gotten things right this time, things like mixing audio streams from different apps which 2.3 seems unable to do, but like you I remain somewhat skeptical. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a new incompatible Android 5.0 API two years from now.
In order to make money the phone makers need to focus their efforts where the profit is and most of the profit is at the top of the price range. You can't be at the top of the price range without Android 4.0, which means that companies like HTC have no other choice than to develop their proprietary fluff for Android 4.0. Once they've done that, which they already have so it's sunk cost, they're going to want to roll that out to all their phones. I bet a lot of their developers had hoped they would gradually improve on their 2.3 stuff, but there's no profit in doing that now that you can't sell a top of the line phone with 2.3.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Go to wherever you usually buy phones and look for yourself. They might still sell expensive phones with 2.3, but you'll notice that those are on their way out and that the newly released phones sell with Android 4.0. The market share for Android 4.0 in terms of end profit for the phone makers is probably close to 100% at this point.
The phone manufacturers have nothing to gain by prolonging the life of legacy software once all the phones that roll off their production lines support the new. Legacy software add complexity and cost to their business. The real question is why they haven't switched already, and the answer is likely that it takes time to design and produce entry-level phones (you can't burn tens of millions of dollars on speedy development) that have what it takes to run Android 4.x satisfactorily.
You should already be able to get an HTC Desire C with Android 4.0 at a reasonably low cost now. Sony Ericsson has switched completely to 4.0 even on their cheapest phones. Those are two signs that the market is about to be flooded with cheap 4.x phones.
Speak for yourself. I like a having a hackable smartphone or tablet that lives outside the Apple walled garden. I do not like that developers are being forced to code to an API that Google froze as obsolete almost two years ago. Nor do I like the fact that a few braver developers are writing cool apps for the current API, but IU can't run them because phones I can afford are stuck on Gingerbread.
Android phone sales may be fine now, but technology is a grow-or-die marketplace. No matter how well it's doing now, Android doesn't have a future if it's stuck like this.
Okay, but your first and second paragraph seem to be in opposition to one another. The reason why there are two popular API:s, one which you can't afford to buy hardware for, is that technology is a grow-or-die marketplace. Growing pains are growing pains.
You'll probably find cheap 4.x phones in Q1 2013. If you're more than a hobby developer and you can't get your hands on the latest tech then it's your boss who's to blame, or your own planning if you're freelancing.
It's not Joe Sixpack who decides which social networks succeed and which fail. It's more like Jane Freshman OMG-where-do-the-cool-people-hang-out? who decides, and she's an unpredictable and fickle character, at least seen from the perspective of your average developer or entrepreneur. One thing we can be sure of is that she views the Facebook blue design with the same mix of familiarity and contempt that she views a McDonald's plastic tray. Creating an attractive, fresh, daring yet easy to use user interface design is going to be an important factor.
Yes, exactly. Nintendo was the first company to make motion control both cheap enough and good enough at the same time, much like Apple was with music players and touch smartphones (granted it took Apple a bit of trial and error to get the pricing right for the iPods and the iPhone). The idea for the iPhone did not originate inside Steve Job's head. Remember how we knew approximately how the iPhone was going to look and function two years before Apple revealed it?
The companies that set out to revolutionize the motion control market, the music player market or the touch phone market in the 1990's did not create products with anywhere near the lasting impact as the companies that perfected those products. Some of the people who worked on them probably did go on to get hired by companies like Apple and Google, though. I understand that was the case with Google and Android at least.
"Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years. There's a real void in the marketplace, and opportunities to create compelling user experiences are being overlooked"
Yeah, aside from the Wiimote and Kinect and every other product that has changed the input in a meaningful way.
It sounds to me like Valve is interested in developing a gaming laptop with Kinect-like functionality built in. That is an interesting idea, but it's nothing particularly revolutionary. Successful products are seldom revolutionary, so that's not a bad thing. Good luck Valve, with whatever it is you're doing!
I'm on Ubuntu and I find that the simplest way to do that is to use the Archive manager GUI. The Gnome Archive manager is a lightweight and snappy app, by far my favorite extraction app of those that I've used, so I guess YMMV depending on what you use.
Then you're probably doing something very specific over and over.
Perhaps you're moving a downloaded file from your downloads folder to a different folder, device or other location? That should really be handled by the app that initiates the download, i.e. the web browser, but AFAIK nobody has solved it in a really elegant way yet so for now we're stuck with the file manager.
Another thing that rocks with Windows is if say you download something and you right click and select "see file in folder", when the file manager opens, the file is already selected so you don't have to hunt around for it. This is a small thing but it makes a huge difference by eliminating extra work.
That is a nice touch for those rare occasions when you want to both open the folder and the file, but most of time you either want the file or the folder and not both.
An important long-term goal of virtually every active UI project is to rely less on folder structures and more on tagging and search, so it's understandable that developers don't spend their limited time on polishing folder-oriented tasks. I agree though that it's a shame that they're apparently spending their limited time on removing features. It would be better to leave Nautilus in the shape it was in it's prime. I mean, why bother to change something that we're going to gradually switch away from anyway?
Unity and Gnome Shell are alright. They were released too early and that was a mistake, but they're okay now. They're no harder to use than Windows 8 is. The UI is not the problem.
There are basically two showstoppers, both of which have to be solved if Ubuntu or another similar project is ever going to take off:
1. Most people can't buy a computer with Linux in your computer store of choice. (Actually, you can and lot's of people do, but I'm guessing this discussion is about Ubuntu and not Android.)
2. Apps take to long to reach Ubuntu and they tend to be behind their Windows and Mac versions, which means that even if you could buy a computer with Ubuntu most people wouldn't. You have to have the latest version of Itunes and Skype with all the latest bells and whistles.
If Canonical can solve these two problems at the same time, then they could start to eat into Microsoft's market share. (Slashdotters and other nerds would probably begin to complain about Canonical's (€anonical's?) evil market behaviours.)
I think it's pretty well established that that Apple's hardware-software combo has been superior to everything else on the market for about five years now aside for niche markets such as gaming. If Apple released a $300 laptop tomorrow Microsoft's Windows business would be destroyed within a matter of years.
Why is Apple not doing that? Well, I'll tell you why. Apple cares about profit, profit margin and market share counted in dollars (and not in users or units shipped). They've probably concluded that they make more money by growing their user base slowly with premium products than they would by producing billions of cheap plastic Macbooks with tiny profit margins.
Yeah, I know. I think that part of Gnome Shell is great, but the thing is that Unity works well enough for me now that I can't be bothered to install Gnome Shell.
I recently did a fresh installation of Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit which I'm planning to install Gnome Shell on and remove Unity. Or rather I was planning to. Unity works well enough that I can't really be bothered to. I'm gonna install Gnome Shell 3.6 some day when I'm bored and have time to spare, but I have to say that I'm pretty happy with Unity for now.
But seriously Canonical, fix the workspace switcher. The thing literally goes to hide in a stack of icons. It's near-impossible to hit with a single mouse stroke. (Can the person who designed that hit it more than 50% of the time? I doubt it.) I've created a hotcorner in Compiz config settings manager that triggers the switcher and I'm happy with that solution for now, but if you're serious about putting Ubuntu on 100+ million laptops you're going to need stuff that doesn't play hide and seek with the user.
You should probably enable zoom desktop by default too. I keep it set to Alt+Mouse Wheel. Fullscreen zoom is one of the features that I really mis whenever I'm in front of a Windows 7 or Windows XP desktop. It sounds stupid when you first hear about it, but it's a lot faster and smoother than physically leaning forward and squinting whenever some web designer throws something tiny at you.
Wikipedia says there's 3.3 mg uranium per m^3 of seawater and the volume of the world's oceans adds up to 1.3*10^18 m^3, which means that there's 4.4*10^12 kg of uranium in the oceans, or roughly 400 kg per human in a world with 10 billion humans. That's a lot of uranium...
I don't suppose much is known about the rate at which it replenishes, but I bet scientists will be able to find out about that long before we begin to see measurable depletion of seawater uranium on a global scale.
Yep, and that's basically Apple's MO ever since Jobs took over. Go down to the store, buy some stuff, figure out why it sucks and then design one or two devices that just work (and look good doing it).
The only slight variation on the pattern is the iPad which they released years after the tablet marked had died on arrival.