Did you hear about the 1920x1200 Amazon Fire HD for $299? It's 8.9" rather than 10", but it is still a very serious iPad competitor.
The hardware is good, and it would be worth considering if a stable build of CyanogenMod comes out for it. But I'm not touching Amazon's privacy-invading (Silk), ad-laden OS variant with a 10-foot pole.
The iPhone has been falling behind in the past year or so. Competitors now have better hardware and an equally good user experience. This is why Apple has been resorting to lawsuits: in the phone arena, they face the real prospect of losing serious market share to Samsung. The Galaxy S III is competitive with even the iPhone 5 (though its app ecosystem may not be quite as good) and the Galaxy Note is far superior to the Apple phones.
On the tablet side of things, Apple is faring better. There is still no serious Android competitor to the new iPad, with its unparalleled 2048x1536 display. Android fans usually try to respond by telling me that I don't really need a high-res display. This is a losing argument – once you've seen the new iPad in action, low-resolution tablets look crude in comparison. It really makes a huge difference, especially when reading PDFs and web pages zoomed out. None of the competing 10" tablets come close to the iPad's market share. The smaller, cheaper tablets (Nexus 7, Kindle Fire) are indeed cutting into Apple's business, but they apparently have an iPad Mini prepped and ready to go to compete there. If rumors are accurate and it goes for $249 or so, then it's going to get a lot of purchases. On the other hand, it's hard to say how many will be taken from Google and Amazon, and how many will be cannibalized from sales of the full-size (and presumably more profitable) iPad.
I'm hoping that Samsung's next Galaxy Note tablet will have a Retina-equivalent display. If they can do that and keep the price at $499 to open (like Apple did), then they will have a real competitor on their hands. I'd seriously consider buying one.
1136x640? What kind of crack-smoking resolution is that? It's not any kind of standard and it isn't an integer multiple of the existing iPhone resolutions. I had expected it to be 1440x960 (3x the original iPhone resolution) so that they could keep using the existing Retina Display features, which use simple pixel doubling for noncompliant apps. But what are they going for with this?
Apple, well all phones, uses transceiver chips by Qualcomm or a competitor of them. Qualcomm/whatever has licensed all relevant patents to make those chips. Any buyer of such a transceiver is automatically covered by that license.
If this is true, then why did the Raspberry Pi Foundation have to negotiate separate licenses with MPEG-LA to enable H.264 decoding (and then extra optional licenses on top of that for MPEG-2 and VC-1)? By your theory, those fees should already have been covered by Broadcom when they manufactured the SoC used in the Pi. Common sense would indicate this, but as with many other things it appears that the law doesn't correspond with common sense.
Sure, companies like Amazon don't care that much if that happens, but book retailers, who are forced to attempt to make a living off of thinner and thinner margins are going to have troubles making ends meet. Publishers are similarly going to have troubles paying the bills as their margins shrink further and further.
Book retailers are just middlemen with no real value-add, so why should society care if they go out of business? (At the present time it would probably be a bad thing because there aren't enough jobs, but that's a problem with employment and aggregate demand, not a good reason to keep obsolete businesses around forever.)
Publishers add some value (selectivity and editing, for example) but they have historically extracted more value than they deserve due to their role as gatekeepers. Whittling down their margins is probably, on average, a good thing.
Events like this further underline why we need a new secure, distributed DNS system, one that is not subject to tampering by either Anonymous or ICE. Yes, there's a huge installed base issue to deal with, but DNS is falling apart, and if things continue the way they have been, the Internet may be completely balkanized across national lines in a few more years.
Poverty, one aspect is that it's strongly tied to a lack of space.
What? No, it isn't. Sure, there are densely packed slums in the Third World, but most of the world's greatest cities have high population densities. People seem to deal with that just fine. A lot of people want to live in midtown Manhattan. And for those who don't, that's fine – we have no shortage of room right here on Earth. We can't find many people who want to live in Wyoming or South Dakota, and you think people want to live on the moon?
And if you're worried about there being too many people in general, then prosperity is the solution, not the problem. Social science has known for a long time that people in prosperous societies tend to have smaller families. This isn't a recent thing, either; the pattern dates back at least to ancient Rome.
If we develop the means to expand our habitable environments. Poverty can be greatly reduced. We see this, with the discovery and colonization of America's, which in fact improved Europe by allowing many of the impoverished to migrate and become land owners.
Space-nuts always reach for that analogy, but it's so flawed that it is amazing anyone ever falls for it. It was obvious from the start that North and South America were clearly inhabitable – they were inhabited already by people. Millions of people, in fact, until imported Eurasian diseases killed about 90% of them. For the analogy to work, the Americas would have had to be an environment far more inhospitable than anywhere on earth, even the Antarctic – even there, you've got oxygen and you've got (frozen) water. If European settlers had instantly suffocated when they landed on the shores of Hispaniola or Jamestown, they probably wouldn't have tried to establish colonies there. Again, we don't have large-scale human habitations in Antarctica or on the sea floor, even though those would both be far, far easier than trying to make a silk purse out of the sow's ear of outer space.
Hm, I've heard of a couple of new things called "Internet Relay Chat" and "News Network Transport Protocol".
Both these protocols are too primitive to do what people expect of modern web forums. IRC is too evanescent (it's designed for real-time chat). It also doesn't support file attachments or other HTML features (yes, you can DCC files, but that doesn't help in a forum context). NNTP lacks the moderation and administration features that forum users want. Also, attachments are a hack rather than an integral part of the protocol.
It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty fucking simple: You want to hail a cab, look for the medallion.
That would work much better if NYC didn't arbitrarily restrict the medallion supply. If medallions were available to anyone who met a basic set of requirements (legal residence, good driving record, regular inspection of vehicle) then that would be sensible regulation. Refusing to issue any new medallions since 1937 is not.
Write the desktop environment to not only look and act as much like Windows as possible (offer a choice between classic, XP, and Win7 appearances), but also have the desktop environment natively use and support the Win32 API via an embedded installation of Wine. Focus obsessively on fixing the API compatibility issues, so that as much Windows commercial software as possible runs on it. Encourage the deprecation of custom toolkits (especially those of very poor quality, like GTK) and instead try to get developers to target everything towards the Win32 API and test against both Wine and Windows. Like it or not, without binary compatibility, Linux isn't going anywhere.
Also, throw away X11 and run the window manager right on top of OpenGL or DirectFB.
There was never the idea that developers had to pay for acces to the API use or information, as in MS charging $500 then $1000 for MSDN.
Win32 API documentation is available for free on the MSDN website and has been for years. There's no need to pay for any subscription. If you do a Google search for a Win32 API function name, the first result will usually be the official documentation for that function.
I know that some people say that MS gives away visual studio, but anyone who says that has not tried to write a non trivial app using the free version.
What specifically can't you do with the free version? I know it doesn't support MFC, but hardly anyone ever uses that any more anyway. If you want to work with the bare metal you code to the Win32 API, otherwise you use C#/.NET, both of which are fully supported in VS Express.
Of course in Germany and many European countries the 'privilege' part of driving is real. You can easily not qualify to be able to drive, in the states its so easy it's not a 'privilege' anymore. That and if you don't have a car in Europe it's at least plausible to get around outside metro centers.
These latter two facts are connected. Precisely because the US doesn't have decent mass transit in most parts of the country, driving requirements have to be fairly relaxed. Otherwise, a large portion of the population would be shut-ins, unable to find work, do their own shopping, or pretty much do anything else that is part of normal adulthood. Since the physical layout of the US makes mass transit impractical in many areas, the only way to break this gridlock will be with self-driving cars. At that point you can institute very stringent requirements for actually doing the driving yourself, and everyone else can just tell their car's computer where to drive them.
Microsoft learned this from Apple i.e by treating their developers like crap.
But the difference is that Apple was pretty much breaking new ground with the iPhone and iPad, so they got to set the terms. (Note that the "treat developers like crap" strategy wasn't, and isn't, really all that successful on the desktop versions of MacOS.) These devices sold like mad, so if developers wanted access, they had to play by Apple's rules. Microsoft does not and will not have that advantage with Windows Phone. In fact, they're going up against two entrenched competitors (iOS and Android). They have to convince developers to build stuff for their platform; they can't expect developers to beg for the privilege. If anything, they should be paying the developers of popular apps to port their stuff to WP8, as a loss leader to bring in more potential customers for the OS.
According to the Wikipedia page, Christianity came to South Korea in the 17th century. When the more obnoxious form of modern fundamentalist Christianity arrived, with anti-science creationism, I'm not sure. Or maybe that statement is a bit ridiculous, since anti-science creationism is part of the original philosophy. Does anyone have any insight into the history of this form of evangelical Christianity?
I don't know about the history of Christianity specifically in Korea, but I do know that even the term "fundamentalism" as applied to Christianity didn't exist until the early 20th century. (It's derived from The Fundamentals, a series of conservative Christian essays published between 1910 and 1915.) For most of Christian history, the Bible was interpreted metaphorically in areas where a literal interpretation would lead to absurd results. Even St. Augustine, a highly conservative Christian writing in the 4th-5th century, said that Christians should not hold up the faith to ridicule by insisting on a literal interpretation of the Bible: "Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn."
Fundamentalism is not a pre-modern ideology, but a specific reaction to modernity. The same is true of Islamic Wahabbism, which is akin to Christian Fundamentalism in many ways. They think they are "that old time religion" but they are actually nothing of the sort. A medieval Christian or Muslim would have found these ideologies both repulsive and unrecognizable.
The hardware seems good for the price, but I'm not at all thrilled with Amazon's custom software. The Kindle Fire HD might be a good deal if they get CyanogenMod working on it. A resolution of 1920x1080 on a 8.9-inch tablet doesn't quite match Apple's 10" @ 2048x1536, but it comes pretty close and is $200 cheaper. Strangely, no articles seem to say what the resolution will be on the smaller 7-inch Kindle Fire HD.
Mitt Romney pays less taxes (~15%) because his money was taxed when it was initially earned and now he's paying taxes on his investments so he's being taxed twice - a fact often omitted form reports.
By that logic, my plumber should only have to pay 15% on his taxes, since that money was already taxed once when me and all of his other customers earned it. But of course things don't work that way for ordinary people, only for the 1%.
If you put it in the bank, the bank can fail and take your deposits with it
No, it can't, at least not in the United States. Under the FDIC, depositors are protected by the federal government for up to $250,000 even if the bank goes bust. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which established the FDIC, was passed specifically to prevent this kind of scenario from happening, which it previously had done with some regularity. (Glass-Steagall also banned some dangerous practices like commingling retail and investment banking; unfortunately, by the 1990s, people had forgotten why these regulations were a good idea, and they were repealed, setting the stage for the financial crisis of 2008.)
I love how some of the comments are of the vein, "No way! How can I code without an IDE and a debugger and my 3 massive monitors and 16-core processor? What a joke!" I've coded on the console, in vi or emacs. If people couldn't write software without modern amenities, we'd never have had the modern amenities.
It's not that people absolutely can't code without modern tools and systems, it's that doing so is less productive. Why would you want to deliberately use a less effective system when you don't have to?
The problem is, all corporations behave badly. If you boycott every corporation that does bad things, you'll essentially cut yourself off from modern society. There are a handful of companies I try to stay away from (Wal-Mart especially), but attempting to police corporate behavior on an individual, ad-hoc basis is a fool's game.
Don't blame the players, blame the game. Vote for politicians who will curb corporate power. Yes, they're hard to find and don't always do what they say they will – that's what primaries are for. "Voting with your wallet" seldom works, because the people with the biggest wallets aren't on your side. Only real democracy – one person, one vote – is the solution. History shows us that the only way to stop bad corporate behavior is for the government to crack down on it. (In this particular case, all that would be necessary would be for the government, through the courts, to stop specifically enabling it).
Actually, after double-checking, no current GPU seems to support a resolution that high. nVidia's cards only go up to 2560x1600, and AMD's cards max out at 4096x2160 (and that only for the top-line models). So if Apple wanted to do this, they'd have to work with one of the vendors to provide silicon that could handle it. This is assuming they don't want to use the same trick the old IBM T220/T221 used, and treat the one physical monitor as 2 or 4 virtual monitors each with its own cable.
I've been thinking lately that at some point in the future, I might buy a big, high-res TV and mount it to the wall for use as my monitor...
Do it. You won't be disappointed. Most PC monitors are 1080p anyway (so you won't lose any resolution) and if you use a HDTV instead, the text is large enough that you don't have to crank up Windows' DPI setting, which can break badly-behaved software. I have used a 32" 1080p TV as my monitor for a couple years and it works very well. More recently, I've been somewhat tempted by the cheap Yamakasi Catleap 2560x1440 monitors on eBay, but I'm worried I would either have to crank the DPI setting way up, or hurt my eyes squinting at everything. The drop from 32" to 27" is pretty significant...
For TV watching, this is probably overkill; even once 4K source material becomes available, the difference is going to be very hard to notice unless you are sitting extremely close to the TV, or are using a front projector with a giant movie screen. (Even then, 1080p looks nice enough with a front projector to satisfy all but the most demanding cinemaphiles.)
However, they could be far more useful as PC accessories. Once these drop to more reasonable prices ($1000-$2000) and are available in somewhat smaller sizes (32"-40"), they would make very nice monitors. I see from the previous posts that others are already thinking along these lines. It's about time that PCs escaped the tyranny of low-DPI, mass-market 1080p panels.
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Did you hear about the 1920x1200 Amazon Fire HD for $299? It's 8.9" rather than 10", but it is still a very serious iPad competitor.
The hardware is good, and it would be worth considering if a stable build of CyanogenMod comes out for it. But I'm not touching Amazon's privacy-invading (Silk), ad-laden OS variant with a 10-foot pole.
The iPhone has been falling behind in the past year or so. Competitors now have better hardware and an equally good user experience. This is why Apple has been resorting to lawsuits: in the phone arena, they face the real prospect of losing serious market share to Samsung. The Galaxy S III is competitive with even the iPhone 5 (though its app ecosystem may not be quite as good) and the Galaxy Note is far superior to the Apple phones.
On the tablet side of things, Apple is faring better. There is still no serious Android competitor to the new iPad, with its unparalleled 2048x1536 display. Android fans usually try to respond by telling me that I don't really need a high-res display. This is a losing argument – once you've seen the new iPad in action, low-resolution tablets look crude in comparison. It really makes a huge difference, especially when reading PDFs and web pages zoomed out. None of the competing 10" tablets come close to the iPad's market share. The smaller, cheaper tablets (Nexus 7, Kindle Fire) are indeed cutting into Apple's business, but they apparently have an iPad Mini prepped and ready to go to compete there. If rumors are accurate and it goes for $249 or so, then it's going to get a lot of purchases. On the other hand, it's hard to say how many will be taken from Google and Amazon, and how many will be cannibalized from sales of the full-size (and presumably more profitable) iPad.
I'm hoping that Samsung's next Galaxy Note tablet will have a Retina-equivalent display. If they can do that and keep the price at $499 to open (like Apple did), then they will have a real competitor on their hands. I'd seriously consider buying one.
1136x640? What kind of crack-smoking resolution is that? It's not any kind of standard and it isn't an integer multiple of the existing iPhone resolutions. I had expected it to be 1440x960 (3x the original iPhone resolution) so that they could keep using the existing Retina Display features, which use simple pixel doubling for noncompliant apps. But what are they going for with this?
Not to be a jerk but.... Does anyone really think of Intel bestowing credibility in the graphics realm?
In terms of raw performance? No.
In terms of stability and compatibility? Yes. Keep in mind, Intel is the largest provider of x86 graphics hardware in the world.
Apple, well all phones, uses transceiver chips by Qualcomm or a competitor of them. Qualcomm/whatever has licensed all relevant patents to make those chips. Any buyer of such a transceiver is automatically covered by that license.
If this is true, then why did the Raspberry Pi Foundation have to negotiate separate licenses with MPEG-LA to enable H.264 decoding (and then extra optional licenses on top of that for MPEG-2 and VC-1)? By your theory, those fees should already have been covered by Broadcom when they manufactured the SoC used in the Pi. Common sense would indicate this, but as with many other things it appears that the law doesn't correspond with common sense.
Sure, companies like Amazon don't care that much if that happens, but book retailers, who are forced to attempt to make a living off of thinner and thinner margins are going to have troubles making ends meet. Publishers are similarly going to have troubles paying the bills as their margins shrink further and further.
Book retailers are just middlemen with no real value-add, so why should society care if they go out of business? (At the present time it would probably be a bad thing because there aren't enough jobs, but that's a problem with employment and aggregate demand, not a good reason to keep obsolete businesses around forever.)
Publishers add some value (selectivity and editing, for example) but they have historically extracted more value than they deserve due to their role as gatekeepers. Whittling down their margins is probably, on average, a good thing.
Events like this further underline why we need a new secure, distributed DNS system, one that is not subject to tampering by either Anonymous or ICE. Yes, there's a huge installed base issue to deal with, but DNS is falling apart, and if things continue the way they have been, the Internet may be completely balkanized across national lines in a few more years.
Poverty, one aspect is that it's strongly tied to a lack of space.
What? No, it isn't. Sure, there are densely packed slums in the Third World, but most of the world's greatest cities have high population densities. People seem to deal with that just fine. A lot of people want to live in midtown Manhattan. And for those who don't, that's fine – we have no shortage of room right here on Earth. We can't find many people who want to live in Wyoming or South Dakota, and you think people want to live on the moon?
And if you're worried about there being too many people in general, then prosperity is the solution, not the problem. Social science has known for a long time that people in prosperous societies tend to have smaller families. This isn't a recent thing, either; the pattern dates back at least to ancient Rome.
If we develop the means to expand our habitable environments. Poverty can be greatly reduced. We see this, with the discovery and colonization of America's, which in fact improved Europe by allowing many of the impoverished to migrate and become land owners.
Space-nuts always reach for that analogy, but it's so flawed that it is amazing anyone ever falls for it. It was obvious from the start that North and South America were clearly inhabitable – they were inhabited already by people. Millions of people, in fact, until imported Eurasian diseases killed about 90% of them. For the analogy to work, the Americas would have had to be an environment far more inhospitable than anywhere on earth, even the Antarctic – even there, you've got oxygen and you've got (frozen) water. If European settlers had instantly suffocated when they landed on the shores of Hispaniola or Jamestown, they probably wouldn't have tried to establish colonies there. Again, we don't have large-scale human habitations in Antarctica or on the sea floor, even though those would both be far, far easier than trying to make a silk purse out of the sow's ear of outer space.
Hm, I've heard of a couple of new things called "Internet Relay Chat" and "News Network Transport Protocol".
Both these protocols are too primitive to do what people expect of modern web forums. IRC is too evanescent (it's designed for real-time chat). It also doesn't support file attachments or other HTML features (yes, you can DCC files, but that doesn't help in a forum context). NNTP lacks the moderation and administration features that forum users want. Also, attachments are a hack rather than an integral part of the protocol.
It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty fucking simple: You want to hail a cab, look for the medallion.
That would work much better if NYC didn't arbitrarily restrict the medallion supply. If medallions were available to anyone who met a basic set of requirements (legal residence, good driving record, regular inspection of vehicle) then that would be sensible regulation. Refusing to issue any new medallions since 1937 is not.
How would you fix the Linux desktop?
Write the desktop environment to not only look and act as much like Windows as possible (offer a choice between classic, XP, and Win7 appearances), but also have the desktop environment natively use and support the Win32 API via an embedded installation of Wine. Focus obsessively on fixing the API compatibility issues, so that as much Windows commercial software as possible runs on it. Encourage the deprecation of custom toolkits (especially those of very poor quality, like GTK) and instead try to get developers to target everything towards the Win32 API and test against both Wine and Windows. Like it or not, without binary compatibility, Linux isn't going anywhere.
Also, throw away X11 and run the window manager right on top of OpenGL or DirectFB.
There was never the idea that developers had to pay for acces to the API use or information, as in MS charging $500 then $1000 for MSDN.
Win32 API documentation is available for free on the MSDN website and has been for years. There's no need to pay for any subscription. If you do a Google search for a Win32 API function name, the first result will usually be the official documentation for that function.
I know that some people say that MS gives away visual studio, but anyone who says that has not tried to write a non trivial app using the free version.
What specifically can't you do with the free version? I know it doesn't support MFC, but hardly anyone ever uses that any more anyway. If you want to work with the bare metal you code to the Win32 API, otherwise you use C#/.NET, both of which are fully supported in VS Express.
Of course in Germany and many European countries the 'privilege' part of driving is real. You can easily not qualify to be able to drive, in the states its so easy it's not a 'privilege' anymore. That and if you don't have a car in Europe it's at least plausible to get around outside metro centers.
These latter two facts are connected. Precisely because the US doesn't have decent mass transit in most parts of the country, driving requirements have to be fairly relaxed. Otherwise, a large portion of the population would be shut-ins, unable to find work, do their own shopping, or pretty much do anything else that is part of normal adulthood. Since the physical layout of the US makes mass transit impractical in many areas, the only way to break this gridlock will be with self-driving cars. At that point you can institute very stringent requirements for actually doing the driving yourself, and everyone else can just tell their car's computer where to drive them.
Microsoft learned this from Apple i.e by treating their developers like crap.
But the difference is that Apple was pretty much breaking new ground with the iPhone and iPad, so they got to set the terms. (Note that the "treat developers like crap" strategy wasn't, and isn't, really all that successful on the desktop versions of MacOS.) These devices sold like mad, so if developers wanted access, they had to play by Apple's rules. Microsoft does not and will not have that advantage with Windows Phone. In fact, they're going up against two entrenched competitors (iOS and Android). They have to convince developers to build stuff for their platform; they can't expect developers to beg for the privilege. If anything, they should be paying the developers of popular apps to port their stuff to WP8, as a loss leader to bring in more potential customers for the OS.
According to the Wikipedia page, Christianity came to South Korea in the 17th century. When the more obnoxious form of modern fundamentalist Christianity arrived, with anti-science creationism, I'm not sure. Or maybe that statement is a bit ridiculous, since anti-science creationism is part of the original philosophy. Does anyone have any insight into the history of this form of evangelical Christianity?
I don't know about the history of Christianity specifically in Korea, but I do know that even the term "fundamentalism" as applied to Christianity didn't exist until the early 20th century. (It's derived from The Fundamentals, a series of conservative Christian essays published between 1910 and 1915.) For most of Christian history, the Bible was interpreted metaphorically in areas where a literal interpretation would lead to absurd results. Even St. Augustine, a highly conservative Christian writing in the 4th-5th century, said that Christians should not hold up the faith to ridicule by insisting on a literal interpretation of the Bible: "Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn."
Fundamentalism is not a pre-modern ideology, but a specific reaction to modernity. The same is true of Islamic Wahabbism, which is akin to Christian Fundamentalism in many ways. They think they are "that old time religion" but they are actually nothing of the sort. A medieval Christian or Muslim would have found these ideologies both repulsive and unrecognizable.
The hardware seems good for the price, but I'm not at all thrilled with Amazon's custom software. The Kindle Fire HD might be a good deal if they get CyanogenMod working on it. A resolution of 1920x1080 on a 8.9-inch tablet doesn't quite match Apple's 10" @ 2048x1536, but it comes pretty close and is $200 cheaper. Strangely, no articles seem to say what the resolution will be on the smaller 7-inch Kindle Fire HD.
iPhones and iPads are not phones or tablets. They are purely fashion statements. No one would buy them otherwise.
Can you suggest a different tablet with a screen resolution of 2048x1536 or higher that is priced at or below $499?
Mitt Romney pays less taxes (~15%) because his money was taxed when it was initially earned and now he's paying taxes on his investments so he's being taxed twice - a fact often omitted form reports.
By that logic, my plumber should only have to pay 15% on his taxes, since that money was already taxed once when me and all of his other customers earned it. But of course things don't work that way for ordinary people, only for the 1%.
If you put it in the bank, the bank can fail and take your deposits with it
No, it can't, at least not in the United States. Under the FDIC, depositors are protected by the federal government for up to $250,000 even if the bank goes bust. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which established the FDIC, was passed specifically to prevent this kind of scenario from happening, which it previously had done with some regularity. (Glass-Steagall also banned some dangerous practices like commingling retail and investment banking; unfortunately, by the 1990s, people had forgotten why these regulations were a good idea, and they were repealed, setting the stage for the financial crisis of 2008.)
I love how some of the comments are of the vein, "No way! How can I code without an IDE and a debugger and my 3 massive monitors and 16-core processor? What a joke!" I've coded on the console, in vi or emacs. If people couldn't write software without modern amenities, we'd never have had the modern amenities.
It's not that people absolutely can't code without modern tools and systems, it's that doing so is less productive. Why would you want to deliberately use a less effective system when you don't have to?
The problem is, all corporations behave badly. If you boycott every corporation that does bad things, you'll essentially cut yourself off from modern society. There are a handful of companies I try to stay away from (Wal-Mart especially), but attempting to police corporate behavior on an individual, ad-hoc basis is a fool's game.
Don't blame the players, blame the game. Vote for politicians who will curb corporate power. Yes, they're hard to find and don't always do what they say they will – that's what primaries are for. "Voting with your wallet" seldom works, because the people with the biggest wallets aren't on your side. Only real democracy – one person, one vote – is the solution. History shows us that the only way to stop bad corporate behavior is for the government to crack down on it. (In this particular case, all that would be necessary would be for the government, through the courts, to stop specifically enabling it).
Actually, after double-checking, no current GPU seems to support a resolution that high. nVidia's cards only go up to 2560x1600, and AMD's cards max out at 4096x2160 (and that only for the top-line models). So if Apple wanted to do this, they'd have to work with one of the vendors to provide silicon that could handle it. This is assuming they don't want to use the same trick the old IBM T220/T221 used, and treat the one physical monitor as 2 or 4 virtual monitors each with its own cable.
I foresee Apple having a 21" 4k iMac sooner or later (unfortunately probably later). And a 5120x2880 27" model as well.
Ivy Bridge supports resolutions up to 4096x2304. To go as high as you suggest, expensive discrete video cards would be necessary.
I've been thinking lately that at some point in the future, I might buy a big, high-res TV and mount it to the wall for use as my monitor...
Do it. You won't be disappointed. Most PC monitors are 1080p anyway (so you won't lose any resolution) and if you use a HDTV instead, the text is large enough that you don't have to crank up Windows' DPI setting, which can break badly-behaved software. I have used a 32" 1080p TV as my monitor for a couple years and it works very well. More recently, I've been somewhat tempted by the cheap Yamakasi Catleap 2560x1440 monitors on eBay, but I'm worried I would either have to crank the DPI setting way up, or hurt my eyes squinting at everything. The drop from 32" to 27" is pretty significant...
For TV watching, this is probably overkill; even once 4K source material becomes available, the difference is going to be very hard to notice unless you are sitting extremely close to the TV, or are using a front projector with a giant movie screen. (Even then, 1080p looks nice enough with a front projector to satisfy all but the most demanding cinemaphiles.)
However, they could be far more useful as PC accessories. Once these drop to more reasonable prices ($1000-$2000) and are available in somewhat smaller sizes (32"-40"), they would make very nice monitors. I see from the previous posts that others are already thinking along these lines. It's about time that PCs escaped the tyranny of low-DPI, mass-market 1080p panels.