You forgot Alan Greenspan for Apple. No really - long before he was Fed chairman, he was a spokesman for Apple in a series of ads, both print and TV...
At least one of these ads around this time (IIc vintage, IIRC) was memorable because Apple's ad/marketing folks had lots of fun with the "fine print" legal disclaimers - it helpfully pointed out that the weight quoted was for the computer alone, and that it would weigh more with monitor, printers, and/or several bricks(!). Can't find a link to that one, but it's out there somewhere...
Parent post has lots of good info for a newbie looking to pick a distro. There are lots of good ones, and which one is "right" depends quite a bit on what you're trying to accomplish, and why.
That said, if you're starting from close to ground zero, then why not learn something that's even more like real Unix than Linux? Something like, maybe, BSD Unix itself! It's fair to say that many innovations that are found in Linux today came from the BSD world.
PC-BSD is as easy to use as most any Linux desktop distro (it's rapidly becoming the Ubuntu of the BSD world, but without the soap-opera politics), and FreeBSD (which PC-BSD is based upon, much like Ubuntu is based on Debian) is the gold standard in rock-solid robustness and reliability. I have never met anyone who actually took the time to learn BSD that hasn't eventually wound up preferring it to Linux for most things. And these days, BSD is capable of running most Linux programs, as well.
(And don't forget that Darwin is the open source core of Apple's OS X and iOS - so BSD is in a lot more places than you might initially think...)
Thankfully, the busybodies failed in this effort. Like the current debate on gun/magazine/ammo bans, the "if it saves even one life, it's worth it" line was a frequent appeal. (It's interesting how the people who are so concerned with saving lives through the use of governmental force in other areas of behavior can't brook even the possibility that saving the lives of people not yet born has any moral value...)
Apple reportedly has two new iPad products in the works - a retina display mini (same form factor as existing mini, and currently rumored for the Fall), and the new "iPad5" (reportedly, the 9.7" retina display ipad with the new, thinner iPad mini's design and thinness).
What will be interesting is to see what the market will say about screen size preference once the design and thinness are again in line, giving an apples-to-apple comparison again.
I *almost* bought a mini, then almost bought a Surface RT, but decided to wait for the retina display iPad mini, since I'm now spoiled by the retina display of my 4s. Now that I hear of the new thin, full-size iPad, I may again look to opt for the full-size tablet instead. I suspect I'm not the only one that may flip my preference back to an improved 10"-ish iPad.
(FWIW, none of the Android tablets, and I've tried nearly all of them, are nearly responsive enough to touch to avoid irritating the crap out of me. The Kindle Fire HD comes the closest., but it's still not good enough to want to live with. Say what you want about Apple's numerous downsides, they *get* what it takes to make a responsive touch device, hardware, firmware, and software. Easy test: Load a large, complex web page on any tablet, then grab the scroll bar and drag up and down like mad. So far, Apple is the only one I've seen that can keep up.)
I know several very competent engineers and physicists working in this area. *Something* is going on here, we just don't understand what it is yet. The science and engineering that has been done is enough to show that there is something real behind the anomalous experiments that occasionally show the effect.
"Cold fusion" is real. It's "global warming" that's B.S.... Funny how Cold Fusion is being rehabilitated as LENR now that there's a couple of decades of strong but anecdotal evidence that the effect really does exist, but yet despite the increasing weakness of the science behind the global warming theory, it continues to be undebateable. That's not how scientific inquiry is supposed to work - we are supposed to follow the *evidence* wherever it leads, and not assume that all of that evidence is correct, either...
"Good" Speech Recognition has been "just a few years away" for at least three decades. Seriously, in 1985, I hacked up a voice-controlled home automation system based on the CoVox VoiceMaster recognition system for the Commodore 64 (about $700, all together). It actually worked reasonably well, especially considering the low cost of both the voice processing hardware and the base computer system. I worked *almost* as well as the $3000 Texas Instruments VoRec system we had at work (which required a $4000 PC AT to host!)
While Siri and her ilk work better than the old CoVox system (which could not handle "connected, speaker-independent speech" at all, but nailed trained words or phrases from a one or two-user training set), the odd thing is that overall, speech recognition is still not really good enough to bother with. (I use Siri about once a month, usually when driving, and with only about a 50-60% success ratio).
Here's the odd thing: In that time, the available compute power to handle speech recognition has increased by well over a million-fold (and it's really more than that, since even on a new fast A5/A6 CPU, Siri still has to fling your voice request up tot he cloud for processing), but the entire system is nowhere near a million times better at recognizing your speech. More like a hundred times, maybe. On a good day.
This is one of those problems that has shown itself to be stubbornly resistant to traditional procedural AI approaches: 30 years on, the best we can do is still not very good!
Movies, TV and video won't drive the move to 4K screens - computing will. We still desperately need *more* pixels to make modern UI concepts work. We're on the cusp of having computers that can really handle reasonable amounts of information. WE NEED DISPLAYS TO GO WITH THEM!
By reasonable, I mean something approaching the bandwidth and resolution of a very small real-world desktop. Seriously, do the math - even at only 150 ppi (roughly the density of Apple's pre-retina iGadgets), a modest desk is far beyond 4K resolution: 48" wide by 27" deep (keeping a 16:9 mail-slot aspect ratio just because we'll never be rid of wretched "widescreens") gives a resolution of 7200x4050! Push that to "retina" territory 250-300 ppi), and you're talking serious pixels - way more than TV or movies will ever need, but exactly what we'll need to be able to really see and handle as much information as our great-grandparents did.
Computer form factors will, no, must change - the requirement for increased resolution and direct touch/motion interfaces will necessarily drive computers to looking more like the state-of-the-art high-bandwidth information desktop of 100 years ago: the original engineering workstation - the drafting table. (Possibly sweeping up into a non-touch interface area a la Tog's Starfire concept from 20 years ago...)
(FWIW, I, and most others I've asked, don't care about 4K for video, because the content isn't good enough to want better than 720p anyhow. For video, I'd rather have good color depth than higher resolution - I saw Skyfall the other day in a digital IMAX theater, and it was awful, at least partly due to compression - not only screen-doored and pixelated as hell, but with outrageous color-banding, especially in any of the sky or water shots...)
You've never seen a PixelQi screen, have you? I buy them for my company, simply because they're the best thing out there for reading a computer in direct sunlight. (Sunlight is distressingly common at the solar arrays my company monitors...) That's not saying that the PixelQi display is very good, just that it's the best of a set of even worse options.
E-ink is great for reading, but you can't buy a real computer with one, and refresh is glacial.
Most people don't know this because they haven't seen one, but a PixelQi display becomes a fairly poor monochrome-only display in sunlight. You only get (even washed out) color from a PixelQi display if you leave the backlight on and your surroundings are dark enough.
They're better than nothing, and quite nice compared to the alternatives, but they're definitely not the sort of display I really *want*...
For the mobile device revolution to *really* take off, we need a fast, vibrant, cheap, color display technology that doesn't emit light (but could be lit). (Preferably one that like e-ink, will maintain an image indefinitely without power, and can be made in virtually any size. Flexible would be nice, too, but isn't an absolute requirement...)
Qualcomm's Mirasol looked promising, but has a "failure to thrive", and color electronic ink has been just over the horizon for decades now. Sadly, there's still no display other than printed paper that can handle color and bright sun well... My ideal display looks just like a page from National Geographic - that's the display quality metric we should be shooting for!
1) Sharpie Pen in fine. (NOT the same as a fine-point or ultrafine-point Sharpie!) This is the answer to your question. I used to use the more expensive Faber-Castell PITT artist pen (favored by Industrial Designers for sketching), but the Sharpie pen performs almost identically and can be had for around a buck apiece in a multipack at WalMart. Will still bleed through thin paper, but only a ballpoint doesn't. This is the one writing instrument with me all the time - good, cheap, and rugged enough to take hunting or elsewhere in the real world - fits easily in a front jeans pocket.
2) Parker 51 fine-point fountain pen. Mine is a 1947 model, which combines the last of the art deco clip styling with the solid vacumatic mechanism. Quite simply the best writing instrument ever invented - the quality is justifiably legendary. Beware of newer "51's" that don't use the same high-precision hand-made internals - the originals required real lathe craftsmen. I own other nice fountain pens, some much nicer and more expensive, but this is my go-to carry pen. Not cheap, but because they were so popular, they are still readily available and relatively affordable for an old "collector" pen.
3) The Pentel P225 (.5mm) is the best mechanical pencil ever. Slim, light, reliable. Only downside is that it doesn't have a twist-up white eraser, but that's why I keep a separate eraser handy most of the time. Rides in the breifcase, as I don't find I'm using a pencil as often anymore...
I've been living with a SurfaceRT for several days now, and to be fair, it's the only device out there that's been thought through as well as the iPad (or possibly even better, in some respects.) If you haven't seen or tried one, it really is a terrific first effort - if MS can keep innovating like this (and it *is* innovative), they *will* wind up on top or at least be very competitive with the great formerly-striped fruit.
You missed one more problem, though, the biggest one for me: RT only supports a handful of new printers, so there's (currently) no way to ever be able to use the really nice, expensive, and still perfectly good Ethernet OKI color LED printer I bought only a few years ago. If you have to buy a new printer, this raises the price of a WinRT device pretty substantially.
That said, I have to hand it to Microsoft - they really did do a super job on this thing. Unlike Android tablets, it's *always* instantly smooth and responsive to touch, which has been only Apple's turf up to this point. The touch cover and kickstand are brilliant, and allow it to be not only a great tablet, but also a passable substitute for a small laptop. Also, keep in mind that although RT does have some limitations, most of them are irrelevant to 90% of the population. The design decisions are mostly right, and more importantly, it's quite clear that every one of them was at least thought about, even if not optimally decided on from my point of view.
If you want a tablet, but also want to be able to use it as a laptop from time to time, then the Surface is worth looking at, especially if you spend most or all of your time in the browser or Microsoft Office. (And even more so if you're into social networking like Facebook and its ilk...)
A full version of x86 Win8 in the same form factor with the same battery life could be a real winner - not sure if I'd want to make the tradeoffs here that the upcoming x86 version will require, even if it solved the printer problem (and gave me the ability to run indispensable programs like Wireshark, Visio, Corel, Inkscape, etc.)
Oh, and for what it's worth - I am no MS fanboy - I generally avoid MS wherever possible, but I call them like I see them., and they have done a very good job with Surface. Now they just need to do it again, and again, and again....
Please get into the habit of using metric. Pretty please? we look like the scientific laughing stock.
Sorry, the Metric system is not magic pixie dust imparting scienceyness.
I'd argue that the *real* work of making technology work is done more in US than Metric units: Both the Aerospace industry (which *is* on-topic here) and the Energy industry (especially Oil & Gas, upstream and downstream) use predominantly US units worldwide (with the exception of those weirdos at Airbus...)
Metric is not better, or really, even particularly easier, unless you're just incompetently innumerate to start with.
Oh, and by the way, I work in solar and used to work in commercial aircraft manufacturing, and the suggestion of horse-drawn airplanes in a thread above makes more sense than solar-powered airplanes. The very idea shows a stunning ignorance of basic physics.
P.S.: I do contract product design and development work and refuse to work with shops (even overseas) that can or will not design/produce geometry or parts in US units. This one filter weeds out 90%+ of the unqualified low-quality vendors, so it's quite useful.
P.P.S.: The *correct* length unit is the "Dublin", which is between a yard and a meter, so that the acceleration due to gravity is an even 10 Dublins/s^2, making life ever so much easier for physics and engineering students the world over.;-) (Yeah, it's "Earthist" - I call home planet prerogative - get over it...)
In general, if the SSD in question has a well-designed controller (Intel, SandForce), then write performance will begin to drop off as bad blocks start to accumulate on the drive. Eventually, wear levelling and write cycles have taken their toll, and the disk can no longer write at all. At this point, the controller does all it can: it effectively becomes a read-only disk. It should operate in this mode until else something catastrophic (tin migration, capacitor failure, etc.) keeps the entire drive from working.
BTW - I haven't seen this either, but that's the degradation profile that's been presented to me in several presentations by the folks making SSD drives and controllers. (Intel had a great one a few years back - don't have a link to it handy, though...)
I suspect Ting may not actually be the first to do this - MetroPCS has been advertising their new LTE offering for a couple of months now, and I know they are an MVNO on Sprint's network. I can't see anyone paying to run premature ads for that long.
(I'd be more familiar with this, but I'm only aware because of local DFW commercials on many of the Rangers ballgames broadcast here in Austin. Ron Washington has been pitching MetroPCS' LTE for a while now - I'm pretty sure since before the all-star break...)
Windows 8 is not for the enterprise. It's for the home. It's their way of testing the waters of a new interface paradigm. If enough home users like the new features of 8, they'll put it into the next version that is intended to replace 7 in the workplace. If users don't like it, they'll go a different route, with the desktop being the default interface in the next version.
That's funny - I'm seem to recall that Slashdot was full of comments using almost these exact same words about the radical new "Luna" interface of XP, which is without question the most sucessful operating system ever... (Heck, just look how many people still run XP, and how MS has had to repeatedly extend XP's end-of-support date all the way to 2014 - that's another TWO MORE YEARS, folks...
XP required changes in usage patterns and retraining, too, but seems to have weathered all that just fine. Maybe, just maybe, the sky isn't falling with Metro after all...
well, i can think of LOTS of 'projects' that could've saved the trillions of dollars, in absolute, 100% waste. The B1 bomber. The B2 bomber. The stealth bomber. The F22. The F35. The war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan. Shall I go on?
Except that those were at least doing something that the government is specifically authorized to do by the Constitution, as opposed to the vast majority of the federal budget. (Yes, oddly, the entire DoD is considered "discretionary spending", as opposed to mandatory spending on effectively off-budget entitlement programs like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, which cannot be cut...)
Actually, it's always seemed to me that the biggest problem with fingerprint identification is that everyone leaves the silly things all over the place all the time - imagine a world where everything you touch is left with a copy of your house and car keys.
Unless we all actually do start wearing gloves to protect us from the obvious flaws in this technology, how would anyone prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the presence of your fingerprints at a particular place and time really corresponded to *your* presence at that place and time? There's simply no plausible way to prevent fingerprint theft by anyone that can get in reasonably close proximity to you. (And I imagine the quality of prints lifted from the oleophobic glass of a modern touchscreen is outstanding...)
Consensus (even if 100%!) does NOT determine truth! History is literally filled with examples of consensus being dead wrong, quite often in the name of "science".
As you look into this (I have) you discover that what we *know* about climate (and especially the causes for its widely varying changes over both history and prehistory) begins to become very thin, very quickly. Large-scale, highly multi-variate, inherently chaotic systems are *hard* to model and understand, and even if you DO manage to build an accurate model of one (and IMO, that is currently WELL beyond our technological abilities), that is NO indication that the model is accurate or valid. And even if the model is valid for a subset of the problem domain, there is a very good chance that the fundamental presuppositions that underlie it are wrong to at least some degree. This is clearly seen even in areas that are far better understood than global climate change and GHG forcing - despite the fact that we can produce useful models of many phenomena (as did Newtonian physics), we frequently(!) discover new knowledge that causes reevaluations of our previous "knowledge" and assumptions.
REAL truth is hard to come by, and even the scientific pursuit of truth and knowledge should start with the recognition of what we don't know, and what we can't know (or at least, what we cannot prove scientifically, which is a great deal - not all questions can be answered in a scientific, observational way...)
For those who are historically unaware, the doctrine of anticipatory self-defense was NOT originated by the U.S. In fact, the U.S. was on the receiving end of the attack by the British known as "The Caroline incident" that established anticipatory self defense as a part of international law. U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster eventually agreed that nations must have a right to take pre-emptive strikes in the event that "necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation".
This is "the Caroline test" used to establish the validity of such strikes under international law, and it's not a trivial standard, as you suppose - simply claiming a need for self-defense is a far cry from satisfying the Caroline test. While this arguably supports actions such as an Israeli bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, it clearly would not support actions such as those Obama took in his recent attacks on Libya. Without a credible threat, it's pretty hard to reach the bar set by the Caroline test...
The gears of the Antikythera mechanism do not have involute teeth - they are simple, hand-filed triangular profiles. This device has been a hobby of mine for years, and my source for this is Price's original scholarly work on the mechanism, "Gears from the Greeks". (Getting a copy of this out-of-print book was quite difficult in the mid-90's - it took me nearly two years to find a copy for sale, and I had to pay nearly $200 for it. I expect it's out on the net somewhere these days...)
That said, it's not the craftsmanship that's remarkable - we have plenty of ancient jewelry to prove that precision metalworking techniques were common long before the Greeks - it's the design of the device.
The amazing thing about the Antikythera mechanism is that it's far harder to figure out how to make one, that it is to actually make it. With a only a few exceptions, most anything that could be built right before the industrial revolution could have been built by the ancient Greeks, Romans, etc. Don't get so proud of being modern - people are no smarter or capable now than they were then, we just have the advantages and motivations of a capitalist society to propagate technology...
The measurements are pretty easy, especially for people who were fluent in geometry, as most ancient empires were. (In fact there's some substantial reason to suspect that the scientists of Rhodes had a still-unknown method of determining longitude at sea, a problem that flummoxed the west's best scientific minds (including Newton and his contemporaries) until the 18th century. (Read Dava Sobel's excellent book "Longitude" for the full story. I highly recommend the illustrated edition, which has hundreds of high-quality photos of old navigational and timekeeping devices.)
Your historical ignorance is truly staggering, but apparently, your blind hatred of Christians and religion blinds you to much else, too... Christians had nothing to do with burning the Library at Alexandria, a fact easily provable by the fact there weren't any Christians in 48 B.C.! I expect even you can handle that math!
Science could not (and actually, cannot) exist without or outside a Christian worldview. Science and Christianity are anything but opposed, since science itself depends on the foundational presuppositions of a Christian worldview (see van Til and Bahnsen). The medieval period was anything but dark - in fact, it was during this time that Christian scholars created modern scientific inquiry, and nurtured it to fullness.
I prefer one of the latest versions of Puppy Linux, which have the advantage of being much smaller and faster than Ubuntu, but still giving you access to all the Ubuntu packages. This is an awesome combination.
Puppy isn't as pretty (in terms of UI polish) as some of the others, but it's technically excellent, and is probably the most innovative distro out there overall - and that innovation has been a continual process for several years now.
With Unetbootin, you can create a bootable Puppy CD in minutes (including download), and install from that to your hard disk if you decide you like it. (Yes, it can coexist with a previously-existing FAT filesystem if you want, and despite what some ignorant Linux purists are saying here, that can be a good option under many circumstances, especially when someone wants to try Linux, but be able to back out everything if they decide they don't like it.)
Puppy has gotten a bit ahead of its documentaition, (as I said it is innovating at quite a pace), but overall, I find that in the vast majority of cases (even on old hardware), Puppy "just works"...
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot Alan Greenspan for Apple. No really - long before he was Fed chairman, he was a spokesman for Apple in a series of ads, both print and TV...
At least one of these ads around this time (IIc vintage, IIRC) was memorable because Apple's ad/marketing folks had lots of fun with the "fine print" legal disclaimers - it helpfully pointed out that the weight quoted was for the computer alone, and that it would weigh more with monitor, printers, and/or several bricks(!). Can't find a link to that one, but it's out there somewhere...
Parent post has lots of good info for a newbie looking to pick a distro. There are lots of good ones, and which one is "right" depends quite a bit on what you're trying to accomplish, and why.
That said, if you're starting from close to ground zero, then why not learn something that's even more like real Unix than Linux? Something like, maybe, BSD Unix itself! It's fair to say that many innovations that are found in Linux today came from the BSD world.
PC-BSD is as easy to use as most any Linux desktop distro (it's rapidly becoming the Ubuntu of the BSD world, but without the soap-opera politics), and FreeBSD (which PC-BSD is based upon, much like Ubuntu is based on Debian) is the gold standard in rock-solid robustness and reliability. I have never met anyone who actually took the time to learn BSD that hasn't eventually wound up preferring it to Linux for most things. And these days, BSD is capable of running most Linux programs, as well.
(And don't forget that Darwin is the open source core of Apple's OS X and iOS - so BSD is in a lot more places than you might initially think...)
Although it was before just about anybody's time here, I'm told this same stupid debate came up when they first started putting radios in cars.
It absolutely did - there were numerous attempts across the country to outlaw those dangerously distracting car radios. Here is an article outlining just one example: http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/02/how-one-bureaucrat-almost-succeeded-in-b
Thankfully, the busybodies failed in this effort. Like the current debate on gun/magazine/ammo bans, the "if it saves even one life, it's worth it" line was a frequent appeal. (It's interesting how the people who are so concerned with saving lives through the use of governmental force in other areas of behavior can't brook even the possibility that saving the lives of people not yet born has any moral value...)
Yeah, but to do that, you need really big carbon atoms, and they're still hard to build... ;-)
You realize you're making an argument for variable-length hours don't you?
Apple reportedly has two new iPad products in the works - a retina display mini (same form factor as existing mini, and currently rumored for the Fall), and the new "iPad5" (reportedly, the 9.7" retina display ipad with the new, thinner iPad mini's design and thinness).
What will be interesting is to see what the market will say about screen size preference once the design and thinness are again in line, giving an apples-to-apple comparison again.
I *almost* bought a mini, then almost bought a Surface RT, but decided to wait for the retina display iPad mini, since I'm now spoiled by the retina display of my 4s. Now that I hear of the new thin, full-size iPad, I may again look to opt for the full-size tablet instead. I suspect I'm not the only one that may flip my preference back to an improved 10"-ish iPad.
(FWIW, none of the Android tablets, and I've tried nearly all of them, are nearly responsive enough to touch to avoid irritating the crap out of me. The Kindle Fire HD comes the closest., but it's still not good enough to want to live with. Say what you want about Apple's numerous downsides, they *get* what it takes to make a responsive touch device, hardware, firmware, and software. Easy test: Load a large, complex web page on any tablet, then grab the scroll bar and drag up and down like mad. So far, Apple is the only one I've seen that can keep up.)
I know several very competent engineers and physicists working in this area. *Something* is going on here, we just don't understand what it is yet. The science and engineering that has been done is enough to show that there is something real behind the anomalous experiments that occasionally show the effect.
"Cold fusion" is real. It's "global warming" that's B.S.... Funny how Cold Fusion is being rehabilitated as LENR now that there's a couple of decades of strong but anecdotal evidence that the effect really does exist, but yet despite the increasing weakness of the science behind the global warming theory, it continues to be undebateable. That's not how scientific inquiry is supposed to work - we are supposed to follow the *evidence* wherever it leads, and not assume that all of that evidence is correct, either...
"Good" Speech Recognition has been "just a few years away" for at least three decades. Seriously, in 1985, I hacked up a voice-controlled home automation system based on the CoVox VoiceMaster recognition system for the Commodore 64 (about $700, all together). It actually worked reasonably well, especially considering the low cost of both the voice processing hardware and the base computer system. I worked *almost* as well as the $3000 Texas Instruments VoRec system we had at work (which required a $4000 PC AT to host!)
While Siri and her ilk work better than the old CoVox system (which could not handle "connected, speaker-independent speech" at all, but nailed trained words or phrases from a one or two-user training set), the odd thing is that overall, speech recognition is still not really good enough to bother with. (I use Siri about once a month, usually when driving, and with only about a 50-60% success ratio).
Here's the odd thing: In that time, the available compute power to handle speech recognition has increased by well over a million-fold (and it's really more than that, since even on a new fast A5/A6 CPU, Siri still has to fling your voice request up tot he cloud for processing), but the entire system is nowhere near a million times better at recognizing your speech. More like a hundred times, maybe. On a good day.
This is one of those problems that has shown itself to be stubbornly resistant to traditional procedural AI approaches: 30 years on, the best we can do is still not very good!
Movies, TV and video won't drive the move to 4K screens - computing will. We still desperately need *more* pixels to make modern UI concepts work. We're on the cusp of having computers that can really handle reasonable amounts of information. WE NEED DISPLAYS TO GO WITH THEM!
By reasonable, I mean something approaching the bandwidth and resolution of a very small real-world desktop. Seriously, do the math - even at only 150 ppi (roughly the density of Apple's pre-retina iGadgets), a modest desk is far beyond 4K resolution: 48" wide by 27" deep (keeping a 16:9 mail-slot aspect ratio just because we'll never be rid of wretched "widescreens") gives a resolution of 7200x4050! Push that to "retina" territory 250-300 ppi), and you're talking serious pixels - way more than TV or movies will ever need, but exactly what we'll need to be able to really see and handle as much information as our great-grandparents did.
Computer form factors will, no, must change - the requirement for increased resolution and direct touch/motion interfaces will necessarily drive computers to looking more like the state-of-the-art high-bandwidth information desktop of 100 years ago: the original engineering workstation - the drafting table. (Possibly sweeping up into a non-touch interface area a la Tog's Starfire concept from 20 years ago...)
(FWIW, I, and most others I've asked, don't care about 4K for video, because the content isn't good enough to want better than 720p anyhow. For video, I'd rather have good color depth than higher resolution - I saw Skyfall the other day in a digital IMAX theater, and it was awful, at least partly due to compression - not only screen-doored and pixelated as hell, but with outrageous color-banding, especially in any of the sky or water shots...)
You've never seen a PixelQi screen, have you? I buy them for my company, simply because they're the best thing out there for reading a computer in direct sunlight. (Sunlight is distressingly common at the solar arrays my company monitors...) That's not saying that the PixelQi display is very good, just that it's the best of a set of even worse options.
E-ink is great for reading, but you can't buy a real computer with one, and refresh is glacial.
Most people don't know this because they haven't seen one, but a PixelQi display becomes a fairly poor monochrome-only display in sunlight. You only get (even washed out) color from a PixelQi display if you leave the backlight on and your surroundings are dark enough.
They're better than nothing, and quite nice compared to the alternatives, but they're definitely not the sort of display I really *want*...
For the mobile device revolution to *really* take off, we need a fast, vibrant, cheap, color display technology that doesn't emit light (but could be lit). (Preferably one that like e-ink, will maintain an image indefinitely without power, and can be made in virtually any size. Flexible would be nice, too, but isn't an absolute requirement...)
Qualcomm's Mirasol looked promising, but has a "failure to thrive", and color electronic ink has been just over the horizon for decades now. Sadly, there's still no display other than printed paper that can handle color and bright sun well... My ideal display looks just like a page from National Geographic - that's the display quality metric we should be shooting for!
Sounds like a step towards a real-life Eierlegende Wollmilchsau, the ultimate all-purpose farm animal!
My three favorite writing instruments:
1) Sharpie Pen in fine. (NOT the same as a fine-point or ultrafine-point Sharpie!) This is the answer to your question. I used to use the more expensive Faber-Castell PITT artist pen (favored by Industrial Designers for sketching), but the Sharpie pen performs almost identically and can be had for around a buck apiece in a multipack at WalMart. Will still bleed through thin paper, but only a ballpoint doesn't. This is the one writing instrument with me all the time - good, cheap, and rugged enough to take hunting or elsewhere in the real world - fits easily in a front jeans pocket.
2) Parker 51 fine-point fountain pen. Mine is a 1947 model, which combines the last of the art deco clip styling with the solid vacumatic mechanism. Quite simply the best writing instrument ever invented - the quality is justifiably legendary. Beware of newer "51's" that don't use the same high-precision hand-made internals - the originals required real lathe craftsmen. I own other nice fountain pens, some much nicer and more expensive, but this is my go-to carry pen. Not cheap, but because they were so popular, they are still readily available and relatively affordable for an old "collector" pen.
3) The Pentel P225 (.5mm) is the best mechanical pencil ever. Slim, light, reliable. Only downside is that it doesn't have a twist-up white eraser, but that's why I keep a separate eraser handy most of the time. Rides in the breifcase, as I don't find I'm using a pencil as often anymore...
I've been living with a SurfaceRT for several days now, and to be fair, it's the only device out there that's been thought through as well as the iPad (or possibly even better, in some respects.) If you haven't seen or tried one, it really is a terrific first effort - if MS can keep innovating like this (and it *is* innovative), they *will* wind up on top or at least be very competitive with the great formerly-striped fruit.
You missed one more problem, though, the biggest one for me: RT only supports a handful of new printers, so there's (currently) no way to ever be able to use the really nice, expensive, and still perfectly good Ethernet OKI color LED printer I bought only a few years ago. If you have to buy a new printer, this raises the price of a WinRT device pretty substantially.
That said, I have to hand it to Microsoft - they really did do a super job on this thing. Unlike Android tablets, it's *always* instantly smooth and responsive to touch, which has been only Apple's turf up to this point. The touch cover and kickstand are brilliant, and allow it to be not only a great tablet, but also a passable substitute for a small laptop. Also, keep in mind that although RT does have some limitations, most of them are irrelevant to 90% of the population. The design decisions are mostly right, and more importantly, it's quite clear that every one of them was at least thought about, even if not optimally decided on from my point of view.
If you want a tablet, but also want to be able to use it as a laptop from time to time, then the Surface is worth looking at, especially if you spend most or all of your time in the browser or Microsoft Office. (And even more so if you're into social networking like Facebook and its ilk...)
A full version of x86 Win8 in the same form factor with the same battery life could be a real winner - not sure if I'd want to make the tradeoffs here that the upcoming x86 version will require, even if it solved the printer problem (and gave me the ability to run indispensable programs like Wireshark, Visio, Corel, Inkscape, etc.)
Oh, and for what it's worth - I am no MS fanboy - I generally avoid MS wherever possible, but I call them like I see them., and they have done a very good job with Surface. Now they just need to do it again, and again, and again....
Please get into the habit of using metric. Pretty please? we look like the scientific laughing stock.
Sorry, the Metric system is not magic pixie dust imparting scienceyness.
I'd argue that the *real* work of making technology work is done more in US than Metric units: Both the Aerospace industry (which *is* on-topic here) and the Energy industry (especially Oil & Gas, upstream and downstream) use predominantly US units worldwide (with the exception of those weirdos at Airbus...)
Metric is not better, or really, even particularly easier, unless you're just incompetently innumerate to start with.
Oh, and by the way, I work in solar and used to work in commercial aircraft manufacturing, and the suggestion of horse-drawn airplanes in a thread above makes more sense than solar-powered airplanes. The very idea shows a stunning ignorance of basic physics.
P.S.: I do contract product design and development work and refuse to work with shops (even overseas) that can or will not design/produce geometry or parts in US units. This one filter weeds out 90%+ of the unqualified low-quality vendors, so it's quite useful.
P.P.S.: The *correct* length unit is the "Dublin", which is between a yard and a meter, so that the acceleration due to gravity is an even 10 Dublins/s^2, making life ever so much easier for physics and engineering students the world over. ;-) (Yeah, it's "Earthist" - I call home planet prerogative - get over it...)
In general, if the SSD in question has a well-designed controller (Intel, SandForce), then write performance will begin to drop off as bad blocks start to accumulate on the drive. Eventually, wear levelling and write cycles have taken their toll, and the disk can no longer write at all. At this point, the controller does all it can: it effectively becomes a read-only disk. It should operate in this mode until else something catastrophic (tin migration, capacitor failure, etc.) keeps the entire drive from working.
BTW - I haven't seen this either, but that's the degradation profile that's been presented to me in several presentations by the folks making SSD drives and controllers. (Intel had a great one a few years back - don't have a link to it handy, though...)
This is so racist AND simultaneously so historically ignorant that it's not even funny... NicBenjamin, congrats, you've beclowned yourself.
I suspect Ting may not actually be the first to do this - MetroPCS has been advertising their new LTE offering for a couple of months now, and I know they are an MVNO on Sprint's network. I can't see anyone paying to run premature ads for that long.
(I'd be more familiar with this, but I'm only aware because of local DFW commercials on many of the Rangers ballgames broadcast here in Austin. Ron Washington has been pitching MetroPCS' LTE for a while now - I'm pretty sure since before the all-star break...)
Windows 8 is not for the enterprise. It's for the home. It's their way of testing the waters of a new interface paradigm. If enough home users like the new features of 8, they'll put it into the next version that is intended to replace 7 in the workplace. If users don't like it, they'll go a different route, with the desktop being the default interface in the next version.
That's funny - I'm seem to recall that Slashdot was full of comments using almost these exact same words about the radical new "Luna" interface of XP, which is without question the most sucessful operating system ever... (Heck, just look how many people still run XP, and how MS has had to repeatedly extend XP's end-of-support date all the way to 2014 - that's another TWO MORE YEARS, folks...
XP required changes in usage patterns and retraining, too, but seems to have weathered all that just fine. Maybe, just maybe, the sky isn't falling with Metro after all...
well, i can think of LOTS of 'projects' that could've saved the trillions of dollars, in absolute, 100% waste.
The B1 bomber. The B2 bomber. The stealth bomber. The F22. The F35. The war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan.
Shall I go on?
Except that those were at least doing something that the government is specifically authorized to do by the Constitution, as opposed to the vast majority of the federal budget. (Yes, oddly, the entire DoD is considered "discretionary spending", as opposed to mandatory spending on effectively off-budget entitlement programs like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, which cannot be cut...)
Actually, it's always seemed to me that the biggest problem with fingerprint identification is that everyone leaves the silly things all over the place all the time - imagine a world where everything you touch is left with a copy of your house and car keys.
Seriously, since we've have advanced cyanocacrylate-enhanced gummy bear fingerprint recovery and duplication technologies for over a decade now, why does anyone even *think* that fingerprints are a secure ID/auth method anymore?
Unless we all actually do start wearing gloves to protect us from the obvious flaws in this technology, how would anyone prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the presence of your fingerprints at a particular place and time really corresponded to *your* presence at that place and time? There's simply no plausible way to prevent fingerprint theft by anyone that can get in reasonably close proximity to you. (And I imagine the quality of prints lifted from the oleophobic glass of a modern touchscreen is outstanding...)
Consensus (even if 100%!) does NOT determine truth! History is literally filled with examples of consensus being dead wrong, quite often in the name of "science".
As you look into this (I have) you discover that what we *know* about climate (and especially the causes for its widely varying changes over both history and prehistory) begins to become very thin, very quickly. Large-scale, highly multi-variate, inherently chaotic systems are *hard* to model and understand, and even if you DO manage to build an accurate model of one (and IMO, that is currently WELL beyond our technological abilities), that is NO indication that the model is accurate or valid. And even if the model is valid for a subset of the problem domain, there is a very good chance that the fundamental presuppositions that underlie it are wrong to at least some degree. This is clearly seen even in areas that are far better understood than global climate change and GHG forcing - despite the fact that we can produce useful models of many phenomena (as did Newtonian physics), we frequently(!) discover new knowledge that causes reevaluations of our previous "knowledge" and assumptions.
REAL truth is hard to come by, and even the scientific pursuit of truth and knowledge should start with the recognition of what we don't know, and what we can't know (or at least, what we cannot prove scientifically, which is a great deal - not all questions can be answered in a scientific, observational way...)
For those who are historically unaware, the doctrine of anticipatory self-defense was NOT originated by the U.S. In fact, the U.S. was on the receiving end of the attack by the British known as "The Caroline incident" that established anticipatory self defense as a part of international law. U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster eventually agreed that nations must have a right to take pre-emptive strikes in the event that "necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation".
This is "the Caroline test" used to establish the validity of such strikes under international law, and it's not a trivial standard, as you suppose - simply claiming a need for self-defense is a far cry from satisfying the Caroline test. While this arguably supports actions such as an Israeli bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, it clearly would not support actions such as those Obama took in his recent attacks on Libya. Without a credible threat, it's pretty hard to reach the bar set by the Caroline test...
The gears of the Antikythera mechanism do not have involute teeth - they are simple, hand-filed triangular profiles. This device has been a hobby of mine for years, and my source for this is Price's original scholarly work on the mechanism, "Gears from the Greeks". (Getting a copy of this out-of-print book was quite difficult in the mid-90's - it took me nearly two years to find a copy for sale, and I had to pay nearly $200 for it. I expect it's out on the net somewhere these days...)
That said, it's not the craftsmanship that's remarkable - we have plenty of ancient jewelry to prove that precision metalworking techniques were common long before the Greeks - it's the design of the device.
The amazing thing about the Antikythera mechanism is that it's far harder to figure out how to make one, that it is to actually make it. With a only a few exceptions, most anything that could be built right before the industrial revolution could have been built by the ancient Greeks, Romans, etc. Don't get so proud of being modern - people are no smarter or capable now than they were then, we just have the advantages and motivations of a capitalist society to propagate technology...
The measurements are pretty easy, especially for people who were fluent in geometry, as most ancient empires were. (In fact there's some substantial reason to suspect that the scientists of Rhodes had a still-unknown method of determining longitude at sea, a problem that flummoxed the west's best scientific minds (including Newton and his contemporaries) until the 18th century. (Read Dava Sobel's excellent book "Longitude" for the full story. I highly recommend the illustrated edition, which has hundreds of high-quality photos of old navigational and timekeeping devices.)
Your historical ignorance is truly staggering, but apparently, your blind hatred of Christians and religion blinds you to much else, too... Christians had nothing to do with burning the Library at Alexandria, a fact easily provable by the fact there weren't any Christians in 48 B.C.! I expect even you can handle that math!
Science could not (and actually, cannot) exist without or outside a Christian worldview. Science and Christianity are anything but opposed, since science itself depends on the foundational presuppositions of a Christian worldview (see van Til and Bahnsen). The medieval period was anything but dark - in fact, it was during this time that Christian scholars created modern scientific inquiry, and nurtured it to fullness.
I prefer one of the latest versions of Puppy Linux, which have the advantage of being much smaller and faster than Ubuntu, but still giving you access to all the Ubuntu packages. This is an awesome combination.
Puppy isn't as pretty (in terms of UI polish) as some of the others, but it's technically excellent, and is probably the most innovative distro out there overall - and that innovation has been a continual process for several years now.
With Unetbootin, you can create a bootable Puppy CD in minutes (including download), and install from that to your hard disk if you decide you like it. (Yes, it can coexist with a previously-existing FAT filesystem if you want, and despite what some ignorant Linux purists are saying here, that can be a good option under many circumstances, especially when someone wants to try Linux, but be able to back out everything if they decide they don't like it.)
Puppy has gotten a bit ahead of its documentaition, (as I said it is innovating at quite a pace), but overall, I find that in the vast majority of cases (even on old hardware), Puppy "just works"...