Climate change denial is an act of treason against life on Earth.
Now let's not get hasty. Life on Earth will do just fine, it'll be just another mass extinction from which new life will spring forth, as it always has.
Now act of treason against humanity, that might fit...
Nope. Same fallacy as with COBOL, "It's just like English, must be easy, right?"
Writing actual code is 10% of programming, constructing algorithms and structures is 90.
My point exactly. Basic BASIC lacks the data structures beyond arrays, and algorithms will be very simple like "adjust xpos variable by key presses but keep it in valid range". BASIC is for the case of wanting to make that 10:90 ratio to 90:10 ratio. And that's just fine when learning by doing, when there's nobody to teach the theory part. Algorithms and data structures and other stuff that needs to be taught or researched can be done later. Today, when real programming languages with good IDEs are a dime in a dozen, there will be natural transition to some "real" programming language, when learner wants to do something more complex, and starts hitting their head against limitations of BASIC, unlike the olden days when BASIC was often the only real alternative, and large programs became sanity-threatening monstrosities.
I mean, with BASIC, to make a simple game, you start by drawing stuff on screen. With a "real" framework, you might start by defining a bunch of classes representing different game objects. The simple game in BASIC can be test-played sooner than just the class definitions (without code) have been written with a "real" framework used "properly".
Why not Python? It's a very easy language in which you can write something significant with the least effort and it has a very steep learning curve. It's easy, it's powerful, and if you ever plan to become a real programmer - it teaches you good programming habits.
Python with libraries is huge. Python language itself is pretty huge too, and trying to read anybody elses code, or just trying to read stuff found by Google when trying to get help on a problem, pretty much requires you know almost all of the language. "Just ignore some parts" isn't a working approach. Also, Python can't really do anything much itself, you need to import a bunch of modules for anything interesting, such as graphics. BASIC is self-contained, you don't need to learn API of some module in addition to learning the langauge itself, because there are no modules.
A BASIC replacement could be built around Python, by making selected modules as part of the core language, and stripping out some of the more advanced stuff from the language itself. But "real Python" is not much of a competitor in the niche where BASIC is. No modern, generally useful language is, because simplicity (including all libraries) and being generally useful are not compatible features.
Hmm, I'll comment the auto_ptr with QObjects, and docs. I'm fairly certain it's always been clearly documented, that QObject is owned by it's parent, or by nobody if parent is 0. I mean, that's one of the cornerstones of Qt framework. Also, QObjects don't get parents by accident, and as far as I can remember, every method which may change parent of an object is documented to do so. Maybe I'm reading too much between the lines, but since you say "Qt takes ownership", I'll say just in case: Qt itself doesn't take ownership of anything, it's always some specific object (at least QObjects, QGraphics stuff, and QStandardItemModel stuff do this with parent-children relationship, and then there are the smart pointer classes of course) which has ownership of another. If there's no object with ownership, then Qt doesn't magically take care of it.
And if you're mixing auto_ptr (QScopedPointer would be more Qt'ish, unless you've got some external dependency which requires auto_ptr) and QObjects which may get a parent at some point (and this is pretty much every QObject subclass in Qt framework itself, but I guess you could be using your own QObject subclasses and not set parents ever), you're doing something wrong in the first place. You seem to know auto_ptr semantics are not compatible with something which may get deleted by somebody else, so why were you even trying?
Anyway, what you wrote sounds very much like the classic case of trying to take a framework designed to be used in certain way, and use it "your way", such as use exceptions in certain way. This generally leads to bad results and frustration, which you apparently also noticed... I agree that mixing Qt with other library/framework which makes conflicting assumptions can be hard, but generally the solution is to isolate the conflicting parts (Qt has a few possible ways to do this), instead of using the parts in a way they were not meant to work.
Win7 interface has the 1. press Win-key 2. type few letters 3. sometimes press down arrow few times/type a few more letters if what you want isn't first in the list 4. hit enter
And it works for pretty "obscure" things too... such as typing "path" will offer "edit environment variables" as the first choice. I wish modfying environment on Linux was as easy (well, apart from the environment editor itself being god-awful legacy crap from... probably Windows NT or something).
That feature alone would make Win7 interface good, no matter anything else. And anything else isn't particularly annoying about it either, so overall the interface isn't just good, it's excellent.
...which made a certain amount of sense back in the day before the ISO C++ standard, and when C++ standard libraries had widely varying performance and compliance.
Today, this decision is more of a liability than a strength. C++ now comes with some of this stuff standard, and Boost has even more. The inevitable consequence is that programmers spend a significant proportion of their time writing code to fix the impedance mismatch between Qt and standard C++ (though the STL-style iterators help).
A large part (maybe even majority) of Qt developers don't really like STL or boost or even exceptions. As one of these, I'm strongly for having an alternative to STL and Boost, and strongly against trying to make Qt code one bit more like STL or Boost code is.
And those who like STL or Boost are free to use some other GUI framework built on top of them, or start developing/improving one if open source landscape doesn't have a good choice already.
I realize I risk a modbombing of epic proportions by saying this, but you people have completely missed the point of a tablet. The world is moving away from the "tweak everything" mindset of 80s/90s PCs. Tablets are supposed to be the escape from that maintenance nightmare, and you people are trying your damnedest to turn it back into a spec-obsessed nerd playground.
Android and especially iOS devices are devices, not computers. Out-of-the-box they're good only for running variably good/crappy apps and limited browsing of the web. Tablets have plenty enough processing power to be real computers, so what do you have against people who'd want to have one device, which is both computer and tablet device?
And trying to make Android be a real computer OS is much more hassle and maintenance nightmare, than having a real Linux distro, where any software is an apt-get (or whatever) away.
No, he is saying that a country with 5% of the world's population is responsible for a disproportionate 25% of emissions, and should try and mend their ways.
What? Why? 25% is not significant. Rest of the world should do their part so that US portion becomes at least 50%, first. Everybody knows that only majority matters, so there's no point even talking about US stuff before they're above 50% of global total. Rest of the world is so ridiculous, they should pull their act together!
Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.
In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern. Democracy exists as a check on tyranny, NOT as a source of omniscience.
Yeah, but in this case, the Greeks look hosed. Up shit creek without a paddle. Royally shafted. Staring at a business end of a fan being hit with a stream of shit. Pick your metaphor. It'd be decent to let them vote which way they'd like to take it...
Also, on a more practical level, if the people of Greece aren't behind what ever the Greece ruling elite decides to do, it simply will not work. First there will be increasing amount of demonstrations, turning into riots, eventually devolving into curfew and tanks on the streets watching the country's own citizens.
I first read that as "Doughnuts Linked to Global Warming".
Stands to reason I suppose.
Doughnuts need energy that is usually created by fossil fuels; thereby causing Global Warming.
Doughnuts also use a bit of animal products (fats and whatnot) that come from animals that create Methane and other Greenhouse gases.
The ingredients used to make the doughnuts have to be trucked in by vehicles that use global warming creating fossil fuels.
The consumers of the doughnuts drive to the store burning global warming fossil fuels in their vehicles.
Doughnuts cause Global Warming,
QED
You forgot the most impotant part: The doughnuts are eaten by animals that produce Methane and other Greenhouse gasses.
Of course the important question is, do doughnuts produce more global warming than alternative food, such as pizza slices. I'm not so sure about that... I think it's better to keep stuffing ourselves with doughnuts instead of pizza slices, and in fact we should increase our doughnut consumption at the expense of pizza slices to maintain our obesity.
The great thing about my smartphone now is that there are no moving parts (except for the vibration motor). How many bends until the phone breaks in half?
Well, how many cycles of deformation does something like... car tyre take before it breaks down because of deformations?
Or how many rotations does a car engine take before even the bearings and seals need fixing?
Or, more electronic example, how many vibrations does a speaker take before it rips itself apart, or the connectors shake loose, or soldered joints break?
Now many bends is a bendable phone expected to take during a lifetime of... let's say, 3 years? Compared to the above exaples, why would it be impossible to build the phone to take that many bends before breaking? It's just a design decision, which then affects price etc.
From mechanical point of view, it's perfectly possible to build something, which allow certain amount of turning, but then not more. If you're unsure how, check out for example... car suspension. Makes travel smooth, yet takes a lot more than regular amount of force to break.
For what it's worth, I just got OTA phone software update for the... Nokia 5800XM. The phone was release in spring 2008, that is three and half years ago.
Of course by... well, any standard, the UI is still crap, even if it's probably 10x better than it was at release, no need to comment about that. But the phone is pretty solid as a phone, considering all the manhandling it has received, such as being dropped so that the phone lock slider broke (fixed with a suitable lock app), does not drop calls etc. It (Symbian S60 5th edition, not Symbian^3, or Anna, or Belle) still seems to get some new apps, too, even though the OS is so old.
Just out of curiosity, how's the software situation or usability of an iPhone purchaced in 2008? Can you still get apps for it from Apple's app store, even if it's just the apps you originally downloaded for it?
What about Android devices from 2008, what's software situation with them, for real use?
These are honest questions, because I don't really know. Also,
Perforating the rock layer above a giant chamber of pressurised magma does not strike me as particularly safe.
It's the weight of the rock which is keeping the magma down, and drilling holes in it would have very little effect in itself. Volcano does not explode because the magma chamber roof breaks, but the other way around. Volcano explodes because CO2 gets released faster than it can bubble up, when pressure becomes lower as the magma raises upwards (with runny enough magma, explosion doesn't happen because CO2 can bubble up).
Drilling small holes would be like pushing the smallest hypodermic needle into a car tyre. It will not make it explode, and it'll take ages to become empty. To get tyre explosion, you have to have catastrophic failure of the tyre material for some reason. Analogous reason to volcano explosion would be overfilling the tyre, like releasing CO2 "overfills" the volcano.
If we're talking about global disaster possibly ending civilization, 1.3 million pipes is nothing. It's one pipe for every 5 million people, basically free on global scale.
If falling pressure releases CO2, wouldn't the rising pressure force the CO2 back into solution ?
Shake a soda can. Pressure rises until no more CO2 gas is released (assuming can doesn't explode). Then let it be, CO2 starts to go back to the solution to reach equilibrium, but very slowly, it takes quite a long while.
The control experiment, where the can is opened too soon to verify that CO2 still hasn't dissolved back into the liquid, is best performed with unsuspecting test subject with suitable behaviour patterns, such as fetching cola from fridge with steady intervals.
Wood and stone? Why not steel? Consider for example common reinforced concrete: tons and tons of highly refined steel stored in very long lasting container, just waiting to be hammered out, then forged into hardened tools... In an event of total collapse of current civilization, survivors will be supplied with plenty of steel for centuries. Also, it would not be anything like stone age, as wind and hydro electric power would trivial to produce, considering all the copper we have spread around. And then of course books keep pretty well as long as they're dry, so much knowledge would not be lost.
The tiles are largely animated, which makes its "live" look quite different from what it's in images.
Also, with modern touch phones, it's all about "feel" when actually used, so passing judgement based on pictures or even videos is like passing judgement on what it would be actually like to make love to somebody just by looking at them in a photo or a movie clip... Better to just go and try 'em all. With phones it's legal and free, just march into a electronics store.
Phone hardware is power-constrained, not just by battery, but also by heat management design of a phone.
Not if you offload a lot of the processing to either a docking station of some sort, or to a remote cloud service like OnLive. That stuff is the real threat to traditional consoles, especially for multiplayer internet games where you're already dealing with participants in remote locations.
But if you have a docking station with a hundred dollars worth of GPU power, then what do you need the phone there for? Plus, there's the obvious problem of phone call to the phone owner interrupts the gaming session. Plus, the phone market is much too splintered. Just to name a few problems.
The next generation of game consoles is in your hand. It's running either iOS 5, Ice Cream Sandwich or Mango, depending on why your interest lies (sorry, Android is the closest you're going to get to Linux).
Nah, a console needs a GPU, which alone will suck more power than the whole phone. Phone hardware is power-constrained, not just by battery, but also by heat management design of a phone. Also, while touch screen is fine for many kinds of games, it just doesn't cut it for most arcade and action games.
Post-PC world? How many college students do you see writing papers on their Androids?
Soon, most of them, be it Android, or maybe iOS or WP or even a "real" Linux. They'll be doing it with tablet + attached keyboard, sometimes with phone + attached keyboard + external display.
Ultimately, humanity must escape the cradle of Earth and venture forth, to provide assurance that we will not be snuffed out by destruction -- self-made or otherwise.
Why? That narrative about it being humankind's destiny to expand and live forever just doesn't hold any more. Plenty of thinkers have speculated that the human race has other possible futures, such as voluntary extinction (declining birthrates in the wake of robots doing almost everything, for example), replacement by a new AI species, living on Earth inside a virtual reality instead of expanding outward, etc.
"Humanity" is not one entity. Declining birth rates are only temporary, evolution will find a way, because those that are more prone to get more kids will have more offspring (duh). Also, the part of humanity that manages to leave Earth will maybe have their offspring survive, when humans on Earth are eventually wiped out, one way or the other. Many of the "future of humanity" visions seem to assume that whatever happens, will happen to the entire humanity, but evolution doesn't quite work that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Climate change denial is an act of treason against life on Earth.
Now let's not get hasty. Life on Earth will do just fine, it'll be just another mass extinction from which new life will spring forth, as it always has.
Now act of treason against humanity, that might fit...
Nope. Same fallacy as with COBOL, "It's just like English, must be easy, right?"
Writing actual code is 10% of programming, constructing algorithms and structures is 90.
My point exactly. Basic BASIC lacks the data structures beyond arrays, and algorithms will be very simple like "adjust xpos variable by key presses but keep it in valid range". BASIC is for the case of wanting to make that 10:90 ratio to 90:10 ratio. And that's just fine when learning by doing, when there's nobody to teach the theory part. Algorithms and data structures and other stuff that needs to be taught or researched can be done later. Today, when real programming languages with good IDEs are a dime in a dozen, there will be natural transition to some "real" programming language, when learner wants to do something more complex, and starts hitting their head against limitations of BASIC, unlike the olden days when BASIC was often the only real alternative, and large programs became sanity-threatening monstrosities.
I mean, with BASIC, to make a simple game, you start by drawing stuff on screen. With a "real" framework, you might start by defining a bunch of classes representing different game objects. The simple game in BASIC can be test-played sooner than just the class definitions (without code) have been written with a "real" framework used "properly".
It's better to teach the machine in the abstract.
The point of BASIC is, it doesn't need to be taught, it can be learned without teaching, without the abstract.
Why not Python? It's a very easy language in which you can write something significant with the least effort and it has a very steep learning curve. It's easy, it's powerful, and if you ever plan to become a real programmer - it teaches you good programming habits.
Python with libraries is huge. Python language itself is pretty huge too, and trying to read anybody elses code, or just trying to read stuff found by Google when trying to get help on a problem, pretty much requires you know almost all of the language. "Just ignore some parts" isn't a working approach. Also, Python can't really do anything much itself, you need to import a bunch of modules for anything interesting, such as graphics. BASIC is self-contained, you don't need to learn API of some module in addition to learning the langauge itself, because there are no modules.
A BASIC replacement could be built around Python, by making selected modules as part of the core language, and stripping out some of the more advanced stuff from the language itself. But "real Python" is not much of a competitor in the niche where BASIC is. No modern, generally useful language is, because simplicity (including all libraries) and being generally useful are not compatible features.
Hmm, I'll comment the auto_ptr with QObjects, and docs. I'm fairly certain it's always been clearly documented, that QObject is owned by it's parent, or by nobody if parent is 0. I mean, that's one of the cornerstones of Qt framework. Also, QObjects don't get parents by accident, and as far as I can remember, every method which may change parent of an object is documented to do so. Maybe I'm reading too much between the lines, but since you say "Qt takes ownership", I'll say just in case: Qt itself doesn't take ownership of anything, it's always some specific object (at least QObjects, QGraphics stuff, and QStandardItemModel stuff do this with parent-children relationship, and then there are the smart pointer classes of course) which has ownership of another. If there's no object with ownership, then Qt doesn't magically take care of it.
And if you're mixing auto_ptr (QScopedPointer would be more Qt'ish, unless you've got some external dependency which requires auto_ptr) and QObjects which may get a parent at some point (and this is pretty much every QObject subclass in Qt framework itself, but I guess you could be using your own QObject subclasses and not set parents ever), you're doing something wrong in the first place. You seem to know auto_ptr semantics are not compatible with something which may get deleted by somebody else, so why were you even trying?
Anyway, what you wrote sounds very much like the classic case of trying to take a framework designed to be used in certain way, and use it "your way", such as use exceptions in certain way. This generally leads to bad results and frustration, which you apparently also noticed... I agree that mixing Qt with other library/framework which makes conflicting assumptions can be hard, but generally the solution is to isolate the conflicting parts (Qt has a few possible ways to do this), instead of using the parts in a way they were not meant to work.
WinVis7a interface is god-awful.
Win7 interface has the
1. press Win-key
2. type few letters
3. sometimes press down arrow few times/type a few more letters if what you want isn't first in the list
4. hit enter
And it works for pretty "obscure" things too... such as typing "path" will offer "edit environment variables" as the first choice. I wish modfying environment on Linux was as easy (well, apart from the environment editor itself being god-awful legacy crap from... probably Windows NT or something).
That feature alone would make Win7 interface good, no matter anything else. And anything else isn't particularly annoying about it either, so overall the interface isn't just good, it's excellent.
...which made a certain amount of sense back in the day before the ISO C++ standard, and when C++ standard libraries had widely varying performance and compliance.
Today, this decision is more of a liability than a strength. C++ now comes with some of this stuff standard, and Boost has even more. The inevitable consequence is that programmers spend a significant proportion of their time writing code to fix the impedance mismatch between Qt and standard C++ (though the STL-style iterators help).
A large part (maybe even majority) of Qt developers don't really like STL or boost or even exceptions. As one of these, I'm strongly for having an alternative to STL and Boost, and strongly against trying to make Qt code one bit more like STL or Boost code is.
And those who like STL or Boost are free to use some other GUI framework built on top of them, or start developing/improving one if open source landscape doesn't have a good choice already.
Please, no WAAA KDE IS BLOATED AND BROKEN AND INCOMPLETE AND THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER arguments because they've been proven wrong time and again.
It's sad that I have to post AC to defend KDE, currently one of the best desktops (okay, the best desktop) for GNU/Linux.
Defending KDE is fine, I think everybody can agree, that KDE is in dire need of apologists defending it ;)
However, it's a sad day every time a post with CAPS in it like this gets "insightful" mod in /.
You want to try Unity.
Tablet owners are the only people remaining i haven't heard complaining about it.
Why not Gnome 3, for the same reason?
Is there a decent "apt-get-able" (which was requested in TFS) distribution which has fully integrated gnome3?
I realize I risk a modbombing of epic proportions by saying this, but you people have completely missed the point of a tablet. The world is moving away from the "tweak everything" mindset of 80s/90s PCs. Tablets are supposed to be the escape from that maintenance nightmare, and you people are trying your damnedest to turn it back into a spec-obsessed nerd playground.
Android and especially iOS devices are devices, not computers. Out-of-the-box they're good only for running variably good/crappy apps and limited browsing of the web. Tablets have plenty enough processing power to be real computers, so what do you have against people who'd want to have one device, which is both computer and tablet device?
And trying to make Android be a real computer OS is much more hassle and maintenance nightmare, than having a real Linux distro, where any software is an apt-get (or whatever) away.
No, he is saying that a country with 5% of the world's population is responsible for a disproportionate 25% of emissions, and should try and mend their ways.
What? Why? 25% is not significant. Rest of the world should do their part so that US portion becomes at least 50%, first. Everybody knows that only majority matters, so there's no point even talking about US stuff before they're above 50% of global total. Rest of the world is so ridiculous, they should pull their act together!
Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.
In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern. Democracy exists as a check on tyranny, NOT as a source of omniscience.
Yeah, but in this case, the Greeks look hosed. Up shit creek without a paddle. Royally shafted. Staring at a business end of a fan being hit with a stream of shit. Pick your metaphor. It'd be decent to let them vote which way they'd like to take it...
Also, on a more practical level, if the people of Greece aren't behind what ever the Greece ruling elite decides to do, it simply will not work. First there will be increasing amount of demonstrations, turning into riots, eventually devolving into curfew and tanks on the streets watching the country's own citizens.
I first read that as "Doughnuts Linked to Global Warming".
Stands to reason I suppose.
Doughnuts need energy that is usually created by fossil fuels; thereby causing Global Warming.
Doughnuts also use a bit of animal products (fats and whatnot) that come from animals that create Methane and other Greenhouse gases.
The ingredients used to make the doughnuts have to be trucked in by vehicles that use global warming creating fossil fuels.
The consumers of the doughnuts drive to the store burning global warming fossil fuels in their vehicles.
Doughnuts cause Global Warming,
QED
You forgot the most impotant part: The doughnuts are eaten by animals that produce Methane and other Greenhouse gasses.
Of course the important question is, do doughnuts produce more global warming than alternative food, such as pizza slices. I'm not so sure about that... I think it's better to keep stuffing ourselves with doughnuts instead of pizza slices, and in fact we should increase our doughnut consumption at the expense of pizza slices to maintain our obesity.
The great thing about my smartphone now is that there are no moving parts (except for the vibration motor). How many bends until the phone breaks in half?
Well, how many cycles of deformation does something like... car tyre take before it breaks down because of deformations?
Or how many rotations does a car engine take before even the bearings and seals need fixing?
Or, more electronic example, how many vibrations does a speaker take before it rips itself apart, or the connectors shake loose, or soldered joints break?
Now many bends is a bendable phone expected to take during a lifetime of... let's say, 3 years? Compared to the above exaples, why would it be impossible to build the phone to take that many bends before breaking? It's just a design decision, which then affects price etc.
From mechanical point of view, it's perfectly possible to build something, which allow certain amount of turning, but then not more. If you're unsure how, check out for example... car suspension. Makes travel smooth, yet takes a lot more than regular amount of force to break.
For what it's worth, I just got OTA phone software update for the... Nokia 5800XM. The phone was release in spring 2008, that is three and half years ago.
Of course by... well, any standard, the UI is still crap, even if it's probably 10x better than it was at release, no need to comment about that. But the phone is pretty solid as a phone, considering all the manhandling it has received, such as being dropped so that the phone lock slider broke (fixed with a suitable lock app), does not drop calls etc. It (Symbian S60 5th edition, not Symbian^3, or Anna, or Belle) still seems to get some new apps, too, even though the OS is so old.
Just out of curiosity, how's the software situation or usability of an iPhone purchaced in 2008? Can you still get apps for it from Apple's app store, even if it's just the apps you originally downloaded for it?
What about Android devices from 2008, what's software situation with them, for real use?
These are honest questions, because I don't really know. Also,
Perforating the rock layer above a giant chamber of pressurised magma does not strike me as particularly safe.
It's the weight of the rock which is keeping the magma down, and drilling holes in it would have very little effect in itself. Volcano does not explode because the magma chamber roof breaks, but the other way around. Volcano explodes because CO2 gets released faster than it can bubble up, when pressure becomes lower as the magma raises upwards (with runny enough magma, explosion doesn't happen because CO2 can bubble up).
Drilling small holes would be like pushing the smallest hypodermic needle into a car tyre. It will not make it explode, and it'll take ages to become empty. To get tyre explosion, you have to have catastrophic failure of the tyre material for some reason. Analogous reason to volcano explosion would be overfilling the tyre, like releasing CO2 "overfills" the volcano.
If we're talking about global disaster possibly ending civilization, 1.3 million pipes is nothing. It's one pipe for every 5 million people, basically free on global scale.
If falling pressure releases CO2, wouldn't the rising pressure force the CO2 back into solution ?
Shake a soda can. Pressure rises until no more CO2 gas is released (assuming can doesn't explode). Then let it be, CO2 starts to go back to the solution to reach equilibrium, but very slowly, it takes quite a long while.
The control experiment, where the can is opened too soon to verify that CO2 still hasn't dissolved back into the liquid, is best performed with unsuspecting test subject with suitable behaviour patterns, such as fetching cola from fridge with steady intervals.
Wood and stone? Why not steel? Consider for example common reinforced concrete: tons and tons of highly refined steel stored in very long lasting container, just waiting to be hammered out, then forged into hardened tools... In an event of total collapse of current civilization, survivors will be supplied with plenty of steel for centuries. Also, it would not be anything like stone age, as wind and hydro electric power would trivial to produce, considering all the copper we have spread around. And then of course books keep pretty well as long as they're dry, so much knowledge would not be lost.
"Can't open easily" also means "no parts flying around when dropped to the floor"...
But what would you do with the SD card slot, which isn't better done with USB or WLAN?
The tiles are largely animated, which makes its "live" look quite different from what it's in images.
Also, with modern touch phones, it's all about "feel" when actually used, so passing judgement based on pictures or even videos is like passing judgement on what it would be actually like to make love to somebody just by looking at them in a photo or a movie clip... Better to just go and try 'em all. With phones it's legal and free, just march into a electronics store.
Phone hardware is power-constrained, not just by battery, but also by heat management design of a phone.
Not if you offload a lot of the processing to either a docking station of some sort, or to a remote cloud service like OnLive. That stuff is the real threat to traditional consoles, especially for multiplayer internet games where you're already dealing with participants in remote locations.
But if you have a docking station with a hundred dollars worth of GPU power, then what do you need the phone there for? Plus, there's the obvious problem of phone call to the phone owner interrupts the gaming session. Plus, the phone market is much too splintered. Just to name a few problems.
The next generation of game consoles is in your hand. It's running either iOS 5, Ice Cream Sandwich or Mango, depending on why your interest lies (sorry, Android is the closest you're going to get to Linux).
Nah, a console needs a GPU, which alone will suck more power than the whole phone. Phone hardware is power-constrained, not just by battery, but also by heat management design of a phone. Also, while touch screen is fine for many kinds of games, it just doesn't cut it for most arcade and action games.
Post-PC world? How many college students do you see writing papers on their Androids?
Soon, most of them, be it Android, or maybe iOS or WP or even a "real" Linux. They'll be doing it with tablet + attached keyboard, sometimes with phone + attached keyboard + external display.
Why? That narrative about it being humankind's destiny to expand and live forever just doesn't hold any more. Plenty of thinkers have speculated that the human race has other possible futures, such as voluntary extinction (declining birthrates in the wake of robots doing almost everything, for example), replacement by a new AI species, living on Earth inside a virtual reality instead of expanding outward, etc.
"Humanity" is not one entity. Declining birth rates are only temporary, evolution will find a way, because those that are more prone to get more kids will have more offspring (duh). Also, the part of humanity that manages to leave Earth will maybe have their offspring survive, when humans on Earth are eventually wiped out, one way or the other. Many of the "future of humanity" visions seem to assume that whatever happens, will happen to the entire humanity, but evolution doesn't quite work that way.