I'd rather see an asteroid hit the earth. I don't actually want anyone to die; I'd like it to hit an uninhabited area such as Antarctica or Siberia (like the Tunguska Event). The reason is simple: I think we humans need a good kick in the pants to work on our space program, so we can deal with problems like this
You vastly overestimate the thinking process of the average person. If a significant asteroid hit Earth, their thinking would be: "We've just had a big asteroid strike. The chances of a second one happening any time soon are infinitesimal!" And they'd push for even more defunding of asteroid tracking programs in favor of daytime soaps.
A 1920x1080 monitor (HDTV) has more pixels than a 1600x1200.
As for form-factor, it seems some people just can't stop hating on any computer monitor that matches up to HDTV's 16:9 display ratio. Why is this? I have no problem with convergence... it greatly reduces manufacturing costs, resulting in lower consumer prices for quality monitors.
Reducing manufacturing costs. Right. Because there are soooo many 15" and 22" 16:9 HDTVs being made and sold.
HDTVs are 16:9 (1.78:1) because it better fits the widescreen format of most movies which are 1.85:1 up to 2.35:1. That makes them good for watching movies.
16:9 sucks on PCs because of the way user interfaces have developed. Take a close look at the web browser you're using right now. Excluding the 5 pixel borders, from top to bottom we have:
the browser's title bar
the menu bar
the navigation bar
most people have a bookmark and add-on bar(s)
the tabs bar
then the webpage contents
a status bar
Windows' task bar at the very bottom.
Meanwhile going left to right we have:
the webpage contents
the scroll bar
PCs need more vertical space to better match the way user interfaces have developed. Instead, manufacturers have been doing the opposite and whittling away at vertical resolution to give us more horizontal resolution. 16:9 is the culmination of this backwards trend, giving us more width while keeping the height at the same amounts which were standard 10-15 years ago (1366x768 vs 1024x768, 1280x1024 vs 1920x1080).
That's why 16:9 sucks on PCs. I've resorted to installing the tree style tabs extension to move my tabs to the side, to free up more vertical space. And before Mozilla did it by default in more recent versions, I reconfigured Firefox's UI to combine the navigation, URL, and bookmark bars into a single bar. (Interestingly, they eliminated your ability to do this on later FF 3.x versions, but my config carried over when I upgraded.) In Lightroom, I have the top and bottom tool boxes set to auto-close, while the left and right remain open. All to free up more vertical space so I can see a bigger version of the photos I'm working on.
1920x1080 may be more pixels than 1600x1200, but they're not useful pixels on a PC. Vertical pixels are simply worth more than horizontal pixels. Manufacturers like 16:9 because it fits better with the aspect ratio of the keyboard + trackpad, so is easier to put into a laptop's clamshell design. About the only benefit of 16:9 on a PC is that you can open two apps/pages side by side. And even there I insist on buying a 16:10 1920x1200 monitor.
And they don't need to prove the tracking platform works if they already have a tracking platform that works, and such tracking platforms were demonstrated last year on test aircraft at distances of 20km or more.
In a documentary about early radar guided missile tests, circa 1950s and 1960s, one of the engineers talked about how they needed film footage of the hits (or misses) to evaluate how well the system was working. How do you aim a camera at the point where two nearly-supersonic objects are going to collide? Then they realized their radar tracking system was already tracking the target (to "paint" it so the missile could track the radar reflection). So rather than engineer a solution, they first tried just mounting a camera on the tracking radar. And it worked beautifully - the target plane always dead center in the frame.
The article has it right. When dealing with changes in energy you have to consider the frame of reference. From the train's frame of reference, which is moving with respect to the Earth's, any incremental change in velocity results in the same change in kinetic energy. Consider this thought experiment. You are on a stationary train. You stand up and begin walking forward at 5 mph. Later the train is moving at 100 mph. You stand up and walk forward at 5 mph. From your point of view the change in kinetic energy both times was the same
No no no no no. You're forgetting Newton's 3rd law and mixing up momentum with energy.
If you accelerate to walk forward at 5 mph on a stationary train, you impart a reverse acceleration on the train. Basically, as you walk forward, you push the train backward. Because this acceleration on the train is momentum-based, it scales linearly with velocity. So if the train weighs 10,000 times more than you, when you accelerate 5 mph, you decelerate the train by 5/10,000 = 0.0005 mph. The kinetic energy change of going from v=0 to v=-0.0005 is negligible.
Totally different story at 3000 mph. From the reference frame of the train, the same thing happens when you accelerate to walk forward at 5 mph. But even though the delta-v for the train is still -0.0005, it's from 3000 mph to 2999.9995 mph, which is a huge energy change. Compared to the stationary train case, it's [(3000^2)-(2999.9995)^2] / (.0005)^2 = 12 million times more energy lost by the train. Basically the same amount of energy needed to accelerate you from 3000 mph to 3005 mph. You provide just enough energy to move yourself from 0 mph to 5 mph, which is why it seems the same to you. But the energy the train needs to maintain 3000 mph when you walk forward is 12 million times greater than when it's stationary.
Since dvorak, colemak, and other optimized layouts haven't really caught on, I'm afraid we'll be living with qwerty and it's international variants for a long time.
I wouldn't be so sure.
1. Replace keycap letters with e-ink.
2. Allow users to remap keys to their liking.
3. Use whatever layout you want, qwerty, dvorak, abcdef, or whatever this new one is.
The thing that's been keeping qwerty alive is everyone having to learn it. Even if you use dvorak, you still have to learn qwerty because you'll frequently sit down at a physical qwerty keyboard. With the move to virtual keyboards and the development of technology which would allow easy reconfiguration of a physical keyboard (including the letter markings), a lot of that inertia disappears.
It's like I say about GUIs - rather than trying to force everyone into a menu model or a ribbon model, include both. The people who like menus can use the menus, the people who like the ribbon can use the ribbon, and if a menu-user sits at a ribbon-user's computer (or vice versa), a single configuration option should let you switch between the two. We should be adapting computers to match the way we (as individuals) like to work, not expecting individuals to adapt how they work to match one monolithic way all computers work.
Welcome to venture capital investing 101. Don't kid yourself, that's what kickstarter is. It's not some fundamentally different way to fund projects. It's the same venture capital of old, just with the investors having less (no) power over how their money is used, and a new interface (website) which allows one to raise small funds from a lot of investors rather than large funds from a few investors. It's not a storefront like Amazon where you pay your money and you're guaranteed to get the advertised product or your money back. There's a risk it could fail, there's a risk it could be a scam. Do your research and invest accordingly.
I helped fund the Makey Makey kickstarter because the guys behind it check out, the product's schedule and price point are feasible, and I could actually use the thing. But I'm not touching the Ouya with a ten-foot pole.
'Safari, unlike other browsers, blocks cookies from ad networks like Google's.
Because irresponsible members of the press attribute features which originated in Opera and Firefox to Apple. A few years later it'll turn out Opera and Mozilla never bothered patenting cookie blocking because it was so obvious, but Apple did. Then Apple will sue them and get an injunction against their products for something they had first.
Naturally, societies not poisoned by this Calvinist bullshit recognize that success and failure are a product of the circumstances of one's birth, upbringing, work habits, education (and access to it), healthcare (and access to it), and just plain dumb luck. How hard you work certainly plays into it, but it is not the sole factor, and often not even the most important factor.
It's not bullshit. What's going on is that as an economy develops and improves, it becomes more efficient. The more efficient an economy, the less effect hard work, education, and good decisions have on your success. The easy improvements with big economic gains have already been done. What's left are harder, more obscure improvements with smaller gains.
The effect of plain dumb luck meanwhile remains the same. When the economy was inefficient and there were lots of easy ways to improve it, luck played a proportionately small role. But now that the economy is very efficient and the remaining ways to improve it are small, luck plays a proportionally larger role. Thus creating the illusion that hard work matters little and it's mostly just luck.
This is a common mistake I see from people trying to draw conclusions about politics or economics. They look at the way things are for themselves right now and incorrectly conclude that it must be the same for all cases. The importance of hard work is like the importance of clean air regulations in an industrialized country. When your country's economy is well-developed / the skies are clear, it seems like their importance is overemphasized. But you have to understand that the reason the economy is in the well-developed state / the air is clean is because of hard work / clean air regulations.
You can thank Ronald Reagan for much of that sentiment: the idea that the government is incompetent at best, evil at worst.
Somehow, some way, it always has to be blamed on a conservative, doesn't it? Half the Americans around today can't even remember Ronald Reagan, much less be taken in by something he said.
You can blame the DMV, the Post Office, jury duty, navigating the IRS tax forms, trying to fight a parking ticket in court, trying to get a permit for, well, just about anything. The long lines and waits, and byzantine and seemingly pointless rules and regulations people encounter in person are what convinces them that the government is incompetent or evil. Compare to their experience at Walmart or McDonalds or the local supermarket, where they walk in, select what they want, pay, and walk out within a few minutes, and is it any wonder they think private enterprise is better at serving their needs?
It gets worse. The taxonomy of the salmonids was based on morphology in the centuries before DNA testing. When the DNA was actually tested, ichthyologists had a lot of egg on their faces. Not only did they find that the steelhead and rainbow trout were the same species, it turned out the rainbow trout - arguably the archetypical trout - is actually a salmon. It also turned out the Atlantic salmon (the most common species of "farmed salmon") was a trout, not a salmon.
The rainbow trout's genus was quietly changed from Salmo to Oncorhynchus, placing it with the other salmons. Several trout (including the ubiquitous lake trout) turned out to be char, genus Salvelinus.
Apple seem to think that thinner == cooler, with products such as the MacBook Air, so I'm not sure this comment is going to sit well with them.
You're trying to find logical consistency where there is none. The resolution/dpi on the first and second gen iPad was the worst of any tablet (aside from $99 Chinese knockoffs) but it was the thinnest tablet. Hence Apple fans insisted the thinness was cool and the resolution was "good enough". By the time the third gen iPad rolled out, it was no longer the thinnest tablet, but had the highest resolution/dpi. And Apple fans felt the high resolution was cool and the thinness was "good enough".
It's a classic case of starting with a predetermined conclusion ("Apple products are cooler than the rest"), and cherry picking the features which support that conclusion. You'll find no logical consistency in it. It's the same misguided reasoning which comes up with "show me a competing product with the same or better features" as an argument of superiority. That argument works for nearly any product because most products have at least one feature at which they're best in class. The Samsung tablet is the thinnest so there is no competing product with "the same or better features". The cheap $99 tablet is the cheapest, so there is no competing product with "the same or better features". Rather than truly ask themselves which product has the best feature set, they subconsciously rephrase the question so that the only answer is the one they want - an Apple product. Completely oblivious to the fact that they've reworded the question to the point where it's meaningless.
The $300 shitty computer can run pretty much anything you want to put on it. How many tablets and smartphones out there will even allow you to put any software you want on your device? Cheering on the post-PC era, with all the locked bootloaders and apps being pulled and features being removed after the device has already been sold via mandatory updates, seems a little short-sighted to me. I'll welcome the post-PC era when all the tablet and smartphone manufacturers aren't raping consumers for every penny they possibly can while deliberately degrading the experience of their previous devices to force users to throw their device into a drawer and buy a new one just to run the newest Angry Birds.
Once upon a time there was no such thing as a $300 computer. And buying one which could run pretty much anything you wanted required a $1000 desktop. Computer sizes have gotten smaller and prices have come down. Tablets and smartphones are a small hiccup in that pricing trend due to the change in form factor, but it won't last. I agree that locked bootloaders and devices having features disabled via software are BS. But you're kidding yourself if you don't see the inevitable PC trend from desktop -> laptop -> something smaller.
I suspect what'll happen though is that in 10-20 years when phones have enough computing power for 99% of people's needs, we'll be calling those PCs. They're still Personal Computers, if not more so.
So I wonder where the anti-UN sentiment in the US comes from?
The UN is funded by member nations in proportion to their GDP. In the past, this has meant that the U.S. has been paying for more than 25% of the UN's activities. Many Americans felt we weren't "getting our money's worth" from that investment, paying a lot of money to support an organization which frequently worked counter to U.S. interests. On the flip side, many people who are anti-U.S. tried to use the UN to thwart U.S. interests while expecting the U.S. to pay 1/4th to 1/3rd of it.
Yes you can argue the EU as a whole pays a bigger share, but the EU has much more representation in the UN's voting bodies. They have 2 permanent security council seats and frequently have non-permanent seats. The U.S. has just 1 permanent security council seat. (Incidentally, when the UN was first formed, the USSR wanted each of its republics to have a separate seat and thus a separate vote. The U.S. countered that if they were going to do that, each of the U.S. states should have their own seat and vote. The EU, by starting off as separate countries at the time the UN was formed, has kinda unintentionally finagled the same thing wrt represenation.)
With globalization and improving economic development around the world, the U.S. share of UN funding has been falling, approaching 20%. When I projected it (before the housing bubble), we were on course to drop below 20% around 2015-2020. The lower the U.S. share drops, the better it will be for both those in the U.S. and those anti-U.S.
"Then it took them years to recognize the importance of the Internet"
Windows had TCP/IP and a dialer built in years before Mac OS.
I was one of the lucky few (in college) who got to taste the Internet in the 1980s. Microsoft absolutely refused to add a TCP/IP stack to Windows 3.x. Gates believed the proprietary network model championed by AOL and CompuServe would win out. MSN was actually Microsoft's entry into that model. Back then, you had to pay a monthly fee to subscribe to it - it was not free like it is now. There was no way in hell he was going to help Windows users use the free Internet, so no TCP/IP stack for Windows. We had to futz around with manually installing Trumpet Winsock ourselves to hook up a Windows machine to the net. This was not for the faint of heart, and took me several hours spread across several days to get it right.
1994 was when the Internet reached critical mass. AOL and CompuServe gave their (massive at the time) userbase access to USENET in 1993, and word spread from there among non-geeks about this great, free worldwide communications network. URLs started showing up in commercials and on billboards that year. IIRC the first Super Bowl commercial with a URL was that year. That was when Gates finally conceded that the Internet had beaten the walled garden networks, and put a TCP/IP stack into Windows. Hence why it didn't show up until Windows 95.
While the Mac did not officially support TCP/IP until later, that was because there was a great and easy-to-use third party TCP/IP installer for it. I want to say it was MacTCP but I don't remember exactly anymore. What I do remember was that we had a bunch of Macs at my college computer lab in 1988 hooked up to the Internet, no problem.
"With the competition dead, they stalled IE development and set back web innovation by a decade until Firefox broke the market back open."
Blaming MS for IE not being developed quick enough is like blaming Apple for not coming out with the iPhone in 2001.
If you check the release history for IE, there's something like a 13 month period where Microsoft released no new features for IE, only security updates. That's what they did after they'd vanquished Netscape. Once the competition was gone, they stopped funding new development. So that's at least a year that browsers are behind that's directly attributable to Microsoft.
I'm not sure I'd say they put the browser back by a decade, but they were working hard the entire time to fragment the industry by introducing non-compliant and proprietary web extensions (ActiveX, which could only be implemented by Windows web servers) in an attempt to take over the WWW. I wouldn't say that's entirely a negative thing - they did force the fogeys at W3C to hurry up and implement new features in HTML that users and web developers were clamoring for. But by trying to take over the WWW instead of working with W3C to improve it, they did put the industry back by a few years at least.
Roman air conditioner. Basically a pipe buried underground with air forced through it by heating it at one end. The air drawn in is cooled by the surrounding earth. In winter it will work as a mediocre heater since the temperature about 15-30 feet underground stays relatively constant year-round at around 50-55 F (not as effective as a fire, but this would work even in the absence of firewood). Would work in high humidity too, though you'd need to add some sort of drainage system to remove water which condenses out from the temperature change.
It's a common misnomer that black gets hotter. Black has higher emissivity. That means when the outside is hotter, a black roof will allow heat from outside to enter inside more quickly. But it also means when the outside is colder, the black roof will allow heat from inside to exit outside more quickly.
Basically, you can think of black as a heat conductor, while white is a heat insulator. So a white roof will actually keep your house warmer in winter. In winter you'll have sunlight heating the black roof more than the white. But unless it heats it more than the interior temperature, the black roof is still going to radiate interior heat away more quickly. And at night the white roof will win by a huge margin.
Are you refuting that Flash drains battery, runs slow and eats up precious RAM on the phones that support it? How many Android owners actually like to use it when other options exist?
Have you actually used Flash on Android? it doesn't drain the battery, slow down the phone, or eat up RAM. If you visit a website with Flash embedded in it, the Flash element is drawn as a letter F. You have to tap on the F to actually load and play the Flash. Apple just tossed up those strawmen (which any competent coder could work around in 5 minutes) to avoid talking about the real reason they were prohibiting Flash.
OP is correct. Apple's decision not to support Flash was to prevent the distribution of apps which can run on iOS bypassing the App Store. They have a very clear policy on all apps in the App Store - NoCodeInterpreters. And Flash is a doozy of a code interpreter. The only code interpreters Apple allows (due to a recent policy change) are ones where you can't download code.
Now, this isn't a one-sided profit thing. Yes it lets them take a cut of any iOS program which you might sell. But it also helps them control and prevent the spread of malware on iOS.
It turned out just fine and dandy. You're assuming that because Apple refused to support Flash and Android took a contrary position, that Android wanted Flash to succeed. That's a gross (and blatantly pro-Apple) misinterpretation of the situation.
It was never about Flash succeeding or failing. It was about giving the user control - the user got to choose whether or not to use flash. Apple refused to give its users that choice. Android did. That's why I agreed with Android's decision to support Flash, even though I have despised Flash almost since its inception and have run Flashblock for nearly as long as I've used Firefox (it was the first extension I ever installed).
Which do you want - millions of users deciding what they like or don't like, and products succeeding or failing based on their preferences? Or one guy at a big company with an overinflated ego deciding which products should succeed or fail based on his preference?
(I should also note that Flash is fundamentally an artist's animation tool, which just so happened could be used for things like streaming video or online ads. It is still wildly popular in its intended target community. It won't be going away for a long time.)
Nexus S, Nexus Q, Nexus 7... uhg. What would've been so wrong with: Nexus Phone, Nexus TV, Nexus Tablet? Then just call later generations, "second generation", etc.
There's a balance which needs to be struck between easy to remember, and informative. The problem with "second generation" is that it tends to be dropped in marketing materials. A little over a year ago my cousin almost bought a Macbook which was on sale at a great price (for a Macbook) at his school's store. But he pretty well-versed in "if it sounds too good to be true..." so he gave me a call. After a lot of discussion over the phone having him look for something, anything which could distinguish it from other Macbooks, I finally figured out that it was an ancient Core 2 Duo Macbook some 3 years out of date. Definitely not worth even the "fantastic" sale price.
Personally I think failing to note the exact model and selling an old product using only the same name as the current model amounts to advertising fraud. But if you over-simplify product naming to something like "Nexus Phone, Nexus TV, Nexus Tablet," that sort of thing is going to happen all the time.
This whole thing reminds me of fashion - what's in is out, what's old is new. Way back when Windows 95 introduced the Start button, I saw the same arguments in reverse. In Windows 3.1, we did the equivalent of pinning by putting the app's launch icon on the desktop or in a folder. There was a huge controversy when the Start button was introduced, about how it was better, easier for people to find stuff, etc. Now we're getting comments about how pinning is better, easier for people to find stuff, etc.
I worry that, like fashion, it's just change for the sake of change. UI elements should be made visible (or made available as options) or hidden based on functionality. e.g.
The only time I've seen staff use the Start button here is to log off when they're done with the machine. If there was a button on the taskbar to do that, they'd never use the Start menu at all!
No, you want the log off command buried in a secondary menu, not available on the regular desktop. Otherwise you'll get mad users complaining about how they were working on something important, accidentally clicked log off, and the computer dutifully shut down all their apps (before they could save) and kicked them off the system.
Some things you want hidden under multiple clicks, some things you want available as a single click. But if you have too many of the single-click things, the desktop can get cluttered and messy to navigate. It's all a balancing act.
Most countries have some form of sovereign immunity, shielding the government from lawsuits. That is, for people, you can be sued unless there's a law saying you can't. For the government, it can't be sued unless there's a law saying you can. It varies by country though. Not sure what the law is in New Zealand. (Overall, I think it's just to stop the government from being sued for every decision it makes by those who don't like the decision - that could quickly bog a government down to ineffectiveness.)
Uhh, anyone remember the BP oil spill ? I guess no one can forget that. It's clear with that attempt to stop the oil spill, any organisation or company didn't know how to stop it.
Oh they knew exactly how to stop it. It's a simple hydrodynamics problem. You need to drill a relief well to inject mud down at the bottom where there's zero ambient pressure, rather than trying to force it down through oil exiting at 10,000 psi at the top. But a relief well would take months to drill, and every day the spill continued was driving BP's reputation and stock price lower and lower. So they had to put together a dog and pony show of wild ideas and hail mary schemes during those months which had virtually no chance of succeeding but would give the public the sense that they were doing something until the relief wells were finished.
That's why it seemed like they were flailing around impotently and all the ideas to stop it failed one after another. Things like "junk shot" were just PR moves to deflect criticism, not expected to actually succeed. The only realistic solution were the relief wells. (Well, the blowout preventer was supposed to prevent it too, but apparently it encountered a situation it was not designed for and ended up about 7% short of the force needed to sever and seal the pipe as they were designed to do.)
You can't just duct tape and weld parts together to make a functioning satellite. Whenever a satellite (or spacecraft for that matter) is designed, it's one person's job to track the weight, inertia tensor, and location of every part which goes into the satellite. Yes, even the duct tape. The reason is that the overall inertia tensor of the satellite (a 3x3 matrix) has to be symmetric and oriented properly to be able to control the satellite when spinning or rotating it. If it's not, its angular momentum vector will oscillate between the axes of the minimum and maximum moments of inertia when you try to rotate or spin stabilize it, kinda like an unbalanced tire on your car, or (for a non-rotational analogy) how a marble dropped in a bowl does not automatically rest at the bottom but instead goes back and forth up the sides. The maneuvering thrusters also have to be in line with the symmetric axes of the inertia tensor. Otherwise firing them will result in a similar wobble instead of a spin (the U.S. submarines with dive planes on the conning tower are a major PITA to maneuver because the up/down force isn't in line with an inertial axis nor the center of gravity of the ship)..
To see this for yourself, take a rectangular hardcover book and hold it closed with a rubber band. Note the three possible major axes of rotation (axis goes from top to bottom, from left to right, or front to back).
If you throw it in the air spinning so it remains flat (rotational axis goes from front to back), it's stable. This is this is the axis of maximum inertia.
If you throw it in the air spinning side-to-side (rotational axis goes from top to bottom), it's also stable. This is the axis of minimum inertia.
But if you try to throw it in the air spinning top to bottom (rotational axis goes from left to right), you can't. It's unstable. Its direction of spin will oscillate between the minimum and maximum axes of inertia, like the marble going up and down the sides of the bowl. If your satellite's inertia tensor isn't preplanned and symmetric, any attempt to rotate it will cause an oscillation between its natural maximum and minimum inertia axes, essentially making it uncontrollable.
I suppose you could mount weights on your franken-satellite to symmetricize its inertia tensor, like they add weights to car wheels to balance them. But have fun weighing and measuring inertia remotely in zero g.
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You vastly overestimate the thinking process of the average person. If a significant asteroid hit Earth, their thinking would be: "We've just had a big asteroid strike. The chances of a second one happening any time soon are infinitesimal!" And they'd push for even more defunding of asteroid tracking programs in favor of daytime soaps.
Reducing manufacturing costs. Right. Because there are soooo many 15" and 22" 16:9 HDTVs being made and sold.
HDTVs are 16:9 (1.78:1) because it better fits the widescreen format of most movies which are 1.85:1 up to 2.35:1. That makes them good for watching movies.
16:9 sucks on PCs because of the way user interfaces have developed. Take a close look at the web browser you're using right now. Excluding the 5 pixel borders, from top to bottom we have:
the browser's title bar
the menu bar
the navigation bar
most people have a bookmark and add-on bar(s)
the tabs bar
then the webpage contents
a status bar
Windows' task bar at the very bottom.
Meanwhile going left to right we have:
the webpage contents
the scroll bar
PCs need more vertical space to better match the way user interfaces have developed. Instead, manufacturers have been doing the opposite and whittling away at vertical resolution to give us more horizontal resolution. 16:9 is the culmination of this backwards trend, giving us more width while keeping the height at the same amounts which were standard 10-15 years ago (1366x768 vs 1024x768, 1280x1024 vs 1920x1080).
That's why 16:9 sucks on PCs. I've resorted to installing the tree style tabs extension to move my tabs to the side, to free up more vertical space. And before Mozilla did it by default in more recent versions, I reconfigured Firefox's UI to combine the navigation, URL, and bookmark bars into a single bar. (Interestingly, they eliminated your ability to do this on later FF 3.x versions, but my config carried over when I upgraded.) In Lightroom, I have the top and bottom tool boxes set to auto-close, while the left and right remain open. All to free up more vertical space so I can see a bigger version of the photos I'm working on.
1920x1080 may be more pixels than 1600x1200, but they're not useful pixels on a PC. Vertical pixels are simply worth more than horizontal pixels. Manufacturers like 16:9 because it fits better with the aspect ratio of the keyboard + trackpad, so is easier to put into a laptop's clamshell design. About the only benefit of 16:9 on a PC is that you can open two apps/pages side by side. And even there I insist on buying a 16:10 1920x1200 monitor.
In a documentary about early radar guided missile tests, circa 1950s and 1960s, one of the engineers talked about how they needed film footage of the hits (or misses) to evaluate how well the system was working. How do you aim a camera at the point where two nearly-supersonic objects are going to collide? Then they realized their radar tracking system was already tracking the target (to "paint" it so the missile could track the radar reflection). So rather than engineer a solution, they first tried just mounting a camera on the tracking radar. And it worked beautifully - the target plane always dead center in the frame.
No no no no no. You're forgetting Newton's 3rd law and mixing up momentum with energy.
If you accelerate to walk forward at 5 mph on a stationary train, you impart a reverse acceleration on the train. Basically, as you walk forward, you push the train backward. Because this acceleration on the train is momentum-based, it scales linearly with velocity. So if the train weighs 10,000 times more than you, when you accelerate 5 mph, you decelerate the train by 5/10,000 = 0.0005 mph. The kinetic energy change of going from v=0 to v=-0.0005 is negligible.
Totally different story at 3000 mph. From the reference frame of the train, the same thing happens when you accelerate to walk forward at 5 mph. But even though the delta-v for the train is still -0.0005, it's from 3000 mph to 2999.9995 mph, which is a huge energy change. Compared to the stationary train case, it's [(3000^2)-(2999.9995)^2] / (.0005)^2 = 12 million times more energy lost by the train. Basically the same amount of energy needed to accelerate you from 3000 mph to 3005 mph. You provide just enough energy to move yourself from 0 mph to 5 mph, which is why it seems the same to you. But the energy the train needs to maintain 3000 mph when you walk forward is 12 million times greater than when it's stationary.
I wouldn't be so sure.
1. Replace keycap letters with e-ink.
2. Allow users to remap keys to their liking.
3. Use whatever layout you want, qwerty, dvorak, abcdef, or whatever this new one is.
The thing that's been keeping qwerty alive is everyone having to learn it. Even if you use dvorak, you still have to learn qwerty because you'll frequently sit down at a physical qwerty keyboard. With the move to virtual keyboards and the development of technology which would allow easy reconfiguration of a physical keyboard (including the letter markings), a lot of that inertia disappears.
It's like I say about GUIs - rather than trying to force everyone into a menu model or a ribbon model, include both. The people who like menus can use the menus, the people who like the ribbon can use the ribbon, and if a menu-user sits at a ribbon-user's computer (or vice versa), a single configuration option should let you switch between the two. We should be adapting computers to match the way we (as individuals) like to work, not expecting individuals to adapt how they work to match one monolithic way all computers work.
Welcome to venture capital investing 101. Don't kid yourself, that's what kickstarter is. It's not some fundamentally different way to fund projects. It's the same venture capital of old, just with the investors having less (no) power over how their money is used, and a new interface (website) which allows one to raise small funds from a lot of investors rather than large funds from a few investors. It's not a storefront like Amazon where you pay your money and you're guaranteed to get the advertised product or your money back. There's a risk it could fail, there's a risk it could be a scam. Do your research and invest accordingly.
I helped fund the Makey Makey kickstarter because the guys behind it check out, the product's schedule and price point are feasible, and I could actually use the thing. But I'm not touching the Ouya with a ten-foot pole.
Because irresponsible members of the press attribute features which originated in Opera and Firefox to Apple. A few years later it'll turn out Opera and Mozilla never bothered patenting cookie blocking because it was so obvious, but Apple did. Then Apple will sue them and get an injunction against their products for something they had first.
It's not bullshit. What's going on is that as an economy develops and improves, it becomes more efficient. The more efficient an economy, the less effect hard work, education, and good decisions have on your success. The easy improvements with big economic gains have already been done. What's left are harder, more obscure improvements with smaller gains.
The effect of plain dumb luck meanwhile remains the same. When the economy was inefficient and there were lots of easy ways to improve it, luck played a proportionately small role. But now that the economy is very efficient and the remaining ways to improve it are small, luck plays a proportionally larger role. Thus creating the illusion that hard work matters little and it's mostly just luck.
This is a common mistake I see from people trying to draw conclusions about politics or economics. They look at the way things are for themselves right now and incorrectly conclude that it must be the same for all cases. The importance of hard work is like the importance of clean air regulations in an industrialized country. When your country's economy is well-developed / the skies are clear, it seems like their importance is overemphasized. But you have to understand that the reason the economy is in the well-developed state / the air is clean is because of hard work / clean air regulations.
Somehow, some way, it always has to be blamed on a conservative, doesn't it? Half the Americans around today can't even remember Ronald Reagan, much less be taken in by something he said.
You can blame the DMV, the Post Office, jury duty, navigating the IRS tax forms, trying to fight a parking ticket in court, trying to get a permit for, well, just about anything. The long lines and waits, and byzantine and seemingly pointless rules and regulations people encounter in person are what convinces them that the government is incompetent or evil. Compare to their experience at Walmart or McDonalds or the local supermarket, where they walk in, select what they want, pay, and walk out within a few minutes, and is it any wonder they think private enterprise is better at serving their needs?
It gets worse. The taxonomy of the salmonids was based on morphology in the centuries before DNA testing. When the DNA was actually tested, ichthyologists had a lot of egg on their faces. Not only did they find that the steelhead and rainbow trout were the same species, it turned out the rainbow trout - arguably the archetypical trout - is actually a salmon. It also turned out the Atlantic salmon (the most common species of "farmed salmon") was a trout, not a salmon.
The rainbow trout's genus was quietly changed from Salmo to Oncorhynchus, placing it with the other salmons. Several trout (including the ubiquitous lake trout) turned out to be char, genus Salvelinus.
You're trying to find logical consistency where there is none. The resolution/dpi on the first and second gen iPad was the worst of any tablet (aside from $99 Chinese knockoffs) but it was the thinnest tablet. Hence Apple fans insisted the thinness was cool and the resolution was "good enough". By the time the third gen iPad rolled out, it was no longer the thinnest tablet, but had the highest resolution/dpi. And Apple fans felt the high resolution was cool and the thinness was "good enough".
It's a classic case of starting with a predetermined conclusion ("Apple products are cooler than the rest"), and cherry picking the features which support that conclusion. You'll find no logical consistency in it. It's the same misguided reasoning which comes up with "show me a competing product with the same or better features" as an argument of superiority. That argument works for nearly any product because most products have at least one feature at which they're best in class. The Samsung tablet is the thinnest so there is no competing product with "the same or better features". The cheap $99 tablet is the cheapest, so there is no competing product with "the same or better features". Rather than truly ask themselves which product has the best feature set, they subconsciously rephrase the question so that the only answer is the one they want - an Apple product. Completely oblivious to the fact that they've reworded the question to the point where it's meaningless.
Once upon a time there was no such thing as a $300 computer. And buying one which could run pretty much anything you wanted required a $1000 desktop. Computer sizes have gotten smaller and prices have come down. Tablets and smartphones are a small hiccup in that pricing trend due to the change in form factor, but it won't last. I agree that locked bootloaders and devices having features disabled via software are BS. But you're kidding yourself if you don't see the inevitable PC trend from desktop -> laptop -> something smaller.
I suspect what'll happen though is that in 10-20 years when phones have enough computing power for 99% of people's needs, we'll be calling those PCs. They're still Personal Computers, if not more so.
The UN is funded by member nations in proportion to their GDP. In the past, this has meant that the U.S. has been paying for more than 25% of the UN's activities. Many Americans felt we weren't "getting our money's worth" from that investment, paying a lot of money to support an organization which frequently worked counter to U.S. interests. On the flip side, many people who are anti-U.S. tried to use the UN to thwart U.S. interests while expecting the U.S. to pay 1/4th to 1/3rd of it.
Yes you can argue the EU as a whole pays a bigger share, but the EU has much more representation in the UN's voting bodies. They have 2 permanent security council seats and frequently have non-permanent seats. The U.S. has just 1 permanent security council seat. (Incidentally, when the UN was first formed, the USSR wanted each of its republics to have a separate seat and thus a separate vote. The U.S. countered that if they were going to do that, each of the U.S. states should have their own seat and vote. The EU, by starting off as separate countries at the time the UN was formed, has kinda unintentionally finagled the same thing wrt represenation.)
With globalization and improving economic development around the world, the U.S. share of UN funding has been falling, approaching 20%. When I projected it (before the housing bubble), we were on course to drop below 20% around 2015-2020. The lower the U.S. share drops, the better it will be for both those in the U.S. and those anti-U.S.
I always joked that you could get a patent on walking and chewing gum at the same time. Guess it's not a joke anymore.
I was one of the lucky few (in college) who got to taste the Internet in the 1980s. Microsoft absolutely refused to add a TCP/IP stack to Windows 3.x. Gates believed the proprietary network model championed by AOL and CompuServe would win out. MSN was actually Microsoft's entry into that model. Back then, you had to pay a monthly fee to subscribe to it - it was not free like it is now. There was no way in hell he was going to help Windows users use the free Internet, so no TCP/IP stack for Windows. We had to futz around with manually installing Trumpet Winsock ourselves to hook up a Windows machine to the net. This was not for the faint of heart, and took me several hours spread across several days to get it right.
1994 was when the Internet reached critical mass. AOL and CompuServe gave their (massive at the time) userbase access to USENET in 1993, and word spread from there among non-geeks about this great, free worldwide communications network. URLs started showing up in commercials and on billboards that year. IIRC the first Super Bowl commercial with a URL was that year. That was when Gates finally conceded that the Internet had beaten the walled garden networks, and put a TCP/IP stack into Windows. Hence why it didn't show up until Windows 95.
While the Mac did not officially support TCP/IP until later, that was because there was a great and easy-to-use third party TCP/IP installer for it. I want to say it was MacTCP but I don't remember exactly anymore. What I do remember was that we had a bunch of Macs at my college computer lab in 1988 hooked up to the Internet, no problem.
If you check the release history for IE, there's something like a 13 month period where Microsoft released no new features for IE, only security updates. That's what they did after they'd vanquished Netscape. Once the competition was gone, they stopped funding new development. So that's at least a year that browsers are behind that's directly attributable to Microsoft.
I'm not sure I'd say they put the browser back by a decade, but they were working hard the entire time to fragment the industry by introducing non-compliant and proprietary web extensions (ActiveX, which could only be implemented by Windows web servers) in an attempt to take over the WWW. I wouldn't say that's entirely a negative thing - they did force the fogeys at W3C to hurry up and implement new features in HTML that users and web developers were clamoring for. But by trying to take over the WWW instead of working with W3C to improve it, they did put the industry back by a few years at least.
Roman air conditioner. Basically a pipe buried underground with air forced through it by heating it at one end. The air drawn in is cooled by the surrounding earth. In winter it will work as a mediocre heater since the temperature about 15-30 feet underground stays relatively constant year-round at around 50-55 F (not as effective as a fire, but this would work even in the absence of firewood). Would work in high humidity too, though you'd need to add some sort of drainage system to remove water which condenses out from the temperature change.
It's a common misnomer that black gets hotter. Black has higher emissivity. That means when the outside is hotter, a black roof will allow heat from outside to enter inside more quickly. But it also means when the outside is colder, the black roof will allow heat from inside to exit outside more quickly.
Basically, you can think of black as a heat conductor, while white is a heat insulator. So a white roof will actually keep your house warmer in winter. In winter you'll have sunlight heating the black roof more than the white. But unless it heats it more than the interior temperature, the black roof is still going to radiate interior heat away more quickly. And at night the white roof will win by a huge margin.
Couple oldies but goodies:
How the different phone users see each other
And I'll go ahead and take a side in this battle....
Have you actually used Flash on Android? it doesn't drain the battery, slow down the phone, or eat up RAM. If you visit a website with Flash embedded in it, the Flash element is drawn as a letter F. You have to tap on the F to actually load and play the Flash. Apple just tossed up those strawmen (which any competent coder could work around in 5 minutes) to avoid talking about the real reason they were prohibiting Flash.
OP is correct. Apple's decision not to support Flash was to prevent the distribution of apps which can run on iOS bypassing the App Store. They have a very clear policy on all apps in the App Store - No Code Interpreters. And Flash is a doozy of a code interpreter. The only code interpreters Apple allows (due to a recent policy change) are ones where you can't download code.
Now, this isn't a one-sided profit thing. Yes it lets them take a cut of any iOS program which you might sell. But it also helps them control and prevent the spread of malware on iOS.
It turned out just fine and dandy. You're assuming that because Apple refused to support Flash and Android took a contrary position, that Android wanted Flash to succeed. That's a gross (and blatantly pro-Apple) misinterpretation of the situation.
It was never about Flash succeeding or failing. It was about giving the user control - the user got to choose whether or not to use flash. Apple refused to give its users that choice. Android did. That's why I agreed with Android's decision to support Flash, even though I have despised Flash almost since its inception and have run Flashblock for nearly as long as I've used Firefox (it was the first extension I ever installed).
Which do you want - millions of users deciding what they like or don't like, and products succeeding or failing based on their preferences? Or one guy at a big company with an overinflated ego deciding which products should succeed or fail based on his preference?
(I should also note that Flash is fundamentally an artist's animation tool, which just so happened could be used for things like streaming video or online ads. It is still wildly popular in its intended target community. It won't be going away for a long time.)
There's a balance which needs to be struck between easy to remember, and informative. The problem with "second generation" is that it tends to be dropped in marketing materials. A little over a year ago my cousin almost bought a Macbook which was on sale at a great price (for a Macbook) at his school's store. But he pretty well-versed in "if it sounds too good to be true..." so he gave me a call. After a lot of discussion over the phone having him look for something, anything which could distinguish it from other Macbooks, I finally figured out that it was an ancient Core 2 Duo Macbook some 3 years out of date. Definitely not worth even the "fantastic" sale price.
Personally I think failing to note the exact model and selling an old product using only the same name as the current model amounts to advertising fraud. But if you over-simplify product naming to something like "Nexus Phone, Nexus TV, Nexus Tablet," that sort of thing is going to happen all the time.
I worry that, like fashion, it's just change for the sake of change. UI elements should be made visible (or made available as options) or hidden based on functionality. e.g.
No, you want the log off command buried in a secondary menu, not available on the regular desktop. Otherwise you'll get mad users complaining about how they were working on something important, accidentally clicked log off, and the computer dutifully shut down all their apps (before they could save) and kicked them off the system.
Some things you want hidden under multiple clicks, some things you want available as a single click. But if you have too many of the single-click things, the desktop can get cluttered and messy to navigate. It's all a balancing act.
Most countries have some form of sovereign immunity, shielding the government from lawsuits. That is, for people, you can be sued unless there's a law saying you can't. For the government, it can't be sued unless there's a law saying you can. It varies by country though. Not sure what the law is in New Zealand. (Overall, I think it's just to stop the government from being sued for every decision it makes by those who don't like the decision - that could quickly bog a government down to ineffectiveness.)
Oh they knew exactly how to stop it. It's a simple hydrodynamics problem. You need to drill a relief well to inject mud down at the bottom where there's zero ambient pressure, rather than trying to force it down through oil exiting at 10,000 psi at the top. But a relief well would take months to drill, and every day the spill continued was driving BP's reputation and stock price lower and lower. So they had to put together a dog and pony show of wild ideas and hail mary schemes during those months which had virtually no chance of succeeding but would give the public the sense that they were doing something until the relief wells were finished.
That's why it seemed like they were flailing around impotently and all the ideas to stop it failed one after another. Things like "junk shot" were just PR moves to deflect criticism, not expected to actually succeed. The only realistic solution were the relief wells. (Well, the blowout preventer was supposed to prevent it too, but apparently it encountered a situation it was not designed for and ended up about 7% short of the force needed to sever and seal the pipe as they were designed to do.)
You can't just duct tape and weld parts together to make a functioning satellite. Whenever a satellite (or spacecraft for that matter) is designed, it's one person's job to track the weight, inertia tensor, and location of every part which goes into the satellite. Yes, even the duct tape. The reason is that the overall inertia tensor of the satellite (a 3x3 matrix) has to be symmetric and oriented properly to be able to control the satellite when spinning or rotating it. If it's not, its angular momentum vector will oscillate between the axes of the minimum and maximum moments of inertia when you try to rotate or spin stabilize it, kinda like an unbalanced tire on your car, or (for a non-rotational analogy) how a marble dropped in a bowl does not automatically rest at the bottom but instead goes back and forth up the sides. The maneuvering thrusters also have to be in line with the symmetric axes of the inertia tensor. Otherwise firing them will result in a similar wobble instead of a spin (the U.S. submarines with dive planes on the conning tower are a major PITA to maneuver because the up/down force isn't in line with an inertial axis nor the center of gravity of the ship)..
To see this for yourself, take a rectangular hardcover book and hold it closed with a rubber band. Note the three possible major axes of rotation (axis goes from top to bottom, from left to right, or front to back).
If you throw it in the air spinning so it remains flat (rotational axis goes from front to back), it's stable. This is this is the axis of maximum inertia.
If you throw it in the air spinning side-to-side (rotational axis goes from top to bottom), it's also stable. This is the axis of minimum inertia.
But if you try to throw it in the air spinning top to bottom (rotational axis goes from left to right), you can't. It's unstable. Its direction of spin will oscillate between the minimum and maximum axes of inertia, like the marble going up and down the sides of the bowl. If your satellite's inertia tensor isn't preplanned and symmetric, any attempt to rotate it will cause an oscillation between its natural maximum and minimum inertia axes, essentially making it uncontrollable.
I suppose you could mount weights on your franken-satellite to symmetricize its inertia tensor, like they add weights to car wheels to balance them. But have fun weighing and measuring inertia remotely in zero g.