They think that they have a brand to bring to the table but they do not have that.
(TL:DNR: except the Surface looks like quite a nice tablet...)
The brands they have to bring to the table are Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Exchange. If they can come up with good implementations of those, well adapted to tablet use, with reliable file interchange, then they'll have something. Many employers will, rightly or wrongly, prefer the idea of employees using "the same" software on tables as is used on desktops - particularly when it comes to connecting to Exchange servers and the like. Of course, Microsoft would never, ever, make undocumented changes to their desktop software to break interoperability, because that would be downright naughty and they're an upright, law-abiding firm.
Also, I give Microsoft some kudos for actually coming up with 'something completely different' with the metro interface rather than just copying Apple*. Most negative comments on Metro relate to the attempt to foist it onto desktop Windows users rather than its utility on phones and tablets.
Looking at the 'surface' the brightly coloured, magnetically-attached cover has rather obvious fruity antecedents, but turning it into a keyboard and trackpad looks like a stroke of genius (I'd have to get my hands on it to be sure, but the big point is that it looks like you can just fold it round the back like an Apple smart cover and use the on-screen keyboard when you're not sitting at a table - whereas if you have a 'keyboard case' you pretty much have to remove the tablet from the case to use it handheld),
(*Look, that doesn't mean that the ideas that Android, Samsung et. al. 'took inspiration from' should be copyrightable or patentable by Apple, or that Apple hasn't sometimes 'taken inspiration from' others, but if you think that Android UI or devices would look anything like they do today if the iPhone hadn't come out when it did, you have a bigger reality distortion field than Apple ever did).
I live in the UK and we use 50/100Hz you insensitive clod! Terrific, back to the days of the Enterprise going jerk-jerk-jerk across the screen because of the 30-to-25 fps conversion.
Actually, AFAIK its pretty irrelevant now we're using TFT LCD displays that don't have a hard-wired scan frequency.
Yep. Next time you go to a store that has a bunch of TV's on display, go find one that has the 240fps interpolation turned on and watch it a bit.
Absolutely - it's a weird, and totally irrational, effect. I got a higher-frequency (interpolating) TV a couple of years ago and for the first month or two everything looked like - just as you say - "daytime soap opera" (i.e. as if it were shot on video). It's technically better, but it seems to trigger negative associations. Pity it doesn't work the other way (vis: ISTR some of the later seasons of Red Dwarf were run through a faux-cinema 'grainy' filter and they still weren't as good as the early stuff).
The good news is that after you get acclimatised to it, the effect goes away, and when you see 24fps films they will look as jerky as hell.
The brain is a bugger like this - I know that when I first switched from an old-style convex monitor screen to a "flatter squarer tube" type, the display looked concave for a while. Probably explains the CD vs. Vinyl wars, too (I always felt a CD 'sounded better' when it had been copied onto cassette tape even though I knew that by all rational standards it was worse).
The "transparency" seems to come from the fact that they tend to install their root CA into Internet Explorer's certificate store, so IE won't actually warn you that your HTTPS traffic may be being snooped
This is the problem. As others have said, it is their prerogative to restrict the use of their network - but if they're going to snoop, or break security, they should make it clear (including to non-techies) that, for example, internet banking will not be secure on their network.
What's more, some people's jobs do involve working on third-party sites. IT shouldn't be able to snoop on people's work-related passwords any more than they should be able to tell you what your current work login password is.
You know, we had the same argument with RISC versus CISC architecture. And we know who lost that one. Badly.
We do? Aside from the fact that the distinction is becoming less relevant as chips become more complex, It seems to me that pretty much any market that isn't dependent on MS Windows has gone with RISC.
The x86 has a monopoly on desktop and laptop PCs and business servers not because it is a better architechture, but because of a huge, legacy code base - so big that even Intel failed when they tried to move to a new 64 bit instruction set (Itanium) and had to fall back on the current, backward-compatible solution. This monopoly gives them the economy of scale to adopt brute-force, complex solutions that (effectively) translate the x86 instruction set into something more efficient on-chip.
The first ARM based computers (Acorn's Archimedes in 1987) weren't mobiles: they were powerful personal computers that could leave their intel-based contemporaries eating dust. But they didn't run Windows (other than by software emulation or, later, plugging in an actual x86) so they never had the market penetration to justify development of faster, desktop ARM chips and were left behind when Intel kept cranking up clock speeds and adding huge caches and on-chip floating point. ARM followed the money and focussed on mobile and embedded markets.
Come the late 90s, PCs with Alpha RISC CPUs started to take off, and then died. Did they die because RISC was inferior, or was it more to do with MS suddenly dropping the Alpha version of Windows and Intel ending up owning the Alpha chip?
Apple didn't switch to switch from PPC to x86 because they wanted a CISC chip - they switched because of supply difficulties and because nobody was interested in making a low-power G5 PPC suitable for laptops and SFF systems - not impossible, just not economical for the sake of making a G5 Powerbook.
Anywhere where the Wintel monoculture isn't important, RISC is still widespread: supercomputers, high-end servers and "mainframes" use the grown-up relatives of PPC, ARM dominates phones and tablets, and both PPC and ARM are prevalent in things like NAS and routers.
x86 and CISC only has a niche market - it just happens to be an absolutely enormous niche...
I wear two ITC/CIC hearing aids with DSP processors built in. Let me tell you a little bit about why they are so expensive. The largest supplier of hearing aids in the USA is Starkey in Minneapolis.
TLDNR: They're expensive because they're not made in China.
That, and today's hearing aids don't just simply amplify external sound. They are filled with a great deal of very sophisticated audio analysis, and digital sound processing...
So is the cheapest non-smart cellphone on the market, or your $100 noise-cancelling headphones... and although the market isn't as large, we're still talking about something that almost everybody will need as their bodies pass their sell-by date.
...and if you're actually paying for the Audiologist's time rather than the hardware (the most reasonable explanation of the price) maybe that should be made a bit more transparent.
Methinks its partly a hangover from the days when hearing aids were at the bleeding edge of miniaturised electronics.
The government wants a libel regime for the internet that makes it possible for people to protect their reputations effectively but also ensures that information online can't be easily censored by casual threats of litigation against website operators.
Can't argue with the sentiments of that but... honestly.... good luck with getting that legislation right. Mind you, since the government are also going to save the economy by outlawing tax evasion, the right people are clearly on the job.
Our proposed approach will mean that website operators have a defence against libel as long as they identify the authors of allegedly defamatory material when requested to do so by a complainant.
Or, to put it another way "Hi, someone just libelled me on your website - please tell me who it was or I'll come after you for libel."
Here's a better idea: website operators running chatrooms/bulletin boards should be no more responsible for libel by their users than the phone company are, and should only have to hand over IDs or remove material when a court has ruled that the case has some merit.
Oh, and remind me how you identify an anonymous poster if you don't ask them to provide ID (or have no way of verifying it) when they post.
If we want new crimes, how about criminalising any idiot who believes, or acts upon, an accusation posted by an anonymous troll on an obscure BBS?
When will the imacs, mini and mac pro get usb 3.0?? and newer video cards?
The Mac Pro: probably never, but since it's full of PCIe slots you can always slap in a USB3 card. I also guess a lot of Mac Pro customers will also be yanking out the stock video card and putting in an expensive specialist one. This is not a product with a long future ahead of it.
The iMacs and the Mini will probably get upgraded later.
The new MBP had to be announced at WWDC because, now the circus is over, its a developer conference and they want to talk to developers about support for the retina display.
Especially when driving alone cross-country, as driver fatigue becomes an issue, and talking to someone on the phone can help keep you awake.
It depends whether you're having a cosy chat with a friend or a high-stress series of business calls asking you questions for which you have to engage brain.
As for keeping you awake, here in Blighty, we have something called "Radio 4" for that, although listening to "I'm sorry I haven't a clue" or suchlike can cause other distractions such as making you piss yourself with laughter while driving. However, I don't think there's a US equivalent: I've listened to NPR and after a few minutes of lists of sponsors being read out in a slow, soporific drawl my eyelids start to become heavy...
Look, if you are reaching this point of trying to not-distract people then you might as well take the next steps:
True, but texting on a mobile phone, or dialling on a handset, really is in a moronic league of its own c.f. talking to a passenger, popping an M&M into your mouth or even using a hands-free. Most people are incapable of walking in a straight line while texting.
However, there shouldn't be any need for new legislation - in the UK there's always been "driving without due care and attention", and I'm sure other jurisdictions have similar concepts. The cell-phone ban was just so that politicians could be seen to be doing something about the Sunday headlines, and had the unfortunate side-effect of legitimising hands-free kits. What's needed are less cameras and more actual, adequately trained, police eyeballs looking for real dangerous driving rather than petty speeding (e.g. doing something about the bloody Audi or white van driving 2' behind you because you have the audacity to only be doing 10mph above the limit).
Perhaps the reason a desktop display should be 3 feet from your eyes is because the PPI is so low?
I'd say its because its more comfortable to focus on something 3 feet away. That's also why I got a 32" telly pre-HD TV - so that I could watch it from the other end of the room.
I use a Cintiq (Wacom pen enabled display) at work, and the pixels on it are huge at normal working distance. Any screen you can interact with directly through touch or a digitizing pen can easily benefit from a 200+ PPI screen.
The Cintiq would be an ideal candidate for a super-high-resolution display - but it is designed to be used close-up. That's also why it makes sense to have super-high-res displays in tablets like the iPad.
Super-higher-res monitors are less necessary if you're going to use them as desktop monitors. My beef with 1080p is more about the aspect ratio and real estate for a given width (i.e. desk space) than the resolution.
Windows is surprisingly ahead of OS X at the OS level, but lots of windows applications misbehave if you change the DPI settings.
Apple have already started adding support for so-called HiDPI modes (that you can currently enable with a hack) to OS X, which is the source of the rumours that they're going to release double-resolution "retina display" MacBooks real soon now.
They're also in a good position to get applications fixed, since they can dictate standards for admission to the Mac App Store. Although, unlike iOS, you don't have to distribute applications through the App Store, there are plenty of incentives for doing so.
Of course, once hi-def displays become standard, it should be easier to write resolution-independent code and rely on the OS to render things properly, without manually tweaking things to line up with pixels, and use vector-based icons without lovingly hand-optimising them for particular resolutions.
Manufacturers make panels with specific pixel densities. They can then cut those panels to a number of different sizes in order to achieve a number of different resolutions.
Citation needed, methinks. I suspect its a bit more complicated than that - what with each panel needing a pattern of TFTs and all the interconnections fabricating onto it.
Even so there would be a lot of steps between cutting your sheet of "LCD" to size and making a finished panel with all the wiring and backlighting in place, which would all depend on the panel size and resolution.
As for densities, TV manufacturers already have to make a range of screen sizes at 1080p resolution, which means different densities.
The "economies of scale" come from being able to use the same, or very similar, panels for both TVs and computer monitors - whatever the manufacturing process.
Since PHP and Javascript stubbornly remain popular.
One distinction is whether the language was designed to meet a practical need, or to prove an abstract point in computer science. Plus, these days, the API is probably more important than the language - its certainly more work to learn a new API than a new language.
PHP is a crap language, but it gets the job done, makes it easy to programatically generate HTML and comes with a humungous library of useful functions. Plus, its widely available on commercial web-hosting services. When I tried some Python (after forcing myself to stop worrying and get past the 'significant whitespace' thing) , I found I wanted an XML/XPath/DOM library but all I could find were several half-finished attempts and a lot of discussion about what would be a suitably "Pythonesque" XML API (the well-defined standard DOM API sounds good to me). Maybe I was unlucky (Python isn't exactly unsuccessful) but that would have been a no-brainer in PHP, Java or C.
Likewise, Javascript is the only game in town for scripting web pages and has become almost platform-independent. It also became joined at the hip with the HTML DOM.
Java also had the big practical plus of being almost platform independent - and again now has a huge array of APIs that programmers have spent time learning.
Or look at C vs Pascal. VAX Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Delphi et. al. were quite successful because they each extended the language in proprietary ways, but standard Pascal was useless for anything other than teaching algorithms because it didn't have any practical API to speak of (you couldn't even open a named file within a Pascal program - that had to be done externally). C, on the other hand, always had a "de facto" standard library consisting of the subset of the Unix API described in "The C Programming Language", full of really useful utility routines for strings, file handling, output formatting, searching etc. You could do a lot in standard C without tying yourself to a particular dialect or platform, and the pre-processor let you #ifdef your way out of any incompatibilities that you did encounter.
C++ - a can of worms which only a language lawyer could love - probably hit the big time because of MS Visual C++ and the MS Foundation Classes. That and the fact that C programmers didn't think they had to learn a whole new language (see earlier comment about cans of worms).
Basically, don't expect your mathematically elegant new language (with no variables, who's only operator is 'is a subset of' and which uses UNICODE accents and ligatures to increase its expressivity) to take off unless it has POSIX regexps, bindings to MS Access and a WIndows application framework.
Hard sci fi or Soft sci fi? There are no hard sci fi movies, at least from the past 20 years, or at least soft sci fi outnumbers hard sci fi by about 200 to 1. In books I'd dare say the ratios approach 50:50 or at least not as intensely skewed.
Well, its quite hard to do hard sci-fi without either (a) assuming the audience understood their high-school science or (b) having huge chunks of exposition (which is easier to get away with in print).
The problem with hard SF films is that you need a popcorn-blockbuster budget but you'll only get arthouse-sized audiences. The best bets are things that you could do on a small budget - like Gattaca, Moon or The Man From Earth - but I'm not sure whether people would agree that they were "hard SF" (however, they all take a "what if..." idea and explore it).
I think if you tried to film hard SF you'll either get Star Trek (thinks its hard SF but just doesn't "get" it) or 2010: 2001 is the proverbial "hard SF" film (mainly because it was the first to depict plausible space travel pre-moon landings), but 2010 dropped most of the hard SF from the book (the exploration of Jupiter's moons), save the ending, in favour of cold-war thriller elements.
What films? Seriously, how many sci-fi films involving space travel have there been in the last 5-10 years?
Serenity (Although that's more than 5 years now...)
Sunshine? (OK if you ignored the plot and watched the pretty lights)
Star Trek 90210?
John Carter?
Wall-E? (OK, scraping the barrel now... you may have a point)
On the other hand, how many have there ever been - especially if you rule out alien invasion flicks?
1. Google calendar has the same issue which is more embarrassing since Google calendar is online by definition and can be fixed more easily than outlook.
Google's getting it right for me - of course, I didn't check this morning so they may have fixed it at the 11th hour...
"Here's the release statement, signed in blood. Sorry for your loss ma'am."
If ma'am's deceased husband was a multi millionaire who could afford a private ticket to space, then ma'am is about to introduce you to some very expensive lawyers who would be delighted to let ma'am send some of her inheritance their way in return for spending the next decade challenging the release form in court.
If you've just killed a schoolteacher and mother of four who won her ticket in a competition then you're going to have the media whipping up hysteria and politicians and lawyers looking to make their name by doing something about it (schoolteachers and mothers of 4 die quietly every day in all sorts of mundanely tragic ways, but if it happens once in space then it will be World News for months).
I don't know whether it's true, but I've read that SpaceX is already profitable. And they have a ton of comm sats lined up on the launch manifest on their web site.
Putting people into space is a much bigger market in the long term.
I would guess that the profit comes from the comms satellite biz - putting people into space is still underpants gnome territory. The only known source of income from that will dry up when the ISS or its successor gets canned.
? If she knew he was texting while driving, I'd say there is a small amount of culpability on her part.
Nonsense. One reason for sending a text rather than calling is precisely so the recipient doesnt have to drop what they are doing. Maybe, just maybe, if it had been a voice call and the caller knew the other person was driving then they should take some responsibility, but really, unless the other person is in the car and literally screaming in the driver's ear, the buck stops with the driver, and texting while driving is really in its own class of mindbogglingly stupid things to do.
The strive for profit will necessarily lead to advancements in space tech, as they have in all other industries where long-term profitability is the primary incentive (Silicon Valley being the prime modern example).
SpaceX, Virgin Galactic et. al. aren't going into space because they are private sector.
SpaceX, Virgin Galactic et. al. are going into space because they are run by individuals who have made shedloads of money in other ventures and, instead of being good capitalists and starting work on their next shedload, have decided instead to try and realise their childhood ambition of being an astronaut, if only vicariously (has Elon Musk been sighted since the launch?:-) )
Kudos to them of course - and they may even end up making money - but without that sort of motivation the private sector would, at most, look at ways of making a risk-free buck by launching comms satellites rather than trying to put people into space.
As others have pointed out, the real test will - unfortunately - come the first time someone gets killed. I'm not sure the private sector could afford a Challenger inquiry.
If every country on Earth fired all of their nukes into the sun, what would be the reaction?
At a guess, they'd melt before they got anywhere near the surface and not have a chance to detonate properly.
Everybody knows that, to properly nuke the sun, you need a bomb the size of Manhattan* with a giant heat-shield and, for no adequately explored reason, despite decades of experience of getting unmanned space vehicles to nail a target 10 AUs away, a human crew to go space-crazy and jeopardise the mission.
(*the Mh is the traditional US unit for the size of an object in space, although the rest of the world use the proper FFF unit of "milliWales")
This is not some old ancient niche that ARM has wrapped up -- these products and markets only appeared within the past 5 years or so.
5 years or so? Not if you count the Apple Newton (1993), the Psion Series 5 (1997) the HP iPaq (2000) and (I think) the Sharp Zaurus (late 90s-mid 00s) - although I think the last 2 actually used Intel's StrongArm or XScale ARM chips. There are also things that never made it but helped set the stage for ARM's share of the mobile and embedded markets.
So yes, smartphones and tablets have boomed in the last 5 years, after Apple came up with a winning formula and everybody else jumped on the bandwagon, but the ideas have been bubbling under for years, and ARM got its feet under the table 20 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
They think that they have a brand to bring to the table but they do not have that.
(TL:DNR: except the Surface looks like quite a nice tablet...)
The brands they have to bring to the table are Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Exchange. If they can come up with good implementations of those, well adapted to tablet use, with reliable file interchange, then they'll have something. Many employers will, rightly or wrongly, prefer the idea of employees using "the same" software on tables as is used on desktops - particularly when it comes to connecting to Exchange servers and the like. Of course, Microsoft would never, ever, make undocumented changes to their desktop software to break interoperability, because that would be downright naughty and they're an upright, law-abiding firm.
Also, I give Microsoft some kudos for actually coming up with 'something completely different' with the metro interface rather than just copying Apple*. Most negative comments on Metro relate to the attempt to foist it onto desktop Windows users rather than its utility on phones and tablets.
Looking at the 'surface' the brightly coloured, magnetically-attached cover has rather obvious fruity antecedents, but turning it into a keyboard and trackpad looks like a stroke of genius (I'd have to get my hands on it to be sure, but the big point is that it looks like you can just fold it round the back like an Apple smart cover and use the on-screen keyboard when you're not sitting at a table - whereas if you have a 'keyboard case' you pretty much have to remove the tablet from the case to use it handheld),
(*Look, that doesn't mean that the ideas that Android, Samsung et. al. 'took inspiration from' should be copyrightable or patentable by Apple, or that Apple hasn't sometimes 'taken inspiration from' others, but if you think that Android UI or devices would look anything like they do today if the iPhone hadn't come out when it did, you have a bigger reality distortion field than Apple ever did).
Fucker should have gone with 60 Hz.
I live in the UK and we use 50/100Hz you insensitive clod! Terrific, back to the days of the Enterprise going jerk-jerk-jerk across the screen because of the 30-to-25 fps conversion.
Actually, AFAIK its pretty irrelevant now we're using TFT LCD displays that don't have a hard-wired scan frequency.
Yep. Next time you go to a store that has a bunch of TV's on display, go find one that has the 240fps interpolation turned on and watch it a bit.
Absolutely - it's a weird, and totally irrational, effect. I got a higher-frequency (interpolating) TV a couple of years ago and for the first month or two everything looked like - just as you say - "daytime soap opera" (i.e. as if it were shot on video). It's technically better, but it seems to trigger negative associations. Pity it doesn't work the other way (vis: ISTR some of the later seasons of Red Dwarf were run through a faux-cinema 'grainy' filter and they still weren't as good as the early stuff).
The good news is that after you get acclimatised to it, the effect goes away, and when you see 24fps films they will look as jerky as hell.
The brain is a bugger like this - I know that when I first switched from an old-style convex monitor screen to a "flatter squarer tube" type, the display looked concave for a while. Probably explains the CD vs. Vinyl wars, too (I always felt a CD 'sounded better' when it had been copied onto cassette tape even though I knew that by all rational standards it was worse).
The "transparency" seems to come from the fact that they tend to install their root CA into Internet Explorer's certificate store, so IE won't actually warn you that your HTTPS traffic may be being snooped
This is the problem. As others have said, it is their prerogative to restrict the use of their network - but if they're going to snoop, or break security, they should make it clear (including to non-techies) that, for example, internet banking will not be secure on their network.
What's more, some people's jobs do involve working on third-party sites. IT shouldn't be able to snoop on people's work-related passwords any more than they should be able to tell you what your current work login password is.
You know, we had the same argument with RISC versus CISC architecture. And we know who lost that one. Badly.
We do? Aside from the fact that the distinction is becoming less relevant as chips become more complex, It seems to me that pretty much any market that isn't dependent on MS Windows has gone with RISC.
The x86 has a monopoly on desktop and laptop PCs and business servers not because it is a better architechture, but because of a huge, legacy code base - so big that even Intel failed when they tried to move to a new 64 bit instruction set (Itanium) and had to fall back on the current, backward-compatible solution. This monopoly gives them the economy of scale to adopt brute-force, complex solutions that (effectively) translate the x86 instruction set into something more efficient on-chip.
The first ARM based computers (Acorn's Archimedes in 1987) weren't mobiles: they were powerful personal computers that could leave their intel-based contemporaries eating dust. But they didn't run Windows (other than by software emulation or, later, plugging in an actual x86) so they never had the market penetration to justify development of faster, desktop ARM chips and were left behind when Intel kept cranking up clock speeds and adding huge caches and on-chip floating point. ARM followed the money and focussed on mobile and embedded markets.
Come the late 90s, PCs with Alpha RISC CPUs started to take off, and then died. Did they die because RISC was inferior, or was it more to do with MS suddenly dropping the Alpha version of Windows and Intel ending up owning the Alpha chip?
Apple didn't switch to switch from PPC to x86 because they wanted a CISC chip - they switched because of supply difficulties and because nobody was interested in making a low-power G5 PPC suitable for laptops and SFF systems - not impossible, just not economical for the sake of making a G5 Powerbook.
Anywhere where the Wintel monoculture isn't important, RISC is still widespread: supercomputers, high-end servers and "mainframes" use the grown-up relatives of PPC, ARM dominates phones and tablets, and both PPC and ARM are prevalent in things like NAS and routers.
x86 and CISC only has a niche market - it just happens to be an absolutely enormous niche...
I wear two ITC/CIC hearing aids with DSP processors built in. Let me tell you a little bit about why they are so expensive. The largest supplier of hearing aids in the USA is Starkey in Minneapolis.
TLDNR: They're expensive because they're not made in China.
That, and today's hearing aids don't just simply amplify external sound. They are filled with a great deal of very sophisticated audio analysis, and digital sound processing...
So is the cheapest non-smart cellphone on the market, or your $100 noise-cancelling headphones... and although the market isn't as large, we're still talking about something that almost everybody will need as their bodies pass their sell-by date.
...and if you're actually paying for the Audiologist's time rather than the hardware (the most reasonable explanation of the price) maybe that should be made a bit more transparent.
Methinks its partly a hangover from the days when hearing aids were at the bleeding edge of miniaturised electronics.
The government wants a libel regime for the internet that makes it possible for people to protect their reputations effectively but also ensures that information online can't be easily censored by casual threats of litigation against website operators.
Can't argue with the sentiments of that but... honestly.... good luck with getting that legislation right. Mind you, since the government are also going to save the economy by outlawing tax evasion, the right people are clearly on the job.
Our proposed approach will mean that website operators have a defence against libel as long as they identify the authors of allegedly defamatory material when requested to do so by a complainant.
Or, to put it another way "Hi, someone just libelled me on your website - please tell me who it was or I'll come after you for libel."
Here's a better idea: website operators running chatrooms/bulletin boards should be no more responsible for libel by their users than the phone company are, and should only have to hand over IDs or remove material when a court has ruled that the case has some merit.
Oh, and remind me how you identify an anonymous poster if you don't ask them to provide ID (or have no way of verifying it) when they post.
If we want new crimes, how about criminalising any idiot who believes, or acts upon, an accusation posted by an anonymous troll on an obscure BBS?
When will the imacs, mini and mac pro get usb 3.0?? and newer video cards?
The Mac Pro: probably never, but since it's full of PCIe slots you can always slap in a USB3 card. I also guess a lot of Mac Pro customers will also be yanking out the stock video card and putting in an expensive specialist one. This is not a product with a long future ahead of it.
The iMacs and the Mini will probably get upgraded later.
The new MBP had to be announced at WWDC because, now the circus is over, its a developer conference and they want to talk to developers about support for the retina display.
Especially when driving alone cross-country, as driver fatigue becomes an issue, and talking to someone on the phone can help keep you awake.
It depends whether you're having a cosy chat with a friend or a high-stress series of business calls asking you questions for which you have to engage brain.
As for keeping you awake, here in Blighty, we have something called "Radio 4" for that, although listening to "I'm sorry I haven't a clue" or suchlike can cause other distractions such as making you piss yourself with laughter while driving. However, I don't think there's a US equivalent: I've listened to NPR and after a few minutes of lists of sponsors being read out in a slow, soporific drawl my eyelids start to become heavy...
Look, if you are reaching this point of trying to not-distract people then you might as well take the next steps:
True, but texting on a mobile phone, or dialling on a handset, really is in a moronic league of its own c.f. talking to a passenger, popping an M&M into your mouth or even using a hands-free. Most people are incapable of walking in a straight line while texting.
However, there shouldn't be any need for new legislation - in the UK there's always been "driving without due care and attention", and I'm sure other jurisdictions have similar concepts. The cell-phone ban was just so that politicians could be seen to be doing something about the Sunday headlines, and had the unfortunate side-effect of legitimising hands-free kits. What's needed are less cameras and more actual, adequately trained, police eyeballs looking for real dangerous driving rather than petty speeding (e.g. doing something about the bloody Audi or white van driving 2' behind you because you have the audacity to only be doing 10mph above the limit).
Perhaps the reason a desktop display should be 3 feet from your eyes is because the PPI is so low?
I'd say its because its more comfortable to focus on something 3 feet away. That's also why I got a 32" telly pre-HD TV - so that I could watch it from the other end of the room.
I use a Cintiq (Wacom pen enabled display) at work, and the pixels on it are huge at normal working distance. Any screen you can interact with directly through touch or a digitizing pen can easily benefit from a 200+ PPI screen.
The Cintiq would be an ideal candidate for a super-high-resolution display - but it is designed to be used close-up. That's also why it makes sense to have super-high-res displays in tablets like the iPad.
Super-higher-res monitors are less necessary if you're going to use them as desktop monitors. My beef with 1080p is more about the aspect ratio and real estate for a given width (i.e. desk space) than the resolution.
Windows is surprisingly ahead of OS X at the OS level, but lots of windows applications misbehave if you change the DPI settings.
Apple have already started adding support for so-called HiDPI modes (that you can currently enable with a hack) to OS X, which is the source of the rumours that they're going to release double-resolution "retina display" MacBooks real soon now.
They're also in a good position to get applications fixed, since they can dictate standards for admission to the Mac App Store. Although, unlike iOS, you don't have to distribute applications through the App Store, there are plenty of incentives for doing so.
Of course, once hi-def displays become standard, it should be easier to write resolution-independent code and rely on the OS to render things properly, without manually tweaking things to line up with pixels, and use vector-based icons without lovingly hand-optimising them for particular resolutions.
Manufacturers make panels with specific pixel densities. They can then cut those panels to a number of different sizes in order to achieve a number of different resolutions.
Citation needed, methinks. I suspect its a bit more complicated than that - what with each panel needing a pattern of TFTs and all the interconnections fabricating onto it.
Even so there would be a lot of steps between cutting your sheet of "LCD" to size and making a finished panel with all the wiring and backlighting in place, which would all depend on the panel size and resolution.
As for densities, TV manufacturers already have to make a range of screen sizes at 1080p resolution, which means different densities.
The "economies of scale" come from being able to use the same, or very similar, panels for both TVs and computer monitors - whatever the manufacturing process.
Since PHP and Javascript stubbornly remain popular.
One distinction is whether the language was designed to meet a practical need, or to prove an abstract point in computer science. Plus, these days, the API is probably more important than the language - its certainly more work to learn a new API than a new language.
PHP is a crap language, but it gets the job done, makes it easy to programatically generate HTML and comes with a humungous library of useful functions. Plus, its widely available on commercial web-hosting services. When I tried some Python (after forcing myself to stop worrying and get past the 'significant whitespace' thing) , I found I wanted an XML/XPath/DOM library but all I could find were several half-finished attempts and a lot of discussion about what would be a suitably "Pythonesque" XML API (the well-defined standard DOM API sounds good to me). Maybe I was unlucky (Python isn't exactly unsuccessful) but that would have been a no-brainer in PHP, Java or C.
Likewise, Javascript is the only game in town for scripting web pages and has become almost platform-independent. It also became joined at the hip with the HTML DOM.
Java also had the big practical plus of being almost platform independent - and again now has a huge array of APIs that programmers have spent time learning.
Or look at C vs Pascal. VAX Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Delphi et. al. were quite successful because they each extended the language in proprietary ways, but standard Pascal was useless for anything other than teaching algorithms because it didn't have any practical API to speak of (you couldn't even open a named file within a Pascal program - that had to be done externally). C, on the other hand, always had a "de facto" standard library consisting of the subset of the Unix API described in "The C Programming Language", full of really useful utility routines for strings, file handling, output formatting, searching etc. You could do a lot in standard C without tying yourself to a particular dialect or platform, and the pre-processor let you #ifdef your way out of any incompatibilities that you did encounter.
C++ - a can of worms which only a language lawyer could love - probably hit the big time because of MS Visual C++ and the MS Foundation Classes. That and the fact that C programmers didn't think they had to learn a whole new language (see earlier comment about cans of worms).
Basically, don't expect your mathematically elegant new language (with no variables, who's only operator is 'is a subset of' and which uses UNICODE accents and ligatures to increase its expressivity) to take off unless it has POSIX regexps, bindings to MS Access and a WIndows application framework.
Hard sci fi or Soft sci fi? There are no hard sci fi movies, at least from the past 20 years, or at least soft sci fi outnumbers hard sci fi by about 200 to 1. In books I'd dare say the ratios approach 50:50 or at least not as intensely skewed.
Well, its quite hard to do hard sci-fi without either (a) assuming the audience understood their high-school science or (b) having huge chunks of exposition (which is easier to get away with in print).
The problem with hard SF films is that you need a popcorn-blockbuster budget but you'll only get arthouse-sized audiences. The best bets are things that you could do on a small budget - like Gattaca, Moon or The Man From Earth - but I'm not sure whether people would agree that they were "hard SF" (however, they all take a "what if..." idea and explore it).
I think if you tried to film hard SF you'll either get Star Trek (thinks its hard SF but just doesn't "get" it) or 2010: 2001 is the proverbial "hard SF" film (mainly because it was the first to depict plausible space travel pre-moon landings), but 2010 dropped most of the hard SF from the book (the exploration of Jupiter's moons), save the ending, in favour of cold-war thriller elements.
What films? Seriously, how many sci-fi films involving space travel have there been in the last 5-10 years?
Serenity (Although that's more than 5 years now...)
Sunshine? (OK if you ignored the plot and watched the pretty lights)
Star Trek 90210?
John Carter?
Wall-E? (OK, scraping the barrel now... you may have a point)
On the other hand, how many have there ever been - especially if you rule out alien invasion flicks?
but they've devolved into just another international political dog ® and pony(TM) show (© IOC 2012).
...fixed that for you...
(Disclaimer: I am not the official sarcastic git of the 2012 egg-and-spoon-race-named-after-a-Greek-mountain).
1. Google calendar has the same issue which is more embarrassing since Google calendar is online by definition and can be fixed more easily than outlook.
Google's getting it right for me - of course, I didn't check this morning so they may have fixed it at the 11th hour...
"Here's the release statement, signed in blood. Sorry for your loss ma'am."
If ma'am's deceased husband was a multi millionaire who could afford a private ticket to space, then ma'am is about to introduce you to some very expensive lawyers who would be delighted to let ma'am send some of her inheritance their way in return for spending the next decade challenging the release form in court.
If you've just killed a schoolteacher and mother of four who won her ticket in a competition then you're going to have the media whipping up hysteria and politicians and lawyers looking to make their name by doing something about it (schoolteachers and mothers of 4 die quietly every day in all sorts of mundanely tragic ways, but if it happens once in space then it will be World News for months).
I don't know whether it's true, but I've read that SpaceX is already profitable. And they have a ton of comm sats lined up on the launch manifest on their web site.
Putting people into space is a much bigger market in the long term.
I would guess that the profit comes from the comms satellite biz - putting people into space is still underpants gnome territory. The only known source of income from that will dry up when the ISS or its successor gets canned.
? If she knew he was texting while driving, I'd say there is a small amount of culpability on her part.
Nonsense. One reason for sending a text rather than calling is precisely so the recipient doesnt have to drop what they are doing. Maybe, just maybe, if it had been a voice call and the caller knew the other person was driving then they should take some responsibility, but really, unless the other person is in the car and literally screaming in the driver's ear, the buck stops with the driver, and texting while driving is really in its own class of mindbogglingly stupid things to do.
The strive for profit will necessarily lead to advancements in space tech, as they have in all other industries where long-term profitability is the primary incentive (Silicon Valley being the prime modern example).
SpaceX, Virgin Galactic et. al. aren't going into space because they are private sector.
SpaceX, Virgin Galactic et. al. are going into space because they are run by individuals who have made shedloads of money in other ventures and, instead of being good capitalists and starting work on their next shedload, have decided instead to try and realise their childhood ambition of being an astronaut, if only vicariously (has Elon Musk been sighted since the launch? :-) )
Kudos to them of course - and they may even end up making money - but without that sort of motivation the private sector would, at most, look at ways of making a risk-free buck by launching comms satellites rather than trying to put people into space.
As others have pointed out, the real test will - unfortunately - come the first time someone gets killed. I'm not sure the private sector could afford a Challenger inquiry.
If every country on Earth fired all of their nukes into the sun, what would be the reaction?
At a guess, they'd melt before they got anywhere near the surface and not have a chance to detonate properly.
Everybody knows that, to properly nuke the sun, you need a bomb the size of Manhattan* with a giant heat-shield and, for no adequately explored reason, despite decades of experience of getting unmanned space vehicles to nail a target 10 AUs away, a human crew to go space-crazy and jeopardise the mission.
(*the Mh is the traditional US unit for the size of an object in space, although the rest of the world use the proper FFF unit of "milliWales")
This is not some old ancient niche that ARM has wrapped up -- these products and markets only appeared within the past 5 years or so.
5 years or so? Not if you count the Apple Newton (1993), the Psion Series 5 (1997) the HP iPaq (2000) and (I think) the Sharp Zaurus (late 90s-mid 00s) - although I think the last 2 actually used Intel's StrongArm or XScale ARM chips. There are also things that never made it but helped set the stage for ARM's share of the mobile and embedded markets.
So yes, smartphones and tablets have boomed in the last 5 years, after Apple came up with a winning formula and everybody else jumped on the bandwagon, but the ideas have been bubbling under for years, and ARM got its feet under the table 20 years ago.