This is the Harper regime we are talking about. Did you need any additional hints?

You don't...exactly...strike me as somebody who would use marxist economic formulations; but a considerable majority of CS workers are kidding themselves if they think that they map to anything other than 'proletariat' or 'petite bourgeoisie' in a marxist economic formulation.

Obviously, if you reject such a thing entirely that doesn't much matter; but the point remains in that context.

Older systems did that by hand but newer systems have algorithms which guide the trajectories of aircraft on approach so they finish up in a nice sequence. Thats what it sounds like in the summary.

If anything, we've gotten worse on standardization over time.

Back in ye olden days, it was actually reasonably likely that the entertainment system was a DIN-mount box with some obnoxious-but-more-or-less-functional bundle of wiring harness that connected it to to the vehicle. Less so today, and(even when that's still physically the case) more likely that it isn't just power and analog audio; but a whole bunch of actively hostile and undocumented CAN chatter that disables a bunch of random cabin systems if you aren't using a suitably blessed device.

What I find puzzling is that (unless somebody needs to be fired yesterday, and hard) the 'Ford Sync' component isn't really something that a good realtime OS would be an obvious choice for. It's the infotainment/navigation/non-essential cabin control widget; and had better not be scribbling all over the ECU over CAN.

That doesn't make QNX wrong, you can put a GUI on top of it just fine; but it makes it a lot less obvious why MS got the boot. WinCE is kind of old and nasty; but the NT kernel is respectable enough, and all reports are that (thanks to the fact that your phone is now more powerful than the workstations it ran on in 1993) it actually delivers fairly peppy performance on the distinctly midrange hardware that most WP8 devices ship with.

Apparently MS and Ford had some sort of togetherness problem, and one or both of them screwed up such that the resulting product isn't good enough; but I'm guessing that the problem wasn't "We need a better real time OS". This 'Ford Sync' is a consumer electronics UI problem.

How about tattooing 'Dirty Cop' on their foreheads(Snow Crash style) and then introducing them to the general prison population?

The janitor will need a nice bonus and a hell of a stiff drink; but the problem will likely be solved.

I'm definitely no Russia wonk; but their activity with respect to the internet looks fairly similar to the Chinese playbook: a mixture of making domestic surveillance easier(mass surveillance is much more practical if you can just subpoena the results, rather than tap the endpoints, so having Russians using American services hosted in places where getting the good stuff is either impossible or at least impossible to do silently isn't desirable for the local authorities) and quasi-mercantilist support for (Putin-friendly) local businesses. American internet companies(though not ISPs) have some very potent offerings compared to many of their international competitors(lest you accuse me of flag-waving jingoism, those offerings are often built with good old American know-how provided by talented foreigners that we attract or buy out; but the products are still good and still owned by American companies), if you wish to support local businesses(for a mixture of economic reasons, cultural considerations, and surveillance purposes); basically any dicking-with-foreigners that you can get away with is to your advantage.

In relatively minor ways, even mostly-friendly European states do it(eg. mandates and subsidies to preserve local, local-language film production vs. Hollywood, various 'Google Tax' initiatives designed to give cover to incumbent publishers with pitiful or nonexistent internet presence). The Chinese are more aggressive and more experienced(the various mandatory 'joint ventures' that end up being tech transfers, using the Great Firewall to mess with external services and make internal services more reliable by comparison, etc.)

The Russians will likely have a harder time of it because they aren't populous enough, and on an economic upswing, to be treated as an 'absolutely must expand into this market, even if the terms are blatantly unfair!'; but their strategy looks fairly similar: mess with the foreigners enough to improve the prospects of local companies, move more Russian internet activity onto servers in Russia that can easily be subpoenaed or equivalent, add a variety of obnoxious measures that can then be used as 'carrots' in diplomacy (we'll totally remove the restrictions on some of your major internet companies that we just pass if you overlook our activities in X!".

It's not exactly nice, and Putin isn't dumb, so I wouldn't just dismiss it; but it looks like a fairly familiar playbook.

Fair enough. Now if we could just get broadcasters to stop succumbing to the temptation to turn TV into legovision because turning up the MPEG-2 compression until the video cries means you can have more channels...

I am not a subject matter expert; but the swift divergence of typical resolutions on small-screen devices with typical resolutions on larger monitors makes me suspect that manufacturing technique has improved substantially at fabricating very small pixels; but less dramatically at avoiding flawed pixels cropping up often enough to hurt yields of large and high resolution screens.

I mean no disrespect to the (likely substantial) engineering effort and cleverness that goes into cramming 2560x1440 into some teeny little phone screen; but it does have the advantage that, if the glass is being cut into a large number of small screens you can limit your defect-related losses to a relatively small percentage of the total area, even if an unacceptable defect or two shows up in every sheet produced. With larger screens, you need much larger areas of zero unacceptable defects or you'll be scrapping substantial amounts of material.

Less important; but still an issue in a few cases(eg. 'retina' iMacs) is that external display interconnects have to hew quite closely to standards because they'll otherwise not work at all(or work erratically depending on sheer luck and generate a huge number of returns), or have to be sold as (wildly expensive) specialist-vendor-validated-and-guaranteed card/monitor pairs(I assume that the absurdly high resolution zillions-of-greys monitors used for reviewing radiology data have already gone down this road at least at the high end). With an embedded display, doing something nonstandard costs more than doing something supported by every cheapo SoC vendor on the pacific rim; but you otherwise have total freedom to do whatever you want, as long as you can deliver a product that works when the customer pokes it. They will never know, and never care, exactly what you did between the logic board and the LCD panel.

You will pay for the privilege(and your ears won't thank you); but is the scaling of SLI/Crossfire good enough to save you? A quick look shows that you can get motherboards with up to 7 GPU slots without recourse to any terribly specialist vendors(they aren't cheap; but they are perfectly normal motherboard brands that you could have from Newegg by Monday, not some specialist display wall vendor who might get you a quote in the same amount of time), so you can throw a lot of GPUs at the problem; but that only helps if performance actually improves at something vaguely approaching a reasonable multiple of how many cards you add.

Arguably, that depends on how large the display is. In the tablets and smartphones market(and, at least to an extent, smaller TVs and monitors) higher resolutions are mostly about aesthetic improvements. Between the limits of human dexterity on input devices and the limits of human vision you can't use the extra pixels to actually make UI elements smaller(it still has to be a certain minimum size for the user to see it, click it, or touch it, regardless of how many pixels fit in that physical area); but you can use them to make things look buttery smooth and more or less eliminate visible jaggies.

In larger panels, there is still a good deal of room(at least for users with decent eyes) to use additional pixels to add additional effective 'space' into a monitor of the same size. No longer being able to see the nasty huge pixels that result when some terrible person smears 1920x1080 over a 27 inch screen is nice(seriously, guys, WTF is up with the increasing sizes of 1920x1080 monitors? Used to be you could get 19.5/20-inch ones quite easily, now the market is rotten with 22 inch and higher); but it's the increase in work room that really makes the difference.

I wonder if it would become natural/intuitive enough to be essentially unnoticeable after a week or two of practice to have a knob or something mapped to adjust mouse sensitivity on-the-fly? If it didn't become intuitive, such an arrangement would really be no better than just using the usual OS adjustment dialogs; but if a little practice caused you to stop even having to think about the fact that you are using it such an arrangement(doesn't need to be that specific peripheral, it's just sort of the iconic USB-attached-knob) it could actually be pretty handy to be able to smoothly move between sweeping-but-imprecise zooming around your giant screen(s) and then upping the sensitivity as you approach the target and need to get some precise clicking done.

Wow "Lack of VESA mount" on something that isn't a sub $100 pack-in piece of shit? What the hell were they thinking?

Perhaps if you are buying your LCDs just to watch TV the 'content' argument is a serious problem; but c'mon, essentially all modern 'TV's are just big monitors with built in ATSC/DVT-B tuners and severely questionable EDID data.

Especially when the resolution is an integer multiple of what the existing 'content' was designed for, and a PC with suitably punchy GPU (which actually isn't much punch these days unless you are gaming, where things can admittedly get damned expensive at high resolutions, this isn't the bad old days when you had to buy some freaky Matrox unit to get a VGA out that didn't turn into blurryvision when it met a real monitor) can drive a seriously enormous screen, who cares?.

Quit carping about how Sony hasn't yet graced us with Premium Ultra HD Content on Blu-Ray 2.0 and embrace the fact that you can buy a terrifying pixel-battery of your very own at surprisingly attractive prices. Still a few kinks to work out at very high resolutions that currently available displayport or HDMI standards can't drive properly; but that's really the remaining issue.

There are way better places to hide C4 if you have access to it that they won't be able to detect.