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Comment Re:COST (Score 1) 544

I can't disagree with you, but I feel there's another aspect missing here - what the manufacturer sees as beneficial (costs such as making physical kb's in every language) and what retailers or business analysts feel will sell based on all the latest marketing research (and remember in Big Data correlation IS causation!). "Wow look at how well the iPhone 3G sold! I guess no wants a physical keyboard anymore... None of our phones will ever sell again unless they're exactly like the iPhone in every way." (Nevermind the fact it could have sold for any one of 10-15 fairly cool / fairly new / or fairly well implemented features).

I believe this is also the reason someone (somewhere) in just about every camp (Mac, Win 8, Ubuntu as examples) thinks a desktop OS should start being gutted to look and work more like a mobile OS. I firmly believe LACK of features on mobiles (like real keyboards, mice, configurability/customizability, etc) are helping keep the PC market alive ever-so-slightly.
China

China Starts Outsourcing From ... the US 274

Posted by Soulskill from the wait-what dept.
hackingbear writes: Burdened with Alabama's highest unemployment rate, long abandoned by textile mills and furniture plants, Wilcox County, Alabama, desperately needs jobs. And the jobs are coming from China. Henan's Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group opened a plant here last month, employing 300 locals. Chinese companies invested a record $14 billion in the United States last year, according to the Rhodium Group research firm. Collectively, they employ more than 70,000 Americans, up from virtually none a decade ago. Powerful forces — narrowing wage gaps (Chinese wages have been doubling every few years), tumbling U.S. energy prices, the rising Yuan — up 30% over the decade — are pulling Chinese companies across the Pacific. Perhaps very soon, Chinese workers will start protesting their jobs being outsourced to the cheap labor in the U.S."
KDE

Linux Mint 17 KDE Released 61

Posted by samzenpus from the brand-new dept.
sfcrazy writes The Linux Mint team has announced the release of Linux Mint 17 KDE codenamed Qiana. It's based on KDE Software Compilation 4.13.0. There are notable improvements in Mint Display Manager (MDM). The multi-monitor display has improved and it allows a user to “configure which of the monitors should be used as the primary monitory by MDM.” Users can also define a background color or a background picture no matter what greeter they are using.
Science

Microscopic View of How Leaves Repel Water 33

Posted by Soulskill from the make-like-a-tree-and-get-outta-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Years of research has gone into products that are hydrophobic — they resist getting wet. But nature solved this problem long ago, and it's ubiquitous outside our buildings and homes. You've probably seen it yourself, after a light rain: water collects in round droplets on many leaves from trees and plants, refusing to spread out evenly across the surface. This article explains why that happens using super slow-mo cameras and an electron microscope. "[T]he water isn't really sitting on the surface. A superhydrophobic surface is a little like a bed of nails. The nails touch the water, but there are gaps in between them. So there's fewer points of contact, which means the surface can't tug on the water as much, and so the drop stays round. ... [After looking at a leaf in the electron microscope,] we saw this field of tiny wax needles, each needle just a few microns in length! The water drops are suspended on these ultra-microscopic wax needles, and that keeps it from wetting the surface."
Mars

Elon Musk: I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026 275

Posted by samzenpus from the go-to-mars dept.
An anonymous reader writes Elon Musk says that he'll put the first human boots on Mars well before the 2020s are over. "I'm hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly possible for that to occur," he said. "But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multiplanetary." He acknowledged that the company's plans were too long-term to attract many hedge fund managers, which makes it hard for SpaceX to go public anytime soon. "We need to get where things a steady and predictable," Musk said. "Maybe we're close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we've flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense."

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