Green! Green! Green!

Aw hell, ok, beggars can't be choosers. I guess blue will do in a pinch. ;-)

Yes, and no. Buying a laptop with a really good keyboard is hard. God knows, I tried 3 months ago. The problem is, if you want a mobile workstation with pointer stick, sculpted keycaps, and tactile snap, you basically have 3 or 4 choices... and NONE of them are sold by normal stores. Every goddamn one of them is a blind act of faith and random dice roll unless you know somebody who has one.

The sad fact is, laptop keyboards all basically suck, it's hard & expensive to buy one that sucks a lot less than most, and nobody has ever really managed to come up with a viable standard for highly-portable (but non-laptop) mobile workstations that's enough of a standard to be able to buy a case-keyboard-monitor(s)-battery, then add your own motherboard & hard drives. I'd *kill* for something like that... say, with:

* 20-24" IPS main display, 2560x1440 resolution, flanked by a pair of portrait-oriented (including subpixels) 900-1280x1440 displays hinged to each side that fold over the main monitor and latch together like shutters over a window... all interconnected via displayport, with displayport hub in the case itself.

* Cherry keyboard (available with all switch colors, including Green and Blue) and pointer stick.

* power supply and battery to act like built-in UPS.

* space for microATX motherboard, and riser cards to allow one or two video cards to be mounted sideways. To make up for the 1x slots that the riser would obstruct, the case has a Thunderbolt to PCI Express interface and one or two sets of side-oriented slots elsewhere in the case.

* Ideally, a storage compartment or two that's big enough to store cables and a gaming mouse.

The only component for something like this that's still off the radar are the 900-1280 x 1440 portrait-mode LCDs (size-matched to be density-identical to the main monitor). Thanks to DisplayPort and Thunderbolt, the other two problems that would have formerly plagued an open mobile workstation form factor are basically solved. DisplayPort solves the "how do we wire up 3 monitors in a way that's non-proprietary and foolproof" problem, and Thunderbolt provides an easy way to add additional PCI Express 1x ports, not to mention micro PCIe and ExpressCard, that aren't on the motherboard itself. If the LCD problem could be solved, this would be a product a company the size of pre-Dell Alienware could literally manufacture and sell, because all the remaining problems (case, keyboard) are relatively low-tech fabrication and assembly issues. But the LCD problem would be a bitch to solve, because AFAIK, there's literally nobody on earth who'll sell you matched panels suitable for P-L-P where the portrait-mode panels literally have the same subpixel layout and density as the more conventional landscape panel.

On "average", maybe... but "average" is not necessarily the same as "norm".

When you're talking about people who've mastered QWERTY to the point where they can effortlessly type faster than 100WPM, a forced change to Dvorak wouldn't be a matter of mere "retraining" -- it would require outright physical therapy. At 100+ wpm, the keyboard is basically a synthetic synapse between the nervous system and target CPU. At that speed, typing occurs almost entirely through muscle memory.

I used to completely despise 16:9 monitors, too, until I discovered WinSplit Revolution (free, http://winsplit-revolution.com/ which makes it really easy to maximize windows to the left or right 1/2, 1/3, or 2/3 of the screen, and goes a long way towards making it behave like a pair of side-by-side 960x1080 monitors in portrait orientation.

Tip: I personally redefined WinSplit's default hotkeys to make them more laptop-friendly... ctrl up/down/left/right maximizes to left or right, while ctrl-alt left/right literally throws the window to the adjacent monitor when I'm running with two or more. There are other permutations, but 99.9% of my window moves are to the left or right size.

A 17" laptop with 16:9 1920x1080 treated like adjacent 640x1080 and 1280x1080 monitors is pretty good, once you have WinSplit handy to make it easy to maximize windows to fully-height partial-width against an edge.

Now that 15" monitors with 1920x1080 are available on most higher-end laptops, 16:9 is more tolerable at that size, too, and does have one concrete advantage over a 1400x1050 14.1" display... you can use the laptop on a plane without having to tilt the screen forward if the person in front of you reclines... or at least, you can if the laptop's manufacturer minimizes the bezel.

Only if you're literally comparing (mobile) Apples(tm) to (desktop) Apples(tm).

Unlike OSX, iOS, and Safari, recent versions of Windows (when used with recent versions of IE to access web sites with recent SSL3/TLS implementations) successfully mitigate BEAST attacks, and can safely use CBC cipher suites. Apple hasn't bothered, so Safari is stuck with RC4.

The shit some alleged jour^h^h^h^h resear^h^h^h^h^h^h overpriced snake-oil salesmen and consultants keep spreading about the "risks" of allowing banking apps to run on jailbroken devices is getting old.

It's wrong, it's a lie, AND it's actively-harmful to the ultimate goal of banking security (fraud-prevention and losses).

There are exactly two things that would happen almost immediately if any major bank in the US with millions of customers tried to prevent customers from running its consumer banking app on jailbroken/rooted hardware:

1. It'll be treated like copy protection, cracked within days, and released online almost immediately... and 15 minutes later, copies with injected malware will be getting aggressively posted online in ways that will make Google rank them high in the search results.

2. Depending on the size of the bank, there will be one or more open-source reverse-engineered banking apps (probably spoofing a desktop browser and doing screen-scraping if necessary) on Github, Sourceforge, and other sites... until the bank tries to get them taken them down at lawyerpoint, they go underground (or get modularized in ways that make them impossible for lawyers to attack directly), and someone manages to slip a subtle trojan into it somehow, or malware authors start distributing precompiled copies with their own special payloads.

Just wait until some major American bank decides to try blocking their app from jailbroken/rooted devices. When it happens, grab a big bowl 'o popcorn, and watch the fun at XDA & Github.

A banking app running on a jailbroken/rooted device is NO LESS SECURE than the same bank's webapp would be if the same user went to it with the same phone (possibly setting it to spoof a desktop browser).

Any app that genuinely depends upon not being able to install from iTunes/Google Play on jailbroken/rooted hardware for security DESERVES to get pwn3d in the worst and most publicly-humiliating way possible.

Pin the certificates? Sure. The only people who'll notice or care are attackers, and they're going to decompile the program and rip it apart anyway. Obfuscate the code? Sure, have fun. Once again, nobody besides attackers will notice or care.

The moment you try to exclude users with jailbroken/rooted phones, you've instantly broken the app for a small, but very loud & opinion-influencing group of users who aren't the least bit shy about taking matters into their own hands AND have the technical skills to pull it off. If you're a major American bank with tens of millions of customers, the LAST thing you want to do unless you're completely insane is motivate a few thousand of them to become casual weekend hackers so they can check their bank account balance on their phone.

I'd kill for a product like this that could be mounted to a pole on my roof and viewed in realtime with host software running on a PC (or Android tablet, if it had the horsepower to do the realtime deconvolution and virtual PTZ).

This would also turn it into a kick-ass security camera for places where aesthetics are less important than performance and cost

To keep the base cost low, they could make the ethernet+PoE an optional second module that the main one screws into and feeds the raw bitstream that would otherwise be written to microSD. Module #2 could handle the PoE (or passively-injected) power conversion and wrapping of raw (presumably h.264) data as UDP multicast (and forward error correction), as well as keeping the actual connection weatherproof. Inside the house, the host PC could then buffer the raw data for a few frames, then implement the virtual PTZ.

Enhancements that would make it even better for this purpose:

* optional "hat" mount to shield the 3 main cameras from rain, with fourth camera pointing up that has a pinhole-sized lens and strong blower to keep it clear of water (obviously you'd lose camera #4 during active rain, but the blower would clear away the water as soon as it stopped raining).

* vapor-tight shell to protect the electronics from night/morning dew in places like Florida, where 99% humidity condenses on just about everything left outdoors overnight. Or "very tight" shell, with a clump of silica gel and a moisture sensor so the user knows when he has to climb up onto the roof, grab the camera, open it up, and bake the silica gel in the oven for a few hours to make it useful again.

I think a large part of it is due to the convenience of Jython, which makes it really easy to embed Python directly into a Java application as a user scripting engine that doesn't require explicit installation or configuration by the user. I'd go so far as to say that Jython is probably 99% of the reason WHY so many Java apps that support scripting do it via Python instead of some other language.

Jython only supports 2.x syntax.

There IS a way to bind a Python interpreter to Java so it can exchange objects directly (py4j), but it still requires separate installation of Python, with all the usual things that can go wrong (and frequently do, at least under Windows), like environment variables, path definitions, etc.

There's also IronPython, which is another 2.x-only Python that enjoys lots of "automatic" mindshare from Windows developers because it presents itself as the "official Microsoft-blessed .Net CLR Python" for Windows, and everyone remembers that a decade ago, Activestate Perl was the de-facto Perl for anyone running Windows (and eventually, the defacto Perl, period). It's basically abandonware at this point, but ActiveState doesn't go out of its way to make it obvious.

That said, I'd put most of the blame/credit for 2.x on the non-existence of "Jython 3".

"Planet Killer" is a bit extreme. Unlike, say, an asteroid strike, Yellowstone wouldn't do much to the other side of the earth (or even the east coast) besides block sunlight and bury soil in a foot of de-facto concrete sludge. In other words, nuclear power plants will still work, and so will anything else not directly destroyed by the explosion. We have something the dinosaurs (and early humans) didn't -- food that's edible for years, and the means to (expensively) grow it without sunlight. Life would suck, to be sure (especially in poorer countries), and war would probably erupt across the globe, but it's unlikely that it would literally kill all human life -- let alone all life -- on Earth.

The biggest immediate consequence would probably be the de-facto end of air travel (jet engines have insurmountable problems flying through ash) -- at least, for a few years. If cruise ships had to fill the gap, Miami would probably become the main port of entry for passenger travel into and out of the US... mainly, because it's one of the only cities that actually HAS the port facilities to handle large volumes of passengers RIGHT NOW. I'm guessing that Barcelona, Montpellier, and probably Rome, would become the main passenger terminals at the "Europe" end (by virtue of having cruise terminals of their own, as well as HSR connectivity to the rest of Europe). I'm sure there would be direct service between New York and Southampton (UK) too, but I don't see New York being capable of assuming a role as the main port of entry for passenger ships if it's under martial law and one major food riot away from civil breakdown.

There's a UK-based company that makes a REALLY cool product that, with some tweaking, could be WILDLY popular in the US -- SecurityBlinds Secur. Basically, it's a set of interior window bars camouflaged to look like working vertical blinds. The product they actually sell was apparently designed as a blast shield against bomb attacks, but if they reduced the "rugged" part down to just the strength needed to keep burglars out, and replaced the aluminum vanes with textured plastic shells in the usual colors that snapped over the steel rods like clamshells, they could sell them by the TRUCKLOAD through the special order department of stores like Home Depot or Lowes to Americans whose homeowners' associations won't allow burglar bars... but would have no way of knowing that there are actually hardcore burglar bars hidden inside the vertical blinds.

Of course, a product like that would ALSO be perfect for anybody with a big cat (tiger, cougar, leopard, jaguar, lion, etc), because then you could let your tiger lounge in front of the living room window without having to worry about his safety if someone broke the glass & he jumped out through the open window. :-)

If you don't care about out-of-the-box sexy experience, it's hard to beat the Elk M1 as a DYI'er. Their view of DIY'ers is largely ambivalent... they won't go out of their way to solve your problems, but the moment you furnish them with a valid M1 serial number, they'll give you access to the same training materials, downloads, firmware, and accessories as their pro installers. It's a strategy that works for them, partly because lots of those prosumers who buy one to install themselves end up starting companies to get certified officially and install the same alarm systems for other people.

Just one thing... do... not... even... THINK... about buying a cheap TCP/IP-UART bridge for ~$20 on eBay and connecting it directly to both the internet and the Elk serial bus. Make sure you have some kind of middleware sitting between the internet and Elk serial port that can only do specific things, like indicate an active alarm, arm the system, etc. And if you don't understand what I just said & want your alarm to be internet-connected, pony up the cash and buy a proper M1-XEP interface for it. The Elk RS-232 bus was NEVER designed to be directly exposed to attackers over the internet, and mostly depends upon being inside a locked box for security. If you interface it to the internet in a way that allows arbitrary values to get blindly relayed straight to the RS-232 bus after reading this, you deserve whatever happens to you for being a complete idiot.

The only thing it really lacks, IMHO, is the ability to implement Boolean logic for triggering alarms. For example, monitoring the state of the glass-break sensor, the door-shock sensor, and motion-detector and triggering an alarm ONLY if at 2 out of 3 fire within 20 seconds. And having similar logic in other rooms. The firmware in my controller allows you to "sort of" do something like that for a single zone, but IMHO it needs the ability to independently do this in multiple zones.

The nice thing about the M1 is that thanks to Arduinos w/Ethernet and the RPi, you can actually extend its logic pretty easily by using the M1 as your low-level sensor interface, and moving higher-level logic to a Pi or Arduino on the Elk RS-232 bus (relaying events from sensors as they happen to that serial bus, and triggering things like alarms by sending events back to the controller via that same serial bus).

Kludge-tip: if you're in a hurry to set up the system, don't feel like pulling wires right away to each room, and have an unused landline phone cable with 6 wires buried in the wall to hijack, you can buy input expanders and use the 6 repurposed phone wires to daisy-chain the Elk bus to strategic points in your house (1 pair for RS-485, 1 pair for +12v, 1 pair for ground). I had my own Elk M1 wired that way for almost 3 years, before I finally got proper conduit and wires pulled throughout the entire house. I had one M1XIN hidden behind the TV in the living room & plugged into the phone jack (which obviously wasn't used for an actual landline phone), and a second one upstairs behind the nightstand in the master bedroom, along with the equally-kludged keypad. Amazingly, it actually worked (if I had voltage issues, plan B was to add DC-DC converters to boost the voltage from 12v to 48v as it left the box, then drop it back down to 12v at the living room & master bedroom. Fortunately, everything used very little power, and the only time I ever had an issue was around year 4, when the backup battery finally died and the voltage started sagging.

Oh... also... Elk's M1 can interface directly with X10, Zwave, Insteon, and some other standard that escapes me at the moment. The MSRP of their expansion boards is pretty high, but you'll never actually pay those prices anyway because there's ALWAYS somebody selling them for a relatively small markup on eBay. However, make sure you buy the main alarm controller itself from an authorized dealer. Elk DOES track serial numbers of main system units, and if a serial number is reported as 'stolen' by a vendor, they'll refuse to give you access to their site to get updated firmware, etc.

All in all, if you're a hacker who wants total control of every aspect of your alarm system and the freedom to implement additional logic as you see fit, it's hard to beat the Elk M1. Especially if you're Arduino-experienced and itching to connect alarm-type sensors to a Pi (using the M1 to manage the sensors & drive the siren, handle the phone interface, etc, and interfacing it to the Pi through the RS-232 bus).

That's also why summer in Antarctica can feel warmer than winter in Chicago, even if the dry-bulb temperature is lower. Inland from the coasts, Antarctica is basically a desert, while Chicago is relatively humid. When it's cold + humid, the moisture in contact with your body can absorb more heat than dry air can radiate away. Being in liquid water is just a more extreme case, with even faster negative consequences.

Yeah, yeah. Discrete is dead, and IGP is good enough now... as long as you don't want hardware-accelerated realtime raytracing:

(drool)

  http://www.siliconarts.co.kr/gpu-ip

(/drool)

When I can have Windows or Linux with full eye candy and zero performance hit (vs Win2k or something XFCE-like) at 2560x1920@240fps, I'll accept current GPUs as "good enough".

When I can open a pdf document on my phone or tablet and effortlessly fling through it without any perceptible lag waiting for the fonts to render, current GPUs will be "good enough". Newsflash: 80% of the reason why ebooks suck so miserably is the fact that current hardware CAN'T effortlessly render them in realtime

OK, the last one is a bit unfair, because the blame for current shit pdf-rendering performance lies mostly at the feet of the videocard industry, for throwing away everything it learned and developed relating to 2D acceleration in the mad rush to cheap 3D. Basically, they took 3D GPUs developed for strap-on videocards, grafted on enough extra silicon to let them stand alone as their own self-hosted minimalist frame buffer, and called it a day.

^^^ Argh. Proofreading typo-blindness. "~25 years ago, I got a Vic-20 on Christmas Eve. By dinner on Christmas Day, ..."

It's both. Comparing OpenGL (ES) to sprite-based and tile-based 2D is kind of like comparing J2EE in all its distributed splendor to PHP.

OpenGL ES 2 was a pain, but dear Jesus God, I spent the better part of a day just TYPING IN the HelloWorld code for an OpenGL ES 3 Android app, and ended up with something like 8 or 10 classes that compiled into a .apk file several hundred kilobytes in size just to draw a yellow triangle on a black screen. Now, admittedly, the increased HelloWorld complexity eventually pays off by making it more straightforward to do COMPLICATED things, but GETTING to that point has absolutely become more painful over the years.

~25 years ago, I got a Vic-20 on Christmas Eve. By dinner on Christmas Eve, I was writing programs with custom characters, animation, and music. Today, you'd spend 2-3 days with a new computer just waiting for Windows Update to finish installing one or two service packs and several hundred individual updates. Some people might grouse about "cryptic code", but I dare anyone to compare the amount of code you need to open a native Window and make its background black under .net or Java to:

POKE 36879, 8 (*)

Butart is a big, huge problem too. Back when graphics were made from 8x8 characters that could either be 2 colors, or 4 colors at half-resolution, there were only *so* many ways to meaningfully make something, and most of them were dictated by a need to have at least 1 pixel separating major features (like eyes) so they'd be recognizable as such. The lack of resolution and subtle colors basically solved the problem for you.

If anything, having an artist involved 25 years ago usually made the gameplay worse, because they'd force the programmer to make horrible performance compromises to implement their artistic vision. Instead of being able to play tricks with barrel-shifting and video timing, the programmer would be stuck shoveling raw bits around the slowest way possible because the artist designed an image whose width wasn't a whole multiple of 8 pixels.

(*) of course, understanding WHY the value was 8, and not 0, as opposed to just blindly copying the value out of a book, required a few semesters in college ;-)