When it comes to laptops though, you're never going to build one yourself. Apple is the only vendor that actually sells "non-sucking" laptops if you will. HP sells nothing but the cheapest trash for laptops, and just about everyone else has gone out of business. It's incredibly painful to see people have to replace their Taiwan-brand laptop every 2 years, or watch people buy Chromebooks and then return them a month later because the build quality is rock-bottom.

You know there are laptop manufacturers besides HP and Acer, right? Asus, Samsung, and Toshiba have traditionally had good reputations for quality.

Personally I think the Moto 360 is the best looking of the current bunch. Definitely better than what I've seen so far from Apple, Samsung, LG, and Sony.

I remember working on a project where network coding was proposed for micro satellite cluster communications. If I remember correctly, network coding requires that all the nodes in the network have complete knowledge of the state of the network at any given transmission window. This requires transmission of the network state which used something like 7% overhead. The routing of a message from one end of the cluster to the other was difficult. I believe it might have been an np-complete problem. Have they solved the routing issues?

Pearl Harbor is a base for a classified number of nuclear submarines. I don't think this map reflects that.

Chrome doesn't have native MNG or APNG right now. They only support APNG through a plugin. Which is a shame because I am sick of seeing 256 color animated GIFs everywhere.

But why have the many successors to jpg that provide better lossy compression not caught on?

Dolphins and chimps are quite intelligent, I will give you that. But I would place parrots (look up the New Zealand Kea on youtube), corvids (crows, ravens, etc), octopuses, whales, and elephants before pigs.

I don't know what genre of game the submitter plays, but for fighting games, which I play, input latency can mean the difference between winning and losing. 50ms is 3 frames of lag, which means you need to react 3 frames faster to an overhead or throw. This wouldn't be a problem if everyone used the same equipment, ie PlayStation controller, but if someone had a controller that somehow had lower latency than the regular controllers then everyone who wants to compete would flock to it.

Not only that, but it lacks the features to exploit. Which is actually an important point in security, to only have the features you need and nothing else. Less surface area to attack.

http://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/5836/Lynx.html
Pretty much any software that is sufficiently complicated will have security bugs.

The current slowdown in PC sales started well before Windows 8 was released to the public and oems. As someone who holds a little bit of money in AMD stocks, I followed their press releases and they were claiming some slowdown in spring of 2012. If you look at Intel's financials, they were also experiencing an inventory buildup of the latest and greatest ivy bridge CPUs and had to idle more 22nm fabs than usual just to keep their margins and income up. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6378/intel-q312-earnings-3-billion-profit-on-weakening-market-intel-to-idle-some-fab-capacity

The fact is that smartphones and tablets have replaced PC notebooks for some tasks like email, calendar/scheduling, and instant messaging. If a certain percentage of the population used a PC primarily for those things then they might delay upgrading their PC and instead get a smartphone.

I appreciate the suggestion but I very much remain dubious they will get it "right". While I don't have anything against those features they are superfluous. Someone needs to get drawing and note taking right. It should work very much like writing on a paper note pad and be very easy to use. Every pen implementation I've seen so far gets carried away with handwriting recognition and other theoretically nifty features (which rarely work very well) but don't make just writing/drawing easy which is the bit that actually matters. It's more important that *I* be able to write and recognize what I wrote than the computer. I remain hopeful but so far every attempt I've seen has fallen badly short.

In fact, the note series does let you just scribble or doodle or whatever. The handwriting and formulae recognition is a feature you need to tap to activate.

You may be looking for the galaxy note series from samsung. The whole series (note 1, note 2, note 10.1, note 8) have features like formula match, which reads your handwritten equations and tries to guess what the formula was, shape match for diagrams, and handwriting recognition.

The hardware part was done by a 3rd party, but the software to do the skeleton tracking and other things was all done by Microsoft. Basically the hardware combined a regular camera with an IR camera in an intelligent way to do range imaging. To get from just the camera to what you have with Kinect takes an awful lot of intelligent algorithms. I think that qualifies as innovative.

The age of planes used as missiles lasted exactly one day.

How long did the kamikaze phase of ww2 last?