Nope. Get an ipad. Better accessibility.

I use android myself, but my father has the same problem. He uses an ipad with big letters, big contrast. works.

Nope! I like it. I miss the lenovo keyboard every time I have to use a Vaio.

I know what those keys are for. Especially because I write daily in German, Portuguese, Spanish and occasionally in a couple of other languages, besides English.

And you know why the apple ones were created, and why they didn't use the already existing modifiers, right? And then why microsoft made those, as well. You can find it on the web.

You might not like the symbol (on the alt case, but never mind - the new keyboards call it alt now). I like the cmd symbol, which is the symbol for touristic landmarks in nordic countries.

Oh, and I am hardly a kid anymore.

I have had notebooks before that. They had mice and trackpads. Look at this one from hp, idiot:

http://blog.laptopmag.com/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/HP-omnibook-300-pop-out-mouse.jpg

I had those pop-out trackballs, some with the trackball over the keyboard, and even with trackballs right next to the screen. So the "magical palm rest" might be a necessity, but no one did it before.

I have in my lenovo three indiscernible hieroglyphs: one that turns out to be the old-generation of the windows logo, one that engages the right click on the mouse (why?), and one called Alt-Gr. It seems that Microsoft took what was bad, made it worse and it is now a standard. Never mind the rest of incomprehensible bullshit I have on this keyboard, like "fn" in blue, but also the whole enter key in blue. Or keys for page back and page forth, right next to the up arrow. Or....

Nah, I am fine with the alt key looking like an alternative line.

Even more: Later PowerBooks featured optional color displays (PowerBook 165c, 1993), and first true touchpad (PowerBook 500 series, 1994), first 16-bit stereo audio, and first built-in Ethernet network adapter (PowerBook 500, 1994).

Wrong. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laptops

The Apple PowerBook series, introduced in October 1991, pioneered changes that are now de facto standards on laptops, such as room for a palm rest, and the inclusion of a pointing device (a trackball).

You really think that those are well designed? It looks like russian solution for me. While it's harder to die from an electric shock, one can easily kill somebody else with such plug :-)

No. Before, notebooks had the keyboard farther from the screen, touching the device's borders. Apple came with the idea of a palm rest, AFAIR.

Some even had printers after the keyboard, like this one:

http://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/computerweekly/photogalleries/233641/194_20_dan-darcys-1993-canon-bj-notebook-bn22.jpg

Reminds me of the notebook's keyboard position, then the trackpad, then the clean designs etc etc...

That. And everything else.

American cars are ugly, spend too much fuel, can't withstand bad roads, are too slow and steer too badly to be driven fast as well, and their quality sucks in general. That's why GM has a whole design/engineering team in Germany, to sell cars to the rest of the world.

Too bad that when the japanese started taking over the american market, their cars started to suffer from the same effects: too big, too shabby, too slow, too soft.

I don't know your phone, but the iphone does zoom any app with three finger scroll. Check on accessibility.

It seems they had reached the level of inkjet printers...

It's just speech. It's a milestone. It's not difficult to exceed one exaflops (the name stands for operations per second, it's not a plural) once you got to, say, 0.99 exaflops. Scientists like to talk in orders of magnitude. Right now we are in the tens of petaflops, but didn't get yet to hundreds. Tiahne-2 gets to 55 pflops, but its sustained speed is a bit bigger than half of that.

Problem is much more about how to get there. It's not just machinery. Is how to actually write and debug programs at that scale. As we cannot make the cores much faster than what we have today, the solution is to add more cores.

The added cores increase the stress on the network, and makes programming such thing much more difficult. Good luck debugging a race condition on one million processes.

Other problems arise from things as mundane as equipment breaking. Think that if you have a single broken memory chip during the execution of a program, the whole computation is either compromised or just lost. And with millions of cores, comes millions of motherboards, power supplies, I/O system, storage, all kinds of electronic components which are subject to problems.

So, while technically, it's not a barrier per se, this huge number of variables that makes things exponentially more complex than what we have today is indeed a barrier. As someone asked here, we cannot just make a cluster of tianhe-2s. The thing would be breaking all the time, spending so much electricity and manpower for maintenance that its uptime would be smaller than a windows 98 unpatched machine connected to an open network.

Huge supercomputers have the advantage that they are efficient, when compared to projects such as those running "@home", and their interconnects allows them to solve problems that need strong communications between the computing elements. Such problems cannot be solved in an efficient way by this "@home" model, where a machine receives a work unit, computes it and returns the result for final aggregation.

Those interconnects can sum to as much as half the price of building a supercomputer.

When you mention the environmental rising costs, I suspect you mean the carbon footprint, caused by energy consumption for manufacturing and operating those machines. The costs are not negligible, granted, but they are probably not as big as that caused by the cars of the thousands of scientists who use such machines :-) This is especially true in US, where cars are horribly inefficient, public transport from the suburbs to research centers is spotty and distances are large.

I understand that these environmental costs are much smaller than the benefits given by the use of such machines. Remember that supercomputers are used to simulate things such as nuclear explosions, ballistics and radiation decay. The costs for the environment are certainly better than blowing atomic bombs around! Not to mention the gains in health research, for example.

So, yes, there is a HUGE demand for such behemoths, and they are much better than the alternative.