I had never seen a black rectangle with rounded edges before the iPhone!
The whole "trade dress" concept seems a bit silly to me in the first place but ti is beyond stupid when they can claim something as simple as their rounded rectangular design as being "trade dress".
Your prodigious display of math is all for naught since you've essentially proved 1=2.
I grew up in the early 60's when sonic booms were part of the background along with Duck and Cover. Nuclear war was just around the corner, or so we thought, and jets routinely generated sonic booms. Sometimes they'd sound like distant thunder and other times they'd rattle the house. Those were far louder, and more objectionable, than your putative 10 mph breeze.
Thankfully, they tapered off towards the end of the 60's as the Air Force realized people *really* didn't like being rattled and those same people objected to Congress. Since the later controlled the budget, the Air Force cut back on high speed overflight over the cities.
Booms weren't just domestic issues. NOVA interviewed a British Consul who was sitting in a tent in the Middle East discussing trade issues with his Middle Eastern counterparts. The Concorde flies overhead and the resultant boom startled all the conferees. The Consul said one of the men pointed at the sky and said "Concorde." at which point the Consul realized another trade issue had just been raised.
Some of those booms were anything but quiet and they sure weren't FUD as you assert.
Nothing rigorous that I've found. I've seen some things like a Mac user posting on a forum asking why Cubase was hitting harder on OS-X than Windows along with screenshots of the overall load meters that it has, but little in the way of details on methodology.
While I haven't done extensive looking, I haven't come across anything and it is something I'm interested in.
Sadly, there seems to be little interest in testing. People who own PCs can't really test it, outside of building a hackintosh, and Mac users are not very interested in testing particularly since many of them have a real need to believe their money was well spend and do not wish to do something which might challenge that idea.
If someone gave me the hardware and software I'd love to try it, but I own only a PC, and the DAW I use (Sonar) is Windows only.
The only thing I can point to with some newer data is a Sonar benchmark, conducted by their lead programmer, showing improvements in Windows 8 vs Windows 7. They found basically an across the board improvement, with no code recompile http://blog.cakewalk.com/windo... . Now that says nothing of cross platform (as I noted, Sonar is Windows only anyhow) but does indicate that MS continues to improve Windows' performance with regards to intensive time critical tasks like audio.
True, though there is some precedence. OS-X does not seem to be particularly zippy in the few cross platform app benchmarks that are to be found. A good example is DAW bench's test on Cubase, Protools, and Kontakt: http://dawbench.com/win7-v-osx.... What you see is that Cubase has a much more efficient engine than ProTools (no surprise) and that on Windows either one gets a lot more polyphony than the Mac. At any given buffer size (lower buffers are harder to deal with) Windows did better.
Pretty good test too since you are dealing with tools that have long been cross platform. Kontakt has been cross platform for its entire life, Pro Tools was Mac only until version 5 (1998ish), since when it has been cross platform, and Cubase has been cross platform since back in the DOS and Atari ST days. All the software has long development histories on both platforms, yet Windows gives superior results.
None of this means OS-X is unusable or anything, but it doesn't appear to have the performance Windows does, when pushed.
Or Malaysia or Thailand and so on.
Be careful when you get on the American hate high horse, you overgeneralize and you risk looking racist.
or maybe admit it is a bit more nuanced than "not a civilized country."
It manifests differently, but it is sexism all the same. Many of the "defender of women" types really do see women as weaker, inferior. These poor little flowers just can't, CAN'T stand up for themselves. They need guys to help them out so that things can be fair! So don't worry, fair lady, they'll protect you from the evil men... unless of course you disagree with them in which case they'll attack your fiercely for having "internalized misogyny" or some such. After all, you can't be strong enough to have your own opinions!
They don't believe they are sexist, but then people who are sexist/racist/etc rarely believe they are. Make no mistake though, that's what it is. While it might manifest as seemingly good intentions, it is actually a view of gender inferiority. I mean after all, if you truly believe that women are equal to men, just as capable, then you aren't going to think they need special champions. They can, and will, handle it themselves. It is only people who view them as weaker in some way that would think they can't handle themselves. It is pretty insidious.
I think people need to start calling them out on their bullshit. Sexism under the cloak of "equality" or "justice" is little better than sexism in the form of harassment.
It's just from breathing Google's hot air for too long. Don't worry, I've quit.
I guess you haven't tried to actually use a Google product from the inside. Fundamentally broken, obvious and repeatable bugs have gone unfixed for years, but as they tell us: "they're working on it." (cough[Shopping]cough)
If it's in a Google car, they'll claim it isn't evil, while being really underhanded (cough[IP rights]cough), but it won't work right (cough[Shopping]cough), and just as you you commit a significant amount of resources to it, they'll either discontinue it (cough[cough]cough) or sideline it. Or never, ever add the features that would make it something actually reasonable (cough[Gmail]cough) Or simply blow out the decent features (cough[Maps]cough) Or never bother to bring it to a level of performance that is even moderately reasonable (cough[Google+]cough)
Unless it never becomes popular. In that case, it might hang around forever. But still under-performing / broken / evil, etc.
No, I'm not bitter. I love when a company wastes my time as if it's worth nothing. Finally I realized that trying to work with Google was making my time worth nothing. So in a way, they had the right idea from the start.
The only car analogy I can come up with is the insufficiently Humvees the government gave our soldiers to drive over IEDs in.
Not a tech dinosaur.
A tech prokaryote-like organism from the Archean.
Even a new instance of Firefox is laggy and slow on my 8-core, 3 GHz, OS X machine. Browsing Amazon has become an extreme exercise in patience.
Starting it fresh with about 6 GB of RAM free, Firefox continuously and greedily consumes memory until I have to quit it to make it give back the gigabytes it has swallowed like an overweight, crazed hot-dog eating contest professional.
One positive thing I will say about Firefox is that even with those major warts continuously unaddressed, it still performs better than Safari. And Firefox is*much* better at dealing with the whole "outdated flash" issue. It asks me instead of smacking me in the face with "you can't do that", so I'm inspired to raise digit #3 to Firefox far less often than I am with Safari.
Sigh.
I could really give the south end of a northbound rat for Netflix on a browser. I have a capable dedicated system which is much more pleasant to watch Netflix-y things on. But I sure do wish FF could just browse places like Amazon without killing off my resources. After all, it's a browser. It seems to me, naive and unduly optimistic fool that I am, that it should be able to do such things. Well.
When will application and OS vendors ever understand that it truly is their obligation to make what they release actually work properly before they slather on more features or proceed to a new version?
I know. Never. *Sigh*
I'd demand you FF enthusiasts to get off my virtual lawn now, but FireFox has grown so large and unwieldy, I can't even tell if you're out there any longer. Hello? Hello? Oh, hey, no RAM left. Again. [gets virtual shotgun out]
I really don't see how, in an age of universally available internet pron, anyone's going to get excited enough by a picture of some tits to care.
Perhaps some time studying the works of US legislators will be of use to you, then. According to them, it's quite obvious, and You Must Be Protected From This. Also, consider that the above cases are real people doing real things. Not actors in pixel-addled MPEGs. You can actually interact with them. Much more pleasantly, too.
Having said that, I think you might want to look a little closer at the last paragraph of my post.
My question: Is this trend a progression to the ultimate conclusion where the browser becomes the operating system and our physical hardware becomes little more than a web appliance?
No. And the "trend" referred to here is 99.999999% junkware. Slow junkware. Junkware that typically invades privacy and/or bombards with ads. You can't compete with my image editor. You can't compete with my word processor. You can't even compete with my text editor. You can't compete with my SDR software. You can't compete with my database. You can't compete with my media center. You can't compete with my fish tank controller. You can't guarantee that you, your ISP, my ISP, the connection(s) between them, the name servers, the competition for bandwidth at any one (or more points) will work to my satisfaction. Or at all. You can't even promise the app will BE there (cough, Google, cough) when I need it. Or that it will work properly in my chosen browser. And you're almost *certain* to screw it up so badly that it does all manner of things with rollovers, popping up garbage ads and menus without an instantiating click or drag or keypress from me.
And the other
Seriously, even the *speculation* is ridiculous.
One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model.
