Maybe there are other choices besides doing nothing and hoping for the he best, and putting politicians in charge of them?

You're half right. The US pharmaceutical industry spends tons of dough developing new drugs, but most of the money isn't spent on curing new diseases; it's spent finding ways around competitors' patents on blockbuster drugs. Why risk developing a cure for Parkinson's which probably won't work and definitely won't make much money when you can tweak some molecules and have a competitor to Viagra?

I'm not saying drug companies are evil or corrupt, I'm saying they're,rational. They know their job is to make as much money as possible. Expecting them to serve the public good is romantic twaddle.

Actually, we're talking about levels of money far beyond what you'd need to buy things for your personal use or secure the services of a mistress. It's in the just-numbers-on-a-spreadsheet territory: not money for spending, but money for counting. A way of keeping score.

A convertible with an Intel compatible processor that can run Windows is probably the sweet spot for you, if you want to program on the go and only carry one device.

If you want to develop *seriously* for mobile platforms, you pretty much have to resign yourself to collecting gadgets. It's ironic, because I'm not a gadget hound; my thing is data. I regard hardware as a necessary evil, a transient commodity like fresh fish that rapidly turns into garbage. But I have an attic full of hard-used, historic gadgets. Palm 100, anyone? Newton? Handspring Visor? Hitachi G1000 running Pocket PC 2002?

The UI issue you complain about is interesting now that I think about it. The "one app owns the screen" is how very, very early desktop GUIs worked, like Apple System Software 5 (circa '87) and Windows 1.0. The floating widget idea harks back to apple's solution -- something called a "Desk Accessory" -- a small piece of software which operated on top of the active application. The ultimate solution was to allow apps to open up overlapping windows on the screen. It would solve your humongous calculator problem, but at the cost of the tablet experience.

Well, it shouldn't. Anyone who *watches* someone use a calculator app will realize there's a tradeoff betwen the size of the motions the user's finger needs to make and the size of the target they have to hit. So the designer of a calculator app should limit the size to which his layout should grow.

But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about having widgets float at the top of the z order as a solution to the problem of apps that don't scale intelligently to tablet size -- or really need that space. That seems like a bad idea to me given the way I've seen people use tablets, although it's probably the bees knees for some oddballs.

Heck I've been that oddball myself on multiple occasions when vendors turned away from what worked for me. For example I much preferred devices that ran on AA or AAA batteries than li-ion battery packs. That's because I could send researcher tracking Chimps and Tanzania into the bush with a brick of AA batteries and know they were good for a couple of months without electricty. Mobile computing for people with no access to electricity wasn't a big focus for vendors though.

"I like this, I don't like that." So what? That's just your taste. Yes, that's a starting point, but everyone overestimates how much they understand *other* users.. What you have to do is observe users working with the software for real. And you can't just do it for five minutes and declare yourself an expert; you've got to watch users over the course of years before certain things become clear.

I was for many years a software designer targeting PalmOS and later PocketPC. In the early days we designed what were essentially scaled down desktop applications -- using common sense of course. But unlike many people in the modern App Store environment I had close contact with users. I traveled to user sites to install the software and train the users. I rode in their trucks and watched them using the software in the field. And over the years I began to gain insight into the PDA form factor and how people use it. We all started out with the notion that UI design for handhelds was about dealing with the limitations of a small screen. It took me years to realize that mobile US design was actually about exploiting the potentials of a touch screen you held in your hand. When the iPhone came out I immediately knew that Apple got it: the handheld form factor is about the experience of direct manipulation. By using a capacitive touch screen Apple removed the last perceived intermediary between the user and the things on scree: the stylus.

Now I'm no longer a professional developer, but I do watch how people use their mobile devices with interest. The author is obviously right when he says a tablet is a different animal than a smartphone, but I think he hasn't grasped what the difference is. It's not just about screen real estate; it's about the totality of how the user interactrs with the device. You can't put a tablet in your pocket, and I think that's a much huger difference than it sounds; it stands for a whole lot of other things that are different betwen a palmtop device and one that is simply hand-holdable. For example he likes the idea of widgets that float over the active application as a way of making use of wasted screen real estate. This is technology focused design thinking (how can we use this resource), not user focused. And my admittedly casual observations suggest that this idea is bad for a lot of the way users use tablets.

One interesting development has been the near-disappearnce of handheld computers in the 4-5 inch screen range that *aren't* smartphones. But wi-fi only tablets remain popular. Why should that be? Again I haven't been observing as a developer, but I think it's because people have different application focuses when they use different devices. When you see someone using a smartphone as a computer they're texting, tweeting,instagramming etc. When they're on their tablets they're surfing the web, watching videos, reading ebooks, and playing games. The idea of widgets floating over active content is ideal for someone who uses their tablet like a smartphone. It's not so great for people using tablets in the ways they seem to. Of course some peoiple *do* use their tablets like smartphones. They're the people who drag out their iPad to take a candid photo. Such people exist, we've all seen them, but it doesn't make them typical. I'd guess most tablet owners these days also have a smartphone.

I'm no longer developing, so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that the focus of smartphone use is connecting, the focus of tablet use is consuming, and the focus of desktop use probably should be creating. Blowing up a phone app to a 10.1 inch screen will clearly make it look ridiculous, but it may not matter. What matters is the usability of apps that are built for the things tablet users are focused on.

Add column C: children are geniuses... at certain things. One of those things is acquiring language, something that adults struggle with but which is literally child's play to them. That doesn't mean children -- even precocious ones -- can reason like adults.

The linguistic genius of very young children might well help one pass a test a standardized test with a simple scalar score which depends in part on whether you can talk the lingo the way the vendor wants you to talk. I'm assuming the tests are devised by marketing people rather than people in actually evaluating human capabilities, like people education or research psychology PhDs.

I was in the last cadre of high school student to learn the slide rule. I did trig and math problems on a Picket N800, although later I preferred a circular Scientific Instrumentys 300B.

The idea of building a machine to perform mechanical analog computation is not so outside the box for anyone who's ever done analog computation by hand. A repetitive series of calculations boil down to a repetitve sequence of movements, and in particular if you used a circular slide rule the idea of some kind of gear train to do the calculation woudl have been obvious.

Which is not to say the devices weren't ingenious. But except for the abacus and the adding machine, analog contraptions were the only way to do computation other than by handwriting.

I actually googled furlong and saw that one acre was the area of 1 furlong * 1 chain where 1 furlong supposedly was how long you plow ..

Good measurement I'd say!

"Oh it's how long my field is!"

(Now I kinda wanted to say acre because in Swedish the name of a field you saw crops on is "ker", maybe it's from the English acre?)

1 mile = 8 furlongs
1 furlong = 10 chains
1 chain = 22 yards / 100 links
1 yard = 3 feet
1 feet = 12 inches or 50/33 links.

"Kalpa is a Sanskrit word (Hindi: ààà¥à kalpa) meaning an aeon, or a relatively long period of time (by human calculation) in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. The concept is first mentioned in the Mahabharata. The definition of a kalpa equaling 4.32 billion years is found in the Puranas (specifically Vishnu Purana and Bhagavata Purana)."

Seem like the Hindus got more of a clue than the Christians.

"Relative long."

Dare I say it will be a hell of a lot of chains in an hindu kalpa?

Maybe it's easier to round it off as 0 googleplex chains per kalpa?

Yeah. Because everyone wants to live near the airport :)

500 km/h?

That's only 0.00000370624 furlongs / light-mile!!

(1 light mile = 1 609.333 / 299 792 458 = 0.00000536815 seconds
500 km / h in m / s = 500000/3600 = 138.888888889 m / s
(500000/3600)*(1609.333/299792458) = 0.00074557736 meters / light mile.
1 meter = 0.00497096954 furlongs
(500000/3600)*(1609.333/299792458)*0.00497096954 = 0.00000370624 furlongs / light-mile.
Now you know how the rest of the world feels!)

It's definitely moving "towards" that speed if it was a lower speed before though? =P

Is it really "monster steam blasts"?

At what point from the sun do we normally see them?

What I mean is that melting ice on the earth isn't really a "monster steam blast", but sure it generate steam ..

Then again I guess it can lose grip if enough is melted away too.

None of which matters if you can get the Li-ion batteries last for as many months as you need them to last and they're priced cheap enough.

It's a service with lots of games.

But mostly it render games over at the Nvidia Grid so you get games which look better than what the Nvidia Shield could render itself.

So if you have no PC to run the games with and stream from yourself this is the solution.

As long as lag is acceptable or if there was none I think it's just perfect to use processing in the cloud rather than have the capacity at home but most often not use it.