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Comment Re:no iOS 5 love (Score 1) 336

I know what you mean. I'm working on an app that doesn't need much horsepower and would like it to be available on the iPad 1 so that people could put old ones they have laying around to good use. But Apple isn't making it easy to support older device so I'll probably have to make it iOS 7+ only. :-(

No you don't. Just set deployment target to iOS 5 and make sure you heed the warnings. Test on your iOS 5 device (yes, no Simulator for that, which sucks) and you're done.

Comment Re:no iOS 5 love (Score 1) 336

This is not breaking support for iOS 5. I have an app in the store that is built against the iOS 7 SDK and it is compatible for iOS 5 and higher. You can even go lower, it's called the deployment target, but since there's no old iOS version available on the current Simulator it's much harder to test.

Comment Re:Segway (Score 2) 331

Personally speaking, I wouldn't mind something like a ruggedized google glass for snow boarding [...]

That already exists, the Zeal Z3. One third the price of google glass, speedometer, temperature, altimeter and more inside the goggles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9u1mUlK8qg

I have never seen somebody wearing these while snowboarding, nor would I want one, but there you go.

Comment Re:What no Android versione? (Score 1) 46

With all those 400+dpi displays out there - are they actually... useful? Short of holding the phone to your nose or otherwise uncomfortably close (to make it hard to actually... use it) does one notice the difference between the 320-odd "retina" DPI vs. the 440 DPI these new 1080p screens offer?

For the human eye it does not make sense to go above the ~320 DPI. It might make sense for Samsung to go to 440 DPI though because their Pentile displays only have two colors per pixel, with different combinations one besides each other (See e.g. here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile_matrix_family). But is a 440 DPI Pentile display better than a 320 DPI IPS LCD? Real tests like the ones over at displaymate.com might give an answer. Whether these in turn make any difference during daily use, who knows?

And for developers the 400+ DPI create a new issue: how should you optimize images for your apps/websites? Do you go 3x the size the image has at standard resolution? Meaning you now have to create each image three times, despite nobody seeing a difference over the double-sized 320 DPI images? Vector images help, but are not the solution since lines will be blurred. Oh how we love numbers.

Comment Re:finally, some good sense (Score 4, Insightful) 97

To be fair, they implement DRM because the content rights holders want them to. Apple fought to be able to remove DRM from the songs they sell, and they convinced the industry to let them remove it some time ago, which is great and hopefully can expand to the other digital content soon.

Comment Re:Why tenure? (Score 1) 193

"getting tenure" is just a proxy for becoming a prof. I don't know at which university you are and how many grants that you have reeled in, but at the European and US agencies that I have applied you better have a list of good publications to get your funding. And as for "not to worry about tenure", that is highly illusory. Tenure and teaching contracts may save your salary, but what do you say to your lab technicians, programmers and grad students when you run out of money? "Don't worry, you'll get completely adequate gov benefits"?

Comment Re:Public-funded research should be public. Period (Score 4, Insightful) 193

This is like saying "we don't need Slashdot or Ars Technica or the NYT, just go to Twitter and let the community upvote the most important news. People with more followers have more weight when favoriting/retweeting".

You will never again see actual news.

There is no way around peer review, and good peer review can only happen if experts choose the review panel. Now this is already being done by professors for journals (for free!) and there is a movement of high-profile profs that will only review for Open Access journals. This is definitely a way to go, and the government agencies requiring Open Access is likely the best solution to date.

Comment Re:Rejection (Score 5, Informative) 148

Science's and Nature's rejection rates are very high, there are just this many articles they can publish every week, 15 to 20 for Nature. Almost every paper gets rejected on the first draft, good ones are encouraged to resubmit after revisions. It can take a few years to get your paper into one of these journals, that's what makes the papers of highest quality -- not to be confused with "certainly true", even high quality research can turn out to be wrong.

The leftovers get resubmitted to lower-ranked journals; that's what you usually do if you want to submit something, you aim for a high ranked journal and hope to get in, if not you revise and resubmit or submit to another journal.

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