Well, technically, we were there, and the industry decided to start moving backwards.
I still use a Thinkpad X61 tablet which has a 1400x1050 screen (150 ppi) and a wacom digitizer. I've been using it to annotate PDF's for years. However, it's on it's last legs but there is still nothing to replace it with.
I made a paper cutout of the size of the screen for 10.1" and 11.6" and 13.3" Windows 8 devices at 1080p, which have respectively 218, 190, and 166 ppi. (In my opinion, 150 ppi is the absolute minimum to be able to read subscripts in a full-page maximized document). You'll notice that all these 16:9 screens are substantially narrower and taller than a sheet of paper. (16:9 is an aspect ratio of 1.78, while 8.5"x11" paper is 1.29) So maximizing the width of a full page on a portrait TV-screen gives you closer to 1.5 pages at a time. The old 4:3 monitors were perfect for documents in portrait mode (aspect ratio 1.33 -- so enough room for a toolbar). Why in the bloody dripping hell everyone decided to use TV screens for computer displays boggles my mind. On the most common Windows 8 screen size, 11.6" at 1080p, an 8.5"x11" document is compressed into a 5.69"x7.36" space. How good are your eyes? For those of you with your calculators out, that's less than half the area of the original 8.5"x11" paper. Sure you could zoom it, welcome to an unending hell of fiddling with scrollbars on a tablet device. Oh and don't forget those 1" document margins wasting screen space. Do you know a good PDF reader that can reliably zoom away margins for screen reading? Neither do I.
The only reasonable upcoming windows 8 device, in my opinion, is the Asus Taichi, the 13.3" version of which has been indefinitely delayed.
Everything else on the market either has: too small of a screen or no digitizer. So, in case anyone from the industry is reading this, bring back 4:3 screens, make them around 14" diagonal with very small bezels and while you're at it, give us > 200 PPI or higher and resistive digitizers!!!. An 8.5"x11" sheet of paper has a diagonal size of 13.9". There's a huge market out there that is unsatisfied. Everyone on the damn planet uses paper, and we need devices that emulate paper use-cases. The OP and myself would definitely buy such devices. Screw Apple and their narrow-minded "no stylus" initiative. Paper has been in use for thousands of years. It's not going to stop tomorrow.
So payment security comes down to insurance and legal liability? Fuck that. Truly secure transactions are well within or means, and have been for decades. I want neither to lose my money, nor to funnel billions to criminals through insurance premiums.
Try again, you jokers.
hint: chip and pin, two factor authentication, and private keys for cardholders are good starting points.
I disagree on the music. I too wanted to upload my music collection to my phone, but thought I'd try to live without it with a Galaxy Nexus phone. Since I bought it I've discovered:
So, yes, I really really do want more storage space on these things, and/or a SD card. Of course FAT formatting is downright retarded (interesting point though). I'm happy if it's EXT formatted...
I've always wanted to create a corporate structure that took into account the needs of customers and society as well, along the lines of co-ops.
Wouldn't it be interesting if you, as a consumer, had voting rights in that company proportional to how much money you spent with them, or how much money they made off you?
Then once you have a workable structure, enforce that all legally incorporated entities use that structure...
I made some cutouts of a 11.6" screen and 13.3" screen, and 11.6 is just too narrow. 13.3" buys you nearly an inch in portrait page width (5.69" vs. 6.52"). What I wouldn't give for 8.5".
I'm holding out for the Asus Taichi 31, because I like the 13.3" screen. Second choice would have to be the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro.
I really would like some data on the styli though. My Thinkpad tablet (Wacom) has degraded resolution near the edges, and with such narrow TV-screens, that leaves about 4" in the middle (portrait mode) that is writable. Do the new ones have this problem? What about the S-Pen and N-Trig styli?
The Surface Pro does. Here is a longer list of Windows 8 tablets with DPI > 150 and a stylus. I find 150 DPI to be the minimum if you want subscripts to be legible when placing a full page on screen (width maximized). Of course, the higher the better.
I've long been frustrate that Apple decided to forgo the stylus (and all others are playing copycat), and I'm really really frustrated that no one else sees the utility and use case in a computer that acts like paper (facepalm). I'll give Windows 8 a try for 5 or 10 minutes, but then Ubuntu and Xournal are going on mine. I'm also really frustrated that all these morons decided a 16:9 TV screen is the only way to make a computer screen: they're substantially narrower and taller than a Letter or A4 piece of paper. But at least they've finally returned to the desired DPI and stylus feature-point. The last time that happened was 2007 with the Thinkpad x61 tablet (with the SXGA+ screen upgrade).
Someone whose graphics card isn't up to the task of running a game at full native resolution?
For the myriad of responses that brought up this point: the answer is video card hardware scaling. E.g. add a flag _NET_WM_STATE_SCALING_ALLOWED which directs the WM to use hardware scaling from a fixed-size framebuffer, as is done by video players. Not only can you make it full screen, but you can resize it to any arbitrary shape and size (e.g. don't cover your widget bar, etc). Then the Window Manager decides what is "fullscreen". It could even make an app span more than one monitor when "fullscreen", or just one.
Who is still running a CRT? Who wants any program to change the resolution of their screen?
This strikes me as the wrong solution to the problem: A program should instead request the "current monitor's resolution" (because there can be more than one!) set its display area to that size, and then tell the window manager to "fullscreen" it by removing title bar and border decorations and moving it to (0,0) of that monitor. But NEVER EVER RESIZE MY MONITORS. Thank you. The window manager should always be superior to the app, and one should always be able to manage the window (task switch, move to another desktop, etc) using the window manager, regardless of what the app thinks it is doing.
So basically they're applying interleaved checksumming error correction (a la RAID5)? Good idea. What they didn't say is how much extra data was required to be sent by their solution. If they want to be able to recover 10% packet loss, presumably that means at least 10% more data sent, and there's still a failure point where the loss is greater than the checksum's size.
We've had these algorithms for decades. I've long been frustrated that checksums/ECC are not used at every single transmission and receiving point. Let's put this into the expansion bus, memory bus (ECC), and filesystem (btrfs/zfs), and of course, wifi and wired networks. Unfortunately the drive to the price floor resulted in everyone wanting to shave that 10% to make things cheaper. ECC was once commonly available in consumer hardware too, now you can only find it on ultra-specialized and ultra-pricey rackmount server hardware.
The 1980's assumption that the error is 1e-20, so can be ignored, is demonstrably false in nearly every computer application today. We need to (re-)start designing error correction into everything. Hey, why not use adaptive error correction, that increases the size of the checksum when the measured loss increases?
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
