As a Lenovo Y2P owner, I have to just say that 3200x1800 is plain great. First, to the detractors of 16:9 aspect ratio, I really like this aspect. Running Blender, I can keep the side panels open and still have a reasonable working area. Same goes for Unity 3D. Web browsing is good, but 16:9 really shines when you side-by-side 2 browser windows.

As for the resolution, having text this sharp is a noticeable, if minor, convenience. I actually find that displaying 20MP photos is astonishingly clear. I thought it would be the other way around, originally. I thought the text readability would be the huge win and the photos/video win would be minor. In either case, more pixels are better than fewer.

And for those complaining about the Windows desktop at really high DPI: I just set the scaling to 200% and it works just great. Some apps kind of suck at scaling, though. I wish those Windows devs would get off their asses and fix it. But they are all probably busy writing Android or iOS apps right now.

Overall, the resolution is great, and the aspect ratio is just fine. Even in tablet mode - having a long page is just fine be me.

If there's one thing I would warn about in general about high res laptop displays, it's that the GPU can easily be underpowered for this. The Y2P's HD Graphics 4400 does an OK job, but the HD 5000 would have been way better. That's my one gripe about the Y2P.

To say another star has an exoplanet seems redundant. Why not just say it has planets?

In fact, seems to me that all stars have exoplanets, by definition.

One major fail was selling the type covers separately for a hundred bucks. They showed the product everywhere *with* the cover, making people think it was all one product. To walk into Best Buy with a picture in your head about what you want to get, and then be told it's another $100 - that kills any forgiveness anyone might have over Surface RT's other issues.

And then they screwed themselves yet again. Announcing a $150 price cut should have also included the cover. Yet again, Microsoft keeps thinking those covers are oh so precious.

I actually think Surface RT is a decent product. I'd buy it *with* a cover for $300. No more. And so, no deal. From someone not fundamentally opposed to the product.

I'm with you, and I think a lot of what is said boils down to trying to paint scenarios in black and white. The word "allocation" really doesn't mean anything until one specifies how and what is allocated. An allocation can come from a recycling allocator, slab allocator, or just plain old unoptimized malloc(). To say game programmers never alloc during "game level execution" (whatever that means) is just a gross facepalm statement. But it's certainly common for game developers to develop allocators well optimized to their memory usage patterns. I don't think many serious game developers would heavily use vanilla malloc/free in performance critical game loops.

code_quality = time * talent * experience * just_dont_care_factor

If you find code_quality nearing 0, that often means they just didn't care.

Junior programmers will inevitably recreate what you created. It is then your job to grumble and start the task of putting proper locks in their code and running it in valgrind.

I hear you can tune into FM radio stations simply by using your arm as the antenna. You just have to keep it that way while you listen.

Is that how it looks? The thing has gaming specs on par with PS4, motion sensors, and dedicated game controllers. It has its own OS partition to handle games.

How is that an afterthought?

Perhaps you meant:

"Looks like the Xbox One is a home-entertainment center for which gaming is a major feature."

So, should Google jump back into the health data service market, who among you would use it, given a statement like this from Page?

I suspect Page believes Google should be able to analyze your health data and even sell you to advertisers.

No way no how.

In order to construct a virtual brain, doesn't that mean it has to be grown, virtually? What would be the environment in which it grows?

Facebook isn't where users want it to be. We like Facebook in the browser and as an app, but collectively users don't feel it belongs as their shell. Consumers had the same reaction to Chrome OS: phenomenal as a browser, but we're rejecting it as the OS, hence, Chromebook has floundered. Same thing goes for Windows - consumers like it on their desktops and laptops, but so far looks like we don't really want it on a phone and tablets. Same thing for Linux - we flocked to it for server apps, but overall avoided it on our desktops.

It's not that I feel they made a mistake, though. I think it's very worthwhile to bump software experiences up and down the stack to see if there's a better fit. But when consumers reject the positioning, it also makes sense to go back to what works.

Except that wasn't the case here.

http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB6-015AEBB1C052

Sounds like the guy was just frustrated and venting. Lots of us do that sometimes, and this one seems ready made to please the slashdot crowd. But do read the retraction the guy posted.

I think Win 8.1 will be a great step forward for them. Not only will it fix most of the things consumers hate about Win8, it will be timed to coincide with Bay Trail and Haswell, and possibly will tie in with XBox "720" (whatever it will be called). It'll never make fans of the slashdot crowd, but it could well become a major market success. Ridiculing Windows and Microsoft has never seemed to matter very much.

I usually sprinkle in some gratuitous criticism of them and their products as it seems standard protocol for slashdot, but that has gotten tiresome. Win 8.1 and their other products might well be a very strong play this year.

Always hard to read the tea leaves, but I predict a wave of new netbooks that will catch the market by surprise. I believe a wave of $350 netbooks running Bay Trail and Windows 8.1 will prove pretty popular. This will, of course, cannibalize the $1000 ultrabook sales, so this isn't to say it will be a revenue success. But Bay Trail would definitely make Netbook 2.0 pretty compelling.