The Retina display showing well-rendered, hinted and sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts may be beyond what a human eye can resolve. But if you render outline fonts into two-colour bitmaps without hinting, they will still look a bit pixellated and ugly even on the high-resolution display, if it is held close up. An even higher-resolution display would give a bit more latitude to render things more simply and still have them come out looking perfect.

I assume the experiment used a high quality 44.1kHz digitizer and DAC. But what about lower quality hardware? If they're done less than perfectly, the digital to analogue or analogue to digital conversions may perceptibly change the sound even at 44.1kHz. One reason to use higher frequencies might be that a 100Hz ADC-DAC pair is always imperceptible, even if built using cheap hardware.

If you can afford it join a gym and hire a personal trainer. If you find your workout monotonous, it's probably not that effective either. A good trainer will be able to plan exercise routines that have plenty of variety and are much more effective than doing the same old thing for long periods. Then once you and your body start getting used to the routine, the trainer can change it.

Does the guy understand what marginal cost means? The cost to Microsoft of including a few extra megabytes on the install media (or on the disk of a machine sold with Windows) is zero. It only costs them extra to include the media stuff because of their own marketing contortions where they decided to package and sell it separately. If they just included it by default, the marginal cost would be nothing. There are upfront costs (also known as sunk costs) involved in writing the software in the first place, but marginal cost is the cost of producing one extra copy. In software, as in movies or music, that cost is either zero or something very close to zero.

Thanks - yes a decent laptop can drive an external display as well as the builtin screen. I am thinking more of desktops with two, four or even eight DVI outputs.

It's a shame there are no add-in PCI Express cards with Intel's graphics hardware (perhaps a couple of low-end Core processors with the CPU part disabled and just the GPU running). I would love to use Intel graphics instead of Nvidia but if you have several monitors it's not possible - unless you can now get a motherboard with two or four video outputs.

The article shows three DVI connectors, but are they single-link or dual-link?

Good point. The phone could run Virtualbox or VMWare, and XP inside that. Come to think of it, it's suprising low-end PCs like netbooks don't so the same - it could cut hardware costs.

Why didn't they just put Windows XP on it? Then it would be *really* useful and have one clear advantage over every other phone. A simple dialler application wouldn't be hard to write to make phone calls. (Linux is better technically, but lots of people are tied to Windows for particular applications and would love to have something more portable than a netbook to run them. In my case, it's a VPN client used to connect to work.) I know Intel wants to push x86 as an embedded platform, and Android is kinda the standard for phones these days, but I'm surprised they give up on the old Wintel model so easily. Heck, I would suggest that replacing Windows Phone with something based on Windows XP and x86 processors is an easy way for Microsoft to grab marketshare in the corporate market.

I don't know what the yield on Intel's new 22nm process is like, but given the large area of the chip used by the GPU, I would have expected a significant proportion of bad chips to be caused by GPU defects. These could then be sold as processors with no onboard GPU. I guess marketing didn't want to confuse things, and in any case the marginal cost of making one more chip is not a big part of the price, so they are content to just throw away these defective chips.

So mosh has brought back the ages-old idea of local echo on the terminal. It disappeared as soon as terminal connections became faster than the old teletype links. I have often wished for such a feature in ssh, some kind of 'cooked mode'. However I usually run a 'screen' session on the other end of ssh, with emacs inside that, and finally a shell-mode under Emacs! Mosh would need to do something quite clever to enable local editing in that.

Are you sure the IBM PC was faster than the C64? I believe it did not benchmark that well against the 6502-based machines of the same era. Though for sure there would be workloads where a 16-bit processor is greatly superior, even if it is crippled with an 8-bit data bus as the 8088 was.

Making computers in the USA is a property of the time period, not the particular company. In those days IBM also built its computers in the USA or in other developed countries such as the United Kingdom or Japan. I believe the factories were also more highly automated than is usual today: many of the IBM PS/2 series could be assembled entirely by robots.

This seems like a good place to ask if anyone has experience with the Wyse 901867-01 terminal keyboards? There are some for sale on Ebay UK at the moment and they look good (Cherry MX black switches, apparently) but the connector is nonstandard. Can it be converted to USB or PS/2?

Yeah, that's the reason I suggested network boot, for ease of management - but provided it can be updated remotely by the administrator, booting a local image would also work well.