I've always wondered why companies making computing devices that run off batteries continually made things smaller and smaller, with the goal of also keeping the same (poor) battery life, rather than realizing that after a certain point these devices are small enough and they should instead start cramming ever bigger batteries into the same form factor.

Take an iPhone 4 and 5 as a recent example. The size of an iPhone 4 is just fine. I wouldn't want something smaller, in fact. Yet, with the iPhone 5 they had as one of their goals the idea to make the thing thinner in order to make it smaller. And while they made the power usage of the device better than the older device, they also made the battery smaller, relatively speaking. So in the end, the battery life isn't dramatically better than before. It is merely about the same, while you do get better performance from the device than you do the older one. I'd much rather have a device that was still the same thickness as before, with all the components inside still having undergone the size reduction they did, and with all the same power usage advances, but a much larger battery taking up all the saved space. This would give you a much better usable battery life. The device was already small enough. Making it smaller wasn't much of a gain.

Laptops have been the same story ever since there were laptops. It would be nicer if they lasted longer while running on the battery. They were pretty bulky in the beginning, but after a few years they got to a certain size that was most certainly small enough. And as time marched on, everything inside them got smaller and smaller, and we got smaller and smaller machines. And power usage for them kept getting better and better, but they kept putting smaller and smaller batteries in them as the overall device got smaller, too. And so, battery life was never improving. It was still being built to a certain battery life goal, which is all well and good, unless that goal is too short.

By this time, with all the power usage improvements that we've seen, and battery design improvements that we've seen, we should have had laptops that lasted 24-48 hours on a single charge many years ago. This story about Sony's device getting 24 hours of usable life out of a charge, with an external add-on battery for crying out loud, shouldn't be something to salivate over. This should've been the norm many years ago. With a battery inside the thing that is already capable of such usable life per charge. After a certain point, small is small enough, and we should be putting that space to use for more usable life out of those suckers.

It's probably my favourite movie. Unfortunately the definitive version doesn't exist. At least, the best version isn't the best it could have been, for they inexplicably changed one word in a key scene that completely changed the tone of that scene. The Final Cut is the best one to see. Even better if you could see my copy where I've replaced the audio data for that line with the data that contains the original line. ;)

The rapper from Poor Righteous Teachers has his own day now?! I didn't think that many people even knew about them. ;)

5 O'clock Charlie ain't scared of no invisible planes.

Also, gmail exists.

I bought three monitors a couple years ago for iRacing, as it is almost a requirement in that sim for a good view. (They even have a built-in FOV calculator to give you a 1:1 life-size view.) I wouldn't want to race without it. I had not given any thought at all to how it would be in anything else, but I've found it's quite nice to have in all kinds of games. I've got an older system, an AMD Phenom II running at 3.8 GHz and a pair of GTX 480 cards in SLI, and for most things it is fast enough, but not everything. I'd definitely like to upgrade to one of the recent Intel CPUs and perhaps 680 cards.

I think a big bottleneck with triple screens is how much RAM they put on the video cards. It doesn't seem to be as much of an issue with single screen setups, but once you triple the resolution you require that much more for the framebuffer data, and that obviously takes away from storage for all the other data. It definitely takes its toll. Not to mention the horsepower required to crunch all the extra pixels. It is definitely worth it, in my opinion.

This is not new research. Pretty sure this was all covered in a 2010 episode of NOVA called Dogs Decoded.

Why is that movie theaters seem to be about the only business that not only doesn't understand or even attempt to follow supply and demand with their pricing of both the attractions and the food, but seem to publicly admit that they don't think supply/demand makes sense? If nobody wants to buy something I'm selling, the price is too high. Any sane person in the world would lower their price. That's the whole idea behind supply and demand. But what do movie theaters do? Jack up the price even more, and claim that they need to do so to survive. On what crazy planet does that even begin to make sense?

Popcorn is CHEAP. Why would you charge $7 for it and then complain that nobody buys it?

Sodas are CHEAP. Why would you charge $5 for it and then complain that nobody buys it?

I don't know about theaters around the country, but where I live we have "cheap nights" on Tuesdays, where movie tickets are a good deal cheaper than usual. And typically the theaters are packed full on that night. Every other night? You could count patrons in a given theater without running out of digits on your hands/feet. And even *THAT* doesn't tell theater owners that their regular prices are too high?! Your theaters are packed full on cheap nights because the price is easier to swallow. It shouldn't cost a family of four over $80 to go have a movie night, yet that's exactly what it cost a friend of mine to take his family to a movie on the weekend. Hell, it cost me and a friend, just two of us, almost $50 to go see 48 fps Hobbits a couple weeks ago. Almost $50 for two tickets and one popcorn/drink/chocolate combo. That's way too much money, and that is exactly the reason movie theaters are struggling, yet they just don't get it.

Supply and demand. This is an insanely old concept that pretty much everyone seems to understand. Except movie theater owners. WHY?!

Look at video games, and Valve's Steam store in particular. They've publicly discussed a few times over the past few years how they have seen insane increases in revenue whenever they have big sales on games, on the order or 40x increase in revenue in one case! Here's what I think was the first article discussing it back in 2009: http://www.edge-online.com/features/valve-are-games-too-expensive/

Movie theaters' own cheap nights prove that supply and demand is warranted in their market, just like any other. If they would lower prices of everything, tickets and refreshments/food, they'd see way more people, and way more money, come their way. If only they'd take their heads out of their asses.

iRacing is practically all I have time for, as it eats a LOT of time. But even if that didn't exist, practically every other game that exists is for Windows anyways. I'm fine sticking with Windows until every single game is available for Linux.

I've said the same thing for years about both phones and laptops. Sooner or later they're of a size that is small enough, and continually making components smaller should simply give us more room for more battery capacity. Even if this iPhone 5 gives us similar, or one can hope for slightly better, battery performance compared to the previous model. But one can only imagine how much better it would be if it were still the same size, and all the shrunken components would give us a battery capacity twice that of the previous model.

Way to miss the point.

And why do you care what you look like at that particular time? Same complaints about wearing 3D glasses at a 3D movie are just as senseless. Who cares what you look like? People are watching the movie, not you, weirdo.

Oh, please. That's such an obvious fake. Did you really not notice how the real phone's black background is not anywhere near as dark as the fake phone's black background once it is placed on the table and the overlaid video starts up? Not to mention the overlaid video's boundaries actually being past the fake phone's screen boundaries.

I don't recall ever reading on any PC hardware site anyone claiming that the CPU doesn't matter and all you need is a good graphics card. How on earth did anyone ever successfully submit that story?

I've got CDs I burned sometime in the mid-late 1990's that still work just fine, 1996-1998ish. I don't know why you'd be worried about them not working. They'd possibly degrade and become unreadable if they were in the sun all the time, but how much sun do you think they're going to get in your package? ;)