zweben

I'm one of the few non-programmers here, and I figured this would be a good place to ask: Right now, few applications are coded to utilize so many cores. Is this simply a matter of programmers transitioning to coding for multi-core computers, or are some types of software not good candidates for taking full advantage of so many cores?

I have an 8-core Mac Pro, and I was hoping to see its performance improve over time as software took better advantage of the hardware, but I don't see that happening yet.

This is probably because it's not shipping yet. They are still selling the older model in the store. It'll probably get a "Now Shipping" front page spot when the time comes.

Not really. I've had a slight interest in programming for years, but I'm more interested in design.

I'd like to develop an iPhone game, but I don't think I have enough motivation or focus to make it up the steep learning curve. I made a Pong clone in Actionscript, that was as far as I got. The only project idea I have right now is pretty complex; I think I'd need a more modest goal to start with.

Nope. I'm a web designer and I have some interest in programing, but all I know is a little Actionscript.

I come here for the high quality discussion on the articles I do understand, and I read the occasional programming story just to see if I can get anything out of it.

I have been getting messages that say "Reddit is currently under heavy load. Please try again later." or something to that effect.

I'm pretty sure they are just having trouble dealing with the level of traffic they're getting.

Page 11? I only see two pages. What am I missing?

I sort of thing that if the keyboard was going to disappear completely any time soon (~10 years), it would've disappeared already. We have a lot of different technologies for text input these days, but I don't feel like any of them would be better than a keyboard for working at a desk, even if they worked perfectly.

-Touchscreens can eliminate the need for typing to interact with a computer, but people will always want to communicate with each other in writing. On a touchscreen only device, this means virtual keyboards. Those are a convenient tradeoff for portable devices, but they're not ideal, and when you have space for as much screen as you need and a keyboard, I can't think of a good reason to get rid of physical keys.

-100% accurate voice recognition would be nice for some things, but I think I'd still be too slow, tiring, disruptive, or not private enough for most uses.

-Silent speech recognition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_speech_interface) is a really interesting option, I think. A device good enough at measuring tiny 'subvocal' muscle movements could seem very similar to mind reading, while also being less intimidating and possibly less invasive. NASA did some interesting work on this (http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/mar/HQ_04093_subvocal_s...).

-I think true mind reading devices also have potential in the long term, but I'd be highly surprised if we had anything practical in less than a decade.

If everything goes well, he won't have to teach you much at all. That's the exciting thing about the direction the iPad is bringing computing; it's very capable, but at the same time, there's not that much to learn.

My guess is they're going to announce they started putting a coating on new phones to fix the issue, and will offer free exchanges or cases to existing iPhone 4 customers.

*Either that, or Jobs is going to come out on stage and give a demonstration of how to hold the phone the right way.

I've got a 2560x1600 monitor, and honestly, the 4k video looked worse to me than 1080p. Blocky all over the place. If they can't raise the bitrate on the 4k videos, there's really no point to it.

How is losses per unit sold relevant to anything? Overall profits or losses are what matter. I don't know how much Microsoft made off each one, so I'll be generous and guess $400 average revenue after subsidy payments.

1,000,000,000 - ($400 x 503) = $999,798,800 lost

1,000,000,000 - ($400 x 8810) = $996,476,000 lost

The difference is negligible.

I have one. I recently moved to an area with very poor AT&T coverage. I am under contract with AT&T, and I wasn't pleased with the prospect of having to go outside every time I wanted to make or receive a phone call from my house, so this seemed good for me.

I bought one for $150 (not $250). It works, but not very well. On some calls I get fairly severe audio distortion that makes it hard to understand people. I'm not sure how to fix this yet. Still, though, it's better than not being able to make or receive any phone calls at home.

Data usage isn't an issue because I have wifi, and call time isn't an issue because I never get close to my limit anyway.

It's Flash. Easy way to check, by the way, is to right click on it. If it's Flash it'll say "About Adobe Flash Player 10".

I wasn't expecting this to really hold my attention, but I ended up watching for 25 minutes the first time I tried it.

I just hope they add a way to add videos to the favorites and view the original youtube page for a video. Also a bit annoying that you can't control it with the mouse, but they'll probably fix that.

I agree. Native apps are great if you have some features you want to implement that aren't practical in a web app, but I can't think of any case where a website with a native app for mobile devices has any good excuse not to also have a web app to fall back on.

The 3G dock might be different than the 2G dock. I've seen several confirmations that it works in the 2G dock but none for the 3G dock.

That said, this article seems to have more completely false bits than correct information, so I wouldn't trust a word of it.

Takes less than a second to load for me.

Well that's a bit of a relief. I thought they were actually charging $500 to unsuspecting account holders.

You're right about people buying the app after it drops in price. When it was $500 it had two obviously fake 5/5 reviews. Now it has an additional 40 reviews, 1/3 of which are additional fake reviews, 2/3 of which are 1-star reviews shocked that their iPhone didn't magically turn reflective.

sigh

Yesterday there was an app called "A mirror" at the top of the Top Grossing list selling for $499.99. The developer, SufPay, has no website listed and has only released one app. The app displays images of picture frames that are simply black in the center; that's it. It's by a different developer, but it definitely seems to be part of a similar scheme.

I checked just now, and the price has changed to 99¢, but it's scary to think that a completely useless app 'sold' enough copies at $500 a pop to become the top grossing app on the app store.

I think you misread what I wrote. I was suggesting separate updates for the rendering engine to solve the problem of upgrade-averse users. Legacy applications would be accommodated by keeping older rendering engines running beside a newer, automatically updating engine. The idea is to remove roadblocks to getting everyone to upgrade, and then make it so that upgrading the browser version is no longer necessary to maintain current standards support.

I would love this as much as any other web designer or developer, but sadly, it's just not feasible.

The biggest problem with upgrades is that lots of companies rely on specific versions of specific browsers for in-house websites and web apps. Expiration dates essentially amount to browser makers saying 'too bad, fix your software'. This would be amusing, but realistically, Microsoft would never do such a thing, and without Microsoft on board, not much will change.

The best compromise I can think of is for browser vendors to decouple updates of web-technology support (HTML, CSS, JS, Canvas, etc.) from updates of user-facing features, the things that get advertised when an full point upgrade is released, and start pushing out HTML, CSS and JS upgrades automatically, in the background. Once the first round of such browsers were widely adopted, browser upgrades would cease to be an issue at all. Upgrade averse users could keep their old versions with familiar interfaces and still have cutting edge standards support.

This leaves the problem of getting the first round of upgrades through, but that could be solved by building in backwards compatibility for all currently popular version of a browser. This would be a pain, but would only have to happen once. If Microsoft, for example, gave IE9 full backwards compatibility with IE8, 7 and 6, and made future rendering updates automatic, there would be very little excuse left for any company to stick with an older version of IE.

I think the release of the bumper case is much more likely because the iPhone now has twice as many glass surfaces, and those glass surfaces are not guarded from direct impact by a metal bezel like on the previous iPhones. If Apple expected reception problems before release they could've just bumped back the release date.

Maybe they will just start putting some clear finish over iPhones from the factory to fix the issue.

The entire point of my suggestion is that a newer browser doesn't need to break compatibility with older browsers to allow people to stop supporting them. Backwards compatibility makes it possible for Microsoft to do a forced upgrade without screwing anyone over. Once a significant majority people are using IE9, it doesn't matter if they're still relying on its backwards compatibility for existing websites, new websites can just target IE9's native rendering engine and ignore older versions of IE.

I didn't mention IE6 backwards compatibility, because no one running IE6 is going to upgrade directly to IE9; they don't run on the same OS. Even if IE9 was made a mandatory or automatic upgrade, people relying on IE6 wouldn't have to worry. IE6 would have to be dealt with differently than IE7&8, which is fine, it'll get to insignificant market share soon enough on its own.

Why would IT departments be pissed off if IE9 was fully backwards compatible? Honest question.

What's frustrating to me is that they could fix the problem of high usage of old IE versions. They just seem to be unwilling to.

They could add in IE7's and IE8's rendering engines into IE9 as compatibility modes, push out IE9 as a forced or automatic update and have HTML5 ready to use in a few weeks. But they seem to be more worried potential whining from update-averse users than holding back the technological progress of the entire internet.

Apple policies are not 'harmful' to general consumers. They're unappealing to certain tech-savvy consumers, but those people are a niche. The average phone buyer has priorities more in line with what a curated app store provides, and that's why other companies are following Apple's lead.

Even if Google decides to focus on making Android appeal to a broader audience and starts following Apple's strategy, the market will still exist for open devices. Either someone will cater to it (which I am confident Google will continue to do), or the market has become so small that no one will bother. Either way, it's just the free market at work, not some evil conspiracy.

iOS asks you each time though. So Apple is erring on the side of caution, if anything.

There wasn't much to rebut in the first place.

The way they have things set up, it's going to be hard for them to keep their generous deal with AT&T intact while opening the iPhone up to other carriers. The second the iPhone is available elsewhere, Apple loses a lot of the leverage that got AT&T to pay the iPhone's huge subsidy.

You can bet that if Apple could negotiate terms with a second carrier that would increase their profits, they would be all over that. I suspect they're having a hard time finding a generous enough offer to compensate for a weakened deal with AT&T.