Posts by Dave 126

RIP Prince: You were the soundtrack of my youth

Re: Seems to be a mass die-off of celebrities at the moment

Re: Seems to be a mass die-off of celebrities at the moment

This was covered by the BBC radio programme 'More or Less' which, in conjunction with the Open University, looks at statistics in public life.

They of course noted the difficulty, because of fuzzy definitions of what one considers a celebrity, but after some analysis they concluded that yes, 2016 has seen more famous deaths than would be expected.

The Guradian's analysis, on the other hand, appears to just be yabbing in about how many z-list celebrities there are these days. Ah well. Prince, Bowie, Rickman, Wood, et al were no mere celebrities, they were famous for being very good at stuff.

HTC 10: Is this the Droid you're looking for?

Re: Meh

>Not really. Speakers should be listed about 20th on any smartphone manufacturers list of importance. >Speakers in phones will be hamstrung whether you invest millions in micro speaker tech or not

A person who listens to spoken-word podcasts whilst cooking is no weirder than someone who wants to snap pictures of their day. Speakers are used for more than just music.

When it comes to music, I agree with you - I'm quite fussy about audio reproduction. I'm not an audiophile nutter, but small tinny speakers do my nut in. I'm perfectly happy with my bookshelf speakers and 30W amp, bought for about £100 many years ago.

Official: EU goes after Google, alleges it uses Android to kill competition

Re: So you're saying

>What other OS options do the manufacturers have? Not iOS, not Blackberry's.

Well, you've just identified an area where the idea of competition breaks down. You can't have true like-for-like competition for thing like bus services, cos that would mean that every half hour three buses from different companies turn up at the same bus stop. Software support for OSs is similar - much wasted work (inefficient) to supply users with much the same application but for various OSs.

Another example is eBay - sellers want the most people possible to bid on their goods, so why would they advertise on another service? The very nature of eBay precludes competition.

Re: Alternate operating systems

>Is this not a wish to express to your phone supplier?

@ Tom dial

Google doesn't allow a phone vendor to use Google Play Services if said vendor also sells phones running a fork of the Android Open Source.

Re: A lot of the APIs were moved in to other services from core Android

>The solution to this problem (carriers and manufacturers not providing updates) is to cut out the middle men and have an update mechanism that works without them. I don't expect my internet provider to manage pc updates for me, why should my mobile provider be updating my phone?

There are technical reasons why that is not possible with Android. If it could be done, Google would have done it already. Moving more APIs to Google Play services is a half-way house (but may slso serve their business motives by differentiating Google Android from ASOP). Google's other OS, ChromeOS, is updated as required, and when buying the hardware you are told how many years it will be updated for.

Business gadget-makers eyeing modular LG G5 smartmobe

No, it is not as modular as the Freephone, but it is better. The Freephone doesn't have much of a choice of components - one can buy a spare camera module, for example, but one can't choose from a range of camera modules. Most people would be better served by buying an LG G2 (equivalent or better spec) and pocketing the change.

Whilst my interest is piqued by the LG G4, the choice of modules (and the concept of investing extra in just one handset, being either abondoned or locked into LG, are concerns) isn't really grabbing me. The B&O DAC would be nice, but the G2 already had a very good audio pathway, and the circumstances in which i might want to sit and listen to high quality audio don't preclude against just using a USB Audio-based solution.

Adoption of the G4 by companies (I'm thinking barcode scanners, receipt/label printers, card readers, temp probes etc) would extend the lifecycle of LG's module format, and perhaps reassure consumers that the concept they have bought into won't be dropped next year.

Re: No such thing as a free replacement screen

Also, if LG are sometimes paying for a broken screen then it creates an incentive for them to design their phones in certain ways: They might use an aluminium bezel rather than ABS (protects against sharp impacts to the edge of the screen), or they might arrange the internals of the phone to make the screen easier to swap out.

Re: No such thing as a free replacement screen

It's true that all buyers indirectly pay for the cost of the replacement screen, but the cost to LG to replace a screen is far lower than the cost to Jo Public would be.

Screens are sold around the £30 mark, but (depending upon the model of phone) repair shops and repair-and-return services charge around another £50 in labour. It obviously wouldn't cost LG anywhere near the same amount.

How Apple's early VR experiments accidentally led to RSS

Haha, Wired's predicting the death of the web browser isn't that unusual a booboo for them, bless. I don't know if anyone actually takes them seriously, but I occasionally read as I might the The Onion.

How much faster is a quantum computer than your laptop?

Re: Time to solve one of those "10^77 years" IT Security Cracking problems

>Past time for DARPA to set the rules for a formal competition.

No, no it isn't.

Breaking conventional cryptography requires a class of quantum computer that Shor's algorithm - which D-Wave has never claimed to be capable of.

Quantum computers than can run Shor's algorithm have been built in the lab, but only up to a few qubits - far too small to be of any use in factorising large numbers (and thus breaking encryption as we now use it). In the event of researchers making significant progress in this area, DARPA or the NSA would not have to hold a competition - they'll already have been paying for the lab. In any case, it would be trivial for even an amateur mathematician to quickly determined if it worked or not.

The D-Wave is a different beast. The smoke and mirrors to which you refer are due to the difficulties in finding fair tests. Still, there's enough uncertainty for Google to take a punt on it, as they should if there is even a small chance it can be made to work for them, finding low points in fitness landscapes.

Re: Quantum computers

>how do you go about checking the machine got the right answer if it takes a several hours to run the program? It would take years on a regular supercomputer.

Checking a single answer can be done near instantly on a classical computer, for many types of problem. The issue is, you have 10^daft possible solutions to choose from - and it is this area that true quantum computers will excel (if someone ever manages to build one).

If you are still doubtful about your quantum algorithms, you could test them with problems to which you already know that answer (because you have constructed the problem for this purpose, from the answer and working backwards)

Woz says wearables – even Apple Watch – aren't 'compelling'

Re: Network Connection

>You listening Casio? Simple and low power is what you do...make this. Now!

Casio have already made some contenders:

1. a G-Shock with Bluetooth phone notifications etc 1 year battery life

2. an Android Wear outdoors watch with all the bells and whistles. Normal Android wear battery of a day or two, but can switch to low power mode and last a couple of weeks.

The trouble with your spec list is you have a low power screen and high power parts such as a cellular radio and GPS. Many people wanting a GPS system (walkers etc) will want some sort of phone, if only for emergencies, so market is small for watch with own cellular radio. Still, you've outlined your own use-case, and shown original thought so have an upvote!

(And of course a phone is no substitutes for planning and preparation when hiking)

Apple pulled 2,204lbs of gold out of old tech gear

Re: Cost is dropping as automation kicks in

> Apple has every incentive to improve costs on this type of recycling

It's one of the reasons manufactures use glue instead of screws. It's easier to heat a batch of devices in an oven than it is to unscrew them all.

Apple's limited product range also aids them in recycling, as does the use of aluminium (rather than carbon- or glass-reinforced resins) in their laptops.

Its been the intention of many territories to make end-of-product-life the responsibility of the manufacturer for around twenty years now. None of this should be surprising.

>Why sell it if you're only going to buy more on the market anyway?

That would make sense if their recycling plant was next door to the factory for new devices. However, if you have recovered the gold in the US, there isn't much point in shipping to China yourself.

Re: Love 'em or hate 'em...

>You don't make piles of cash by selling stuff that lasts or is easy & cheap to fix.

Really? Can you support your claim in any way?

http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/laptop-brand-ratings

http://www.zdnet.com/article/consumer-reports-notebook-reliability-survey/

http://www.digitaltrends.com/buying-guides/which-laptops-are-the-most-reliable/

If Apple's business model is to sell gear at a high margin, and find ways of enticing repeat custom through making newer, lighter faster etc models, then it is of no advantage to them to make flaky kit. I'm a bit confused of why you think it might be.

NZ hotel bans cyclists' Lycra-clad loins

That's a bit harsh. What about Tron Guy?

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/web03/2012/5/5/15/enhanced-buzz-24959-1336247132-3.jpg

(Don't worry, this isn't one of Mr Maynard's more revealing poses!)

Anyway, my pragmatic approach would be for the hotel to keep aside some baggy cargo shorts for any Lycra-clad men who arrive.

Apple assumes you'll toss the Watch after three years

Re: The Ghost of Tommy Cooper

Or Terry Pratchett's

Light a man a fire and you'll keep him warm for a night. Set a man on fire and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life

USB-C adds authentication protocol

Re: @Timeo

>The issue with USB-C is power and signalling on the same pin

Can you expand upon that, Horridbloke? On every Type C pin-out diagram I can find, power and data are on separate pins.

There are some further pins called 'USB power delivery communication' but they are just data pins dedicated to communicating power draw and the like.

Re: Security?

> Nice idea but from the article: "Once USB-C becomes ubiquitous and makes a single wire responsible for carrying power and data..."

The article means *cable", not *wire". USB C still has dedicated power pins, discrete from its data pins. The 'short length of cable' I referred to would be one modified so that only its power pins were still connected. Such a solution will give the cautious / paranoid user more peace of mind than any software approach.

A USB C pin-out diagram is here:

http://bi9he1w7hz8qbnm2zl0hd171.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/USBTypeCPinOutDiagram.jpg

Re: I can't wait

>What was wrong with those chargers with just a pin connector...

Not a lot - they were very ergonomic, much easier for people with limited dexterity or eyesight to use than microUSB. However, such people would benefit even more from charging docks or wireless charging solutions.

Ultimately, phones have got smaller, so designers have looked at ways to save space. Phones needed a data connection anyway, and then the EU mandated microUSB.

Most of the pin connectors were hard-cabled to the older, inefficient sort of power adaptor - the kind that was heavy and got warm during use.

Ha, I even remember a mate's Nokia that had a pin connector for charging and a mini USB socket for data - but it wouldn't charge over miniUSB, which was just frustrating.

Some Sony Xperia phones had a similar feature - two external nubbins mounted on the side of the phone, for charging from docks. Of course the required a non-standard cable or dock to use, so isn't directly applicable to the scenario sketched out here (i.e. you want to use an untrusted but common power plug. )

Re: Security?

Another possible method:

- Carry a short length of USB male > female cable that only has power pins connected. For the next few years, this would be a handy cable anyway, because it could be microUSB.female > USB.C.Male, thus allowing owners of new phones to use a common microUSB charger.

A method to Doug S method has been implemented before - I've had gadgets that connect for power only (at a higher rate of mA) when turned off, and connect with data when turned on. It used to be (in USB 2) that many devices would charge more quickly on cables with the data pins shorted (AFAIK the thinking was to limit the draw gadgets would make on a host PC's USB bus).

I am slightly wary of not being able to access a device's storage by USB if a hardware button is broken, but TBH that is the situation at the moment (to access the internal storage of an Android phone with a damaged digitiser you need to use USB OTG to unlock it - if you haven't previously turned on USB debugging).

HTC 10: Flagship goes full Google – but the hardware's top notch

Re: The price is out - it's £570

Don't worry, new phones are usually available cheaper than their list price. Often by a big chink, like £150. Do check real retail prices (from reputable sites, of course!) when drawing up your final short-list.

Re: Yet another landfill flagship

>No removable battery = dead brick after 2 years that can't hold charge

No, it means you pop down your local electronics emporium (or flea market stall) and pay someone £20 to fit a new battery. Against the cost of a phone, it's not a king's ransom.

>No removable battery = can't go away for a weekend without power

Use an external battery pack or two. Probably no pricier than buying a dedicated phone battery (which itself is only a good investment for the original phone which you might choose to upgrade for other reasons) Also handy for other camping gear, such as mp3 players, cameras, speakers, kindles etc.

>No removable battery = a guarantee to kill the phone if it gets wet

Just buy a waterproof phone. Any of the well-regarded Xperia Z models, some of the recent Samsung flagships, some other big names also use a limited form of internal waterproofing but don't advertise it. Or buy a waterproof case. I can't think of any non-waterproof Android phone that can do what its aquatic cousins can't. The best screens and cameras on Android handsets are all available on water-resistant models.

Re: I have a question....

I have a Z3 Compact, and the battery life is excellent. However, the two days time largely comes from 'Stamina Mode' which means the phone isn't using its data connections all the time. The side effect, which doesn't bother me, means that you might not receive social media notifications until you manually turn the screen on. (And turning the screen on can be done with a double tap - one of those feature you only appreciate when using a handset that doesn't have it.) Such a Stamina Modo has come to stock Android, I believe.

I imagine that the smaller, lower resolution screen of the Z* Compact phones helps too.

Re: How long will it receive OS updates for?

One of the HTC phones from a couple of years back was offered in a Google Silver edition (ODM-branded phones but sold through Google with vanilla Android and a guarantee of a certain period of prompt updates), so its HTC-only sister-handset also received prompt updates.

Cash, fear and uncertainty: The Holy Trinity of Bitcoin and blockchain

Re: It's all fun and games until

>you remember that you don't have to pay for the privilege of using cash,

We do pay to use cash, but just not directly. There are costs involved with minting, regulation, sorting, handling... those metalsmiths, accountants and security guards still need to be paid.

Re: Nerd Mona Lisas

>Actually, the really rich buy good land.

>>Why only the really rich?

In addition to our summer and winter estate, [my father] owned a valuable piece of land. True, it was a small piece, but he carried it with him wherever he went.

- Woody Allen, Love and Death

Re: $6Bn

>Im not entirely sure its possible to calculate how many bitcoins are technically out of circulation because of this.

I don't it is - Butcoins might be sat there doing nothing for all to see, but we won't know if the owner has lost the key or if the owner is saving them for a rainy day.

Your comment did make me think of how (or if) minters of real cash account for inaccessibly lost or destroyed coins or notes. Anyone here have any ideas?

Re: "systems where trust cannot be exploited"

>That blockchain is currently approaching 65GB in size. ... This makes getting into Bitcoin in a serious way rather a PITA,

That's another interesting issue. I'm sure it's been discussed by people who know what they are talking about, unlike me. As a layman, I imagined that a solution could involve torrents, and hashes made so that you know you're not downloading a doctored segment. Upon googling it just now, it seems that some proposed solutions do involve Bittorrent-like systems and hashing, but with some extra cleverness that starts to make my brain hurt:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/how-to-ensure-network-scalibility-fighting-blockchain-bloat-1415304056

I'm no expert, and my interest in this is only idle.

Re: "systems where trust cannot be exploited"

>Why do you believe it is particularly difficult to control over 50% of the computing resources in the community?

I don't, especially in a nascent community.

The point I was trying to make is that a blockchain - properly designed and audited - can't be commandeered by an individual with some some sort of magic master key.

I might have sounded dismissive of the 50% weakness, but then it doesn't bother me personally - I've never mined or bought Bitcoin - and discussing it doesn't now help the OP at this stage, because his misunderstanding was a little more fundamental. (It's also worth noting that Bitcoin is but one implementation of the blockchain concept, and whilst Bitcoin gives a massive advantage of ASICs for mining, blockchains based on other algorithms still allow CPUs to be competitive. GPUs haven't been worthwhike for a while now. )

Re: "systems where trust cannot be exploited"

> if the solution has a part of it encrypted, someone has to have the key and that someone is therefor a weak link.

Um, no. Er, it can be a bit hard to wrap one's head around the blockchain concept, but I found the explanations that take the form of talking through the steps needed to have a way of Alice sending Bob a digital credit note (without sending the same note to Charlie, Dan, Edwina, et al). Try this one: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-explained-five-year-old/ (and please, genuinely, forgive the title, I don't mean to be condescending)

In answer to your specific point, the blockchain can't be changed by a single person with a key because the blackchain is stored by every participant. A hash of the block chain is then used in generating the next blockchain, every few minutes. To make a retrospective illegitimate edit to the ledger, you would have to brute-force many successive generations of encryption, all within minutes. And even if you managed that impossible feat, the ledger that everyone is storing would look dodgy, so you would have to control over 50% of the computing resources in the community in order to force a consensus.

Ames boffins mix metals to boost electron velocity

Re: Obvious question

You can make an alloy where the electrons exceed the speed of light in the alloy*, but you can't make an alloy where the electrons exceed the speed of light in a vacuum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

Former Microsoft HoloLens man: It's NOT about gaming

Re: Augmented reality?

You didn't notice that the example use-cases were all situations in which goggles and hard-hats, or other pieces of PPE, are commonly worn anyway?

Re: If that's their use case then its doomed

> it strikes me that someone would need to code up the displays you describe.

It would simply be a case of selecting the two physical vertices of interest (either by touching them with a finger or pen, or by highlighing them on a superimposed wireframe display), and 'pasting' them onto the material you want to cut, then dragging the sketch until it 'snaps' to the corner or edge of the board.

All of this operation could be done with a UI similar to that already used in CAD. The conventions of selection, filtering, sketching, constraints, snapping etc are still the same. It just means that real, physical objects in front of you can be used as reference objects.

Re: UWP

You're confused, Mage.

Input to output lag is not the same thing as raw computational power.

Input to output lag is a function of the system design as a whole. In this case, the input is head motion and the output is rendered content - 2D desktops and 3D polygons. What the Hololens device is not trying to do is render millions of polygons to provide eye candy for a gamer ('console-level' graphics), such as Oculus or Sony's PSVR efforts seek to do. Rendering CAD models, which typically contain far fewer ploygons than a virtual environment in a video game) at 90 fps is easily doable with tablet-grade silicon (and CAD software for years is designed to simplify the display of large assemblies to match hardware, and the video game world has other tricks that can be used - see http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/15/halo-5-frame-rate-resolution/). For sure, it will be custom silicon designed for minimal latency, but its power consumption and thermal design parameters will be comparable to what's currently available on tablets.

So input latency won't be an issue due to the GPU. Also, you've failed to note that the Hololens display doesn't fill your field of view - it is equivalent to a 15" monitor - so nausea is very unlikely.

I haven't mentioned the Kinect-like object tracking systems on the Hololens (again, specialist silicon with a very high data throughput) with regard to nausea, because this work only needs to be done to build a scene - it is the head-tracking which keeps thing where they should be, so the depth-sensing isn't as crucial. Real time object tracking has also been done by Google's Project Tango, and about to be shipped in a phone by Lenovo. Intel have been at it for a few years now, and made an acquisition in this area only last week. nVidia too have set their sights on machine vision processing.

Re: UWP

>How would a phone or tablet have the computational power to avoid lag in movement?

Very easily. It only takes a lot of grunt to shift 4k prettily rendered pixels around at 90 frames per second. If you just want to display more simply rendered polygons at a lower res - or even 2D schematics marking out the location of electrical cabling, say - the hardware required is far more modest.

'Lag' is not directly related to computational power per se - in the same way that bandwidth isn't the same thing as ping time.

If the equipment was needed to keep production going, then knocking down a wall - and charging the cost to the supplier - would be the quickest and most cost effective solution. Regardless of who made the cock-up, the situation needs to be fixed. But hey, you're right, it's a pretty miserable Monday morning!

It was only an example - the point remains the same, that it is a tool that can aid collaboration between (in the example) a structural engineer, an architectural systems engineer and a contractor. So they can discuss which wall will be the least headache to remove, given the location of services like electrical cabling and water, the height of lifting gear, that sort of stuff.

All modern building are design in CAD anyway, the Unity engine is already commonly used for architectural walk-troughs. The expected price of AR kit like this is tiny compared to CAD display systems of the past, and offers some demonstrable advantages. And that is just in one sector, architecture and building.

Picture this: An exabyte of cat pix in the space of a sugar cube of DNA

500-year half-life? Yep.

>I'd be a little sceptical about the claimed half-life.

I'd rather look at the evidence myself - and an internet search isn't that bothersome, is it? A half life of 500 years has been observed in the DNA from bones of Moa, extinct birds, dating from between 600 to 8,000 years, preserved in similar conditions.

- http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/title/Half-Life-of-DNA-Revealed/

Were this DNA archival process ever to be used, there is no reason why the archive couldn't be based somewhere cold - much like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault#Construction )

Then of course error correction methods and redundancy can be built into any DNA-archival process.

You mutations you mention are those seen in living cells, and usually occur during the copying stage (and yeah, our cells have several error-correcting mechanisms) - but this is very different to these inert strands of DNA that have been removed from the molecular machinery.

Random Access

>It also sounds like it's not random-access either.

Read the article again!

We propose a method for random access that uses a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify only the desired data, biasing sequencing towards that data. This design both accelerates reads and ensures that an entire DNA pool need not be sequenced.

We demonstrate the feasibility of our system design with a series of wet lab experiments, in which we successfully stored data in DNA and performed random access to read back only selected values.

SpaceX's Musk: We'll reuse today's Falcon 9 rocket within 2 months

Re: The plans are going to sound crazy

@ tirk

Yes, Musk deliberately called the drone barges in honour of the late Iain M Banks.

From the horse's mouth: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/558665515351019520/

@Geoff

Yep, they were both the same person. His novel Transitions is sometimes M. Banks, sometimes plain Banks depending on where it was published. Iain was not related to Rosie M. Banks, a fictional romance author who appears in P.G Wodehouse stories. Though fictional, her name was borrowed as a pseudonym for real romance novels, and Iain's publishers initially didn't want to risk any confusion (not that anyone would confuse The Wasp Factory with Barbara Cartland-esque books). For a bit of fun, the two desk sergeants in the film Hot Fuzz, who are both played by Bill Bailey, can be distinguished by the noting that one reads Iain Banks books, the other Iain M. Banks.

Re: Weight Savings

There are quite a few design decisions made for cost reasons. Yes, reusing design elements and modules across stages reduces cost. Another example is that instead of machining material out of the tank walls (time consuming and expensive), friction stir welding is used to add material.

How Remix's Android will eat the world

Re: Remix OS is not FLOSS

>Remix OS is not FLOSS

?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android-x86#Remix_OS

http://www.android-x86.org/#Source_code

http://liliputing.com/2016/01/jide-releases-remix-os-source-code-to-comply-with-gpl-apache.html

How do you build a cheap iPhone? Use a lot of old parts

Re: Cheap?

The 4.6" Xperia Z3 Compact is significantly wider than the iPhone 5 S/SE

(I have the Z3 Compact, a couple of friends have the iPhone 5 S)

Full Linux-on-PS4 hits Github

I seem to recall that the PS4 is more or less a standard x64 PC and GPU, but with a bit of AMD's shared memory gubbins or something...

I have read Linux users lambasting AMD on forums for not releasing great graphics drivers, I don't know what the current state of affairs is in this regard.

Apple Fools: Times the House of Jobs went horribly awry

Re: The $150M rescue by Gates

>This was obvious at the time, but for some reason, not to journalists.

Hehehe! I remember reading at the time, in a dead-tree edition of Wired, "Twenty Things Apple Must Do To Survive" or somesuch title. Jobs then did the opposite of damn-near everything Wired recommended, and the bottom line has vindicated him.

( Recently Wired.com has blocked articles unless I turn off my adblocker - I stopped visiting Wired, which is a shame cos it's good for a laugh from time to time. Curiously, I didn't have a complete adblocker extension running - I see all the Reg ads - but I do have Ghostery installed. )

Re: The sad part is....

And yet Woz ended up with so much money that he was giving it away.

There are various ways of looking at morality, but if you start throwing figures at the question then we might be inclined to look at it in a pragmatic fashion.

If someone steals my wallet containing £20 but after a few years gives me a suitcase full of cash, I'm not sure that I would be too negative towards them. I guess it depends on the context, such as if I was going to use that £20 to take a lovely lady on a date.

Re: So many gaffes

It's just a MK I thing.

- First Ipod: FireWire only, Mac only. 'Only' 5GB. Three times the price of a MD player.

- First iPhone - no 3G

- First iPad - didn't receive nearly as many OS updates as the MK II product.

It isn't just an Apple thing. Sony, internally, saw product range lifespans as being like a day, from sunrise to sunset. Mk I was 'build it any way you can'. MK II was the 'iconic' version being more refined, and bought by more people than just the first adopters. Sony would then produce themes and variations. And yes, Steve Jobs had a friendly relationship with the tops executives at Sony. In turn, the father of the Playstation and VAIO was a fan of Essingler's Mac design languag, and Sony's design team would use Macs. (Source: Digital Dreams. The Work of the Sony Design Centre - ISBN: Google it yourself)

What we forget in the UK is that Apple only sold the iPhone through one network, and insisted that they didn't take the piss on data charges.

Done making the big stuff better? The path to Apple's mid-life crisis

Re: Following's not what Apple was good at

>And another example is the amazing Magic Trackpads and the new interface it brings to the desktop.

That is a good example of how to bring some ideas from a touch OS (iOS) to a desktop OS. Bringing gestures to OSX didn't stop anyone from using OSX in the traditional way with a conventional mouse - if they so wanted.

I use Windows on my PC with a 'Hyperglide' Logitech mouse, and it works well for me. However, I find it very frustrating trying to use a cheap Windows laptop's trackpad to scroll. The Logitech software also emulates what on OSX is called 'Expose' - a press of one of the mouses many buttons, and all my open windows are presented in a grid. I've grown very used to it.

Re: @404

Maybe a detached hand, al a 'Thing' from the Addams Family is the 'next big thing'. It could type for you, fetch items, and in times of privacy perform more intimate functions...