zweben's comments

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.