I'm pretty sure that both of those things are necessary (and neither of them, separately, is sufficient) in order to transform the idea of a "car phone" into what we think of as "mobile phones" today. Transistors allowed us to get to pocket-sized, battery-powered devices; cellular allowed us to get more calls into a given spectrum, so more than a dozen people could be using their mobile phones at the same time in the same city.

Butler Lampson summed it up best: Apple knows how make things "yummy".

Actually, one of the ideas articulated and advanced by Alan Kay is that non-technical domain experts should be the people that design and implement most line-of-business apps, and that their IT departments should only do optimizations.

One of the reasons that is may not have worked vis-à-vis the RAD platforms like Access and Excel is that the GUI part always looked polished irrespective of the quality of the program.

But, Scratch programs always looks like toy prototypes, so they never fool the non-technical user into thinking that they built something indistinguishable from what experts do.

Presumably, optimization doesn't necessarily mean making it run faster, but rather is about making is scalable (which means things like cleaning the codebase, addressing security issues, etc.).

Because this kind of naming has worked out so poorly for brands like Mercedes and BMW . Not too mention Lexus and Acura with similar naming schemes for most of their cars.

Maybe Mr. Harper should pull his head out of his butthole?

The version I'm getting explicit states "Upgrade Tonight" rather than simply "Upgrade Later". You can see a screenshot here. They don't make it obvious but you can just close it with the X in the upper right corner and it doesn't upgrade; there's no "Don't upgrade ever" button. It's only a slightly dirty trick on MS's part - you need to train your wife to read better before clicking on things....and yes I know difficult of a problem that is, I'm married, too.

Google Now even started out with the code name "Majel".

Smartphones are very good currently. Within the next year or two, I think they'll have mostly caught up with desktop PCs for casual and office-type tasks. So currently specs MOSTLY matter if you're a hardcore phone gamer, doing something like running a bitcoin miner on your phone, or are WAY behind the curve (like me). But in the reasonably near future, there are only going to be a couple of specs that matter: How fast is the mobile connection? How long does the battery last? How big is the screen?

Well, at least some people on the MS shell team thought it was better because it would allow them to develop two different shells for regular and advanced users. See: http://www.reddit.com/r/techno... and http://www.reddit.com/user/pwn...

I'd have modded you up if you weren't already at +5. This echoes my own feelings on the subject quite eloquently, although I have owned a smartphone, and browsed on it. IMO, the ONLY reason to browse on a smartphone is that you don't have a desktop available - it's a terrible experience all around; I'm glad that developers are trying to get all the functionality they can into mobile browsers, but when you throw a current mobile browser against a web site that's designed for a desktop PC, which have the ability to make changes to the page on the "mouseover" event, usually a lot more processing power, and a far wider range of available plug-ins for browsers....it's seems likely to utterly fail, not because it's not a good for mobile, but because it's not a good for desktop.

I can see some purpose to HAVING a mobile interface...but mobile is SUCH a different environment from desktop that it deserves to have a totally separate UI. A mobile UI might also be worth copying for, say, an Android-on-a-TV type device that use Wiimote style pointer for input...but is definitely NOT worth copying for the desktop space, where a mouse and keyboard are the expected interface devices.

You don't understand how natural selection or evolution work, do you? The innumerate are winning at the natural selection game because they can't figure out how bad having another kid is going to be for them financially. And the "survival of the fittest" doesn't imply fittest for anything but producing lots of offspring. (Of course, this is self-limiting, since this planet has a finite carrying capacity, and the innumerate are incapable of running a space program...)

Do you ever wonder if it would be cheaper and easier just to go back to using horses? I mean, we've been breeding them for hundreds of years...and I'm sure we could make some Kevlar-and-ceramic armor for them to protect them from bullets and shrapnel...

I suppose the advantage is that robots don't need to trained not to panic in the middle of battle. But I still wonder if chasing a technological solution is the wrong path.

I was bored this morning, so for those interested, since the article makes it hard to extract this information:

All iOS versions total 84.36% of crashes; all Android versions total 15.49% of crashes. The worst offenders for iOS are version 5.0.1 at 28.64% and 4.2.10 at 12.64% (with seven other version listed at above 1% of crashes). The worst offenders for Android are versions 2.3.3 at 3.86% and 2.3.4 at 3.65%, with 4 other versions listed at above 1%.

I wonder that, too. Seems like they'd be perfect for things that regularly get used outdoors in bright sunlight - like cell phones. Last I look, Pixel Qi wasn't offering a screen that was suitable for use in cell phone.

Heh. Just re-read that and realized it should have said "to use a smartphone outside than there is to use a laptop". It's late and I've been up since 5AM local time.

Dear PixelQi guys:

Please make a screen suitable for smartphones. There is a lot more need to use a smartphone than there is to use a laptop, as you can't control when you get incoming calls.

Thanks,
Ender Stonebender