devx

Surface Pro actually has a worse GPU than MBA, too (Intel HD 4600 vs Intel HD 5000), which contributes to that, plus a higher clocked CPU. And we already know that Windows' battery life is terrible [1].

It's all a perfect storm of bad decisions the reason why Surface itself has bad battery life.

[1] - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-ha...

I wonder if say 50 years from now, we'll be like those religious conservatives who don't want to let women do whatever they want with their bodies (mainly talking about abortion here).

Will we also be the ones demanding that the new generations have no right to design their children, while they'd argue that we should just "mind our own business" and that it's not government's place to decide how to effectively "create" their own children.

I think this century will see a lot of interesting changes, and not just technological, but also societal. Can we design our own children? Can we marry robots? Can we change our gender? Should the government be able to monitor our thoughts to protect us from terrorism? Will we still have the nonsense "war on terror" even 50 years from now, or will we end all "war on abstracts" by then, just like we are about to end the war on drugs?

A lot of new questions will need a lot of new answers as new technologies start making all sorts of new things possible.

Why would you want to keep your data "in the cloud", if the government uses the argument that as long as your data is on a 3rd party's servers, then it's not yours?

I don't buy it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/104...

Plus they have a frigging NSA base in Berlin:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how-...

And if it were true, it may actually be worse. How can Obama still claim "relax people, no abuses have happened" with one corner of the mouth, and then with the other say "oh, well I didn't know about these!"

Same goes for their continuous claim that NSA is run like a very tight ship and it's audited thoroughly, yet they didn't know what Snowden took for months, and some of the internal abuses were found out years later, by the employees own confessions. Yeah, sounds like an air-tight auditing system to me, too.

What do you mean too much freedom? From the user's and even developer's perspective, it's better for Android to be more like Windows (pre-Windows 8), than more like Linux (tons of different distros/forks).

Google needs to start treating Android and Google Edition Android like Chromium and Chrome.

GE Android is Google's and they do whatever they want with it, and they control and update it just like they do with Chrome, but Android needs to become a little more open than it is (more like Chromium), and they need to actually keep develop it, just like they do with Chromium.

I'd actually prefer a more Google-dominated Android ecosystem than a Samsung or some other Android OEM one, and I'd prefer to see more standardization in the Android ecosystem for both hardware and software.

My only concern is NSA or the US government starting to demand of Google to spy all Android users through Play Services, or to be able to shut down their phones at will during protests. I just hope Google will not be that stupid to allow them without a fierce fight.

But I guess we'll deal with that when the day comes. Until then, yes, I want Google to get more control of Android and fix fragmentation.

The good news for those organizations is that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is coming out in the same month Windows XP's support is expiring. If they are ever going to move off Windows (especially governmental institutions), now it's the best time to do it, with them moving off XP, and with Windows 8 being so schizophrenic, radical, and generally enterprise-hostile.

I just hope that when this whole mess of a project goes online, and is hacked to death, NSA & friends won't be using this an opportunity to tell us that "see, this is why you need to give us bigger funds and spy on everyon - to protect you against those hackers (offensively)!" - even though the whole issue would be the bad programming and security of the system.

Other than the RAM usage, I'm not that impressed with the CPU usage. It uses about as much as Windows would use.

I actually had to try a bunch of Linux distros for an old Atom netbook with 1 GB of RAM. The one with the lowest resource usage was Zorin OS Lite 7.1 which uses 0-1 percent CPU when doing nothing, or even with the system monitor on, and ~100 MB of RAM. Zorin Lite is based on LXDE/Lubuntu, so I assume Lubuntu uses about as much, but I didn't try it anymore, because I don't really like the default LXDE interface, and I like Zorin's more.

The one with relatively low CPU (5 percent doing nothing( and RAM usage (140 MB) that I liked most was Linux Lite, with its XFCE-based interface. The slightly extra resources it needed were a noticeable a little when trying to open stuff, compared to Zorin Lite, but not a significant slowdown (still much smaller than what I see with Elementary in the video).

I could've lived with that, because I really liked the interface, but unfortunately for some reason it doesn't recognize the keyboard properly, and for some keys, instead of typing the letters on them, it would type the numbers on them. Maybe they can get it fixed with the next version that will be based on 14.04 LTS (they only base it on LTS versions).

Super lightweight distros like Puppy and others that run in RAM are a non-starter for me, because they have really ugly, non-intuitive interfaces, and I actually want to use apps like Chrome and so on.

http://zorin-os.com/lite.html

https://www.linuxliteos.com/

I wish Amazon would stop subsidizing Kindle device buyers, by surcharging everyone else by $2 on ebooks - especially when that money isn't even split with the authors.

http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/amazon-hold-ba...

What happens when more and more types of jobs are becoming automated?

Also a very nice way for everyone to create their own dossiers, that most law enforcement agencies can access even without a warrant these days, and can even collect en masse.

The reason copyright is not supposed to be forever, is because everyone builds on previous works. Nothing is 100 percent original. Maybe not even 20 percent original, if you really start deconstructing something and rip the most fundamental ideas out of the "new" creation.

Plus, if you then again allow others to build on the more recently "invented" stuff, then you get even more ideas and creations, as a society, which is why there's this "agreement" that copyright works should go into public domain. But corporations, who don't invent anything themselves, want to be able to exploit those works forever.

This is why I support Sweden's Pirate Party's idea [1] to limit copyright to 5 years, and then allow creators to extend it every 5 years up to 20 years, for a fee each time, because then you wouldn't end up with problems like these, where the vast majority of works become abandonware that nobody can use for almost a century to at least remix them:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-ho...

Watch these videos, and then hopefully it will make it more clear:

http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

[1] - http://copyrightreform.eu/

Then keep the damn spying on terrorists, not on politicians and CEO's. But let's face it. They can't help themselves. Even if they agree to roll back the spying a little bit now, they'll go back to spying everyone again in a few years, if they think they need that data for economical purposes.

That's why there needs to be drastically more oversight, that's a lot more effective, and with members of the Intelligence Committee who can declassify information at will in congress, without anyone's approval.

Also the FISC needs to either be abolished, or disbanded, and create a new process for electing the judges, and creating a Court with much more transparency.

But they are not exceptional Americans, so who cares, right? If 1,000 "others" have to die, in order to save an American's life, then it's all worth it.

No way that's why Google's CPC is down. It's because on mobile it's a lot lower, and people are using mobiles more and more instead of PC's (measured in time spent on them).

Windows revenue is (finally) down. I say finally only because many people wouldn't believe this would happen, even a few quarters ago. That could be quite a problem for Microsoft over the next few years. Right now they are offsetting that with enterprise deals, but do they really think that's safe for them? RIM did, too.

Does it need to be 1/4 of the page, though?

I think at this rate Google will only show one result on the page in the future, with a 90 percent chance that result being a big brand, and with a "See more results" link at the bottom. I'm not sure I'd like that future, even if it wasn't compromised by Google's push towards showing big brands at the top, and if it were in fact showing the "best of the best" result.

Great analogy.

Either way, terrible news for Intel and Microsoft.

> Most agree that patents are a good thing

No, not software patents:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2552740

I imagine the US ambassadors are working overtime these days, in all countries, to make up excuses for the US government, and try to mend their relationships (hopefully unsuccessfully, since they'll just be vain promises).

Wasn't there an awful ad from Samsung or some big company recently, and they had to pull it and apologize for it, because it was very offensive, and they had no idea what the ad would be prior to being on TV? (or at least that's what they claimed).

Either way, I don't think it's that hard to imagine. These companies, especially mediocre companies who like to "outsource" stuff and not care as much about the result, pay millions of dollars at a time, and don't look into all the details of the advertising campaigns.

Maybe future polls should just ask HN users to use something like http://strawpoll.me

Not that useful if it's not updated often enough.

Gladwell said it takes 10,000 to mastery, not "learning" the basics of a skill. You don't need 10,000 hours to learn how to drive a car, obviously. You may need 10,000 hours to become a racing master.

If only Google did the same with all Android devices, or at least a big "Google-approved" subset of them. They need to bring over the ChromeOS update system to Android, especially now that Chrome and Android have the same guy running them.

I'm not so sure that will continue to be true. Maybe if Americans convince me that they can elect a Congress and a new president that is very against these mass surveillance practices, campaigns on that, and has a proven track record regarding that, maybe I'll change my mind.

But as long as US keeps giving itself "freebies" with every foreigner's data, I'm not trusting it. I want some well established rules for how US can access my data, and only with the agreement my government.

Couldn't we set-up a laser system to detect asteroids from farther away? Or would that be pretty inefficient?

It would be nice if they made it cross-platform, like on Linux/Windows and even Android/iOS eventually. It might give Adobe a run for their money.