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That being said, it's going to take time as well as money for Apple to even marginally close the gap. Google has a tremendous lead when it comes to data. e.g. Just having a place on your map arguably isn't enough when Google probably has a dozen user reviews just for your local neighborhood dry-cleaner! No doubt that's why Apple initially tried to ram their maps down all iOS users' throats.

You can either be a "winner" online or offline. You can only choose one.

If she can do a stellar job while devoting a large portion of her time to a video-game, more power to her, but the odds are stacked against that actually being the case!

There seems to be a key element of trust required for using this site. How do we know the code cycret.com runs is the same as what's on Github? i.e. How do we know cycret isn't actually running different code that serves as a man-in-the-middle by creating RSA encrypted channels to both the sender and receiver, but archiving plain-text of all their communications as they pass through cycret.com? Programs like GPG can be compiled from source on your own computer so that, if you understand the code, you can trust it. This doesn't appear to have that advantage!

I don't know that much about web stuff, so if there is an easy and trustable way to see what code cycret is actually running without taking your word for it, I'd be very curious to know how!

Dilution refrigerators have their limits, especially when you're trying to cool a complex experiment with a lot of wires and fibers going into it (they all bring in heat). I've seen magnetic refrig units stuck inside of helium cryostats to give them the extra oomph to get such experiments down to millikelvin levels.

4K is probably warmer than they'd like for a quantum circuit, but getting their apparatus colder would require a much beefier cryostat or more exotic technologies like magnetic cooling built inside a helium cryostat. Such setups are capable of getting complex setups down to the hundreds of millikelvin, which is much nicer for this sort of work!

As for writing a scientific article using Fahrenheit... Please don't do that. Just don't.

The former would be world-shaking, so that's probably not the case unless I've been living under a rock. The latter just means that it might be safe, but it might be broken at any time if somebody comes up with the right algorithm. If you're making long-term information infrastructure plans that's something you have to account for.

Currently, quantum computing is just barely at the simple analogue circuit level (e.g. D-Wave). Fault tolerance is crucial for scaling up quantum computing devices towards more complex algorithms and, eventually, being able to execute stored programs. Fault tolerant protocols typically operate by redundantly encoding a single qubit's worth of data in several physical qubits. How many physical qubits are required depends greatly on the reliability of the physical qubits used. Thus, the complexity of a quantum computer is massively dependent on finding reliable physical qubits, like majorana fermions could prove to be!

  Calgary
  -------
  2011 Population: 1,096,833
  2011 homicides: 10 
  Rate: 0.91 per 100,000 people

  Kalamazoo
  ---------
  2011 Population:  74,262
  2011 Homicides: 5
  Rate: 6.73 per 100,000

The move from DOS to Windows was very much one based on the addition of a mouse. Sure, some DOS applications could use a mouse, but it was not a necessary device for interacting with the operating system. Windows changed that. Yes, I know you could do almost anything in Windows with keyboard shortcuts, but it was painfully counter-intuitive to try doing so. Since then, the mouse and keyboard have remained more or less unchanged. The underlying technology has improved (e.g. optical vs ball mice) or deteriorated (most modern keyboards vs an IBM Model M), but their capabilities have remained almost frozen in time. The last major degree of freedom to be introduced and widely adopted was scroll-wheels. Some mice have other degrees of freedom, such as horizontal scrolling capabilities or zoom wheels, but none of these have become standards across all mice. Interfaces have gradually coaxed richer interactions out of those existing degrees of freedom, but that's it.

Touch mice offer new degrees of freedom that traditional mice do not have. e.g. Gestures. If MS is smart, they are planning to develop Metro along lines that will exploit those new degrees of freedom. It will likely take years or decades for touch mice to reach their full potential but, if the people at MS have done their job well, there should already be compelling advantages to using them with Windows 8.

When they get a little bit older we start seeing different behavior. Little girls play with dolls because we buy them dolls. Little girls wear dresses because we buy them dresses. Little girls start emulating princesses because all the little-girl movies we let them watch have princesses as role models. Fart jokes will still be hilarious for a while, but eventually that becomes "gross boy stuff". Yes, there is evidence that male and female minds work differently, but we certainly do our best to force them to develop along different paths!

Physics and math are tools for understanding and manipulating the universe around us. If you want to get young students interested in math and physics, don't try to get them to understand a deep proof about why 1+1=2. Fire some balls at each other and then get them to calculate momentum transfer. It's in human nature to enjoy seeing stuff like that happen, and understanding it so we can control how that stuff happens in new and entertaining ways is a phenomenal motivator.

Painting a physics text-book pink isn't going to work any better on girls than painting it blue would on boys. Girls like more of the same stuff that boys do than we usually think. It's human nature to like those things. The problem is that some of the lessons girls are taught about what it is to be female contradict their human nature. Painting the book pink is an attempt to appeal to girls via the faulty lessons they've learned. Instead of doing that, we need to help them unlearn those faulty lessons and appeal to their human nature. e.g. Little girls should like explosions too.

e.g. After the DMCA and associated acts in the U.S. were passed, U.S. lobbyists went to work in Canada. The result was a series of bills that were delayed and ultimately not passed by the recent series of minority governments. To ramp up pressure on Canada, the U.S. added Canada to it's piracy "priority watch list" along with countries like China. Piracy is practically non-existent in Canada as compared to China, but that list was never about where piracy is actually happening! Canada will likely never be taken off that list unless we completely obliterate our own film and TV industries and turn the CBC into a re-broadcaster for HBO.

Now that there's a majority government, the successor to those failed bills, Bill C-11, is now in the process of being passed. It cleared the House of Commons in June. This bill contains some truly bad legislation on digital locks. i.e. If media has a "digital lock" such as the half-assed encryption on DVD's, it is illegal to circumvent those locks even for fair-use or educational purposes. e.g. Ripping a DVD to your laptop so you can watch it on the plane without bringing along an external DVD player is now illegal because you had to use software that breaks a digital lock to do so.

For more on this, read: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6544/125/

Canada will see it's own 6-strikes legislation soon enough.

Why should anyone care? Well, some security proofs for quantum cryptographical systems out there could conceivably assume the original relation holds, and would therefore require correction. Not to go into too much detail, this might have an impact on the bit-rate that some quantum crypto systems can securely run at.

I'm not married yet.

Seriously dude, you don't have to buy every bloody Apple product or follow every release show. Give yourself a year off. Keep the 4S. Use the money you save to buy yourself some climbing gear or a snowboard. Go have fun.

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/the-perfect-runner....

(If you're really keen, the above link includes references under "resources".)

The article seems a big cribbed quite frankly in that it mostly talks about the a subset of the same things the NoT episode did, only in less detail. The man vs. horse marathon was not in the NoT though.

If you are interested enough in this to watch a 40 minute documentary then the NoT episode is highly recommended. It might be difficult to find for those outside of Canada unfortunately.

As successful as iTunes and Apple currently are, media distribution is still undergoing massive disruption. It's likely that something completely new and utterly amazing compared to any current online media store will win out in the end. Distribution services that provide a sub-par experience on the majority of hardware out there are doomed to fail even sooner. i.e. iTunes does not provide a good user experience under anything but OSX, and even there it's love/hate. Amazon and Google Play are serious contenders despite the artificial iOS obstacles Apple is heaping in their paths.

One might argue that iTunes will live on even if other stores win out, but legacy support only goes so far. Once iTunes stops making Apple money they'll wait a respectful period of time and then quietly shut everything down.

I know many will disagree with me on iTunes' fate, but all I have to do is to live long enough and I'm virtually guaranteed to have the last laugh!

Then a funny thing happened. The video game market outgrew the movie market. It started making financial sense to invest tens of millions in the development of a single game. The cost of the content (i.e. character designs, level designs, script, voice acting, motion capture, etc.) far outstripped the cost of coding the engine. It became a complete no-brainer to port games to as many platforms as possible to maximize your audience. The corollary to this is that it became necessary to design games such that it was possible to port them to as many platforms as possible. That meant that most developers stopped exclusively developing for one platform and instead started designing for them all. While you can always tack on some superficial eye-candy on when the hardware supports it, games could not be designed to have basic gameplay requiring more resources than the slowest platform was capable of. Thus, consoles became an anchor that brought the relentless march of PC game requirements to a screeching halt.

The Xbox360 and PS3, not to mention the Wii, are handily out-performed by today's desktops by a large degree. Mobile phones are poised to pass them within a couple of years! However, the games you can play on a PC are largely identical to the console versions. Sure, there are some improved graphics, additional content, etc., but these differences are superficial. In fact, if your hardware isn't the latest and greatest, most games can simply scale back the eye-candy to maintain performance. Even PC-only developers, such as Blizzard, have recognized that they must build games with conservative minimum requirements in today's market.

The end result is that PC gamers can run new games with only superficial inferiority to what the latest generation of desktop hardware is capable of. They no longer need to upgrade their desktops. At least, they won't until the next generation of consoles arrive. When that happens there will be many new games designed with greatly increased resources in mind and a big wave of desktop upgrades will ensue.

In the end, PC obsolescence isn't really dead. It's just quantized differently.

China has been at the forefront of quality manufacturing for quite some time now. It was only a matter of time before some of their design companies started to make proper use of them.

While that link makes me appreciate that SVG speficially might be hard to work with and that simply scaling everything proportionally might not make for good icons across all sizes, I remain unconvinced that vector icons are hopeless. Perhaps SVG's have the ability to do what I describe above, or perhaps we need a more powerful vector graphics format to work with.

Translation: Whatever exists in the EPEAT guidelines that would prevent the retina MBP's from receiving GOLD certification is about to be tossed in the rubbish bin.

I am not a UI designer, so I am ignorant. Please educate me.

Several other posters have mentioned the option of moving away from raster graphics, and indeed this was my own first thought. I remember using IRIX back in the glory-days of SGI. For those who have no idea what I'm blathering on about, IRIX was a professional workstation OS that had en entirely vector based UI. Yes, almost two decades ago an OS existed that was immune to the retina problem. Pause for a moment and let that sink in.

IRIX was actually one of the first GUI-based OS's, and SGI's use of vector-based UI elements probably arose from specific needs SGI faced. I can only speculate on what they were, but one thing they had plenty of was raw power. SGI workstations were very nice in their day! However, the average smartphone built these days probably has more power than all but the last SGI workstations, and perhaps even them too. Processing power is therefore likely not the issue. In fact, given that most desktop OS's already render your desktop in a 3D environment (OSX, Win7, and Linux (depending on what you're running) all do this), vector UI elements may actually be less intensive to draw than raster elements in these situations!

Wild speculation: Is it that UI building tools and API's make working with vector graphical elements painful, or are UI designers just ignorant after almost a decade without a major vector-based OS in common use?

One of the worst things about the peer review process at journals is the lag and one-way nature of communication between authors and referees. It is tremendously frustrating to have one referee torpedo the whole process because he/she has interpreted the paper incorrectly. I'd love to see somebody try to replace the traditional referee process with something like an invitation-only forum so that authors and referees can interact in a timely basis with anonymity preserved. Arxiv could do a variation of this by creating a forum open to users who have published papers on the arxiv (just to weed out spammers). This could provide rapid feedback to strengthen papers as well as a place to collect answers to questions from readers.

Cheers!

OSX and iOS are used predominantly to run personal computing devices. In addition to PC's, Windows also runs a significant number of the world's servers (although Linux dominates here) and embedded systems (see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/windows-embed...). Despite OSX and iOS gaining significant market share, virus-writers may still find that the sweetest targets are disproportionately running windows. OSX and iOS are more "obscure" in the sense that they don't run many of the systems virus-writers want to target.