Unto the pure, all things are pure

When I first heard the "Retina display" of the iPhone explained, the perplexed reaction I had was "what for?"  By the way, "Retina display" is just a marketing term for a density of greater than 300dpi. Display area is probably the most expensive piece of real estate in the world after the Disney Store in New York city's Times Square.  When you have a large spreadsheet to analyze, every pixel is priceless. Why would you want to waste 960x640 of screen real estate at 326dpi?  It's not about discernible (read snobby) people being able to tell the dots when the display density is below 200dpi. For paper printouts, yes, you would want 300dpi or better.  But for an electronic display which is refreshed at 30 times a second?  For an electronic display showing moving images or video? My main beef with high resolution displays on cell phones is that the density is too high.  The density should be reduced to make the display more readable when each...

Why do the specifications of smartphones still give the maximum number of talk hours?  And this is usually a huge fantastic number of half a month or more.  And there is no other indicator of battery life. As we all know, we use the smartphone more as a computer than as a (voice) phone.  If I had wanted a very good voice phone, I would just get a $20 Nokia simple phone. Smartphone battery life should be stated like laptops.  And no laptop battery can last a day.  Similarly, if you use a smartphone like a computer full time, don't expect it to last a day. From experience, on the first day you bought your smartphone, your usage will be abnormally high.  You discover that the battery life isn't that "good".  As the days go by, your usage drops to a more realistic rate and you will find that the battery can last about a day.

I predict that the iPhone 5 will have a much bigger screen, à la the Samsung Galaxy Note.

Related: Retina display The word "resolution" has been so misused that the original definition, if I remember it correctly, actually bears little connection to how it is used nowadays. Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. The first step in the communication process (from the screen to the person) is "visual acquisition".  Your eye must be able to acquire the image.  The image must be big and bright enough to trigger photosensitive cells in your retina.  Ignoring brightness, and just considering a single dot to represent the image, there is a minimum size for the dot below which the human eye cannot pick it out.  But this depends on how far away you are from the dot, so a better parameter to quantify this is the angle subtended by the dot to your eye. Figure 1 - Images of different sizes can subtend the same visual angle, depending on distance Obviously the minimum subtended angle that can make a dot visible varies from person t...

I have been looking for a good (and cheap) RDP client for my Android phone. I was about to pay $25 for Xtralogic's software when I saw the one from Jump Desktop for only $0.99. Having tested both, I find the Jump Desktop one better than the much more expensive one. Jump Desktop's price for Apple is $14.99. Better grab Jump Desktop for your Android before the price goes up. Jump Desktop's RDP client has the following useful and better features: It is both RDP and VNC. But I have not used VNC myself. It is a standard RDP client, but at the same time, if your host is on an internal network and you don't know its external IP address, you can configure Jump Desktop to go via Google for connectivity instead. I haven't tried it myself, but I think the host contacts "Google's servers" (according to the FAQ), your client contacts Google, and Google makes the connection. Neat if it works. It has two "cursors", making use on a small phone ...

I didn't want to describe my computer until I read this: http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/good_programmers_are_good_sysadmins_are_good_programmers. First, what I do.  I write code, some of it, everyday.  I administer networks and servers too. I develop Windows apps, about a hundred thousand lines of C# code so far.  I do ASP.NET apps, more than twenty operational but small web sites.  I do Silverlight too, a LOB one used by two thousand  users.  I have an unmanageable number of Powershell scripts, doing all sorts of funny things which most people would have written a console or Windows app to do, and this is possible because Powershell has full access to the complete .NET Framework class library.  I administer several PCs and about ten servers currently.  I install OS'es with my own two hands from a floppy/CD/DVD/thumbdrive, ie SYSPREP images strictly prohibited, in well over 100 machine instances from DOS 1.1 to Windows Server ...

Do you know of anyone who has an iPad but not another personal computer? Do you know of anyone who has an iPad but not a mobile phone? I think the answers are overwhelmingly no for both questions. Managing three devices is crazy, cloud services notwithstanding.  You spend more time managing the devices than using them.  It's not about enthusiasm.  It is just plain showing off. A tablet computer is a great, probably the greatest, computing device for the situations when you can't be sitting down.  When you are not sitting down, you cannot do serious work.  Hence, an iPad is just that, for not serious work.  It is an expensive toy, just like those expensive hand bags with names you can't pronounce. But what the heck, we need spenders like that to keep any economy functioning. Today's iOS or Android is essentially a single tasking system.  If you are reading a document, you can't be looking at another document to compare the two.  If you ...