Both the iMac and the Dell 5k monitor use the same LG AH-IPS panel. Because LG is a well known Apple supplier and the 5120x2880 resolution of the panel is exactly doubling the X and Y resolution of the previous iMac's 2560x1440 resolution, leads one to believe that this panel size was very likely specified by Apple. They seem to love to do that perfect "2X pixel ratio" thing even when it leads to an odd resolution like 5120x2880 for the iMac or 2048x1536 for the iPad.

Plus, how many of those Dell monitors do you think they sold at $2500 vs. how many iMac Retina's that Apple managed to sell (also at $2500) to fanboys.

Say what you will about their legal department (i.e. they are assholes), but you have to admit that Apple makes some damn nice hardware. Also, they often push manufacturers upper bounds to make sure their stuff is the latest and greatest.

For example, when most desktop users are still drooling over the new 4K monitors, Apple releases a 5K iMac. Most people have heard of their CNC milled MacBook frames, but another example of a neat manufacturing technique is how they use lasers to shine light through metal. No other company puts that much effort into the design.

I still have my Nokia N900 slider! Maybe I could ebay it! (although the battery has long since died and would need to be replaced) The Debian GNU/Linux Maemo distro with a GTK+ DE predated both Apple iOS and Android by many many years.

But as a user of a sliding keyboard phone, I was always petrified that I would break it. So many moving parts made of tiny plastic pieces - I'm sure if I would have dropped the phone¹, it would have exploded into hundreds of tiny shards.

¹ I did install the app "N900 Fly" that used the accelerometer to measure how far up in the air you could hurl the phone. Alas, my personal score was not able to place in the top scores list.

I welcome anything that helps kill off the constantly vulnerable and non-free flash player.

Did you know you can read them on Pipedot?

• AnandTech
• Ars Technica
• Engadget
• ExtremeTech
• Gizmodo
• LWN
• Mr. Money Mustache
• POWER Magazine
• Space Industry News
• TechCrunch

Or browse the full list. Or just at the pretty pictures.

Can Samsung smart TVs run android apps? Or are they stuck with a handful of proprietary apps that come with the device with no chance of future updates?

Both linux and bsd story topics already exist! However, to help further equalize the two: I promoted the bsd topic to the left nav bar.

If you spend most of your day glued to the computer, you shouldn't skimp on your keyboard or mouse. I spent far too many years under the assumption that any cheap generic keyboard or mouse was "good enough" just because they worked. Then I started trying the higher end of the spectrum and now I'll never go back!

Mechanical keyboards simply offer a far superior tactical feel and much better durability. Many manufactures now offer a whole range of models based on "Cherry MX" mechanical switches. These switches come with a variety of haptic effects designated by color: Black, Red, Brown, or Blue. My current favorite keyboard is the Corsair Vengeance K70.

Don't overlook your mouse either. Modern mice have far superior optical tracking than models from just a few years ago and can now work on damn near any surface. I've ditched all of my old mousepads and glitchy mice and no longer have to battle for the mouse cursor. My current favorite mouse is the Logitech G400s.

Not entirely sure what you mean by parent links. Does it mean adding the target attribute to links?

<a href="/" target="_parent">Some link</a>

This would be one of those "frame-buster" type constructs, but since there are no framesets or iframes on this site, when is this useful?

This is an interesting idea and I had a good laugh at the inpired name.

Seems like the Airbnb logo would be a pretty good fit too; more-so than lodging, anyway.

Doesn't storing hydrogen inside a metal container embrittle the container?

I also got a 4k monitor over the holidays. Try setting the system zoom setting to 200%. Some apps and webpages may not have full "retina" or "2x" support, but this site does at least. :)

I think he means that, like the rest of us, he has a washing machine and dryer dedicated to cleaning cloth things. The cloth grocery bags just happen to fit that category.

Part of the problem is that companies don't figure the ongoing hardware and software maintenance into their solutions. They develop the product until it works, ship it, and then ignore it. This leaves the products stuck at a fixed point in time while the rest of the technology world evolves at Moore's Law speed.

Take our office phone system for a simple example. Twenty years ago, our small office (20 employees) upgraded the phone system to the latest and greatest digital PBX. Many of the functions where designed to use a standard computer (a sub 100Mhz original Pentium). The computer/PBX interface was a full length ISA card, voice mail was stored on the IDE hard drive (still measured in megabytes), the call holding music was simply a mp3 playlist piped out to the audio card (an original Sound Blaster), while the whole thing ran Windows 95a and Microsoft Schedule+. Or, in other words, an archaic piece of crud that still has to function today.

I've looked into preemptive bans using existing spam databases (see http://www.stopforumspam.com/usage for an example) that use either a REST API call or a DNS lookup. However, with the current spam load I think the reactive approach is sufficient for now.

Click the ban IP button it if it's one of those spammer bots. Otherwise, it'll just keep posting. That poor poll article I linked above had over 1000 spam messages all from the same french bot network.

Of course, the IP ban just prevents anonymous posts from that address. Registered users can still post through it.

Directly linking to the comment will also show the comment, regardless of its junk status. Example: #2VAK

All of the grocery stores around here (Texas) have reusable cloth bags at the check-out counters. For a couple of bucks you get a durable cloth bag that can be used hundreds of times and wont break when carrying heavy objects like milk or orange juice bottles. For me, plastic bags "died" years ago.

Pipedot story.

Spam will persist as long as anyone chooses the last option; even if it's over a billion-to-one odds against it and the whole planet hates you.

Yes.

Woot! I guess it worked. From the FAQ:

Unicode characters for most languages and useful symbols (like math, currency, and punctuation) are allowed. Dingbats, smiley faces, non-printing characters, right-to-left switchers, and other gibberish are filtered.

Hmm... Newegg doesn't show any monitors with 1440 x 768. Maybe 1368 x 768?

I mainly just included the resolutions that had over 90 results from Newegg.

As I'm recovering from binge leveling two characters to 100 this last weekend...

Anandtech awesomely includes the entire article in their RSS feed.

The Beagleboards sold for over $100 while the Pi was $25-$35. Then again, you do get a better system - such as real gigabit Ethernet instead of something tacked onto the USB bus.

Indirectly linked from the Gizmodo article was Elon Musk's confirmation via his twitter account:

SpaceX is still in the early stages of developing advanced micro-satellites operating in large formations. Announcement in 2 to 3 months.

I had devised a ray gun with an intergrated can of silly string. I had blue, green, and red ammo for the contraption, but alas, I ran out of time during the construction. Garden hose sprayer was my last minute, but much simpler, plan B.

From the linked YouTube video:

The print of Interstellar is 49 reels, weighs about 600 pounds, on a 72 inch platter.

No wonder they like the digital setups - soooo much easier for everyone involved - just not as jaw-droppingly cool.

I had twice as many options, including choices such as "Fox News" and "The Onion," but I figured there where already too many. So I removed the non-religion choices for this poll.

Seem like the the aims of "the right to be forgotten" and this style of "data retention" law are in direct conflict.

Yet another reason to use HTTPS everywhere.

Those OSX reviews are defiantly nicely written. That recent Yosemite review was the first of those articles that I actually saw (I don't have a Mac, so I normally don't follow OSX too closely), but it seems Ars has extensively reviewed the past several releases as well. I'm a little envious.

A simple interface that does what you expect without throwing throwing around this year's version of eye candy gimmicks? Sounds like a pretty good feature to me.

The world is sorely lacking a sane removable file system. FAT has tons of technical and political problems and yet it remains the only filesystem that is even remotely feasable for cross platform removable disks.

• Small single file size limit (4.2 GB)
• Small total drive capacity
• Microsoft's long filename patents
• Non-free extensions that only work with Microsoft operating systems

If you live completely in Linux, you can format your drives as ext4. But good luck trying to get Windows or Macs to see it.
If you live completely in Apple-land, you can format your drives as HFS+. But good luck trying to get either Windows or Linux to see it.
If you live completely in Windows, you can format your drives as NTFS. Linux does have multiple competing options of supporting NTFS, but they all basically suck (read only, disables journal, etc.)

Case in point:
My car's stereo system has a USB port that you stick a thumb drive into to play mp3s. Guess what the only supported file system is?
New smart TVs have USB ports that you can stick a thumb drive into to play MP4s, MKVs, and AVIs. Guess what the only supported file system is?
My digital camera uses an SD card to store photos and videos that I take. Guess what the only supported file system is?

I prefer portrait mode when the tablet is alone. But with the ASUS Transformer, I often have the tablet attached to its keyboard dock - which pretty much locks it into landscape mode.

Fixed. #2TET

What?! You mean Evil Viper isn't your real name?!

Some daemons are built to recover from crashes and restart their own worker processes. For example, Apache's main pid is mainly in charge of spawning new child processes to do the actual work. The children can even be configured to terminate themselves after serving X number of requests.

However, some daemons, such as mysql end up relying on a shell script to do this task. I've always thought of the mysqld_safe script as being an ugly hack. Wouldn't a real program be a better fit for this? And if you make a generic enough service monitor, couldn't you use it for more than just one program?

The traditional inetd process is another example. The post-fork method of operation is just too slow for modern tasks such as web page serving. But systemd does have some interesting ideas on how to fix it.

Until the USB 3.1 chipsets come out so we can use those neat new reversible connectors: #2TA0 USB 3.0 is just unfeasable. The old-style Micro-B connector just plain sucks for a phone.

Oops. I saw 6" and assumed it was a tablet. Nope. That's a 6" phone. I guess that helps explain the price bump too.

Pretty sure that Thunderbird disables javascript on HTML emails. Otherwise, that would be a pretty big exploit on its own.

Wikipedia cheatsheet:

• Agile
• Cowboy
• Design for test
• Feature driven development
• JAD
• RAD
• RUP
• Scrum
• Spiral
• Waterfall
• Wheel and spoke
• XP
• Bugger off I code alone (cowboys deserve two options)

There is a history of edits. And a system to easily spot the differences between the edits using highlighted red/green "diff" text.

"¦ or Library of Congresses?

One of the major goals of the "git" source code management system was to be distributed. Each git repository has the full data set, can stand alone, and can act as the full SCM system by itself. This is in stark opposition of traditional SCMs, like CVS and Subversion, where one central server controls the code base. GitHub is a central server that, for the most part, tries to replicate the old ways with the new tools.

That being said, it's the new "cool" project hosting site and lots of people use it. I find it easy enough to push my own git repository out to it every once in a while - even if I don't see it as the "master" repository.

The libav vs ffmpeg argument was to some as big of a religious war as any (emacs vs vi, systemd vs sysv, gnome vs kde)

Leaf, not VW.