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To be honest, I don't think much of these stories. As much as I don't like microsoft and windows. MS is to big and powerful to let tablets run them out of business. This is just a small hiccup to them.
I do have an android tablet but its mainly used for light to medium tasks.
I still prefer a desktop. I use my linux desktop for the heavier tasks.
I don't know where the direction of desktops are heading, but if people are favoring portability on the go (i.e tablets, ipads, netbooks and even smartphones), microsoft's dominance on the desktop market could dwindle while we are heading in the new generation of computer usage.
Last edited by RedNeck-LQ; 04-29-2011 at 04:11 PM.
well... i guess that good news is better than no news...
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To be honest, I don't think much of these stories. As much as I don't like microsoft and windows. MS is to big and powerful to let tablets run them out of business. This is just a small hiccup to them.
do you know what killed stuff like the Tyranossaurus Rex...?
two things...
1. a small lowering of average earth temperature, caused either by a glaciar age, or massive eruptions that shed dust into the atmosphere enough to block and reflect back part of the solar rays, decreasing solar heat input.
one dozen degrees would be enough to decelerate their metabolism and drop them in a letargic state... since they are cold blooded, like all reptiles...
2. Small friggin creatures, hot blooded, and immune to average teperature drop, with a more resilient metabolism, like mice, biting and gritting them to death while they were partially frozen and inactive because lower T wouldn't allow to even have a metabolism to react...
still would allow them to hibernate, and remain alive...
I don't know where the direction of desktops are heading, but if people are favoring portability on the go (i.e tablets, ipads, netbooks and even smartphones), microsoft's dominance on the desktop market could dwindle while we are heading in the new generation of computer usage.
Tablets, etc., could (will, really) increase in use, but that doesnt mean that microsofts dominance of desktop computer will go anywhere.
In a lot of ways, I hope that microsoft actually does OK with nokia. I'd hardly want them to get any stranglehold on mobile computing, but I'd rather see them in the market than not. I dont trust google any more than microsoft or apple.
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Originally Posted by Alexvader
do you know what killed stuff like the Tyranossaurus Rex...?
two things...
1. a small lowering of average earth temperature, caused either by a glaciar age, or massive eruptions that shed dust into the atmosphere enough to block and reflect back part of the solar rays, decreasing solar heat input.
one dozen degrees would be enough to decelerate their metabolism and drop them in a letargic state... since they are cold blooded, like all reptiles...
12C 'a small lowering'? :S I'm not even going to go into the extinction of the dinosaurs, I'm already bad enough at moving things OT. But there is evidence that T-rex, and at least some other dinosaurs were warm blooded.
regardless of my dislike of everything M$/W$ related, it is scary to immagine gazillions of mice pounding down a Dinossaur's carcasse to bones, or warrior ants doing it to an Elephant that failed to escape ...
12C 'a small lowering'? :S I'm not even going to go into the extinction of the dinosaurs, I'm already bad enough at moving things OT. But there is evidence that T-rex, and at least some other dinosaurs were warm blooded.
thought all these dudes reliead on hot cimate to breathe, walk, feed... like any reptile
thought all these dudes reliead on hot cimate to breathe, walk, feed... like any reptile
That idea has been changing since the late 1960s.
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Researchers led by Herman Pontzer at Washington University in St Louis examined the anatomical details of 14 dinosaurs of different sizes to work out how much energy the animals might have needed to move around. He found that, for dinosaurs weighing from a few kilograms to tonnes, the power their muscles needed was far too high for the animals to have been cold-blooded.
"We found that the energy costs of locomotion for them, the amount of oxygen they'd have to consume to walk and run, would have far exceeded the rate of energy use that cold-blooded animals are able to sustain," said Pontzer. "This says they may well have been warm-blooded and, if so, we can't think of them as slow, lumbering reptiles any more."
You can't assume that dinosaurs were like "any reptile." The closest living relatives of dinosaurs are birds, not "any reptile." Birds are warm-blooded.
From what I understand, the mystery of dinosaur metabolism has yet to be solved.
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do you know what killed stuff like the Tyranossaurus Rex...?
Yes. The asteroid impact that carved the Chicxulub crater. Possibly with help from the Deccan Traps eruption.
Temperature regulation in such huge creatures was a bit tricky...
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Large dinosaurs may also have maintained their temperatures by inertial homeothermy, also known as "bulk homeothermy" or "mass homeothermy". In other words, the thermal capacity of such large animals was so high that that it would take two days or more for their temperatures to change significantly, and this would have smoothed out variations caused by daily temperature cycles. This smoothing effect has been observed in large turtles and crocodilians, but Plateosaurus, which weighed about 700 kilograms (1,500 lb), may have been the smallest dinosaur in which it would have been effective. Inertial homeothermy would not have been possible for small species nor for the young of larger species.[34] Vegetation fermenting in the guts of large herbivores can also produce considerable heat, but this method of maintaining a high and stable temperature would not have been possible for carnivores nor for small herbivores or the young of larger herbivores.[59]
Since the internal mechanisms of extinct creatures are unknowable, most discussion focuses on homeothermy and tachymetabolism.
Assessment of metabolic rates is complicated by the distinction between the rates while resting and while active. In all modern reptiles and most mammals and birds the maximum rates during all-out activity are 10 to 20 times higher than minimum rates while at rest. However in a few mammals these rates differ by a factor of 70. Theoretically it would be possible for a land vertebrate to have a reptilian metabolic rate at rest and a bird-like rate while working flat out. However an animal with such a low resting rate would be unable to grow quickly. The huge herbivorous sauropods may have been on the move so constantly in search of food that their energy expenditure would have been much the same irrespective of whether their resting metabolic rates were high or low.[60]
I assume that a sudden change in environmental conditions such as Average temperature, or/and scarcity of food would easily ( and it did ) doom them...
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