Posts by Ship of Fools 13 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jan 2014
In point of fact we are not only descended from apes, we are apes. Obviously we are not descended from any of the other modern apes. But the closest common ancestor would have been an ape. Humans belong to the family Hominidae (aka the Great Apes), together with the other modern apes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae
@chemist : I stand corrected. Strongest material known to man. Yet it seemed so puny on the Sellotape! Icon is for self. Need bigger ship ^^^, etc.
Moving on, I'm sure you can improve on my answer, if you care to. If the structural strength of graphene is currently realisable (no pun intended), why not ditch the copper entirely and go with a graphene conductor? I don't see any other commentards try to answer that one.
I suspect my answer was otherwise substantially correct in terms of practicalities, but full disclosure, I'm not really Sherlock, just another random commentard idly speculating
... Why not eliminate the copper completely?
Perhaps because graphene is one atom thick and has no structural strength? Ergo it needs to be layered on something that does. Why copper? Presumably for practical reasons, for instance because copper is the known quantity and allows an apples-to-apples comparison between graphene and traditional coatings, because common sense says don't change more than one variable at a time if you don't have to, and so on.
Why assume this is anything other than the usual incremental evolutionary step forward from the current state of the art?
Firstly, the article clearly said it was "the lion's share of the Hardware division's $1.9bn revenue HIKE..." You left off the crucial word "hike", thus misrepresenting what the author was saying, namely that the 54% gain in XBox revenue in the past year outweighs the total current revenue from Surface.
According to Microsoft's own press release, your interpretation that Surface revenue "now accounts for nearly half of the Hardware division's revenues" is simply not true. Microsoft says that "Surface revenue more than doubled sequentially, from $400 million in the first quarter to $893 million in the second quarter." (http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/PressReleaseAndWebcast/FY14/Q2/default.aspx)
Since the Devices & Consumer Hardware division's latest quarterly revenues are $4.73 billion as the article correctly reported from Microsoft press release, Surface's total of $893 million only accounts for 19% of the division's TOTAL revenue, as opposed to 47% of its year on year INCREASE in revenue.
So there was no bad maths involved, at least not on the author's part. On the contrary his figures fully substantiate his statement that "you can't credit [Surface sales] for most of those gains."
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