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if the author can't be bothered to put their name behind it (and, really, since it can be a pseudonymous throwaway account, how hard it that?)

You acknowledge that AC posts can be just as anonymous as named accounts. It seems your objection is primarily to the content of this particular post.

There is a distinction between a pseudonymous account that is used once and never again, and an Anonymous Coward; they are not equivalent. I would point to this classic Penny Arcade comic. My objection is that, by being an Anonymous Coward rather than a long-established pseudonymous account, there is no way that anyone can judge what is being said: is it FUD, a bot, personal anecdote, or someone with some authority on the matter? My objection isn't with the content of the post, but rather that it got modded up, rather than staying at 0 where, as you point out, it is less likely to be seen.

it is equivalent to bullshit, FUD, and reverse-astroturfing.

I should amend my earlier statement: it may not be equivalent, but it is indistinguishable from those things, just as it is indistinguishable from fanboi-ism or astroturfing, and doesn't add to the conversation.

Mike Krahoulik and Jerry Holkins, better known as Gabe and Tycho.

It does lend credence to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

More likely that he'll become an independent and speak at a GOP nominating convention...

Penny Arcade's thoughts on Internet anonymity come to mind...

Obligatory Penny Arcade.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28

Obligatory Penny Arcade.

I give you the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

People (kids too) are more likely to be fucking barbarians when they're behind a computer and have a little pseudonymity, when someone can't reach over and punch them in the nose for going too far.

And as the AC noted, pedos.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

It's time we put a stop to this crap.

Oh, applause for you AC. It's up to you to stop this.

Shutup you shitcock.

It's time we put a stop to this crap.

Oh, applause for you AC. It's up to you to stop this.

Just cause you can fly airplanes in a video game, that doesn't mean you can fly a real airplane.

...seems legit

How about "because the pirated product is actually better quality and more functional than the so-called genuine article"?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/when-piracy-offers-a-better-product-the-legitimate-for-pay-versions-will-al

I don't know if he still uses it on the road but Mike liked it when he tried it out for drawing. http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro

I did not "insist on a privacy invading Log-in"
I just think that it's kind of fucked up to post a slur on the entire slashdot user base as an anonymous coward.
But you, I give you credit for at least not being anonymous.
I have no love for Facebook. I have no dog in this fight.
And I can't help but notice that you have given up your privacy, number 574257.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

Works well enough for the artist behind Penny Arcade, who gave the Surface Pro a rave review:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/05/07
naming anything in space is laughable when you consider what you are in relation to it.

I want a _Surface_Tablet_(pro) because I'm an artist and like having a Wacom tablet that is also a computer. And games.

It's actually gotten good reviews from artists. Here is one example. Of course the same doesn't go for RT, which is just overpriced.

Gosh, I suppose anyone who likes the surface must be a shill, including Penny Arcade.

Its not like they would be well suited to evaluate computers, or tablets, right?

Obligatory Penny Arcade reference.

Here, maybe if we use a visual guide.

Maybe they can put a menu in for Windows 8.2?

Hyperbolic insults, rants, threats and bullying are commonplace in every type of communication over the internet. The anonymity and pseudo-anonymity enable a culture where there is rarely any significant penalty for even the worst insults.

Gabriel from Penny Arcade really summed it up nicely with his Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/7/31

People are waiting for it for the same reasons they waited with anticipation for the first Vista service pack: they hoped that it would fix things. I think the way that Microsoft has implemented 8.1 makes it more likely they're trying to send a message.

How in hell releasing 2 or 3 models of new hardware are going to solve a basic software/UI thing, I don't know. The best solution might be to ship ClassicShell as an option, but pride would prevent that.

This is what I love about Slashdot. There's always some anonymous fuckwad ready and willing to shit on anything and everything.

Quote numbers or be silent, fuckwad.

Sometimes tried and trusted are the way to go.

From here:

We learn how to act, and how to accept things, through our fiction, and we have a gigantic problem with women in authority. By creating a female Doctor, and then giving her interesting male companions and having them work together without falling mutually in love, having sex, or keeping her locked in the male gaze, we could begin to work through some of the issues our society has with women in authority.

It may seem silly to pin these hopes on pop culture, but remember that it took Star Trek to bring us one of the first scripted kisses on television. A female Doctor wouldn't just be fun, it would be important. It could be a way to teach young men how to treat powerful women with respect, a lesson that is rarely discussed well, anywhere.

Obligatory cartoon.

Have you actually used one? The guys at PA (who have been doing webcomics for a decade and a half, and presumably are good judges of sketch tools) reviewed one, and seem to indicate that it has sensitivity levels:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro

Plus, its not "worse than a wacom", it IS a wacom.

At that price, the Surface Pro is more or less even with the Wacom stylus-input displays (of similar size, larger ones are substantially more expensive) that don't have a computer attached to them...

Unless the pen input is totally gimped, this seems like it would be a serious competitor to those for everyone except people whose photoshopping is serious enough that the Surface's specs can't handle it. Especially if your demands are at all mobile, it's hard to justify buying the Wacom when you could get the screen and stylus input with the laptop thrown in for free. It's a pity that the Surface can't act as a monitor/input device (optionally, while charging at your desk, for example, it could go from a waste of space to an extra monitor) for more powerful computers.

Apparently the device is good enough for Mike "Penny Arcade" Krahulik:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/06/28/windows-8.1

At that price, the Surface Pro is more or less even with the Wacom stylus-input displays (of similar size, larger ones are substantially more expensive) that don't have a computer attached to them...

Unless the pen input is totally gimped, this seems like it would be a serious competitor to those for everyone except people whose photoshopping is serious enough that the Surface's specs can't handle it. Especially if your demands are at all mobile, it's hard to justify buying the Wacom when you could get the screen and stylus input with the laptop thrown in for free. It's a pity that the Surface can't act as a monitor/input device (optionally, while charging at your desk, for example, it could go from a waste of space to an extra monitor) for more powerful computers.

Apparently the device is good enough for Mike "Penny Arcade" Krahulik:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/06/28/windows-8.1

That idea has already been done a few times, but it's never caught on. The GBA could be connected to the Gamecube with a cable. The best game to use the link was probably Pac-Man vs. One player was Pac-Man, who used the GBA screen and could see the entire maze. The other players were the ghosts. They had their individual split screens on the TV. The ghosts had a very limited view so that pac-man wasn't completely screwed with 3 human controlled ghosts.

Of course, the difference is that with the Wii U the screen is included, while with the GBA-GCN setup you had to buy extra equipment. It wasn't used that often. Penny Arcade had a comic on the people who complained about having to buy all the extra hardware.

I believe the Wii could also connect wirelessly to the DS, but that was never used for anything major to my knowledge.

The dreamcast also had the VMU on their controllers, but it's just not the same when the screen is only 48x32 pixels.

The real winner in the device market will be the first vendor to offer a tablet that connects to a laptop through a true HD interface to become a second screen and input device. People don't want everything in one device... computer sales are down because everyone has one.

Give us a laptop -- we like keyboards. Give us an iPad like device -- something to lend to a visitor or a kid, or to haul on to the couch, or for casual gaming. When we plug one into the other, pop up the hard drives so we can move data back and forth, or even use the free space on the tablet as an extra bit of scratch space. Allow the tablet to become a Cintiq-like input device for the laptop, and make sure the laptop has an additional video out for a larger 4k-ish screen.

But with all of the non-Apple vendors stuck with whatever horrible idea Ballmer's team of dunces "imagineers," we'll probably end up with a lot of stupid and unusable convertibles like this Lenovo thing.

Recently I was forced to work with Windows Server 2012. And you know, I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the simple stupidity of the Microsoft Bob era in Redmond. At least Bill Gates was smart enough to not touch servers with such an infantile interface.

"Oh, the database connection seems to be down, and you need to check running processes? We've removed the Start Button to speed up the process. Simply tilt the device to the right, swipe left, and choose the Unhappy Face. Then cycle through the server managers and click the undulating cube -- the red one, not the chartreuse (duh). Then hope and pray we keep the same method in Smiley Server 2015."

Sounds like Gabe's dream is about to come true.

Surface pro is good for artists. Here is an example of a review. It's like a Wacom tablet that you can look at while you draw.

It became less customizable each release,

Sort of like Windows itself. Witness how much is hidden from the user in Vista/W7 (W7 is essentially the service pack for Vista) compared to XP, then even more so in W8. Sure, W8.1 gave you back the Start button, but as Penny Arcade pointed out, it only brings you back to the tiles in a big "Fuck You!" from the UI folks.

I wish they would do this for the Surface Pro. In a recent discussion over on /r/math on Reddit on taking digital notes, and there was a link to a math grad student's video review of Surface Pro with OneNote. It looked like it was an excellent tablet for doing serious mathematical note taking and writing.

Gabe at Penny Arcade reviewed it as a device for drawing, and was very pleased with it.

I would love a tablet that is good for those things, but not at $900.

Our evil camera is non-negotiable!

I just can't believe how they keep hiring total fuckups at microsoft. The group think and bad management must be rampant in that company now. Just look at the recent xbox one drm debacle, any discussion with people outside of their company, perhaps a few gamers would have told them this, they needed to lay down a record of steam like summer sales and the rest to gain the trust before online drm would be an acceptable thing to ask for. Its not rocket science, its demonstrated in the market place by a competitor for them already... Now this windows 8 UI mess, how many times do people have to explain that they don't want this nonsense, they won't even give us the OPTION of disabling all the new junk to switch back to win7 UI. Its like they know people would turn metro off en masse and they'd be embarrassed, so what, they should have buried it and moved on, but no, they hang on and torture us for no reason at all. So the alternatives just keep looking better at this point. And add to this mess their recent announcement about technet being over, and they are just driving the nail into their own coffin as they push even more people to find and build alternatives to their system. Its not good for a desktop UI to constantly switch to a different screen to do other functions, the point of a desktop is not always have to "context switch", its like having to clear your desk, clean it and wipe out off do minor multitasking, it wipes your memory a little in a bad way, its just how human brain works. Hell science has shown us that memory wipes a bit when you just walk through a doorway even. Their new interface is just broken, it has no place at all being on a desktop machine, and the more they force it, the more obvious how unsuited to task it is. Windows 7 evolved to where it was, windows 8 just skipped evolution and is just arbitrary. As the penny arcade said already http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28 This is just a big middle finger to all of us that use their o/s's. A whole boat load of managers across microsoft need to be fired, they've grown tone deaf to criticism and reality. Problem is balmer is at the helm, and he was the guy that dismissed the iphone because he said microsoft was just fine selling millions of their phone....yea oops.

I think penny-arcade hit the nail on the head :

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28

You forgot the </sarcasm> tag. It is very important to remember for without it, someone might actually think you were being serious, which you obviously cannot possibly be.

Perhaps next time we say "please bring back the start button" we should add "and make it work like the old start button as well". They misunderstood the problem; it's not so much the lack of that button as it is the features it had and the fact that it didn't switch the entire screen. I believe Penny Arcade said it best: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28

I think this one is better: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/14

Actually, I think people are focusing too much on the camera aspect of Google Glass and are ignoring the potential benefits of the display.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28

I think this one is better:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/14

Pretty much mirrors my own. Although I would add in an extra side of "fuck you"...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28

But, as "Gabe" says in the actual news post for that day, he actually LIKES the TIle UI. I like it too.

But, I can see it not being for everyone, and it obviously has some short-comings.

Does the start button work like this: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28

Penny Arcade.

'nuff said.

But, as "Gabe" says in the actual news post for that day, he actually LIKES the TIle UI. I like it too. But, I can see it not being for everyone, and it obviously has some short-comings.

Pretty much mirrors my own. Although I would add in an extra side of "fuck you"...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28

Penny Arcade.

'nuff said.

I know xkcd is usually oblig, but for the constant camera in your face, lets go with some oblig. Penny Arcade

The only real reason I want an Ouya? Emulators. Stick in a MAME for Android emulator on there and a USB hard drive full of ROMs, and you've got a nice gaming machine right there.

This. It's not like no one knows about the real raison d'être of the Ouya. It's a Dingoo-like appliance for the living room, with a good-enough gamepad. Also, it's hacker-friendly so there are people running XBMC on it.

(Sorry for posting TWO Penny-Arcade links in this discussion, but they really have a good insight about the OUYA).

So I don't see much incentive for publishers to make exclusive titles for the Xbox One.

Also, Microsoft has a pretty indie-UNfriendly policy: