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Software Uses Almost 1/2 the Storage On 32GB Surface Tablet
First time accepted submitter jigamo writes "Microsoft's newly released Surface tablets are available in 32 and 64 GB capacities. The company has disclosed how much of that space is available to the user. After taking into account Windows RT, Microsoft Office, built-in apps, and Windows recovery tools, nearly 13 GB of the available space is eliminated from user accessible storage. Microsoft's recommendations for adding additional capacity are to use cloud storage, a memory card, or a USB storage device."
A Tablet full of Microsoft, whats not to love?
13GB is not bad. I made the mistake of getting a 40gb SSD for my Windows 7 partition. I recently upgraded it to a 120GB one, much better.
It seems ridiculous to me that 13GB is taken by the OS and built-in software.
How does that compare to iOS? And to be fair, how does that compare to iOS+Pages+Keynote+Numbers?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
"Nearly 13"/32 = nearly 40%.
"Nearly 13"/64= nearly 20%.
Almost half. Sure, no exaggeration detected at all. And then you can add a memory card if over 19GB isn't enough for everybody.
Ok, so you're accounting for what is likely to be the largest single software install (as in storage) available for the unit outside of the OS. What is it without the Office package?
Yes, really. There's no nice way to say it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
And don't forget to say that cloud storage is no good in Canada, where uncapped internet doesn't really exist, and mobile plans are absolute garbage.
Yes, it's so bad that it's worth mentioning twice.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I thought all that was stored in the tiddly-winks chips.
(16GB for Windows, Office and media apps.... my Desktop uses FAAAAAAR more. Get it through your head people - Surface is a touch screen ultrabook, not a tablet.)
It's supposed to be a freakin tablet.
Which is a freakin' computer running a freakin' operating system.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IJ9DJF1_FrE
My android phone has 3 of those.
A file system browser is always handy, and so it notepad. If you actually want to do useful work a command prompt can be damn handy.
These types of things take up very little space, Office is likely what is taking up all the space.
because you might need them when things break.
it's windows.
also, my android phone have a file system browser, a notepad, and a command prompt, and they take waaaaay less space
factor 966971: 966971
Here is my recommendation: "Buy something else."
I for one, bought a Google Nexus 7, and quite like it.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
None of those things would have made any free space at all and would simply detract from functionality. They want your Tablet/PC experiences to be relatively similar and streamlined.
Registry is part of Windows and an editor would be a good idea. Why wouldn't you need a file system browser? I have one on Android for managing files, Android (and I believe jailbroken iPhones) have a terminal, Notepad is another popular app that many tablet users download. The only thing I can see as unnecessary is the DirectX Diagnostics, but they do intend for you to develop on the tablet also, so that may be why it stayed.
None of these things are really necessary, but many tablet users download similar apps to them anyway. They really don't take up precious space either so that point is rather moot.
A fully loaded linux install takes up no more than 4 GB.
13GB means bloat.
There are options if you want unlimited Internet in Canada. Fewer or greater depending on where you live. They do tend not to be the mainstream carriers though. Fortunately, I happen to live in a small area serviced by a cable provider that offers unlimited.
That's quite high for Android tablets. Most top out at 8-16GB, and they usually leave little room for user data also. So in comparison, they are really quite above most tablets available..
Indeed. I remember when a 40gb disk was huge.
To... much... bloat...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
What did you expect? Of course to be fair, if you install a *full* version of the average desktop linux ( or bsd ) distribution you get tons of stuff by default too. Most of it you dont want.
But still, for a tablet product they should have gone out of their way not to just toss crap onto it. Space is not cheap, like it is on a desktop.
Idiots.
Calling other people idiots doesn't make them so. As for your comparison with a Linux Desktop with a healthy selection of Apps I am running at 7GB after many months. I suspect a fresh install would require much less. Ubuntu for example https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements suggests 5GB.
It accepts a MicroSD, so who cares? Contrary to the market-segmentation-via-soldered-in-SSD strategy of certain other companies, the fact is, the stuff is very cheap - $1 per gigabyte.
Would you drive your car around with the hood welded shut and no lug wrench?
If you insist on keeping important configuration in a ludicrously unreadable binary registry, instead of simple and efficient text files, you aren't going to be able to maintain the box with a general purpose tool like a word processor or text editor. Windows systems pretty much require a registry editor.
None of those tools take up a significant amount of space. You can remove them if you WANT to, but their usefulness far outweighs that.
Plus, the command prompt is needed if you want to run batch files. Some installers, even modern ones, do. And for workplaces, IT will likely have a bunch of logon scripts written that may rely on it.
Registry Editor, as well as most of the tools you named, would probably be more likely used by IT to try to diagnose problems with a device. Without it you can still use reg.exe to apply tweaks you find on the internet or whatever but it is not suitable for general registry browsing.
DirectX Diagnostic Tools is used by many game company support teams in order to get a profile of your system from you. It definitely should stay.
Notepad is a basic notepad, and is the default association of .txt and .log files. I shouldn't have to go into why this app should be included.
But let's see how much space you could save. Notepad is 200kb on Windows 7, and there are two copies. So 400kb. Regedit is ~450kb. Dxdiag is 350kb, as is cmd.exe. Congrats, you saved less than 2mb. Most of the support files are shared by other applications so you couldn't really increase this figure by much. I will be generous and say 10mb, which is still not significant enough to cut away the usefulness and compatibility (in the case of Command Prompt).
You can certainly cut out big chunks of the OS on the desktop (see: nLite, vLite) but it is likely MS has already done a LOT of this just to get it down to 13gb while still including all features the consumer would expect to see.
Well, it's actually kind of cool that the user can pop in a memory card. I guess I have gotten a little to used to iProducts that don't allow such niceties.
So there is a 16GB Surface! :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I'd rather take a device with 13gb free space and a memory card slot, rather than one with 28gb free and no way to expand.
My guess is that no matter how much they polish it up to make it all tablet-ey -- underneath, it's still Windows, which has all the same crap as any other Windows, and you'll need this stuff to make work.
It sounds like they haven't made anything which lives in a smaller footprint.
Of course, Microsoft will say they needed that much space to cram in the awesomeness. Me, I'm just going to call it bloat they couldn't pare down.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This.
And the fact that you CAN access external media, unlike that other popular, non-android table.... pad thing.
Other misc recommendations
REMEMBER, TABLETS ARE LOW MAINTENANCE! (compared to PC's)
With Love,
Microsoft
PS: You really did not think things would change THAT much!
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/31/microsoft-surface-can-not-compete-against-real-tablet/
Child!
I remember my first floppy disk drive with 68K per 5.25" disk.
That was my third computer.
Also, get off my lawn.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Notepad: 189KB
dxdiag: 336KB
regedit: 10KB
cmd: 337KB
total: 872KB
is like 4GB alone. They need to get rid of the bloat if they are serious about mobile/tablet.
Why doesn't a tablet need a file system browser? Are you not going to put any files on it?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
40GB? Heck, I remember when 40MB was huge. I remember when 5MB was amazing.
Now get off my lawn.
So this was always my assumption of putting a full OS on a tablet. It simply would not have enough power or memory to really make it work, even using something like the simplified interface that was so-recently-called-Metro. Even the 64 GB iPad is getting insufficient. I am not going to buy another until there is 128GB.
So, big surprise, building a table to meet a price point is not going to result in a high end experience, no more than buying the cheapest laptop allows one to create a feature film. In this case, however, we may find that bloated software may not even allow one to write a memo in MS Word. I suspect we will find the low end solution is still going to be Android and Google Drive.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Get a load of little lord Fauntleroy here, with his floppy disk !
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Just do what this guy did and use two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-pMZd1fupw
If you can spend $700 on a tablet computer, you can spend $50 on a 64 GB thumb drive.
Not the same. You'll always have a dongle sticking out of the tablet, it may not fit in the case, it gets caught on things when you put it in a bag, etc. Now an SD card is not so bad. Still some inconvenience in that you can't import pictures off other SD cards, but it's *much* better than those tablets that don't even have an SD slot.
~$ df Ooo look 7312160k - full office suite - browser *2 - graphics package *2 - video/music player *2 - music creation package * 7 - wine + PCB package *2 - cd/dvd package - etc.
And the fact that you CAN access external media, unlike ...
the Motorola XOOM "Google Experience", where the external SD card has been made READ ONLY, except when the device is mounted as a USB disk. So, you cannot store anything you create locally, or download via WiFi, on the external media. You can't even delete things you are finished with from the external media except by connecting baby to momma and doing it from a real computer.
And this behaviour was part of an "upgrade" to the OS.
It is great that the surface has a micro-sd card, but it suffers the same issues that the android platform has, which is that you can NOT install apps on the micro-sd card. For comparison, both IOS 6 and Jelly Bean are around 2gb in size.
You misspelled "apple land" there. Microsoft handily includes a microSD port with its tablets.
You seem too used to the fact that in apple tablets and phones, whatever memory you buy the device with, you're stuck with. This is not the case here.
Nearly 13GB should be enough for everyone.
A full version of Ubuntu including OpenOffice tips the scales around 2gig. You were saying?
Or about the same on microSD card.
5GB is a recovery partition.
3GB is lost* due to 32GB drive = ~32,000,000,000 bytes. System reports that as 29GiB.
* The advertised local disk size is shown using the decimal system, while Windows displays the disk size using the binary system. As a result, 1 GB (in decimal) appears as about 0.93 GB (in binary). The storage capacity is the same, it's just shown differently depending on the how you measure a GB (decimal or binary).
I bought a DEC Microvax for work many years ago and after many meetings with the DEC people about the specs of the thing, it was delivered with a 30Meg hard drive. After a few days the tech came to update the OS and found the disk was full as delivered so the update could not be done and we could not run any programs. Their solution was for us to delete all the help files and other "unnecessary" stuff. Sigh. We upgraded to a whopping 150Meg.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I'm an iOS guy, and let me say that the lack of a file manager is the most irritating thing about using iOS. I understand why Apple designed it to keep application data in independent silos, but that's often something you've got to work around. What makes RT interesting by comparison to iOS is that you do have a full file manager, you can access network drives, and you can shuffle stuff around just as if you were on a desktop machine.
Still some inconvenience in that you can't import pictures off other SD cards
There are these things that plug in to USB ports that let you stick in other memory cards.
Just as well Windows RT only uses 8GB then. There's a 5GB recovery partition.
And how much is it to add an additional 32gb or 64gb to your iPad if you hit your storage limit?
You swap some data out to external storage, just as Microsoft recommends.
$20 or $49 like the Surface or more?
You can't put apps onto external media on the Surface either.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nexus 7 tablet - no SD card. Nexus 4 phone - no SD card.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's supposed to be a freakin tablet.
Which is a freakin' computer running a freakin' operating system.
With freakin' lasers attached to their heads!
This may not sound convincing to the nerds who know their way around a computer, but the Surface is a Windows machine, and an iPad is an iPad. The concept of storage device, drive letter, file location is not really required on an iPad. I suppose you can say you need to know whether it is on the iPad or on the Cloud, but that's different from which drive to access to find your movie file, or which memory stick to use (did you label it?). Sure, I'd prefer a device with cheap expandability, but the iPad has sacrificed in a lot of areas to be as simple as possible, and for a vast many people that is a good thing.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
On an iPad using the camera connection kit, I can access an SD card and load images and movies from it.
Or of course I could also load things from network storage.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This was from my 4th computer:
http://fatphil.org/images/im_floppier.jpg
Next!
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
iOS 6 is ~700MB - 800MB depending on what device you install it on. From what limited info I can gather online, Android "Jelly Bean" is anywhere from ~770MB - 900MB depending on what crap the vendors load on the device along with it. Point being, both of these OS's have been heavily optimized to be mobile. WinRT being many times larger than the average mobile OS, appears to be Windows 8 shoehorned into a mobile device.
grep -iw skynet
You can use iPhone Explorer ( a third party app) to browse and delete/add files on an iOS device.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
40GB??? My first PC had a 20MB hard drive. My 2nd had a whopping 40 MB...
You can only use that space on the SD card for data. You cannot use it to store apps.
Say the Surface's memory is evenly divided into 16 GB for the operating system and included applications and 16 GB for third-party applications, with all music and movies on a microSD card. What kind of application collection takes up 16 GB, other than a bunch of hardcore games? I thought hardcore games weren't ported to Windows RT, and most apps and casual games were far smaller than that.
Good to know. I use GoodReader, which supports windows shares, ftp servers, dropbox, etc. A bit awkward, but it works.
And WTF do I need Office on a tablet for? That's why my notebook and PC are for, and in a pinch my netbook.
It's for carrying around with you instead of a netbook. And it's for using once your netbook breaks. With no mention of Microsoft making available a special cheap OEM version of Windows 8 for netbooks the way it did for Windows XP (ULCPC licensing) and Windows 7 (Starter Edition), I've read that netbooks won't be sold in stores anymore. Even the maker of the Eee PC, which launched the netbook category, has discontinued its line of netbooks.
The Surface comes partitioned with a 3.5GB recovery partition, which can fully reset the device including drivers, OS updates, full volume encryption + losing the recovery key, and people running amok with Admin permissions (assuming they don't mess with the recovery volume itself). The iPad, last I checked, still required the use of a real PC if something goes drastically wrong and it needs resetting. It can handle typical reset scenarios just fine, but can't be used to downgrade (or so I'm told; that may be wrong). I don't know if the iPad even supports installable drivers, either (although on the Surface RT, they must be signed by MS so hopefully not *too* much harm would occur from them).
The Surface also comes with the standard suite of Windows admin tools, including the Management Console and the Disk Management snap-in for it. You can modify the partitions if you want to. You could even back up the recovery volume to a USB storage device or NAS (the device supports booting from USB, not sure about NAS) and then remove the recovery partition and extend the main volume to fill its space. You can also mount a removable storage device, such as a microSD card or USB Mass Storage volume, into the root filesystem. Can an iPad do anything like that?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Yeah! Functionality be damned! Even though all of those combined takes less than a meg of space! We want less options, Microsoft! Less!
You misspelled "apple land" there. Microsoft handily includes a microSD port with its tablets. You seem too used to the fact that in apple tablets and phones, whatever memory you buy the device with, you're stuck with. This is not the case here.
*WHOOSH* Reading comprehension is fundamental. The GP was talking about how Microsoft likes to cram the same OS onto multiple form factors. In the case of Windows 8 and Windows RT, they decided that desktop users should use an OS that is a cross between a tablet OS and windows instead of having a separate tablet OS which just uses some of the core functionality of windows and a separate desktop/laptop OS.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I get it! You made an irrelevant comment that could be easily misunderstood to be relevant, then you get to make fun of people for misunderstanding what you said! I have not seen such artful trolling for many months. Well done, sir!
(Since this discussion is about how ridiculous the size of the Windows tablet installation is, stating that Linux desktops include unwanted apps without making any sort of size comparison is completely irrelevant to the discussion.)
It's not like you can use that card to install applications on, so what does it really matter?
Media collection?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Well since music and movies can all be obtained through the cloud
The cloud is useless if it can't be reached because A. you have the Wi-Fi-only version and are away from home and open hotspots, B. you have no cellular data subscription, or C. you've already burned through your data plan this month.
Or of course just keep some media on external network devices
Which portable external network devices are you talking about?
or SD cards
I guess the Surface can, but I wasn't aware the iPad could play movies and the like from an SD card.
The equivalent for the Surface is 8G, and that includes what amounts to the .NET framework, which takes quite a bit of space, but enables developers to develop for a single platform rather than multiple platforms as with iOS and OSX. Good or bad one could argue either way, but the virtual machine and libraries take about 4G, so that would account for much of the difference.
Office is also something quite different than the iOS productivity apps.
There are these things that plug in to USB ports that let you stick in other memory cards.
Just because you can physically plug devices into the machine doesn't mean that the operating system will recognize the devices. I seem to remember several tablets not having drivers for USB mass storage.
8GiB for RT+Office+apps
5GiB for recovery
That's 13GiB gone. From 29GiB, that's almost half.
'After taking into account Windows RT, Microsoft Office, built-in apps, and Windows recovery tools, nearly 13 GB of the available space is eliminated from user accessible storage.'
I don't really get what your complaint is here. The summary seems pretty accurate, especially for slashdot.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
64GB is pathetic for anything costing seven hundred bucks. It's like booting off a floppy.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I wonder to what extent the limitation of FAT support to read-only use was Microsoft's fault, as Microsoft owns the patent on how file names are stored in the FAT file system used on most SD cards. The "VFAT" patent probably won't expire for at least another three more years.
I don't think I have read an article full of so much lies and bullshit since Mitt Romney's last speech. Sorry, but what the fuck has that article writer been drinking? Bleach? The pathetic attempt at comparison is absurd, and just full of outright lies. Sad. "Surface without any apps. - 15G free." Are you joking? No apps? Please stop lying.
"The surface is ... much slower at everything". Yeah, great comparison. Please forgive me for ignoring morons with unsubstantiated claims. Someone poisoned this dudes Cool Aid with some serious hallucinogenics.
Don't forget that explorer.exe is also the full graphical shell (taskbar, etc.). Also don't forget that, unlike most tablets, the Surface also includes a full window manager.
As for the command prompt, cmd.exe is pretty tiny, but Powershell is (relatively) huge. You can basically use its script language to access the entire .NET framework. plus a bunch of additional commands and built-in help data.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I guess they don't ignore me like they say they do. Either that or the revalation was entirely promted by Microsoft's high corporate ethics standards. That said, it is still wrong, the one I tested had 15.0GB free, not 16. I guess MS didn't want to admit they have LESS than half of their storage free.
And I didn't even mention the impending service packs, patches, and related bloat. WART is going to be a disaster...... No, it is out, WART _IS_ a disaster.
-Charlie
"After taking into account Windows RT, Microsoft Office, built-in apps, and Windows recovery tools, nearly 13 GB of the available space is eliminated from user accessible storage"
... Ubuntu usb-creator
I have a 4GB usb device with the full system taking up 712kb storage
AccountKiller
This is 'Windows' we are talking about
No, it's Windows RT. Microsoft reserves the right to leave out drivers for strategic reasons.
Plus for most of the USB devices (like thumb driver, external HDD, Digi Camera, keyboard, mouse, etc.) Windows doesn't need particular driver, there are class drivers
Some operating systems leave out even class drivers for particular classes. For example, a thumb drive, an SD card reader, an external hard drive, and a digital camera are examples of devices that conform to the USB mass storage device class. But to mount a USB mass storage device on a Nexus 7 tablet running Android OS, you need to root it and install StickMount, and I seem to remember reading that a rooted tablet can't run certain applications such as Netflix.
It has nothing to do with the size of the apps themselves but instead all the bits of the architecture needed to support those apps.
You're only supposed to be able to use Metro apps and Office, according to Microsoft, on the Surface RT and these tools aren't needed to do that.
I guess nobody here has ever worked with Windows CE and all of the variants? Windows-RT will be bloated for quite awhile and it will eventually die, like CE or be reborn as something else like Windows Mobile or WP7/8 or something else. The nice thing about Android or iOS for that matter is a clean sheet approach and you can get away from all those old nasty Windows XP or Windows 95 things that you still have to support because people expect you to. Right now I'm laughing at folks who spurn Windows 8 in general and give the "I'll wait to SP1" crap. If you're technical, jump on in, the water's fine and like Windows-RT it works. My biggest annoyance has been placing the tiles where I say to place them and stop moving them you annoying.. anyway..
Yeah, it's a bit bloated but that's what MSFT needs too, is people pointing to it like Nelson and saying "Ha Ha!" That way, like the fat kid in school he'll either get straight, become obsessed with getting back at those who laughed, eventually climbing a tower with a high power rifle and shooting indiscriminately, or he'll go back and have another twinkie and start writing code and working on things like math and science and stuff. In MSFT's case I can't see Ballmer climbing a tower so they'll just eat another twinkie and push for the next generation of NAND storage just in Ballmer's case skip the math and science stuff.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
So I have been trying to figure out what on earth is taking up the 13GB, and here is what I have so far:
Recovery and EFI partitions - 4.0 GB There are two recovery and one system partitions. The system partition appears to be there for EFI. Pagefile.sys and Swapfile.sys - 2.6 GB Virtual Memory! Program Files - 1.0 GB This is mostly Office, with a few other things thrown in: IE, Windows Contacts, Photo Viewer, etc. Office occupies about 630MB Windows/System32 - 1.75 GB This is the core of the OS Windows/Fonts - 400 MB Some really large font-files here, but Windows does ship to a huge international audience with complex script support. Windows/Speech - 400 MB Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech. Windows/IME - 200 MB This is the support for inputting complex scripts among other things. Dominated by Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Windows/Microsoft.NET - 200 MB .NET frameworkI also have about 800 MB in a SoftwareDistribution folder, but that may be tainted by Windows Update (there were patches available on the first day, literally, weighing in at 600+ MB - for the Office update to RTM among others). Another curiosity is that there is a 10 MB SysWOW64 folder for some reason. Aside, I have not checked how big the system registry hives are.
My user folder is about 2.0 GB, most of which is in Windows Store apps. Still trying to find a way to visualize how much each application takes.
So far that adds up to 10.55 GB (11.35 if including SoftwareDistribution). I have purposely left out the WinSxS folder, because I have no way to telling what its real on-disk footprint is until I figure out how to scan a folder for hard links, which may not be possible on WindowsRT.
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ukash
In comparison my full blown Fedora Linux 64 bit installation is using 7.8GB. That is the system + a bunch of applications like Office, Firefox, Gimp, development tools, Wine, tools, some games.
I LOLed quite hard when I saw how much hard disk a blank (i.e. only the system) Windows Vista installation was using. Something like 8GB only for an empty system. I run a check and saw that most of the space is used by DLLs in 10 times duplicates.
My guess is Microsoft is extra blowing the system up so a) they can say more is better and b) to slow down illegal downloads of Windows.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
See, that's incredibly pertinent information that should be part of the submission. I didn't know that, I'm not big into mobile. That is a rather large difference.
So long as it works very, very well the size of the install will be a minor detail. That's a big if though.
Canada doesn't have wifi? Surface RT doesn't have a sim slot so mobile plans shouldn't come into play.
My ZX80 didn't have a hard drive. It had 1KB of RAM and a crappy cable to connect to an even crappier cassette deck!
Now ALL of you get the heck off MY lawn
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
Explorer.exe is the entire desktop shell, not just the file browser.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Office is probably half or more of that.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Hell, most people around here probably don't even know that the 5.25" drive slot we have today are actually half height... my first computer was an XT with an MFM hard drive so slow it actually ran faster double-spaced.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Having to buy and carry around an add-on is functionally the same to you? And only "slightly" less convenient?
The more misleading drivel I read from you the more convinced I become that you are Slashdot's best troll ever; Poe's law in action. It is solid platform for a Slashdot troll.
You assume they wouldn't do something equally stupid with this tablet?
but with 10gb open on my N7 don't miss it too much
If you simply buy the device ahead of time with a bit of extra space, it really does not get in the way - it's so easy to swap in and out media that really you mostly have to factor the size of the applications you like to use plus a decent buffer for games/media.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Having to buy and carry around an add-on is functionally the same to you? And only "slightly" less convenient? Does the Surface get more storage without having to buy anything?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Around here 99.9% of people lock their Wi-Fi, because of the monthly caps.
Yes, cable/DSL has monthly caps too, sometimes not even 50GB monthly. Netflix Canada even had to add another quality setting so that people wouldn't go through their caps too quickly.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
You're going to need them.
I'm not sure why pointing out that having to purchase a $30 add-on that hangs out of a device (in other words cannot be left in all the time) makes me an "android folk". Android is not even in the discussion so you can relax- the boogeyman isn't out to get you here.
I am terribly sorry if the truth offends you; a hard life is in store for you I fear.
Not quite sure what that really means. You seeming like a troll doesn't hurt my feelings at all.
It's a little hard to understanding[sic*] how pointing out a fact is misleading.
I'm fairly certain you know exactly why it is misleading but I will spell it out anyway. The Surface has an SD slot. I could plug an extra N gigabytes of additional space into it and forget about it. The iPad does not. The iPad apparently has an add-on called a "camera connection kit" made to load pictures which appears to also allow loading other media as well. This is not plug in and forget. This is: "hope you remembered to bring it when you feel the urge to use it". Most people do not even know this exists; fewer would use it.
I know somebody poked fun at an iPad's lack of expandable storage but it was not a personal attack against you. You are not an iPad. You know what people mean when they talk about expandable storage. You know the iPad does not have it in the same sense. Nonchalantly claiming the iPad has expandable storage is a lie of omission.
...a first class citizen. Apps, music, pictures, videos, etc. all need to be able to reside on the memory card and work the same.
You might be OK misleading people even in jest; I am not. I want people to know how things work so they can intelligently decide between devices.
You say that but your post history shows the opposite. You clearly aim to mislead people when you say the iPad supports expandable storage. You are always sure to fully articulate any shortcoming in another product:
No you cannot just forget about it. You can't put applications on it. You have to remember to save media to it separately.
You cannot do that on an iPad so this is not a pro/con list between the two devices. Neither do this. Nor does it change the fact that once my SD card is in the device I can forget about it.
You always overlook the shortcomings of any Apple implementation:
You swap some data out to external storage, just as Microsoft recommends.
You already know for a fact Microsoft does not recommend you buy a dongle so you can temporarily plug in an SD card. If it was the other way around and Microsoft's tablet required a dongle we both know you would be proclaiming how terrible of an experience that is.
The only time such expansion really matters is for something like a long trip with spotty access to data connections, so in the end that difference does not really matter much.
Just plain false. Cell data is expensive (and only available on a small percentage of tablets) and wifi is in no way ubiquitous enough in most of the world to make "the cloud" a viable alternative to local storage.
but enables developers to develop for a single platform rather than multiple platforms as with iOS and OSX
Bullshit.
The language or libraries aren't why iOS and OSX apps are different, the target environment is different, and its different on a surface tablet as well. The same APIs are there for the most part in both, but you have to behave and do things differently in a touch based UI rather than a keyboard/mouse based UI. The iOS and Android solution? Target a tablet or a desktop, not both. Microsoft solution? EVERYONE DOES BOTH, like it or not, poorly!
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I post facts; you post facts but omit the whole story. ... It's hardly misleading when it does in fact do exactly that.
When I buy an iPad can I plug in my SD card? No? You mean you omitted the part about needing to buy an additional dongle?
You keep insisting you cannot do something that you can; why would you state something so plainly false? It would reduce trust of your views in the anyone reading your posts.
Can you or can you not install apps to an SD card on an iPad? Without Jailbreaking (we'll assume for a second the user knows they need a "camera connection kit" and does not think it is a ridiculous requirement).
You are wrong. Cell data is not that expensive; but more importantly in everyday life WiFi is pervasive.
Cell data is expensive. Denying that is asinine. Wifi is not pervasive in any useful measure. It may almost always be present but it is not very helpful to have an encrypted AP. Yes I have wifi at home and at work but both of those places my tablet is really only going to be used as a remote control. Where are the number one spots media on a tablet is useful? Probably trains, buses, bus stops, malls. Some of those will have wifi, some of them will have poor quality wifi and most of them will have no wifi. No matter what remote storage has degraded availability over local.
I am not quite sure exactly what you are going on about "well off enough to buy a tablet" and their "networking environment". They really have nothing to do with each other. Large metropolitan areas occasionally have good wifi availability. More often than not, though, a few key points have wifi access here and there. I imagine you will find a small percentage of the united states has open wifi availability. You may only travel between work and your home but many people "well off enough to buy a tablet" probably leave their little city bubble and would like to listen to music while doing it.
In any case I am more reassured now that you are a troll. Definitely one of the best (possibly the very best) I've seen on Slashdot so congrats on that. What concerns me is how often people agree with your most likely (hopefully) trolls. Troll on.
Target a tablet or a desktop, not both
Sigh. So all the hoopla surrounding the fact that the Windows desktop OS is now designed around a touch metaphor is just bullshit? With Win 8 you can target the same application to both environments. X86 desktop and ARM tablet. No code change. No recompile. Same app.
A portable computer with a screen and a keyboard for > $600 is called a laptop. I don't think you can even buy a laptop anymore with a 64 GB hard drive even if you were drunk enough to want one.
U get less cpu, less software choice (no windows apps run on it), less ram, less storage...and why???
By the time MS awakens from their batshit insanity it will be too late.
The same camera connection kit that has voltage issues that only reads specific files, the same camera connection kit that needs voltage hacks implemented to do anything useful with.
Yeah dumb ass why aren't you using the camera connection kit!
Ever tried to remove google maps, you tube, more shit and yahoo finance from your android thing?
Privacy is terrorism.
We want less options, Microsoft! Less!
*Fewer*
Less *bloat* could be had even without fewer options.
Windows RT supports Win32. In fact, RT is built on top of the Win32 APIs, which means that Metro apps are just using APIs that (partially, at least) are wrappers for the Win32 APIs.
Win32 and all associated architectural elements aren't going anywhere soon.
Yes, microSD is RAM.
Fracking idiots who can't read?
Your grammar Nazism aside; sure. However the examples given by the person I was replying to are downright silly. Why wouldn't you have a notepad application on a tablet, or a file system browser, seriously?
The more misleading drivel I read from you the more convinced I become that you are Slashdot's best troll ever; Poe's law in action. It is solid platform for a Slashdot troll.
You're giving him way too much credit. I have never laughed out loud at a SuperKendall post. I have shaken my head sadly a few times, but that hardly qualifies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
SD card is no different than a "different folder".
Some OS-es allow some don't allow you to save data to it.
Such expansion matters as long as "having more memory" matters.
"Convenience" of Apple's way of charging 100$ per 16Gb of flash memory is "proved" by the raise of popularity of "wi-fi HDD"-s.
It has to be a restaurant now?
Or any other well-known place with open Wi-Fi that's not your home.
Damn Apple and its walled Olive Garden.
Cute :-)
13GB used just by the initial install??? Wait until service pack 3!
Ok, I've been reading this discussion, and it's simple: having the option of an SD slot on the device that is NOT a dongle is preferable to having to add a dongle to get SD access.
Jeez, it's not that hard.
Wait, what? My Telus DSL line has no cap whatsoever; my cell service with Wind has a soft-cap at 5GB (ie. no extra charges, but traffic is de-prioritized). I guess I'm just living in a bubble with exceptional no-longer-offered plans . . . or maybe most people don't try hard enough to find a decent plan. Okay, fair enough.
P.S. I think most people lock their wifi because they think that 'damn thiefs' are why their youtubes are so slow. Ironically though it's only recently that I've seen WEP starting to disappear . . . only to be replaced by WiFi Protected Setup networks, which in many respects are even *less* secure. Now, I doubt you're going to have injection-capable drivers on a Microsoft tablet, but you'd better believe I'd take advantage of that if I didn't just have a $35 unlimited data plan for my cell anyways. Hell, I've used it a few times since Google annoyingly locked non-Infrastructure-mode networking out of Android, so my Nexus 7 could never connect to my cellphone, but I'm starting to ramble now.
Point is, things aren't *so* bad. Hell, having broken my N7 by tripping over my roommate's cat, I'm tempted to get one of the new HSPA+ Nexus 7s, and just pay the $35 for a mobile data plan with a 10GB-down soft-cap. That'd put me at 5GB soft on my phone, 10GB soft on my tablet, and unlimited on my (admittedly only 700KBps in practice) DSL line. In principle the telecommunications industry here in Canada is atrocious, but in practice I don't have anything directly to complain about.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
they call it the usb port on surface, and its included in the sale price.
In other words, the Surface is more expensive than it has to be for millions of people who do not need a USB port built in.
I never said it was not extra on the iPad. Just that the iPad can in fact do what you and others claim it cannot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why would you store anything except the last couple of movies, recent photographs, videos and documents? It is designed for efficiently managing and working with current but transitory content. If you want storage, connect it to a homegroup (2 clicks), acquire a storage device or home server.
You can write to the card when the XOOM is a USB disk, which means all the code necessary to do writes is on the hardware.
When an Android device is acting as a USB mass storage device, it processes requests from the host computer to read and write 512-byte blocks on the SD card. All file system processes, such as the patented method of writing to VFAT, are happening on the host computer. Thus, the Android device performs no patented processes in this mode.
I remember my first HD. It had the handy form factor of a shoe box. It needed an external power supply. It made a most frightful racket. It weighed a ton. And it did hold a whopping 10MB.
Not many of us can claim their first computer was a 640k, 16 color, 2 floppy, 10MB HD Decision Mate V. That's NCR. In the early 80ies a computer deal with Iran fell through(for some reason or another...it's got something to do with changing the name of the country from Persia to Iran and them snubbing Jimmy Carter) leaving NCR stranded with storehouses full of those amazing machines. My dad having worked for 15 years for those bozos nabbed one of them. Well, he payed 600 deutschmarks for it and got one for his son. My fate was sealed ever since.
Thanks, dad. I could have been a literature scholar if it hadn't been for you. Hrumph.
20 minutes into the future
everybody needs a usb port.
For what?
Keyboard: Bluetooth.
Printing: WIFi
Data Transfer:WiFi/Cell data
Even for loading images with an EyeFi card I don't need to plug in a card, or I get images over the network from my iPhone.
I have a USB adaptor but I only use it for loading images from a DSLR, a specialized need that I would not claim more than a tiny fraction of users need.
Here's a thought: Not every person on earth needs to plug in a 300 baud serial coupling modem you still have via a serial port to USB adaptor. Not that such a thing would work on Surface either...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Duude... Just. Stop. Digging.
Nor does it change the fact that once my SD card is in the device I can forget about it.
Please explain how you can "forget about" a separate storage that you must manage. This I think is the most terrible of your deceptions, misleading people to think having an SD card is equivalent to more base storage. It is not true for any user, as it adds complexity to how you deal with media. I don't know if you are technically ignorant of this fundamental problem but it seems unlikely with this being Slashdot, so I can only assume you are being willfully deceptive as to this point.
Okay, yer right wrong on that one, mate.
I can only speak about what I know, so I will reference the (apparently evil IYO) Android platform, since I've never used a Surface device. For all the Android devices I own (phone, several tablets) as well as the devices I help others with (mostly Android phones), the 'external' storage is indeed plug-and-forget. It auto-mounts when the device is turned on, I can shift the bulk of most of my app storage to the SD card with no drop in usability for the apps in question, and as for media? I simply had to open my camera app settings and tell it to save to the external storage instead of local storage. My Gallery app has no problem parsing the external and internal storage together and showing me everything.
As an added bonus, if I drop my phone under a truck or in a toilet, well my precious dog photos are stored on a nice, non-volatile, easily-removeable microSD card. I have a high probability of being able to get them back even if I don't happen to have immediate access to teh internets, and I can copy them back over to my netbook in about 2 minutes.
Or, I can just retrieve them from ONLINE_CLOUD_STORAGE_PROVIDER of my choice (Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc...) if it happens when I am near my home WiFi. Yes, I do have to explicitly enable these backup services myself, but I actually prefer that to trusting 'the man' to do it for me. I back up what (and only what) I want to back up.
Just plain false. Cell data is expensive
You are wrong. Cell data is not that expensive; but more importantly in everyday life WiFi is pervasive. I have only a 2GB data plan but consume around 100-200 GB a month between two iOS devices.
I come nowhere near the limits of my data plan each month.
Again, you are trying to mislead by ignoring how real people use real devices.
Wow, privileged much? So, where do you live, Seoul? Tokyo? I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but unless you live in a metropolis, WiFi availability is most certainly *not* 'pervasive'. Where I live, I cannot travel from my home to my work without losing the (supposedly city-wide) crappy 'free' WiFi signal almost as soon as I leave either place. And since the speed of it is a joke, it's not even worth it to try, usually.
I like to use my devices on the go, and since I'm in Canada (and not Vancouver or Toronto), that means anything that's delivered over the air comes directly off my cell data plan. And in case you haven't heard, us Canucks pay through the nose for mobile data, especially roaming data.
Wifi is in no way ubiquitous enough in most of the world to make "the cloud" a viable alternative to local storage.
You go broad when you should go narrow. Sure if I am traveling across Africa WiFi might be harder to come by (having travelled there though you might be surprised). But In that case pre-loading an SD card before leaving home and is the same degree of trouble for iOS and Surface, and the dongle is hardly an issue to bring in an area where power will be more precious than anything.
But the people that actually can afford to buy a surface or iPad? You are in
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
I can only speak about what I know, so I will reference the (apparently evil IYO) Android platform
I never said Android was evil, nor have I an issue with that platform.
In fact I also own an Android phone I use for testing things...
Where I live, I cannot travel from my home to my work without losing the (supposedly city-wide) crappy 'free' WiFi signal almost as soon as I leave either place.
But mostly people are loading media where they work or live. Point, me.
I have travelled all over the world and not had an issue getting WiFi if I needed it.
Perhaps you should get out more and think about how people really use devices.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Where I live, I cannot travel from my home to my work without losing the (supposedly city-wide) crappy 'free' WiFi signal almost as soon as I leave either place.
But mostly people are loading media where they work or live. Point, me.
I have travelled all over the world and not had an issue getting WiFi if I needed it.
Perhaps you should get out more and think about how people really use devices.
How well does that work for you on road trips? There's only so long that I can linger over a mochachino at Starbucks before going completely mental...and I am absolutely not anal (or, admittedly, organized) enough to pre-plan my entire road trip playlist beforehand! Me, I just pack along extra SD cards with more songs/videos from my library instead...a quick swap and I'm chilling to classic rock instead of alternative, or watching sci-fi instead of comedy.
I can only cite how I use my devices, and AFAIK that's for pretty much the typical things people use devices for: playing music and video, taking and looking at pics and (of course!) playing absorbing little games. Oh, and reading ebooks, although those don't really add to the storage crunch at all, being so relatively tiny.
My phone is used mostly to surf the interweb, youtube, email, twitter (but not FB, eww), etc., and with that, I still typically use well over 2 GB a month of my 5GB plan. I couldn't even imagine what I would be pulling if my music and video came from the cloud instead...yikes.
Oh yes, you definitely don't live in Australia or New Zealand, do you? Friends and I took a trip down that-a-way a couple of years ago, and let me tell you, unless you really like McDonalds and StarryBucks, there's no such thing as free wifi anywhere. Heck, all of the hotels and campsites we stayed at had a charge-by-time or (usually) charge-by-MB access fee to use their WiFi. The airports charged for the wifi, fer chrissake. It really sucked, since I brought some shiny toys along and planned on Skype'ing back home fairly regularly, but we hardly ever could (you know how much data Skype uses? it's goofy) I'm just glad for those SD cards, or we would have gone batty listening to the same 30 albums or so...I know, I know, FWP :)
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
I also have (almost) the entire libraries of every 8-64 bit video game system stored on it.
Including Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX for the 32-bit PlayStation? Those alone are more than a gig each.
Yet that's not true. Not in my case. It might have been true before but it's not true any longer. I tried searching for "App A" in the app store and it prompted me to purchase it. Tech support who I contacted also indicated I would have to re-purchase all the content. Also, even if the apps worked, that would only be a small fraction of my total content. To be fair the tech (and her supervisor) I talked to claimed they did try and make an exception (that the apps and data would be in my download queue if they were available in Country B and I could make a local backup), but when that failed, they told me I was SOL and would have to repurchase as they originally told me.
The registry system already exists, so the bulk associated with it can't be trimmed. The Registry editor only takes 10K on Windows 7; I can't see it taking much more on Windows. Once again, the DirectX framework already exists and I doubt the diagnostic tools take much more space than the framework itself. Just looking at my space analyzer on Windows 7*, the things taking up the most space are the winsxs folders (which hold a million different library versions and probably is not that large on Windows RT as it doesn't have legacy support), the Installer cache, assembly (probably .NET), System32 (drivers, registry, etc), SysWOW64 (probably doesn't exist on WinRT, so [citation needed]), the Microsoft.NET folder, Fonts, and Help. I'd imagine IE also takes a huge chunk, but that lives elsewhere. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if .NET (after things are compiled and optimized, not the installer packages) took most of the space on WinRT outside of Microsoft Office. Since that's a foundation of the "Not Metro" application stack, there's no reducing space there.