Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft To Start Dumping Surface RT To Schools For $199
onyxruby writes "In a move that will remind many of Apple in the '80s, Microsoft is going to start dumping Surface RT computers to educational institutions. In an effort to try to gain mindshare for their struggling Surface RT platform, Microsoft is giving away 10,000 Surface RTs to teachers through the International Society for Technology in Education. They're also preparing to offer $199 Surface RTs to K12 and higher education institutions. The strategy of flooding the educational market was quite successful for Apple. Unfortunately for Microsoft, today's computers require management and the Surface RT presents significant management challenges in terms of the inability to join the computer to a domain or available management tools."
Unfortunately, Surface RT requires that secure boot must not be possible to disable. The only way to get Linux on these things is to install an additional key or an approved boot loader, and that can be very complicated.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
+1 funny. The Apple II a dud? It was sales of the Apple II that made Apple the first personal computer company to reach $1 billion in annual sales in 1982.
Especially since Linux drivers for a Windows tablet thats apparently designed be bootloader-locked aren't going to be forthcoming.
But it does say it wasn't a dud.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Except that there's no Outlook. Try getting business done without that.
Actually, the latest version of Office RT (2013) does include Outlook.
The big thing Apple had going for it compared to Atari and Commodore was expansion. They had slots that you could put cards in that allowed it to do things:
Serial cards (RS-232 serial interface)
Parallel cards (Centronics/IEEE 1284 parallel interface)
Multifunction I/O cards
Internal modems
80 column (or more) text cards (e.g., Videx)
PAL Color graphics cards (required for color graphics in early European Apples)
RGB cards
Floppy disk controllers
Hard disk controllers
Network adapters
Co-processor cards
Memory expansion cards
Accelerators
Realtime clock cards
Music and sound cards
Miscellaneous cards
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
All executables on Windows 8 RT must be signed before they're allowed to run. You won't even get an "are you sure" dialog box. Thus no software is possible without prior permission from Microsoft. Sure you may have some nice byte code emulator but it's useless if you can't get it signed.