So the program would have to be rewritten for the tablet UI? Isn't that a good thing, rather than just another program thrown onto a tablet?
Perhaps, but the argument being made for the Surface Pro is that you can run all that pre-existing WIN32 desktop software unmodified - without the benefits of the tablet UI. So then to say that requiring it to be rewritten to a tablet UI justifies Surface RT - well, you're being less than consistent.
To the extent that support for the 'old' desktop API (which aren't going away, by the way) is a plus for the Surface Pro, those same API's could've been a plus for RT as well - except that Microsoft doesn't want it that way. They want to use Windows 8 to force dev's to rewrite for RT. Of course, they're not beneath providing WIN32 API support for MSOffice when they need a competitive advantage...
There's an obvious reason why Google's doing this. They target the most popular desktop distros and can't be maintaining releases for old distros without a lot of desktop users. Now, if there were a 'standard' Linux API (lumping all the various API's together as something Google could target and all distros could support), this wouldn't be an issue. The same Chrome release for Windows can be used on XP->Win8 (desktop mode). That's why 3rd party dev's target WIN32. That's also why 3rd parties won't (for the most part) target Win8 'metro' - which differs way more from WIN32 than RHEL does from, say, Ubuntu.
As other posts have pointed out, though, Red Hat - or anybody else, for that matter - is free to take the pure open source Chromium and port it to RHEL. That is, until Google decides to target some library that RHEL doesn't provide. Then it's not such a simple matter to Compile and release the latest Chromium source.
Turns out UEFI boot lock isn't the only impediment to other OS's. Ever try setting up a Windows/Linux dual boot on a system with an OEM copy of Windows and a UEFI boot loader - Windows 7 in this case without boot lock 'security'. It's hard - most linux distros can't set it up out of the box, and even those that can require you to be able to boot the installer from the CD/DVD or flash drive in EFI mode - which is iffy, depending on your firmware. It's possible to install in legacy mode - though the system will not be bootable until you 'convert' it to EFI mode. Prior to converting my brand new Linux Mint 14 installation, I was only able to boot into it by loading grub2 from CD and booting it from there.
After just having spent two hideous weekends getting this to work, I am quite a bit less optimistic for the future of Linux on the desktop. Dual boot setups used to be really easy.
That assumes they're not planning on flipping the company in a few years. In that case all long term bets are off, and all they want to do is make the company look good on paper for the next resale. And in my experience, that's the more common case.
Dell may not be a good example of that, since Michael Dell is still involved and presumably still cares about the company that bears his name. But the company I work for has been bought and sold at least 6 or 7 times (most recently last month). And for the first 2 years, the private equity guys talk about how much they 'believe in the business'. After that, every decision makes sense only in the context of a jacked up balance sheet in prep for resale...
Good point. I am a longtime PCLinuxOS fan - primarily for its 'rolling update' policy, but also for the Mandriva-derived configuration tools. Much better than what Ubuntu derived distros have.
But... I just got a new PC with Windows 7 and (non-secure) EFI booting. It seems like only Ubuntu-derived distros know how to set up to be booted on such a system. And it's kind of hit-and-miss with a lot of manual intervention required even at that. Apparently there are more hurdles involved with EFI than just 'turn off secure boot' - a lot more. And there is no consistency between firmware implementations, so no place to go to get a straightforward explanation of what to do. If you're struggling with this too, let me recommend rEFInd - not magic, but its author at least tries his darndest to explain why it's all so hard and what you can do about it. And it works (that helps).
Anyway, I ended up with Mint, and am not thrilled with it. It seems like an okay KDE distro, but not stellar. The online forums seem good, though. I guess I'll give it a fair try (since I don't want to go through all the setup hell again), but installing Linux to co-exist with Windows has become a lot harder, and it's not just because of Windows 8 (but it is largely because of Microsoft having its way with OEM's).
You can compile and run your own apps on it if you happen to have completely rewritten them as metro apps. I wonder whether this jailbreak could unleash a protest movement to enable compiling WIN32 desktop code for ARM. Do the tools even exist for that?
Just because Microsoft wants to force-feed their phone/tablet ecosystem - and are willing to screw win32 developers to do it - doesn't mean there aren't plenty of win32 dev's with code out there they'd like to port. Microsoft should've provide a way to either make that code runnable in desktop mode on ARM or to minimally rewrite it to a metro wrapper that closes some security holes, etc, but allows an upgrade path. Maybe a popular revolt would do the trick.
Seriously, the attempt to deprecate desktop mode in Windows 8 is its biggest shortcoming - and I say that having just happily bought a new Windows 7 desktop yesterday (to run Linux on, but hey...). But apparently the old monopoly magic is gonna make Windows 8 succeed on PC's. Not so much on tablets.
I think this whole thing's a bit of a red herring. Yes, AIG paid back their bailout money with interest. But if I remember correctly, the government made good on all the AIG insured mortgage backed securities as part of the bank bailouts in addition to bailing out AIG itself. I could be wrong about that, but there was so much cronyism going on in the TARP process that it's safe to assume there's some bait-and-switch going on in the repayment process.
The legacy driver hasn't made the jump to the new xorg that Ubuntu included in their latest system. My FX5200 is no longer supported under Ubuntu without back-loading xorg. Pity, since the driver supports it fine. I've put off the switch to UBU 12.10 because of that. If the driver were open source, it could probably be easily adapted to work with the xorg update - but nVidia doesn't feel like it, so no dice.
Not to mention that Microsoft is restricting the Chrome experience on Win8 Metro by denying access to API's. Exactly the same thing. And disallowing any other apps beyond MSOffice from running in desktop mode on ARM.
That's the real question. Is the ability to disable secure boot on X86 just a temporary concession to corporations that would refuse to buy new computers without it? Once XP and Windows 7 work their way out of the corporate infrastructure, will Windows certified X86 machines still be required (or even allowed) to support disabling secure boot. If there's some promise to that effect, then fine. But I don't know of any.
Also, if ARM ever supplants X86 in corporate settings, then all bets are off. There is no viable commodity marketplace for non-microsoft, non-apple X86 systems. We Linux users are lucky that commodity hardware can run our preferred OS. If the commodity X86 market were ever to dry up, leaving only locked down ARM stuff, we'd be out of luck. Yeah, there'd be stuff built for Android, I guess, but that assumes that Android succeeds at commodity levels in all the form factors we want to run Linux on. And that all those Android vendors don't lock down their systems too...
I guess there'd always be the niche Linux only hardware vendors. But they tend to build high-margin non-commodity stuff. I personally like running Linux on 'outdated' hardware that does everything I need it to do for a few hundred bucks. There exists a market for that stuff today, and OEM's even make money selling it. That could go away pretty easily.
Actually, tablets might end up taking a big chunk of the laptop/netbook market. I'm happy enough with my ancient Nexus One to have lost all interest in buying a laptop. My 8 year old desktop is getting a little rough around the edges, so I'm thinking of replacing it... with a new desktop. It'll be fast and cheap and run Linux (as) flawlessly (as possible), and I'll use it when I actually sit down at the computer. On my couch, I'll use my new Nexus 4 (if it ever arrives). And maybe some day, I'll get a cheap Nexus 7 - which is the first tablet I'd consider, since it is the first 7 incher to go multi-user.
They don't have to support old IE versions - they're in the fortunate position of being in the early part of their growth curve. They don't have legacy installations to support, and will be kept busy for years to come supporting the customers whose infrastructure is a good fit for them - or those who are willing to install Chrome alongside their legacy IE browsers, where necessary.
Yeah, kind of. Google apps are web based, and the ability to work on a web based app without a connection to the server is new - certainly for anything as complex as an office documents app. May not have been invented by Google, but it certainly wasn't an obvious piece of cake. I don't know that Office 365 can do it (without a locally installed copy of Office).
It wasn't just the competitive upgrades. They also struck deals with OEM's so that, for a while at least, it was hard to find a Windows PC that didn't come with MSOffice 'for free'. That was the point where the company I worked for switched from WordPerfect to Word. And people complained for the next 6 months about the lack of WordPerfect's show codes feature. Of course, they eventually got used to Word, but victory didn't come because of quality or desire - it was monopoly bundling deals pure and simple.
Since he and his site were significant parts of the hype in creating the bubble in the first place, It's not surprising he knew it was going to burst...
It's one of the reasons Apple wouldn't accept Google's conditions for adding turn-by-turn navigation to the old Google Maps app.
I'm assuming the reason for Apple's reason is that they want the access to the information for themselves. That said, making this stuff truly anonymous is a good thing.
I'm in the market for a new desktop PC. Currently have an old nVidia card, and haven't had any serious problems.
I don't do gaming, but love my 3D desktop effects. The new machine's for Android development. My old one doesn't run eclipse very well, and the latest Android emulators are downright painfully slow on it. But other than that, the box has served me well for 8 years, and it was a cheapo AMD box back then (have since added the cheap nVidia card and some memory). So, I think I'm looking for a fairly cheap desktop today. Fast intel or amd processor, but nothing fancy. Most of the cheap boxes these days seem to come with AMD/ATI combos, but I've been afraid to go ATI based on the driver horror stories. Not too many cheap boxes seem to come with nVidea cards any more - but I also hear good things about the intel video drivers.
Obviously, But my primary point is that the cheap laptop is not a full replacement for the 7" tablet. That's why you buy the tablet in addition to the cheap laptop - or better yet, a cheap desktop with a cheap big monitor and mouse. Just because it's now possible to do all possible things with a Surface Pro, doesn't make it desirable. I'd rather do software development on a desktop system any day, with a real keyboard and mouse. If I need to travel with my dev system, then okay, I'll compromise and make it a laptop - though that's less than ideal for development. But I see no scenario where it makes sense for my dev system to be a tablet. As the original comment conceded, a Nexus 7 makes more sense for couch browsing, or even email when travelling. It's cheap and portable with good battery life - and that's what a tablet should be. The Surface Pro remains an impressive piece of hardware that has very little reason to exist.
5) Can run touch apps and browsing for couch use, although an additional cheap 7" tablet might be good for couch, bed and bathroom use.
That pretty much sums it up. The Surface Pro is usable as a tablet, but not really handy as one. Why not just buy a cheap laptop. It would be as powerful as the Surface, have much more storage, and the savings would pay for the Nexus 7 you admit you really ought to have for the times you really want a tablet.
I suspect...it runs much faster than win7 on lower end hardware really means it boots faster, since Win8 doesn't routinely boot at all - just reloads a pre-booted memory image. Still, that probably makes it feel like it runs faster, since the main 'slowness' of Windows is that it seems to be ready to work when it really hasn't finished booting.
The obvious part is that you need some kind of identifiable gesture to unlock the phone - otherwise it would unlock itself spontaneously when sitting in your pocket. You've suggested several different gestures, but they're all the same obvious 'invention'. And once a particular gesture is in common use, it becomes part of the 'language' of dealing with touchscreen devices. Same applies to 'pinch to zoom'.
These standard vocabulary 'words' of touchscreen interaction are the exact equivalent of the universal 'walk' symbol or the stop sign, or the location of the gas a brake pedals in a car. For modern life to work, we have to agree on common standards. If you start granting monopolies on those things, there is chaos. If you deem these things worthy of patent protection, then they need to be FRAND patents. Perversely, however, the standards required to actually make a phone call on a cellphone are FRAND, but the trivial standard on how to interact with the device are not. So you have Apple trying to make a deal with Motorola on the standards that allow them to make a cellphone in the first place, while reserving for themselves the standards on how to unlock a cellphone display. This is insane.
The problem with non-distro repositories (or downloaded.deb's or.rpm's) is that most packages have dependencies on specific versions of many libraries. Unless you're using the repository for the exact version of your distro that you're running, it's unlikely that other packages will install or work reliably on your system.
Windows and MacOS provide much better backward binary compatibility in their system libraries so that you can build to an old version of the OS and install on anything up to the latest version (though many apps come with updated 'system' libraries just in case). Unfortunately in Linux, that's not usually true. If an app is statically linked to just about everything except maybe the CLIB and X libraries, you can hope for a generic package from a third party site to install (and actually work) on your system. Otherwise, you're better off using your distro's repository - or maybe building from source. It's far from ideal, and that's why there are next to no 3rd party apps. Luckily, there are enough 'first party' apps that most users these days can live happily in their distros' unlocked, but nonetheless practically walled gardens.
The only way Microsoft could enter the tablet market this late and possibly succeed is to offer something nobody else can offer and that some people (think they) need. Namely MSOffice. They probably did a quick and dirty port to WIN32 on ARM (y'know, the API that dare not speak its name, but remains the basis for Microsoft's monopolies). So the huge multi-gigabyte app designed for desktops and laptops with hundreds of gigabytes gets shoved onto the Surface.
As many have said, it's not that bad, since you can buy an SD card, etc. But they're kind of bastardizing what a tablet is and is for by doing this. A tablet (post Kindle fire, at least) is a cheap data consumption device. A notebook is a small desktop computer. They used to be quite different, but Microsoft's approach to hybridizing them is removing the biggest plus of tablets (cheap and simple) without really offering the biggest plus of notebooks (full featured and keyboard-bassed). It's not a bad device, and lots of people will shell out for it, but it's no stocking-stuffer either.
There are some parallels with netbooks here. Nimble, cheap competition crops up, and Microsoft kills it with a loss leader that 'can run all your Windows apps'. It's not quite the same, because this thing can't run all your windows apps. But it apparently can run MSOffice. I don't know whether it's a loss leader or not. It could be intended to limit the ARM tablet threat to the more profitable Intel tablet and desktop market. Who knows. But Microsoft had to do something to stay relevant. Personally,. I'd prefer a cheap, light Nexus 7 on my coffee table or backpack and my desktop system on the desk where it belongs...
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So the program would have to be rewritten for the tablet UI? Isn't that a good thing, rather than just another program thrown onto a tablet?
Perhaps, but the argument being made for the Surface Pro is that you can run all that pre-existing WIN32 desktop software unmodified - without the benefits of the tablet UI. So then to say that requiring it to be rewritten to a tablet UI justifies Surface RT - well, you're being less than consistent.
To the extent that support for the 'old' desktop API (which aren't going away, by the way) is a plus for the Surface Pro, those same API's could've been a plus for RT as well - except that Microsoft doesn't want it that way. They want to use Windows 8 to force dev's to rewrite for RT. Of course, they're not beneath providing WIN32 API support for MSOffice when they need a competitive advantage...
There's an obvious reason why Google's doing this. They target the most popular desktop distros and can't be maintaining releases for old distros without a lot of desktop users. Now, if there were a 'standard' Linux API (lumping all the various API's together as something Google could target and all distros could support), this wouldn't be an issue. The same Chrome release for Windows can be used on XP->Win8 (desktop mode). That's why 3rd party dev's target WIN32. That's also why 3rd parties won't (for the most part) target Win8 'metro' - which differs way more from WIN32 than RHEL does from, say, Ubuntu.
As other posts have pointed out, though, Red Hat - or anybody else, for that matter - is free to take the pure open source Chromium and port it to RHEL. That is, until Google decides to target some library that RHEL doesn't provide. Then it's not such a simple matter to Compile and release the latest Chromium source.
Turns out UEFI boot lock isn't the only impediment to other OS's. Ever try setting up a Windows/Linux dual boot on a system with an OEM copy of Windows and a UEFI boot loader - Windows 7 in this case without boot lock 'security'. It's hard - most linux distros can't set it up out of the box, and even those that can require you to be able to boot the installer from the CD/DVD or flash drive in EFI mode - which is iffy, depending on your firmware. It's possible to install in legacy mode - though the system will not be bootable until you 'convert' it to EFI mode. Prior to converting my brand new Linux Mint 14 installation, I was only able to boot into it by loading grub2 from CD and booting it from there.
After just having spent two hideous weekends getting this to work, I am quite a bit less optimistic for the future of Linux on the desktop. Dual boot setups used to be really easy.
That assumes they're not planning on flipping the company in a few years. In that case all long term bets are off, and all they want to do is make the company look good on paper for the next resale. And in my experience, that's the more common case.
Dell may not be a good example of that, since Michael Dell is still involved and presumably still cares about the company that bears his name. But the company I work for has been bought and sold at least 6 or 7 times (most recently last month). And for the first 2 years, the private equity guys talk about how much they 'believe in the business'. After that, every decision makes sense only in the context of a jacked up balance sheet in prep for resale...
Good point. I am a longtime PCLinuxOS fan - primarily for its 'rolling update' policy, but also for the Mandriva-derived configuration tools. Much better than what Ubuntu derived distros have.
But... I just got a new PC with Windows 7 and (non-secure) EFI booting. It seems like only Ubuntu-derived distros know how to set up to be booted on such a system. And it's kind of hit-and-miss with a lot of manual intervention required even at that. Apparently there are more hurdles involved with EFI than just 'turn off secure boot' - a lot more. And there is no consistency between firmware implementations, so no place to go to get a straightforward explanation of what to do. If you're struggling with this too, let me recommend rEFInd - not magic, but its author at least tries his darndest to explain why it's all so hard and what you can do about it. And it works (that helps).
Anyway, I ended up with Mint, and am not thrilled with it. It seems like an okay KDE distro, but not stellar. The online forums seem good, though. I guess I'll give it a fair try (since I don't want to go through all the setup hell again), but installing Linux to co-exist with Windows has become a lot harder, and it's not just because of Windows 8 (but it is largely because of Microsoft having its way with OEM's).
You can compile and run your own apps on it if you happen to have completely rewritten them as metro apps. I wonder whether this jailbreak could unleash a protest movement to enable compiling WIN32 desktop code for ARM. Do the tools even exist for that?
Just because Microsoft wants to force-feed their phone/tablet ecosystem - and are willing to screw win32 developers to do it - doesn't mean there aren't plenty of win32 dev's with code out there they'd like to port. Microsoft should've provide a way to either make that code runnable in desktop mode on ARM or to minimally rewrite it to a metro wrapper that closes some security holes, etc, but allows an upgrade path. Maybe a popular revolt would do the trick.
Seriously, the attempt to deprecate desktop mode in Windows 8 is its biggest shortcoming - and I say that having just happily bought a new Windows 7 desktop yesterday (to run Linux on, but hey...). But apparently the old monopoly magic is gonna make Windows 8 succeed on PC's. Not so much on tablets.
I think this whole thing's a bit of a red herring. Yes, AIG paid back their bailout money with interest. But if I remember correctly, the government made good on all the AIG insured mortgage backed securities as part of the bank bailouts in addition to bailing out AIG itself. I could be wrong about that, but there was so much cronyism going on in the TARP process that it's safe to assume there's some bait-and-switch going on in the repayment process.
The legacy driver hasn't made the jump to the new xorg that Ubuntu included in their latest system. My FX5200 is no longer supported under Ubuntu without back-loading xorg. Pity, since the driver supports it fine. I've put off the switch to UBU 12.10 because of that. If the driver were open source, it could probably be easily adapted to work with the xorg update - but nVidia doesn't feel like it, so no dice.
Not to mention that Microsoft is restricting the Chrome experience on Win8 Metro by denying access to API's. Exactly the same thing. And disallowing any other apps beyond MSOffice from running in desktop mode on ARM.
That's the real question. Is the ability to disable secure boot on X86 just a temporary concession to corporations that would refuse to buy new computers without it? Once XP and Windows 7 work their way out of the corporate infrastructure, will Windows certified X86 machines still be required (or even allowed) to support disabling secure boot. If there's some promise to that effect, then fine. But I don't know of any.
Also, if ARM ever supplants X86 in corporate settings, then all bets are off. There is no viable commodity marketplace for non-microsoft, non-apple X86 systems. We Linux users are lucky that commodity hardware can run our preferred OS. If the commodity X86 market were ever to dry up, leaving only locked down ARM stuff, we'd be out of luck. Yeah, there'd be stuff built for Android, I guess, but that assumes that Android succeeds at commodity levels in all the form factors we want to run Linux on. And that all those Android vendors don't lock down their systems too...
I guess there'd always be the niche Linux only hardware vendors. But they tend to build high-margin non-commodity stuff. I personally like running Linux on 'outdated' hardware that does everything I need it to do for a few hundred bucks. There exists a market for that stuff today, and OEM's even make money selling it. That could go away pretty easily.
Actually, tablets might end up taking a big chunk of the laptop/netbook market. I'm happy enough with my ancient Nexus One to have lost all interest in buying a laptop. My 8 year old desktop is getting a little rough around the edges, so I'm thinking of replacing it... with a new desktop. It'll be fast and cheap and run Linux (as) flawlessly (as possible), and I'll use it when I actually sit down at the computer. On my couch, I'll use my new Nexus 4 (if it ever arrives). And maybe some day, I'll get a cheap Nexus 7 - which is the first tablet I'd consider, since it is the first 7 incher to go multi-user.
They don't have to support old IE versions - they're in the fortunate position of being in the early part of their growth curve. They don't have legacy installations to support, and will be kept busy for years to come supporting the customers whose infrastructure is a good fit for them - or those who are willing to install Chrome alongside their legacy IE browsers, where necessary.
Really? This is a Google invention?
Yeah, kind of. Google apps are web based, and the ability to work on a web based app without a connection to the server is new - certainly for anything as complex as an office documents app. May not have been invented by Google, but it certainly wasn't an obvious piece of cake. I don't know that Office 365 can do it (without a locally installed copy of Office).
It wasn't just the competitive upgrades. They also struck deals with OEM's so that, for a while at least, it was hard to find a Windows PC that didn't come with MSOffice 'for free'. That was the point where the company I worked for switched from WordPerfect to Word. And people complained for the next 6 months about the lack of WordPerfect's show codes feature. Of course, they eventually got used to Word, but victory didn't come because of quality or desire - it was monopoly bundling deals pure and simple.
Since he and his site were significant parts of the hype in creating the bubble in the first place, It's not surprising he knew it was going to burst...
I assume you run Linux - otherwise, your comment isn't relevant. So do you use the closed or open source ATI driver?
It's one of the reasons Apple wouldn't accept Google's conditions for adding turn-by-turn navigation to the old Google Maps app.
I'm assuming the reason for Apple's reason is that they want the access to the information for themselves. That said, making this stuff truly anonymous is a good thing.
I'm in the market for a new desktop PC. Currently have an old nVidia card, and haven't had any serious problems.
I don't do gaming, but love my 3D desktop effects. The new machine's for Android development. My old one doesn't run eclipse very well, and the latest Android emulators are downright painfully slow on it. But other than that, the box has served me well for 8 years, and it was a cheapo AMD box back then (have since added the cheap nVidia card and some memory). So, I think I'm looking for a fairly cheap desktop today. Fast intel or amd processor, but nothing fancy. Most of the cheap boxes these days seem to come with AMD/ATI combos, but I've been afraid to go ATI based on the driver horror stories. Not too many cheap boxes seem to come with nVidea cards any more - but I also hear good things about the intel video drivers.
Suggestions...?
Obviously, But my primary point is that the cheap laptop is not a full replacement for the 7" tablet. That's why you buy the tablet in addition to the cheap laptop - or better yet, a cheap desktop with a cheap big monitor and mouse. Just because it's now possible to do all possible things with a Surface Pro, doesn't make it desirable. I'd rather do software development on a desktop system any day, with a real keyboard and mouse. If I need to travel with my dev system, then okay, I'll compromise and make it a laptop - though that's less than ideal for development. But I see no scenario where it makes sense for my dev system to be a tablet. As the original comment conceded, a Nexus 7 makes more sense for couch browsing, or even email when travelling. It's cheap and portable with good battery life - and that's what a tablet should be. The Surface Pro remains an impressive piece of hardware that has very little reason to exist.
5) Can run touch apps and browsing for couch use, although an additional cheap 7" tablet might be good for couch, bed and bathroom use.
That pretty much sums it up. The Surface Pro is usable as a tablet, but not really handy as one. Why not just buy a cheap laptop. It would be as powerful as the Surface, have much more storage, and the savings would pay for the Nexus 7 you admit you really ought to have for the times you really want a tablet.
I suspect ...it runs much faster than win7 on lower end hardware really means it boots faster, since Win8 doesn't routinely boot at all - just reloads a pre-booted memory image. Still, that probably makes it feel like it runs faster, since the main 'slowness' of Windows is that it seems to be ready to work when it really hasn't finished booting.
The obvious part is that you need some kind of identifiable gesture to unlock the phone - otherwise it would unlock itself spontaneously when sitting in your pocket. You've suggested several different gestures, but they're all the same obvious 'invention'. And once a particular gesture is in common use, it becomes part of the 'language' of dealing with touchscreen devices. Same applies to 'pinch to zoom'.
These standard vocabulary 'words' of touchscreen interaction are the exact equivalent of the universal 'walk' symbol or the stop sign, or the location of the gas a brake pedals in a car. For modern life to work, we have to agree on common standards. If you start granting monopolies on those things, there is chaos. If you deem these things worthy of patent protection, then they need to be FRAND patents. Perversely, however, the standards required to actually make a phone call on a cellphone are FRAND, but the trivial standard on how to interact with the device are not. So you have Apple trying to make a deal with Motorola on the standards that allow them to make a cellphone in the first place, while reserving for themselves the standards on how to unlock a cellphone display. This is insane.
So if you show the whole page 'flipping' and not just the corner, you're okay? This is all beyond ridiculous.
The problem with non-distro repositories (or downloaded .deb's or .rpm's) is that most packages have dependencies on specific versions of many libraries. Unless you're using the repository for the exact version of your distro that you're running, it's unlikely that other packages will install or work reliably on your system.
Windows and MacOS provide much better backward binary compatibility in their system libraries so that you can build to an old version of the OS and install on anything up to the latest version (though many apps come with updated 'system' libraries just in case). Unfortunately in Linux, that's not usually true. If an app is statically linked to just about everything except maybe the CLIB and X libraries, you can hope for a generic package from a third party site to install (and actually work) on your system. Otherwise, you're better off using your distro's repository - or maybe building from source. It's far from ideal, and that's why there are next to no 3rd party apps. Luckily, there are enough 'first party' apps that most users these days can live happily in their distros' unlocked, but nonetheless practically walled gardens.
The only way Microsoft could enter the tablet market this late and possibly succeed is to offer something nobody else can offer and that some people (think they) need. Namely MSOffice. They probably did a quick and dirty port to WIN32 on ARM (y'know, the API that dare not speak its name, but remains the basis for Microsoft's monopolies). So the huge multi-gigabyte app designed for desktops and laptops with hundreds of gigabytes gets shoved onto the Surface.
As many have said, it's not that bad, since you can buy an SD card, etc. But they're kind of bastardizing what a tablet is and is for by doing this. A tablet (post Kindle fire, at least) is a cheap data consumption device. A notebook is a small desktop computer. They used to be quite different, but Microsoft's approach to hybridizing them is removing the biggest plus of tablets (cheap and simple) without really offering the biggest plus of notebooks (full featured and keyboard-bassed). It's not a bad device, and lots of people will shell out for it, but it's no stocking-stuffer either.
There are some parallels with netbooks here. Nimble, cheap competition crops up, and Microsoft kills it with a loss leader that 'can run all your Windows apps'. It's not quite the same, because this thing can't run all your windows apps. But it apparently can run MSOffice. I don't know whether it's a loss leader or not. It could be intended to limit the ARM tablet threat to the more profitable Intel tablet and desktop market. Who knows. But Microsoft had to do something to stay relevant. Personally,. I'd prefer a cheap, light Nexus 7 on my coffee table or backpack and my desktop system on the desk where it belongs...