Funny how the non-computer folks I know who have an ipad (even my mother, who's never touched a computer before in her life) loves their ipads.
It's not funny at all. iDevices were designed for this exactly group of customers - those who never owned a computer; perhaps older people, perhaps people without a need for a computer; perhaps those who are too young to reach the keyboard. The simplistic interface of iDevices is perfect for all of them.
I work with computers for many years. I don't have an iDevice and I see no reason to get one for myself. My parents have Nexus 7 and they are happy with it just like your parents are happy with an iPad. (I bet they wouldn't know the difference.) Apple always understood the recipe for happiness: make the device reliable, so that it doesn't talk gibberish to you (IRQL_LESS_OR_EQUAL - huh?) and make the device's operation simple enough. Microsoft never followed those rules; they went for complexity and rich functionality. We needed that too; but that had to be reserved to professionals, and even those needed an extensive IT support. Your common Windows can at any time throw a notification at you that you don't understand and cannot handle. This is not how you make tablets.
Where would you get the driver for a very specific build of iOS or WinRT or Android? How would you install one? Without a special driver many common USB devices will not work.
This is possible only on the x86 tablet that runs Win8. But that tablet is already huge, heavy and power-hungry. You might want to just call it a netbook with a Bluetooth keyboard. That thing is not a tablet that people will be buying; even MS does not count on that - that's why they made WinRT.
In any case, 3rd party drivers are an excellent way to introduce instability and unpredictability into your old and boringly stable tablet. Plug mouse and TV tuner at the same time and watch it bluescreen:-)
I think if many people who sneer at the free speech of the US were to travel to Iran and start talking about how Mohammed liked to butt fuck little boys they'd find out just what intolerance is.
Iran is a theocracy, not a democracy - and they never professed otherwise. A crime of blasphemy and the punishment for it are written in their laws, for everyone to see.
The USA claims to be a democracy, and it supports free speech in foreign countries. It works like this:
"Mr. Khan, you should be free to speak your mind in Pakistan and be free of intimidation!" - "And, by the way, Mr. Khan, if you dare to come here you may not speak. We support freedom of speech only where and when it suits us, and we decide what speech should be free and what speech should get you arrested."
It's called "double standards," and the USA is well known for using them at every opportunity.
If this administration does not have control of the levers of government who ordered that?
It was someone who knew who the guy is and what his political views are. This can't be just discovered while clearing him for travel. This means he has a thick dossier on him; his speeches were translated and analyzed, and someone made a decision to tag him as an "enemy of the people." Where would such a dossier be? At the State Department most likely, or at CIA as a remote second possibility.
Why do you ask? Anyway, the Assad's regime is firmly in the "ultimately abandoned" territory, with only the remaining palace guards (his troops) willing to die for him. Assad will fall as soon as he runs out of loyal troops or equipment or simply territory.
Among the many other problems already listed is whether or not paintballs will pop at 2.7 degrees kelvin.
If you are going to apply the paint that far away from the Sun then yes, it will be a concern. Obviously, liquid paints will not work since only liquid Helium will be still liquid at that point. So you will need powder paints. The next question is how do you hold the paint there. Electric charge would be one interesting method, but will it last? Without some sort of adhesion the only force you have is gravity, and gravity of a small asteroid is also small. At least there is no atmosphere at that time to blow the paint away. (But as the asteroid comes closer, it is to be expected that the outer ice starts evaporating, and that will blow the paint off the surface.)
All in all, I think this proposal is very hard to do technically. Just the amount of paint that we need to deliver would be astronomical. Forget the "size of Texas." If the asteroid is only 1 mile in diameter, it has surface of 87 million square feet. Let's say you need 50 grams of powder to "paint" one square foot. (I think it's on the low side.) The total mass of powder that is necessary to cover the asteroid will be then 4350 kg, or about 4.5 tonnes. Delivering that much mass that far from Earth is a challenge that is entirely comparable to delivering several ion thrusters along with nuclear-powered (RTG or fission or fusion) energy sources for them - esp. if we don't need much of shielding. Considering that the paint gives you zero control, and can actually make things worse, there is no advantage in using that method. No politician will go ahead with this plan if he can be blamed (correctly) for causing an asteroid that was going to miss Earth to not miss it.
It's not about any of those things. It's about protection from foreign states.
This is patently untrue, if you only read what founders said on the subject. But leaving that alone, what if the government becomes a foreign state to the rest of the country? What if the country has no control over who runs the government; what if the country has no control where its army fights or does not fight, and against who; what if the country pays ever-increasing taxes to the government which then uses it as the government pleases. What then? This is not a contrived situation; most governments, right before they are overthrown by the angry mob, decay into such a world unto itself, detached from the reality and ultimately abandoned by everyone - including the palace guards.
Can we please get rid of this obnoxious and worse, ineffective legacy of George W Bush?
The democrat known as Obama says no, we must keep the TSA. If Romney becomes the next President I do not expect any changes either. Both D and R play the same game and implement the same policy.
Police procedure has become an instrument of punishment which can be handed out at any time.
That is the dividing line between the nation of laws and the police state. The USA always had small-town Sheriffs who abused their power against "undesirable" visitors. But today a SWAT team can throw you on the ground, shock you with a Taser, put a barrel of the gun to your head, and after they are done you will be glad that they haven't carted you away. Plenty of SWAT raids are done on wrong information, just because the police couldn't be bothered to knock on the door and ask - or even to check the street address. And, FSM forbid, if you mistake the police for burglars and try to defend yourself... your life as a law-abiding citizen effectively ends then. For some, their entire life ended at that point. If that's not a police state then what is?
It's OK, as long as everyone has a gun they will prevent the government from overstepping its bounds.
The threshold of the 2A is intentionally very high. Nobody will rise up against the government until the people feel their own lives threatened - and become willing to take lives of others to protect themselves. When the government starts running death squads then perhaps we can revisit the issue. Until then all weapons in people's hands are on safe.
There is yet another aspect of this problem. As they say, every nation gets the government it deserves. The majority of the voting public is ignorant of the issues and is unwilling to support candidates who are radical enough (Ron Paul is a faint approximation of a real radical.) As result, the ruling class is using the voters as a rubber stamp on their policies. Voters have complete control over the elections - and they do nothing; they continue to choose between two equivalent candidates. This is because the US population wants this kind of the government. It does not want freedom because it comes with a very real chance of dying in a ditch. It wants to be taken care of. Both D and R want a strong, large government; fractions that argue for a small government and smaller taxes still have no political weight.
The settings that are synced are: Personalization, Accessibility, Language Settings, Application Settings, Explorer Settings, Windows Settings, Credentials.
Microsoft have never had first-mover advantage in anything. It's never bothered them before.
They were the dominating force in computing, that's why they got away with such behavior. But now Apple and Google are just as large as Microsoft, and they have a very solid, multi-year foothold. Furthermore, everyone and their dog believes that Microsoft is not a player in the mobile market. They have a good reason to think so. MS's twitching in this area are not sufficient to convince Jane Doe to buy an experimental WinRT tablet instead of a fashionable iPad, just like what all other girls in the class have. That's more than 50% of the customer base, mind you.
99.99% of the time people have one application taking up their entire monitor.
Out of tens of people who I know only one consistently does that. He has poor eyesight, so he configures his desktop for the largest font he can scare up, and that requires maximized windows (and a huge monitor) to see the application.
Other people have overlapping windows. This actually was the winner concept that elevated Windows over competing software like DesqView (which was a window switcher in DOS.) People love to layer things and move things as they go about their business. One of the reasons for that is they see what other work items are on their desk to be done.
There are 2 exceptions: The first is geeks who like to have all these widgets all over their screen because multitasking is cool and having lots of gauges is cool.
Isn't that a bit patronizing toward people who truly need to see time in several time zones, for example, or monitor the weather because they work in the field, or who look at security cameras, or who control machinery? Not all gadgets and windows are just "cool" - most are necessary, for one reason or another.
But when I see some supposed power-user who is editing code while only looking at 15 lines of text, I think them a fool not a power user. You don't need to have the other 2/3 of your screen telling you the weather, the CPU core temperature, and the latest Slashdot headline. That's inefficient
But who are you to tell complete strangers what they should do with their lives? I would love to grab a whip and use it on the crowds that sit on Twitter or Facebook most of their life - but I cannot because in this society (which we call civilized) it is not appropriate.
I understand that some managers are excellent slave drivers. They want you to open and maximize your MSVC++ IDE and pound keys from 9am to 5pm non-stop. But most people cannot work like that. They want distractions - that's how they relax from the monotony of work. They look at Slashdot feeds, they look at gallery of little photos, they listen to music in a little player in the corner, they have a few chat windows opened (often with coworkers, for work-related reasons,) they have Outlook open with current tasks and new emails. There are many good reasons why 100% of business workflow on PCs, per my observation, is based on overlapping windows - even though one may be maximized on occasion. Single purpose kiosks, like terminals at stores, are the only exceptions that I know of. Even at the bank tellers have multiple windows for different purposes.
You are also forgetting one important development that occurred in last couple of decades. That development is called wide screens and screen resolution and screen size. I have a single 25" monitor in front of me. My FF window only occupies about 40% of it. The rest is other windows. Why? Because it is pointless to maximize FF; I will not see more text than there is. I cannot read from a 25" screen that is full of text. I want my information in pieces that I can handle. This is even more so for MSVC. Why would you want to maximize the MSVC IDE window? It allows you to see 250-character long lines of code; but you are not supposed to write such long lines anyway. There is a little pane for the solution explorer, but often you don't even need that. Why would you stare at the white screen with a smattering of text in a corner? I prefer to have the desktop background there, or email, or something else that is at least marginally useful - as opposed to the white expanse that only shines into my eyes.
As a user of Photoshop, GIMP, and a Blender, I would love to try versions of those apps that work that way.
They already work that way. Just maximize the window:-)
But Metro does something else that is wrecking the control of the application. Metro is for tablets, and so Metro depends on gestures. However mouse + keyboard control is not suitable for gestures (you cannot drag with a
RT's ONLY chance for success is from these casual users because it will not come from the tech savvy or business community.
Perhaps that is true. However casual users are heavily influenced by educated, power users. In fact, casual users ask for a recommendation; they don't just rush to Fry's to buy whatever they can grab - not for $599, at least.
For example, my parents have an XP box (for legacy reasons.) They came to me with a need, and walked away with Nexus 7. Not only the price is reasonable and the OS - recent. I have another Android tablet, so if they have any issues with theirs I can advise over Skype. That's the same reason why MS Windows and MS Office proliferated like kudzu. Now MS finds themselves to be an outsider. It's not nice out there.
On the subject of integration, most people do not need to transfer documents from the tablet to the PC. Much of the target audience for tablets doesn't even have PC anymore. But if you want to, there are tons of services that specialize in exactly this (Dropbox, SkyDrive, all Google services.) There is very little to integrate. And if you are an audiophile with 100,000 audio files then chances are you are already on the iPod+iTunes needle. WinRT has no clearly defined audience, and MS doesn't seem to care to define it. There is not a single social group that MS can address and say "This device is for you!"
Casual users will probably love it, especially if they have Windows 8.
Metro start screen is just like Android's application pages, only with ugly colors. Why would a Win8 sufferer pick the same malady for his tablet? Would you, an Android user, launch your frequently used applications from application pages - and not from the icon strip, the start screen, or the "Start" menu in ICS? Win8 takes away all these methods of simple customization, so that you have all your essential software (email, chat, news, browser, books, etc.) where you want them, and not among hundreds of other "tiles".
iPads and Android tablets already perfectly integrate into a Windows ecosystem. Most importantly, they support MS Exchange to the point that you can schedule meetings from them. For most people that's all they need.
Keep in mind though, that apps made for windows 8 "metro-style" will be compatible with windows RT. So the ecosystem will build up anyway.
Now you need to answer a different question. Why would anyone develop for Metro? What is the advantage of having one or several huge monitors dedicated to one application? Even the IE in Metro mode looks ugly as sin, to the point of being useless. Who would want a browser that uses "magic spots" to reveal menus and that would hide every control in existence at the first opportunity? Can you imagine Photoshop in Metro mode? Or SolidWorks? PC software is not for playing around, it's for doing work, and Metro is not helping there at all.
Metro applications, necessarily simplistic, make sense on a tablet. However tablets do not benefit from x86 - to the point that hardly any of them use x86 today. A Metro developer would be burdened with supporting his software on platforms that generate no sales.
Light bulbs are easily removable, and there can't be that many of them in a rented apartment - or even in a rented home. Take them with you, since you will need them at the new place anyway, and leave the old ones (that you saved) in their place.
In your example if the satellite has a 20 dBi antenna then the path loss, excluding atmospheric losses, would be 155 dB. If the transmitter has +53 dBm output then the receiver's input will be about -102 dBm. This is not a lot, but receivers of a reasonable size do work with these signals. (The gain is not as much of a problem as the noise.)
Why would they use a standard, unmodified BT client for this? All they want is the address of everyone in the swarm.
You are talking about the monitor. Indeed, the monitor doesn't have to declare available blocks. But I'm talking about a casual BT user. Here is a quote from one of higher level posts:
By participating in a swarm, you've made your information available to anyone else who joins that swarm.
That was about a casual user who disloses his IP address to his peers. If one of those peers is a monitor... too bad, you volunteered your IP address hoping for proceeds of a crime (so to say.) It's like walking up to a group of criminals in the street and offering some stolen goods for trade. A few accept your offer; but one of them is an informant, and you get arrested. There is no entrapment because the monitor (the informant) is a passive observer who had no communication with you.
I can put it in different words. Microsoft empire needs money - more and more money every year to continue to look like a company with a bright future. They started well by selling software for PCs when each PC was sold for thousands of dollars. Private deals with major PC makers resulted in inserting MS into the food chain (the MS tax.) MS was able to sell incremental copies of software at zero cost - they didn't even have to copy the bits, OEMs did that for them!
However today computing is no longer a luxury. Computing devices became cheap. If the hardware of your tablet costs $99 you cannot slap a $150 Windows on top of that. Windows blatantly exhaused its food supplies. Sure, it keeps selling Windows, and it will keep doing so for another decade. But in the end if they do nothing they will retrace the steps of Kodak - and of buggy whip makers before that.
As I said, MS empire runs on money. But fewer money is available to them with every new day. The whole concept of Windows is getting old. MS can read the writing on the wall just fine. That's why MS is in panic mode. Win8 is a truly desperate attempt to try and lock up the tablet market. But as usual this is too little and too late. Android is winning in the industry, and iOS is picking up the luxury market. MS has no market left to insert itself into - and they don't seem to have new ideas to make a new market for themselves. The more MS flops the more it distances itself from its customers. Win8, for example, will not be accepted in the enerprise - not now, not ever - simply because Win8 offers nothing of value to engineers and researchers and coders.
The example of Kodak is actually fitting. Kodak lived off of the expensive film and chemistry, where you paid $1 for each printed photo. That was a nice racket while it lasted. But now I can buy a $10 SD card and take thousands of photos onto it - and, look, I can reuse the SD card once I'm done! The whole business model of Kodak collapsed almost overnight. MS's business model is still standing, but it is based only on two cash cows - Windows and Office. And the Office is largely standing on the back of Windows. Sales of PCs to businesses, with Windows, are not threatened - but sales to consumers are not just threatened, they are already against the wall. As businesses defer upgrades for cost reasons (it's not exactly an economic boom out there) MS starts seeing smaller profits, and in 2012 they posted the first loss.
I have done that also. There are many smaller, business-oriented ISPs that announce out front that they don't do port blocking and they don't do packet inspection. I'm using one such ISP.
In case all small ISPs disappear, being bought by Verizon/Comcast types... well, that's a nice business to be in. I can imagine that a regular Joe from the street doesn't know how to set up an ISP, but the/. crowd is better educated in this respect. I cannot imagine that Freedom ISP (or whatever name you pick) will find no customers. It doesn't even need to beat the price of Comcast. Freedom is seldom cheap. But you get what you pay for.
just joining the swarm doesn't necessarily imply that it's uploading anything.
Once you downloaded at least one block you are offering it for upload to others. It would be hard to prove in court that you connected to a swarm with a standard, unmodified BT client with the sole purpose of... what would be your purpose, other than to share the material?
Slashdot Mirror
Funny how the non-computer folks I know who have an ipad (even my mother, who's never touched a computer before in her life) loves their ipads.
It's not funny at all. iDevices were designed for this exactly group of customers - those who never owned a computer; perhaps older people, perhaps people without a need for a computer; perhaps those who are too young to reach the keyboard. The simplistic interface of iDevices is perfect for all of them.
I work with computers for many years. I don't have an iDevice and I see no reason to get one for myself. My parents have Nexus 7 and they are happy with it just like your parents are happy with an iPad. (I bet they wouldn't know the difference.) Apple always understood the recipe for happiness: make the device reliable, so that it doesn't talk gibberish to you (IRQL_LESS_OR_EQUAL - huh?) and make the device's operation simple enough. Microsoft never followed those rules; they went for complexity and rich functionality. We needed that too; but that had to be reserved to professionals, and even those needed an extensive IT support. Your common Windows can at any time throw a notification at you that you don't understand and cannot handle. This is not how you make tablets.
Where would you get the driver for a very specific build of iOS or WinRT or Android? How would you install one? Without a special driver many common USB devices will not work.
This is possible only on the x86 tablet that runs Win8. But that tablet is already huge, heavy and power-hungry. You might want to just call it a netbook with a Bluetooth keyboard. That thing is not a tablet that people will be buying; even MS does not count on that - that's why they made WinRT.
In any case, 3rd party drivers are an excellent way to introduce instability and unpredictability into your old and boringly stable tablet. Plug mouse and TV tuner at the same time and watch it bluescreen :-)
I think if many people who sneer at the free speech of the US were to travel to Iran and start talking about how Mohammed liked to butt fuck little boys they'd find out just what intolerance is.
Iran is a theocracy, not a democracy - and they never professed otherwise. A crime of blasphemy and the punishment for it are written in their laws, for everyone to see.
The USA claims to be a democracy, and it supports free speech in foreign countries. It works like this:
"Mr. Khan, you should be free to speak your mind in Pakistan and be free of intimidation!" - "And, by the way, Mr. Khan, if you dare to come here you may not speak. We support freedom of speech only where and when it suits us, and we decide what speech should be free and what speech should get you arrested."
It's called "double standards," and the USA is well known for using them at every opportunity.
If this administration does not have control of the levers of government who ordered that?
It was someone who knew who the guy is and what his political views are. This can't be just discovered while clearing him for travel. This means he has a thick dossier on him; his speeches were translated and analyzed, and someone made a decision to tag him as an "enemy of the people." Where would such a dossier be? At the State Department most likely, or at CIA as a remote second possibility.
How's the revolution in Syria going?
Why do you ask? Anyway, the Assad's regime is firmly in the "ultimately abandoned" territory, with only the remaining palace guards (his troops) willing to die for him. Assad will fall as soon as he runs out of loyal troops or equipment or simply territory.
Among the many other problems already listed is whether or not paintballs will pop at 2.7 degrees kelvin.
If you are going to apply the paint that far away from the Sun then yes, it will be a concern. Obviously, liquid paints will not work since only liquid Helium will be still liquid at that point. So you will need powder paints. The next question is how do you hold the paint there. Electric charge would be one interesting method, but will it last? Without some sort of adhesion the only force you have is gravity, and gravity of a small asteroid is also small. At least there is no atmosphere at that time to blow the paint away. (But as the asteroid comes closer, it is to be expected that the outer ice starts evaporating, and that will blow the paint off the surface.)
All in all, I think this proposal is very hard to do technically. Just the amount of paint that we need to deliver would be astronomical. Forget the "size of Texas." If the asteroid is only 1 mile in diameter, it has surface of 87 million square feet. Let's say you need 50 grams of powder to "paint" one square foot. (I think it's on the low side.) The total mass of powder that is necessary to cover the asteroid will be then 4350 kg, or about 4.5 tonnes. Delivering that much mass that far from Earth is a challenge that is entirely comparable to delivering several ion thrusters along with nuclear-powered (RTG or fission or fusion) energy sources for them - esp. if we don't need much of shielding. Considering that the paint gives you zero control, and can actually make things worse, there is no advantage in using that method. No politician will go ahead with this plan if he can be blamed (correctly) for causing an asteroid that was going to miss Earth to not miss it.
It's not about any of those things. It's about protection from foreign states.
This is patently untrue, if you only read what founders said on the subject. But leaving that alone, what if the government becomes a foreign state to the rest of the country? What if the country has no control over who runs the government; what if the country has no control where its army fights or does not fight, and against who; what if the country pays ever-increasing taxes to the government which then uses it as the government pleases. What then? This is not a contrived situation; most governments, right before they are overthrown by the angry mob, decay into such a world unto itself, detached from the reality and ultimately abandoned by everyone - including the palace guards.
"That storm surge will only be magnified by the full moon this weekend to make it a "dangerous period," Uccellini said."
He is obviously concerned about incidents of licanthropy. They are directly caused by the full moon, as everyone knows.
Can we please get rid of this obnoxious and worse, ineffective legacy of George W Bush?
The democrat known as Obama says no, we must keep the TSA. If Romney becomes the next President I do not expect any changes either. Both D and R play the same game and implement the same policy.
Police procedure has become an instrument of punishment which can be handed out at any time.
That is the dividing line between the nation of laws and the police state. The USA always had small-town Sheriffs who abused their power against "undesirable" visitors. But today a SWAT team can throw you on the ground, shock you with a Taser, put a barrel of the gun to your head, and after they are done you will be glad that they haven't carted you away. Plenty of SWAT raids are done on wrong information, just because the police couldn't be bothered to knock on the door and ask - or even to check the street address. And, FSM forbid, if you mistake the police for burglars and try to defend yourself... your life as a law-abiding citizen effectively ends then. For some, their entire life ended at that point. If that's not a police state then what is?
It's OK, as long as everyone has a gun they will prevent the government from overstepping its bounds.
The threshold of the 2A is intentionally very high. Nobody will rise up against the government until the people feel their own lives threatened - and become willing to take lives of others to protect themselves. When the government starts running death squads then perhaps we can revisit the issue. Until then all weapons in people's hands are on safe.
There is yet another aspect of this problem. As they say, every nation gets the government it deserves. The majority of the voting public is ignorant of the issues and is unwilling to support candidates who are radical enough (Ron Paul is a faint approximation of a real radical.) As result, the ruling class is using the voters as a rubber stamp on their policies. Voters have complete control over the elections - and they do nothing; they continue to choose between two equivalent candidates. This is because the US population wants this kind of the government. It does not want freedom because it comes with a very real chance of dying in a ditch. It wants to be taken care of. Both D and R want a strong, large government; fractions that argue for a small government and smaller taxes still have no political weight.
Romney has not been elected yet.
I didn't know that the TSA terrorism was enforced in last four years by Tooth Fairy.
The settings that are synced are: Personalization, Accessibility, Language Settings, Application Settings, Explorer Settings, Windows Settings, Credentials.
Yes, I love that last one. Funny as hell.
Microsoft have never had first-mover advantage in anything. It's never bothered them before.
They were the dominating force in computing, that's why they got away with such behavior. But now Apple and Google are just as large as Microsoft, and they have a very solid, multi-year foothold. Furthermore, everyone and their dog believes that Microsoft is not a player in the mobile market. They have a good reason to think so. MS's twitching in this area are not sufficient to convince Jane Doe to buy an experimental WinRT tablet instead of a fashionable iPad, just like what all other girls in the class have. That's more than 50% of the customer base, mind you.
99.99% of the time people have one application taking up their entire monitor.
Out of tens of people who I know only one consistently does that. He has poor eyesight, so he configures his desktop for the largest font he can scare up, and that requires maximized windows (and a huge monitor) to see the application.
Other people have overlapping windows. This actually was the winner concept that elevated Windows over competing software like DesqView (which was a window switcher in DOS.) People love to layer things and move things as they go about their business. One of the reasons for that is they see what other work items are on their desk to be done.
There are 2 exceptions: The first is geeks who like to have all these widgets all over their screen because multitasking is cool and having lots of gauges is cool.
Isn't that a bit patronizing toward people who truly need to see time in several time zones, for example, or monitor the weather because they work in the field, or who look at security cameras, or who control machinery? Not all gadgets and windows are just "cool" - most are necessary, for one reason or another.
But when I see some supposed power-user who is editing code while only looking at 15 lines of text, I think them a fool not a power user. You don't need to have the other 2/3 of your screen telling you the weather, the CPU core temperature, and the latest Slashdot headline. That's inefficient
But who are you to tell complete strangers what they should do with their lives? I would love to grab a whip and use it on the crowds that sit on Twitter or Facebook most of their life - but I cannot because in this society (which we call civilized) it is not appropriate.
I understand that some managers are excellent slave drivers. They want you to open and maximize your MSVC++ IDE and pound keys from 9am to 5pm non-stop. But most people cannot work like that. They want distractions - that's how they relax from the monotony of work. They look at Slashdot feeds, they look at gallery of little photos, they listen to music in a little player in the corner, they have a few chat windows opened (often with coworkers, for work-related reasons,) they have Outlook open with current tasks and new emails. There are many good reasons why 100% of business workflow on PCs, per my observation, is based on overlapping windows - even though one may be maximized on occasion. Single purpose kiosks, like terminals at stores, are the only exceptions that I know of. Even at the bank tellers have multiple windows for different purposes.
You are also forgetting one important development that occurred in last couple of decades. That development is called wide screens and screen resolution and screen size. I have a single 25" monitor in front of me. My FF window only occupies about 40% of it. The rest is other windows. Why? Because it is pointless to maximize FF; I will not see more text than there is. I cannot read from a 25" screen that is full of text. I want my information in pieces that I can handle. This is even more so for MSVC. Why would you want to maximize the MSVC IDE window? It allows you to see 250-character long lines of code; but you are not supposed to write such long lines anyway. There is a little pane for the solution explorer, but often you don't even need that. Why would you stare at the white screen with a smattering of text in a corner? I prefer to have the desktop background there, or email, or something else that is at least marginally useful - as opposed to the white expanse that only shines into my eyes.
As a user of Photoshop, GIMP, and a Blender, I would love to try versions of those apps that work that way.
They already work that way. Just maximize the window :-)
But Metro does something else that is wrecking the control of the application. Metro is for tablets, and so Metro depends on gestures. However mouse + keyboard control is not suitable for gestures (you cannot drag with a
RT's ONLY chance for success is from these casual users because it will not come from the tech savvy or business community.
Perhaps that is true. However casual users are heavily influenced by educated, power users. In fact, casual users ask for a recommendation; they don't just rush to Fry's to buy whatever they can grab - not for $599, at least.
For example, my parents have an XP box (for legacy reasons.) They came to me with a need, and walked away with Nexus 7. Not only the price is reasonable and the OS - recent. I have another Android tablet, so if they have any issues with theirs I can advise over Skype. That's the same reason why MS Windows and MS Office proliferated like kudzu. Now MS finds themselves to be an outsider. It's not nice out there.
On the subject of integration, most people do not need to transfer documents from the tablet to the PC. Much of the target audience for tablets doesn't even have PC anymore. But if you want to, there are tons of services that specialize in exactly this (Dropbox, SkyDrive, all Google services.) There is very little to integrate. And if you are an audiophile with 100,000 audio files then chances are you are already on the iPod+iTunes needle. WinRT has no clearly defined audience, and MS doesn't seem to care to define it. There is not a single social group that MS can address and say "This device is for you!"
Casual users will probably love it, especially if they have Windows 8.
Metro start screen is just like Android's application pages, only with ugly colors. Why would a Win8 sufferer pick the same malady for his tablet? Would you, an Android user, launch your frequently used applications from application pages - and not from the icon strip, the start screen, or the "Start" menu in ICS? Win8 takes away all these methods of simple customization, so that you have all your essential software (email, chat, news, browser, books, etc.) where you want them, and not among hundreds of other "tiles".
iPads and Android tablets already perfectly integrate into a Windows ecosystem. Most importantly, they support MS Exchange to the point that you can schedule meetings from them. For most people that's all they need.
Keep in mind though, that apps made for windows 8 "metro-style" will be compatible with windows RT. So the ecosystem will build up anyway.
Now you need to answer a different question. Why would anyone develop for Metro? What is the advantage of having one or several huge monitors dedicated to one application? Even the IE in Metro mode looks ugly as sin, to the point of being useless. Who would want a browser that uses "magic spots" to reveal menus and that would hide every control in existence at the first opportunity? Can you imagine Photoshop in Metro mode? Or SolidWorks? PC software is not for playing around, it's for doing work, and Metro is not helping there at all.
Metro applications, necessarily simplistic, make sense on a tablet. However tablets do not benefit from x86 - to the point that hardly any of them use x86 today. A Metro developer would be burdened with supporting his software on platforms that generate no sales.
Light bulbs are easily removable, and there can't be that many of them in a rented apartment - or even in a rented home. Take them with you, since you will need them at the new place anyway, and leave the old ones (that you saved) in their place.
Please provide a reference to this "101" level effect.
Here you are.
In your example if the satellite has a 20 dBi antenna then the path loss, excluding atmospheric losses, would be 155 dB. If the transmitter has +53 dBm output then the receiver's input will be about -102 dBm. This is not a lot, but receivers of a reasonable size do work with these signals. (The gain is not as much of a problem as the noise.)
Why would they use a standard, unmodified BT client for this? All they want is the address of everyone in the swarm.
You are talking about the monitor. Indeed, the monitor doesn't have to declare available blocks. But I'm talking about a casual BT user. Here is a quote from one of higher level posts:
By participating in a swarm, you've made your information available to anyone else who joins that swarm.
That was about a casual user who disloses his IP address to his peers. If one of those peers is a monitor ... too bad, you volunteered your IP address hoping for proceeds of a crime (so to say.) It's like walking up to a group of criminals in the street and offering some stolen goods for trade. A few accept your offer; but one of them is an informant, and you get arrested. There is no entrapment because the monitor (the informant) is a passive observer who had no communication with you.
I can put it in different words. Microsoft empire needs money - more and more money every year to continue to look like a company with a bright future. They started well by selling software for PCs when each PC was sold for thousands of dollars. Private deals with major PC makers resulted in inserting MS into the food chain (the MS tax.) MS was able to sell incremental copies of software at zero cost - they didn't even have to copy the bits, OEMs did that for them!
However today computing is no longer a luxury. Computing devices became cheap. If the hardware of your tablet costs $99 you cannot slap a $150 Windows on top of that. Windows blatantly exhaused its food supplies. Sure, it keeps selling Windows, and it will keep doing so for another decade. But in the end if they do nothing they will retrace the steps of Kodak - and of buggy whip makers before that.
As I said, MS empire runs on money. But fewer money is available to them with every new day. The whole concept of Windows is getting old. MS can read the writing on the wall just fine. That's why MS is in panic mode. Win8 is a truly desperate attempt to try and lock up the tablet market. But as usual this is too little and too late. Android is winning in the industry, and iOS is picking up the luxury market. MS has no market left to insert itself into - and they don't seem to have new ideas to make a new market for themselves. The more MS flops the more it distances itself from its customers. Win8, for example, will not be accepted in the enerprise - not now, not ever - simply because Win8 offers nothing of value to engineers and researchers and coders.
The example of Kodak is actually fitting. Kodak lived off of the expensive film and chemistry, where you paid $1 for each printed photo. That was a nice racket while it lasted. But now I can buy a $10 SD card and take thousands of photos onto it - and, look, I can reuse the SD card once I'm done! The whole business model of Kodak collapsed almost overnight. MS's business model is still standing, but it is based only on two cash cows - Windows and Office. And the Office is largely standing on the back of Windows. Sales of PCs to businesses, with Windows, are not threatened - but sales to consumers are not just threatened, they are already against the wall. As businesses defer upgrades for cost reasons (it's not exactly an economic boom out there) MS starts seeing smaller profits, and in 2012 they posted the first loss.
It will be a dud like Vista...oh wait...Vista was a commercial success...I forgot.
"One more such commercial success, and we shall be undone."
I have done that also. There are many smaller, business-oriented ISPs that announce out front that they don't do port blocking and they don't do packet inspection. I'm using one such ISP.
In case all small ISPs disappear, being bought by Verizon/Comcast types ... well, that's a nice business to be in. I can imagine that a regular Joe from the street doesn't know how to set up an ISP, but the /. crowd is better educated in this respect. I cannot imagine that Freedom ISP (or whatever name you pick) will find no customers. It doesn't even need to beat the price of Comcast. Freedom is seldom cheap. But you get what you pay for.
just joining the swarm doesn't necessarily imply that it's uploading anything.
Once you downloaded at least one block you are offering it for upload to others. It would be hard to prove in court that you connected to a swarm with a standard, unmodified BT client with the sole purpose of ... what would be your purpose, other than to share the material?