There's not much chance of accidentally overwriting a disconnected external HDD clearly labeled BACKUP either. I take it you've never tried to restore a large amount of data from optical media? I have and they do get unrecoverable CRC errors, but what's almost as bad is the read speed of old discs. My drive would spin up, down, read and re-read so a single disc could take an hour to read. Even on good discs I say you'd be lucky to restore 4 DVDs/hour, and it takes 200+ to restore a single 1TB HDD. And unless you have a disc robot that means you'll be glued to your computer for days changing discs every 15 minutes.
This. I backed up about ~150 gigs of data a few years ago (back in the DVD days), and by the time I was done, I never ever wanted to see another optical disc again. Nevertheless, when the time came to restore everything (being very naive, I left the hard drive on a different continent and only took the discs with me to my destination), about 10 gigs of data were unreadable... Screw optical discs. I'd rather keep 10 levels of hard drive redundancy up to date than rely on another optical disc...
Just looking at the computers I'm around on a regular basis (work, random people at my university, home, friends' places), there are thousands of places to put USB sticks, and about... 3 (?) to put a BD, and two of those are dedicated video BD players, so no use for BD "storage" discs...
I had a "NetMD", so I had to use the software, but the battery life was fine there too. Ran much longer than a Discman off the same amount of batteries (took a single AA as well, IIRC)... that thing got an insane amount of use.
This. If everyone invested in a solar array and a battery bank instead of paying an electricity bill for the next 20 years, private households would be pretty much out of th energy-consumption equation... Office buildings and such may also be alright for something like this - the company I'm currently working at has a huge solar array on its main building's roof, and I'm quite sure the energy needs of everything but manufacturing are covered quite nicely.
Unfortunately, this isn't quite true - many of the tablets are having issues booting from USB to install an alternative OS. The TPT2 and ATIV 500T, for instance... I doubt other Clover Trail devices are less problematic.
I'm also fairly certain many of the newer Windows 8 devices (such as Clover Trail tablets) would see a significant drop in battery life if you did this - and battery life is more or less the only good thing about the damned things (I bought one so I'm allowed to rag on 'em:p)...
What can an iPad do that a laptop can't? I've got a tablet and a laptop, and all I can think of is "freehand" use (i.e. without a table or lap to place the device on). Battery life (12+ hours of web browsing/office/coding) is the same in all areas except maybe media playback (Sandy and Ivy Bridge are still battery hogs here while ARM and Clover Trail tablets are much more efficient for some reason), neither fit in a pants/jacket pocket (Scottevests don't count:p)... or is greasy-screen-syndrome something you like? Swipey swipey smear touch gesture and so on and so forth...:S
Wouldn't it be nicer to have a laptop you could grab in a similar fashion? I can understand not docking the laptop (undocking is just too much of a hassle - even with a tiling window manager it's horrible getting all your crap organized again after it's compressed from 3+ screens down to one), but for the price of an iPad with the keyboard, you could get a full blow Windows/Linux machine with similar size and battery life... and a hinge!
Pointing and touching may be the single most intuitive user interface that will ever be developed... as it connects directly with how we, as human beings, first learn to interact with the world... even before we have learned how to speak. Heck, even my *CAT* can use our iPad (to an admittedly limited extent, but it's invariably funny to watch him try to interact with what he sees on the screen).
Ah, but remember: Touch is only intuitive when you're touching something that's visually there, i.e. when visual cues are used to tell you WHERE to touch.
On Windows 8, that's simply not the case. Many functions are hidden - swipe inward on a screen edge (every edge is different and changes from app to app), use short swipes in a certain direction to select screen elements (seriously, to select an object in the start menu, you have to swipe it down... WTF?) instead of pressing on them or holding them for a second or two... incredibly annoying.
Let's see... chiclet keyboard, move to 6-row keyboard layout (no more grouped F-keys, no Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn grouping), and this abomination (coming soon!):
I'm typing this from a (freakin awesome!) Thinkpad right now, but if these changes are implemented into the main T/X/W series lines, I'm gonna be typing from a MacBook Pro pretty soon...
What would a feature phone need updates for? It's not like they'd run any sort of arbitrary code, so security updates would be relatively unnecessary. And in case of a real update-emergency, you can always just flash the firmware via cable.
People like you don't seem to get it. Symbian HAS failed. If it hadn't it would be here today.
That's like saying a man's heart failed - because it had a knife stabbed through it. It's dead but not by natural causes and the CEO holding the knife is Elop.
Replace "man" with "100-year-old-zombie" and you're on the right track...
Oh yeah, that stupid 3km long wall of icons that extends indefinitely off the right of my screen in a jumble with no discernable order (and reorganizing the icons without a mouse takes about 10 seconds per icon - IF you're moving it to a spot that's immediately visible on the screen! If you want to move something from the end of the list to the front [so that it's visible right away when you press the start button] using a touchscreen, it's a big fidgety mess that takes even longer) and no subfolders... definitely a large start menu.
Oh wait, no, it's just a cluster**** of everything that's installed in a jumbled mess.
Corners? What ******* corners? I'm using a tablet, so there's no mouse pointer. Do you know how hard it is to exactly hit one of the "hot corners" with your finger on a capacitive touchscreen? And why would you try to? There's nothing visually there to touch!
As for the start button... that pulls up the start menu... how the **** is that supposed to help?
Don't get me wrong - I can get around the system just fine. It just pisses me off that the UI is so unintuitive - if you don't figure it out accidentally look it up, how are you supposed to know "hot corners" exist? Swiping edges... WTF? And they're different in every app too... the settings charm for instance - being able to access the control panel from the settings charm ONLY if you're on the desktop.. Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.
However, for most people, it's easier to just leave it on all the time, so that it autoconnects to known networks. Just turn off connection to unknown, unlocked networks and you'll be fine.
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There's not much chance of accidentally overwriting a disconnected external HDD clearly labeled BACKUP either. I take it you've never tried to restore a large amount of data from optical media? I have and they do get unrecoverable CRC errors, but what's almost as bad is the read speed of old discs. My drive would spin up, down, read and re-read so a single disc could take an hour to read. Even on good discs I say you'd be lucky to restore 4 DVDs/hour, and it takes 200+ to restore a single 1TB HDD. And unless you have a disc robot that means you'll be glued to your computer for days changing discs every 15 minutes.
This. I backed up about ~150 gigs of data a few years ago (back in the DVD days), and by the time I was done, I never ever wanted to see another optical disc again. Nevertheless, when the time came to restore everything (being very naive, I left the hard drive on a different continent and only took the discs with me to my destination), about 10 gigs of data were unreadable... Screw optical discs. I'd rather keep 10 levels of hard drive redundancy up to date than rely on another optical disc...
Just looking at the computers I'm around on a regular basis (work, random people at my university, home, friends' places), there are thousands of places to put USB sticks, and about... 3 (?) to put a BD, and two of those are dedicated video BD players, so no use for BD "storage" discs...
How is optical media more "standard"?
I had a "NetMD", so I had to use the software, but the battery life was fine there too. Ran much longer than a Discman off the same amount of batteries (took a single AA as well, IIRC)... that thing got an insane amount of use.
Are emulators not an option for the older games? Keep the consoles around until there's a decent emulator, then switch the games over to the HTPC...?
I haven't used anything newer than a PSX emulator (which worked rather well), so this is actually a genuine question...
This. If everyone invested in a solar array and a battery bank instead of paying an electricity bill for the next 20 years, private households would be pretty much out of th energy-consumption equation... Office buildings and such may also be alright for something like this - the company I'm currently working at has a huge solar array on its main building's roof, and I'm quite sure the energy needs of everything but manufacturing are covered quite nicely.
Unfortunately, this isn't quite true - many of the tablets are having issues booting from USB to install an alternative OS. The TPT2 and ATIV 500T, for instance... I doubt other Clover Trail devices are less problematic.
Or have you read something I haven't?
SecureBoot and so on :(
I'm also fairly certain many of the newer Windows 8 devices (such as Clover Trail tablets) would see a significant drop in battery life if you did this - and battery life is more or less the only good thing about the damned things (I bought one so I'm allowed to rag on 'em :p)...
What can an iPad do that a laptop can't? I've got a tablet and a laptop, and all I can think of is "freehand" use (i.e. without a table or lap to place the device on). Battery life (12+ hours of web browsing/office/coding) is the same in all areas except maybe media playback (Sandy and Ivy Bridge are still battery hogs here while ARM and Clover Trail tablets are much more efficient for some reason), neither fit in a pants/jacket pocket (Scottevests don't count :p)... or is greasy-screen-syndrome something you like? Swipey swipey smear touch gesture and so on and so forth... :S
Wouldn't it be nicer to have a laptop you could grab in a similar fashion? I can understand not docking the laptop (undocking is just too much of a hassle - even with a tiling window manager it's horrible getting all your crap organized again after it's compressed from 3+ screens down to one), but for the price of an iPad with the keyboard, you could get a full blow Windows/Linux machine with similar size and battery life... and a hinge!
Pointing and touching may be the single most intuitive user interface that will ever be developed... as it connects directly with how we, as human beings, first learn to interact with the world... even before we have learned how to speak. Heck, even my *CAT* can use our iPad (to an admittedly limited extent, but it's invariably funny to watch him try to interact with what he sees on the screen).
Ah, but remember: Touch is only intuitive when you're touching something that's visually there, i.e. when visual cues are used to tell you WHERE to touch.
On Windows 8, that's simply not the case. Many functions are hidden - swipe inward on a screen edge (every edge is different and changes from app to app), use short swipes in a certain direction to select screen elements (seriously, to select an object in the start menu, you have to swipe it down... WTF?) instead of pressing on them or holding them for a second or two... incredibly annoying.
The typing feel really is pretty decent, I like it too - but the layout is pretty atrocious :(
Does it really matter that it's an Ultrabook? Call it whatever you want, it's still a T Series Thinkpad... :(
Yes, if only out of spite.
If I don't have a working trackpoint, I might as well get a retina display in exchange...
Goddamnit, I feel like an idiot posting this 10 times, but everyone keeps saying Thinkpads are fine... they're not:
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/ThinkPad-T431s-User-Guide-amp-Pictures/m-p/993279/highlight/true#M73300
I for one am freakin terrified (I love my Thinkpads)...
Try a T530, with the 6-row tictac keyboard... and then look here:
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/ThinkPad-T431s-User-Guide-amp-Pictures/m-p/993279/highlight/true#M73300
THAT is where Lenovo is taking Thinkpads.
As a fellow T520i user (btw, swap out the display for the 1080p one... it's AWESOME!), let me be the first to say: We're fucked!
Let's see... chiclet keyboard, move to 6-row keyboard layout (no more grouped F-keys, no Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn grouping), and this abomination (coming soon!):
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/ThinkPad-T431s-User-Guide-amp-Pictures/m-p/993279/highlight/true#M73300
Non-removable battery, trackpoint buttons nixed (they're now integrated in the top of the trackpad), an even bigger trackpad (aka space-waster)...
Two more generations and we'll be looking at black MacBook clones.
You must not have heard the latest news... Lenovo is nixing the trackpoint buttons in favor of a bigger touchpad (seriously!):
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/ThinkPad-T431s-User-Guide-amp-Pictures/m-p/993279/highlight/true#M73300
I'm typing this from a (freakin awesome!) Thinkpad right now, but if these changes are implemented into the main T/X/W series lines, I'm gonna be typing from a MacBook Pro pretty soon...
What would a feature phone need updates for? It's not like they'd run any sort of arbitrary code, so security updates would be relatively unnecessary. And in case of a real update-emergency, you can always just flash the firmware via cable.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.navfree.android.OSM.ALL&hl=en
OSM based, IIRC.
People like you don't seem to get it. Symbian HAS failed. If it hadn't it would be here today.
That's like saying a man's heart failed - because it had a knife stabbed through it. It's dead but not by natural causes and the CEO holding the knife is Elop.
Replace "man" with "100-year-old-zombie" and you're on the right track...
Oh yeah, that stupid 3km long wall of icons that extends indefinitely off the right of my screen in a jumble with no discernable order (and reorganizing the icons without a mouse takes about 10 seconds per icon - IF you're moving it to a spot that's immediately visible on the screen! If you want to move something from the end of the list to the front [so that it's visible right away when you press the start button] using a touchscreen, it's a big fidgety mess that takes even longer) and no subfolders... definitely a large start menu.
Oh wait, no, it's just a cluster**** of everything that's installed in a jumbled mess.
Corners? What ******* corners? I'm using a tablet, so there's no mouse pointer. Do you know how hard it is to exactly hit one of the "hot corners" with your finger on a capacitive touchscreen? And why would you try to? There's nothing visually there to touch!
As for the start button... that pulls up the start menu... how the **** is that supposed to help?
Don't get me wrong - I can get around the system just fine. It just pisses me off that the UI is so unintuitive - if you don't figure it out accidentally look it up, how are you supposed to know "hot corners" exist? Swiping edges... WTF? And they're different in every app too... the settings charm for instance - being able to access the control panel from the settings charm ONLY if you're on the desktop.. Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.
Now all it needs is a bike mount! :P
*all* smartphones allow you to turn off WiFi.
However, for most people, it's easier to just leave it on all the time, so that it autoconnects to known networks. Just turn off connection to unknown, unlocked networks and you'll be fine.
Are you really planning on using a tablet tethered to a power cord all day?