And Windows 8 sucks. I bought a Windows 8 Atom tablet for the insane battery life (OneNote FTW!), and for everything else, it's more or less unusable. Sure, Chrome more or less works, so I can check e-mail and use Google Reader and so on, but the OS itself (the Metro/"Modern" part) is horrible... undiscoverable, unintuitive UI (missing a function? Try swiping in or out from any of the four edges.... stupidest UI paradigm I've ever heard of) and the incredibly cluttered takes-ages-to-reorganize start screen... it's just SHIT.
I find this amusing - because for me, Mint (with Cinnamon, I think it was) is the most intuitive distro for me, because it behaves more or less like Windows. Is that really "traditionalist" Linux? I figured it was just Linux for fed-up Windows users:D
Back to this old argument again? To get the same experience (in terms of immersiveness) from a console as you'd get from a PC gaming setup with a standard 24" 1080p monitor (which is what, $200?), you'd need something along the lines of a 70-80" TV. If you have one anyway, the console might be cheaper, but for the rest of us... a $1000 tower with a $200 monitor is cheaper than a $200 console with a $3000 HDTV.:)
Or maybe it's because they just didn't put out very high quality in their established product lines. My 6-man office is filled with Dell laptops (Precision and Latitude, no low-end junk) and it's like working in a freakin wind tunnel...
What happens to the extended (what's the max for Dell? 4 years?) Next-Business-Day warranties you buy today if your described scenario happens in, say, two years...?
What about the corporate side? If a company buys x hundred Dell rack servers (say R320) today, with y year support contracts, but Dell goes under completely in y-1 years... is the company with the nearly-new servers simply fucked?
Do you have the FullHD wide-gamut screen? I'm quite satisfied with mine... good color reproduction, high contrast, decent viewing angles, bright... OK, I do miss 1200 vertical pixels, but you won't be seeing those anywhere until we get 15.6" 2560x1440 laptops...
Or is your W520 OK and you're jumping ship because of the chiclet keyboards? I've been stockpiling US Layout T520/420 keyboards for a few weeks now... thinking maybe I should start on palmrests. Should hold me over until Lenovo get their heads out of their asses and bring back a sane keyboard layout.
I beg to differ. I'm typing this on a T520, which is by far the best laptop I've ever owned. Doesn't make any noise whatsoever (configured it with the i3 and integrated graphics only for this reason), the FullHD display is awesome (color reproduction, viewing angles, brightness), the battery lasts 12+ hours (when I arrive at home after a 10 hour day it's usually got 30-40% left) and the keyboard is fantastic. Oh and it takes a beating like a champ...
Yes, there are some weak points (the speakers, the creaky palmrest), but these are things I can absolutely live with, because other than those, it's the perfect laptop.
With Lenovo, you unfortunately have to consider very carefully which model is the right one for you:
X220/230: Decent IPS displays, 7mm (instead of 9.5mm) HDD slot, long battery life, low resolution, no Ultrabay for an additional hard drive, 6c slice battery T420/430: Horribly bad displays, 7mm HDD slot starting from the T430, long battery life, Ultrabay, 9c slice battery T420s/430s: Horribly bad displays, 7mm HDD slot, short battery life, Ultrabay that's battery-compatible (although the Ultrabay batteries are only ~30Wh, unlike the slices which are ~60 and ~90 respectively) T520/530: Good HD+ and awesome FullHD displays (the HD-Ready 1366x768 is so so... usable if you like very low pixel density and low contrast), long battery life, 9c slice battery
If you pick the wrong device for your usage, you're going to think all Thinkpads are crap. It's more than just bigger and smaller (T vs. X) or thinner and lighter (TXXX vs TXXXs)... Having to know all this is obviously a big negative point for potential buyers, but saying that all modern Thinkpads are crap is simply wrong:)
The new chiclet keyboard you refer to is actually pretty awesome in terms of typing feel, BTW (similar to the good old NMB T60 keyboards). It's just the layout that makes it horribly unusable...
Cheap plastic housing => light weight => not much fall damage. It's a good design philosophy, but I personally prefer a phone with a little more heft, as do many others.
"When it comes to consumer electronics, it almost never pays off to buy the expensive product, especially not with the pace that the technology is advancing."
Depends on what you're looking for. If we consider high-end computers like Thinkpads and owners who know what they're doing, it almost certainly pays off to buy the more expensive X/T/W series Thinkpad instead of a low-end Dell Vostro or Latitude... have you ever tried to replace parts (from sourcing to actually replacement) on a low-end machine?
For the high-end Thinkpad, you simply type the part number (listed in the hardware maintenance manual) into eBay and order it for (usually) a peasly amount (I paid 120€ for the top-end FullHD screen with an official Lenovo FRU sticker, now compare that with the prices for a low-end laptop's "Screen assembly"... and in the US it's probably much cheaper), then grab a screwdriver and follow the instructions in the hardware maintenance manual for repair. Anything short of a dead mainboard and you should be up and running in three days or less...
With the Dell, on the other hand, once that 1 year of NBD runs out, you're completely screwed, because on the low end, replacement parts are 1. way too expensive and 2. difficult to replace.
And even if your device doesn't break (and high-end Thinkpads rarely require more than a new battery and keyboard, maybe palmrest, after two years of daily use - and replacing these things takes about 60 seconds), you're still better off with the high-end model because the resale value is better. My Thinkpad is still worth twice as much as a new Vostro, even after an entire year of use... if I sell it and buy the next gen model as a demo unit, pump it full of upgrades (SSD + big spinning drive, top-end LCD, max out the RAM), I'll still be spending less than I would on a low-end Vostro, and have the performance (both in terms of grunt as well as battery and thermal/noise) to back up the high price.
It's got nothing to do with a status symbol - I'm just cheap enough to recognize that buying cheap crap is not very efficient economically.
Be glad you didn't stick with the Precision. I sit in a 6-man office at work, and 3 of my coworkers have company-issued Dell Precision laptops (one with the old Core 2 Duo, one Arrandale and one Sandy Bridge)... it's like working in a freakin wind tunnel. The fans on those things are constantly running full tilt for some reason, even when you're just writing an e-mail or Word document.
As I sit here typing this on my Thinkpad T520, on the other hand, I can't hear it at all (SSD so no spinning hard drive, fans are off because the CPU temp is somewhere around 37 anyway)...
Couldn't agree more... I'm currently typing this on a brand new Windows 8 tablet, and no matter how I sit or try to position the tablet, the angle my wrists require to type properly require a less than optimal viewing angle... sure, the display is IPS so it's not horrible, but still rather suboptimal. Oh, and the text input is annoying as hell...
Also, having just looked at the videos, I actually find the AMD version to be more visually pleasing - yes, there's a big "jump" at a few spots in the video, but it's in no way regular, while the nVidia jumps (albeit a smaller distance) periodically - roughly once a second. It's like a rhythmic pulsing... really weird.
And I can't say I've seen this issue on my HD7750 (awesome little card - no PEG connector needed, doesn't break 50C running Starcraft 2 on high, low power consumption)... although that might be because I'm not running the beta driver.
I quite enjoyed the CoD Modern Warfare games, and was enthralled by the fact that they play more like a movie than a game. On higher difficulty levels they were hard enough to be challenging, and had better plots than many games I've played (because let's be honest: Video game storylines nearly always suck, and the ones that were extremely good for video games pale in comparison to books or movies/TV).
Does that really matter? Remember, these alternatives all have a far smaller feature set, and the overlap (mostly basics) is all very similar... you don't need to relearn anything to use them if you've extensively used MS Office - you just forget 90% of what you've learned in the past and are automatically an expert user;)
I'm not quite as PC-illiterate as you seem to think... I've been using menu keyboard shortcuts (with ALT to open the menu) for years, far before the ribbon existed;)
The issue is that in older menu-based UIs (Office 2003, OpenOffice) the keyboard shortcuts very often lead to UIs that are no longer keyboard-navigable, or require the use of the tab key (multiple times) to navigate through a bunch of checkboxes, drop-down lists and so on. Also, many of the options don't actually have a dedicated shortcut key...
For instance: In order to change certain formatting aspects in Office 2007+, I can use keyboard shortcuts to access anything visible in the home tab of the ribbon. In Office 2003, I have to open Format=>Font (which is accessible via a keyboard shortcut, like you said), but then I need to either tab around a lot to select checkboxes and drop-down lists or just use the mouse.
However, the ribbon has other advantages, such as making all non-dialogue functions accessible via keyboard shortcuts. Want to highlight the last word yellow (something I use a lot at work), for instance? CTRL+SHIFT+Left then ALT H I Enter. Insert a cross reference? ALT C R F.
Hell, I almost updated to Windows 8 just to get the ribbon in Explorer...:p
Do you really think it's likely MS Office will disappear any time soon?:)
Yes, schools need to teach concepts - however, this usually involves the use of actual examples, and why not make those examples relevant to current everyday work life?
It's not about the UI, but rather all the missing or more bend-over-backwards features in OpenOffice (or LibreOffice or whatever you want to call it) when compared to MS Office. In 7th grade, we were using Office 2000 or maybe XP... the basic concepts translate to 2007+ (ribbon) just fine.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, drives me crazy because I can't find many of the features that I'm looking for, or they work just slightly differently enough to be annoying...
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And Windows 8 sucks. I bought a Windows 8 Atom tablet for the insane battery life (OneNote FTW!), and for everything else, it's more or less unusable. Sure, Chrome more or less works, so I can check e-mail and use Google Reader and so on, but the OS itself (the Metro/"Modern" part) is horrible... undiscoverable, unintuitive UI (missing a function? Try swiping in or out from any of the four edges.... stupidest UI paradigm I've ever heard of) and the incredibly cluttered takes-ages-to-reorganize start screen... it's just SHIT.
Can't wait for a de-Modern-ified Windows 9...
I find this amusing - because for me, Mint (with Cinnamon, I think it was) is the most intuitive distro for me, because it behaves more or less like Windows. Is that really "traditionalist" Linux? I figured it was just Linux for fed-up Windows users :D
So where does that leave the rest of us? "Shut up or learn to code"?
The end result of this is more along the lines of "Shut up or go back to MS."
Back to this old argument again? To get the same experience (in terms of immersiveness) from a console as you'd get from a PC gaming setup with a standard 24" 1080p monitor (which is what, $200?), you'd need something along the lines of a 70-80" TV. If you have one anyway, the console might be cheaper, but for the rest of us... a $1000 tower with a $200 monitor is cheaper than a $200 console with a $3000 HDTV. :)
That's why I use both Keepass and two-factor authentication where possible. You should too.
Or maybe it's because they just didn't put out very high quality in their established product lines. My 6-man office is filled with Dell laptops (Precision and Latitude, no low-end junk) and it's like working in a freakin wind tunnel...
Well that's bleak... just out of interest:
What happens to the extended (what's the max for Dell? 4 years?) Next-Business-Day warranties you buy today if your described scenario happens in, say, two years...?
What about the corporate side? If a company buys x hundred Dell rack servers (say R320) today, with y year support contracts, but Dell goes under completely in y-1 years... is the company with the nearly-new servers simply fucked?
Where did I mention glass? I use a Galaxy Nexus, which is also a Samsung product, but feels a bit less cheap because it weighs more :p
Do you have the FullHD wide-gamut screen? I'm quite satisfied with mine... good color reproduction, high contrast, decent viewing angles, bright... OK, I do miss 1200 vertical pixels, but you won't be seeing those anywhere until we get 15.6" 2560x1440 laptops...
Or is your W520 OK and you're jumping ship because of the chiclet keyboards? I've been stockpiling US Layout T520/420 keyboards for a few weeks now... thinking maybe I should start on palmrests. Should hold me over until Lenovo get their heads out of their asses and bring back a sane keyboard layout.
I beg to differ. I'm typing this on a T520, which is by far the best laptop I've ever owned. Doesn't make any noise whatsoever (configured it with the i3 and integrated graphics only for this reason), the FullHD display is awesome (color reproduction, viewing angles, brightness), the battery lasts 12+ hours (when I arrive at home after a 10 hour day it's usually got 30-40% left) and the keyboard is fantastic. Oh and it takes a beating like a champ...
Yes, there are some weak points (the speakers, the creaky palmrest), but these are things I can absolutely live with, because other than those, it's the perfect laptop.
With Lenovo, you unfortunately have to consider very carefully which model is the right one for you:
X220/230: Decent IPS displays, 7mm (instead of 9.5mm) HDD slot, long battery life, low resolution, no Ultrabay for an additional hard drive, 6c slice battery
T420/430: Horribly bad displays, 7mm HDD slot starting from the T430, long battery life, Ultrabay, 9c slice battery
T420s/430s: Horribly bad displays, 7mm HDD slot, short battery life, Ultrabay that's battery-compatible (although the Ultrabay batteries are only ~30Wh, unlike the slices which are ~60 and ~90 respectively)
T520/530: Good HD+ and awesome FullHD displays (the HD-Ready 1366x768 is so so... usable if you like very low pixel density and low contrast), long battery life, 9c slice battery
If you pick the wrong device for your usage, you're going to think all Thinkpads are crap. It's more than just bigger and smaller (T vs. X) or thinner and lighter (TXXX vs TXXXs)... Having to know all this is obviously a big negative point for potential buyers, but saying that all modern Thinkpads are crap is simply wrong :)
The new chiclet keyboard you refer to is actually pretty awesome in terms of typing feel, BTW (similar to the good old NMB T60 keyboards). It's just the layout that makes it horribly unusable...
Cheap plastic housing => light weight => not much fall damage. It's a good design philosophy, but I personally prefer a phone with a little more heft, as do many others.
So she's the reason the damned things are sold out... slap her for me, would you?
"When it comes to consumer electronics, it almost never pays off to buy the expensive product, especially not with the pace that the technology is advancing."
Depends on what you're looking for. If we consider high-end computers like Thinkpads and owners who know what they're doing, it almost certainly pays off to buy the more expensive X/T/W series Thinkpad instead of a low-end Dell Vostro or Latitude... have you ever tried to replace parts (from sourcing to actually replacement) on a low-end machine?
For the high-end Thinkpad, you simply type the part number (listed in the hardware maintenance manual) into eBay and order it for (usually) a peasly amount (I paid 120€ for the top-end FullHD screen with an official Lenovo FRU sticker, now compare that with the prices for a low-end laptop's "Screen assembly"... and in the US it's probably much cheaper), then grab a screwdriver and follow the instructions in the hardware maintenance manual for repair. Anything short of a dead mainboard and you should be up and running in three days or less...
With the Dell, on the other hand, once that 1 year of NBD runs out, you're completely screwed, because on the low end, replacement parts are 1. way too expensive and 2. difficult to replace.
And even if your device doesn't break (and high-end Thinkpads rarely require more than a new battery and keyboard, maybe palmrest, after two years of daily use - and replacing these things takes about 60 seconds), you're still better off with the high-end model because the resale value is better. My Thinkpad is still worth twice as much as a new Vostro, even after an entire year of use... if I sell it and buy the next gen model as a demo unit, pump it full of upgrades (SSD + big spinning drive, top-end LCD, max out the RAM), I'll still be spending less than I would on a low-end Vostro, and have the performance (both in terms of grunt as well as battery and thermal/noise) to back up the high price.
It's got nothing to do with a status symbol - I'm just cheap enough to recognize that buying cheap crap is not very efficient economically.
Be glad you didn't stick with the Precision. I sit in a 6-man office at work, and 3 of my coworkers have company-issued Dell Precision laptops (one with the old Core 2 Duo, one Arrandale and one Sandy Bridge)... it's like working in a freakin wind tunnel. The fans on those things are constantly running full tilt for some reason, even when you're just writing an e-mail or Word document.
As I sit here typing this on my Thinkpad T520, on the other hand, I can't hear it at all (SSD so no spinning hard drive, fans are off because the CPU temp is somewhere around 37 anyway)...
Couldn't agree more... I'm currently typing this on a brand new Windows 8 tablet, and no matter how I sit or try to position the tablet, the angle my wrists require to type properly require a less than optimal viewing angle... sure, the display is IPS so it's not horrible, but still rather suboptimal. Oh, and the text input is annoying as hell...
Nicely done, the whole office is rolling around on the floor laughing... :)
Also, having just looked at the videos, I actually find the AMD version to be more visually pleasing - yes, there's a big "jump" at a few spots in the video, but it's in no way regular, while the nVidia jumps (albeit a smaller distance) periodically - roughly once a second. It's like a rhythmic pulsing... really weird.
And I can't say I've seen this issue on my HD7750 (awesome little card - no PEG connector needed, doesn't break 50C running Starcraft 2 on high, low power consumption)... although that might be because I'm not running the beta driver.
I have no idea, but there are "call" buttons on the web app... try it and see ;)
Depends what you're looking for, I suppose.
I quite enjoyed the CoD Modern Warfare games, and was enthralled by the fact that they play more like a movie than a game. On higher difficulty levels they were hard enough to be challenging, and had better plots than many games I've played (because let's be honest: Video game storylines nearly always suck, and the ones that were extremely good for video games pale in comparison to books or movies/TV).
Have you tried a web based IM service that supports voice? I know imo.im has voice call buttons for Skype... maybe that'll work.
Does that really matter? Remember, these alternatives all have a far smaller feature set, and the overlap (mostly basics) is all very similar... you don't need to relearn anything to use them if you've extensively used MS Office - you just forget 90% of what you've learned in the past and are automatically an expert user ;)
I'm not quite as PC-illiterate as you seem to think... I've been using menu keyboard shortcuts (with ALT to open the menu) for years, far before the ribbon existed ;)
The issue is that in older menu-based UIs (Office 2003, OpenOffice) the keyboard shortcuts very often lead to UIs that are no longer keyboard-navigable, or require the use of the tab key (multiple times) to navigate through a bunch of checkboxes, drop-down lists and so on. Also, many of the options don't actually have a dedicated shortcut key...
For instance: In order to change certain formatting aspects in Office 2007+, I can use keyboard shortcuts to access anything visible in the home tab of the ribbon. In Office 2003, I have to open Format=>Font (which is accessible via a keyboard shortcut, like you said), but then I need to either tab around a lot to select checkboxes and drop-down lists or just use the mouse.
Touch(e-with-a-line).
However, the ribbon has other advantages, such as making all non-dialogue functions accessible via keyboard shortcuts. Want to highlight the last word yellow (something I use a lot at work), for instance? CTRL+SHIFT+Left then ALT H I Enter. Insert a cross reference? ALT C R F.
Hell, I almost updated to Windows 8 just to get the ribbon in Explorer... :p
Do you really think it's likely MS Office will disappear any time soon? :)
Yes, schools need to teach concepts - however, this usually involves the use of actual examples, and why not make those examples relevant to current everyday work life?
It's not about the UI, but rather all the missing or more bend-over-backwards features in OpenOffice (or LibreOffice or whatever you want to call it) when compared to MS Office. In 7th grade, we were using Office 2000 or maybe XP... the basic concepts translate to 2007+ (ribbon) just fine.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, drives me crazy because I can't find many of the features that I'm looking for, or they work just slightly differently enough to be annoying...