It therefore has probably the largest developer support base of any desktop platform.
Which might be good, if it wasn't a tablet that tries to be a crappy laptop.
Whatever you may think it's trying to be, it's the best ultraportable laptop on the market when used as an ultraportable laptop. I came from a Zenbook UX31A and an X230 and neither are as good as the Surface Pro even if you just use the SP as a laptop with a type cover.
Why would you prefer the Surface Pro over an ultraportable though? It sounds like you don't use it much as a tablet. I have a monster Dell that I hate and wish I had something like a Zenbook or Air.
I've got a Surface Pro and its predecessors were a Zenbook UX31A (awesome) and an x230 (maybe even more awesome). The Surface Pro vastly outstrips either of those or any other ultraportable in terms of ultraportability. While I sometimes wish I had my 512 GB SSD from the X230, the Surface Pro pretty much makes nearly every ultrabook obsolete. And unlike the GP, I use the digitizer input all the time. Onenote with a digitizer is unbelievably great, maybe the best new (to me) thing I've started using in computing in a decade.
Shows how far behind Samsung is in terms of hardware engineering. They stack the deck and still can't touch a 9 month old phone. Both browser performance and gaming performance, the 2 most stressful use cases on a smartphone, are way behind Apple. http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6914/54305.png
Look at your link. It shows the S4 beating the iP5. Also Sunspider is kind of weird. I think that current Windows Phones with underpowered SoCs post the best scores in more recent comparisons, and that doesn't make a lot of sense.
Regarding your other links, yes, the iP5 has oddly good GPU performance.
Why not just create your content in something that all of your non-geek friends are happy to use (Word with track changes, for instance) and then spend a short time formatting it when you're done writing?
If you want an idea of how complex and worthwhile your industry is, look at the average age of your coworkers and whether the more experienced ones tend to have more to contribute. If that's the case, you're probably doing something interesting, creative, and innovative. If it's not the case, you're probably doing something menial like picking radishes or coding.
Anybody who, implicitly or explicitly, asserts anything even close to contemporary threats of Civil War gravity needs a smack with the cluebat.
Except that Lincoln could have ended the war at any time by just letting the South go their own way. We have no "easy out" with Al Qaeda. Unlike the Confederacy, they want more than to be left alone.
But there are hardly any of them and they have no money and have never directly caused significant damage to any nation. They're like five hundred times less dangerous than the tobacco industry. We have no "easy out" with a few angry two year olds in Bermuda, either, but that doesn't really matter. Just put a reasonable amount of resources toward fixing the problem, and not through mass killings that just lead to another generation of Al Qaeda, and stop spending hundreds of billions every year to fight a few hicks with a budget ten thousand times smaller than that.
The term "cartwheel" has different meanings to different people. Unfortunately, just like with the Boston Bombing, CNN rushed a story out without getting its facts straight, though at least this time it was somewhat more substantial than pure speculation.
The top priority of most news outlets is to get a story published before competitors get the scoop. Now that someone flipped a switch and news sources officially believe any claim made anonymously on Twitter, this is resulting in a lot of misinformation. When I hear people in the industry discussing the way technology has altered news reporting I'm struck by the disconnect between what the reporters want and what the public wants.
Reporters want countable readers and somewhere to direct blame if the story ends up being false. In other words, they want to be the first to break a story and are happy with anonymous or unverified sources. The public (or at least the people I know) don't care at all whether they hear about the details of this plane crash now, tomorrow, or Monday - they want accurate information, not prompt misinformation.
One rumor I heard was that ILS (or some portion of it) wasn't functioning on the runway the plane was landing on (28L) so the pilot was making a manual approach without the automated glidepath alerts he'd normally have. If this is true, then this gives the story a technology/geek tie-in, and touches on issues like whether or not humans (pilots in particular) have become too reliant on machines and when the machines fail, humans don't have enough experience without them to be an adequate back up.
I don't think we need extra excuses to talk about this here. The plane itself is more impressive technology than the entire field of computer programming.
Unfortunately, most airplane accidents and incidents are due to pilot error, ATC error and maintenance mechanic error (I think in this order). Problems with hardware or firmware that are unrecoverable in spite of following proper procedures are pretty damn rare. For example, AF447 was not directly caused by any hardware failing - it was due to the pilots not following procedures and good practice.
If you read the black box transcript from AF447 the most notable single problem was that two of the three qualified pilots in the cockpit believed that the stick was being pushed forward, when in fact it was being pulled back.
When a plane stalls, a common panicked reaction is to pull back on the stick in an attempt to point the plane back into the sky. A lot of training goes into eliminating this instinct, because the solution is actually the opposite - point the noise toward the ground to regain speed. IIRC, the copilot was pulling back on the stick for the last several minutes even as the pilot and the alternate pilot (or a flight engineer or something, I forget) were saying things like, "we're pushing on the stick, why aren't we gaining airspeed?"
The communication problem was largely caused by an major Airbus design flaw: the sticks between the left and right seats aren't linked. In other planes, the pilot would have known the copilot had the stick pulled back because the action would make his own stick move back as well. On AF447, the pilot saw nothing other than the copilot's hand on the stick and assumed he was doing the right thing, and in the understandable confusion as they struggled to gain control of the plane the copilot never verbally corrected the misconception.
Certainly pilot error in response to some external factors that aren't that uncommon (like a pitot tube freezing) was the direct cause of the crash of AF447, but a more sensible flight control design would have likely prevented the pilot error.
You may call it Independence Day, but over here it's just the anniversary of when we finally got shot of those troublesome colonies started by religious fanatics.
Rationalize all you want - we beat you. As for those religious fanatics, you should have known better than to go up against them They were the same variety that beheaded your king in 1649.
No, we didn't beat them, as you so childishly state. We were born a couple hundred years after a war to which we have no personal connection.
The test with the biggest difference was memory usage, with Firefox using half the memory of Chrome. This matches comparisons I have done. If you ever have to use an older computer with 2GB of RAM Chrome is pretty much unusable while Firefox works fine. I have an SSD so I turned off virtual memory. With 8GB of RAM I would have to close Chrome if I want to play a game but have no problems with Firefox.
This guy went from EA to MS to now Zynga. Notice a trend?
EA: Hemorrhaging money, dominant market share, in decline MS: Record profits, dominant market share, in decline Zynga: Hemorrhaging money, large share of market with no customer loyalty, in decline
I'm a third gen native as well, now living elsewhere.
First, regarding the article, it's obvious that it's objectively wrong about the idea that people don't want to live in the valley because house prices in the valley are absurdly high and climbing. The market has spoken and it has conclusively proven TFA to be incorrect.
Second, regarding your comment...yeah, I largely agree. I miss a lot of things about the bay area, but whenever I go back it's sad to see what the place has become. I think new residents are the real problem. While San Jose/Mountain View/etc. are suburban, they were never at all like suburbs elsewhere in the country. They had character and above all, uniqueness. With all the overpaid, uncultured, unintelligent, fresh out of college people coming in to work at places like Google, Facebook, etc. there's a perceived demand for endless clones of hipster friendly restaurants and coffee houses that are essentially repeating the same half dozen archetypes found in any college town.
Suppose that I as a private person collected data about people, did not correct errors, and passed it around to the world as I see fit. If a credit agency can do that and be immune from suits or criminal charges what concept in American law permits a credit bureau to do it? Seems like equal before the law resides in the toilet.
You can take them to court, represent yourself, and beat them. Maybe the answer is for everyone with credit history errors to sue.
I don't understand. What does this do that Google Docs/Drive doesn't already do?
Will this get us pixel-perfect wysiwyg editing of Microsoft Documents?
Somehow, I doubt it. Google Docs/Drive doesn't even get that right for PDF documents. I doubt it will get that right for Microsoft Word Documents, which by design are much much worst than PDF documents.
This is Google. They like to make redundant products where they'll get the main concept right but half a half-assed implementation which gets improved for a few iterations before it's abandoned and eventually taken off the market for a somewhat inferior alternative with more social networking features and less core functionality.
I'm also a Sprint customer who uses Google Voice. Regarding your three points:
1. This is why I use GV. Useful.
2. GV's transcription has such amazingly low accuracy that it's good for comedy, but not for understanding about 50% of messages. Late 1990s Dragon Naturally Speaking was far more accurate. Even Siri makes maybe a tenth as many mistakes. When I compare to the recorded voicemail I hear clear, normal American accents speaking clearly where my messages show up as things like "Easter...go between store nine fig pie hand turkey...Eugene pizazz." As another power has mentioned, Google has the worst voice transcription available.
3. I already use other email-SMS bridge services when necessary and never switched.
Here in the UK we enjoy almost uninterrupted mains power. No brownouts (a brownout perhaps every eight months which is usually due to maintenance, extreme weather or emergency works), no requirement for external generators nor for a UPS for your desktop PC.
I understand that the power supply in the US is patchy at best, with frequent brownouts. I think you guys really do need a stable source of power. Nuclear is a good way to supply this. Focusing on renewables won't begin to replace this, nor will it give an easily modulatable power supply that reacts to user demand. Sure they take a long time to build, and there's legislation preventing waste processing being done that would wring out more power from the same uranium. So you end up with large waste disposal sites where you wastefully allow spent rods to decay needlessly. That's assuming you still are building old-style reactors. Newer ones have much less waste, more power and frankly are less dangerous.
Solution lots of smallish pebble-bed nuclear reactors to do the heavy lifting, augmented with solar, with the odd gas & coal power stations taking up the slack.
I like a lot of what you say, but your "patchy at best" lead in isn't very convincing. An average American home that hasn't just been through a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake might see 5 minutes without power per year and no brownouts in the occupants' lifetimes. Yes, these things happen, but they're isolated and rare. The brownouts in California about a decade ago, which were the only widespread American brownouts in recent history, were caused by Enron manipulating power markets, not a lack of real power.
Google employees are on average quite young and in my experience naive beyond their youth. I think they're particularly ill-suited to the kind of experience-based critical thinking necessary to evaluate applicants.
Only if you consider American citizens enemies of the American government.
Apparently you confuse the Taliban, al Qaida, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, et. al., with American citizens. You tell the world and everybody knows, including the very terrorists against whom you are trying to protect the American people. He could have gone to the inspector general or Congress, but didn't. Who knows what the damage will be?
The Inspector General and Congress are part of the problem.
Terrorism isn't dangerous on its own. It never was and never will be. The point of terrorism is to provoke a disproportionate response that harms the target more than the terrorists would be able to do directly. The world's terrorists' primary partners are western governments. The United States have spent over a trillion dollars in the last 10 years to "fight terrorism," with absolutely no indication that they're doing anything other than breeding resentment and planting the seeds for greater terrorism in the future. If you want to know why world leaders are willing to spend so much money to "fight" something that causes similar physical harm to bee stings, look at who received those trillion dollars and their relationships with governments.
Additionally, it's extremely unlikely that anything Snowden shared about spying will have any impact on our espionage efforts against "terrorists." So far it's all been information about spying on Americans and foreign noncombatants. Furthermore, everyone who's cared to pay attention in the last twenty years already believed the strong but indirect evidence of exactly this sort of spying. In other words: the terrorists already knew about these programs, or something like them. The only people who see this as a revelation are naive American citizens and our allies, and the only thing in jeopardy is the NSA's unjustified unaccountability.
Slashdot Mirror
It therefore has probably the largest developer support base of any desktop platform.
Which might be good, if it wasn't a tablet that tries to be a crappy laptop.
Whatever you may think it's trying to be, it's the best ultraportable laptop on the market when used as an ultraportable laptop. I came from a Zenbook UX31A and an X230 and neither are as good as the Surface Pro even if you just use the SP as a laptop with a type cover.
Why would you prefer the Surface Pro over an ultraportable though? It sounds like you don't use it much as a tablet. I have a monster Dell that I hate and wish I had something like a Zenbook or Air.
I've got a Surface Pro and its predecessors were a Zenbook UX31A (awesome) and an x230 (maybe even more awesome). The Surface Pro vastly outstrips either of those or any other ultraportable in terms of ultraportability. While I sometimes wish I had my 512 GB SSD from the X230, the Surface Pro pretty much makes nearly every ultrabook obsolete. And unlike the GP, I use the digitizer input all the time. Onenote with a digitizer is unbelievably great, maybe the best new (to me) thing I've started using in computing in a decade.
Shows how far behind Samsung is in terms of hardware engineering. They stack the deck and still can't touch a 9 month old phone. Both browser performance and gaming performance, the 2 most stressful use cases on a smartphone, are way behind Apple.
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6914/54305.png
Look at your link. It shows the S4 beating the iP5. Also Sunspider is kind of weird. I think that current Windows Phones with underpowered SoCs post the best scores in more recent comparisons, and that doesn't make a lot of sense.
Regarding your other links, yes, the iP5 has oddly good GPU performance.
Why not just create your content in something that all of your non-geek friends are happy to use (Word with track changes, for instance) and then spend a short time formatting it when you're done writing?
Nixon(literally betrayed the country for first election, secretly spied on opponents with the CIA for re-election).
Don't forget that Nixon jump-started the transition from American to Chinese economic dominance.
you can fight for my rights anytime~~
This was all pre-Marissa. Marissa's public history is at Google, where user rights are eliminated with a wink and a smile.
Who would you rather have spying on you, a company whose mission is to 'not be evil' or a company whose attitude is 'bend over and take it!"
Google, Apple, and MS all have the bend over and take it attitude. Is the "do no evil" company some Linux support brand?
If you want an idea of how complex and worthwhile your industry is, look at the average age of your coworkers and whether the more experienced ones tend to have more to contribute. If that's the case, you're probably doing something interesting, creative, and innovative. If it's not the case, you're probably doing something menial like picking radishes or coding.
The best part is the BORT license plate on the back of the vehicle.
My son's name is also Bort.
Anybody who, implicitly or explicitly, asserts anything even close to contemporary threats of Civil War gravity needs a smack with the cluebat.
Except that Lincoln could have ended the war at any time by just letting the South go their own way. We have no "easy out" with Al Qaeda. Unlike the Confederacy, they want more than to be left alone.
But there are hardly any of them and they have no money and have never directly caused significant damage to any nation. They're like five hundred times less dangerous than the tobacco industry. We have no "easy out" with a few angry two year olds in Bermuda, either, but that doesn't really matter. Just put a reasonable amount of resources toward fixing the problem, and not through mass killings that just lead to another generation of Al Qaeda, and stop spending hundreds of billions every year to fight a few hicks with a budget ten thousand times smaller than that.
The term "cartwheel" has different meanings to different people. Unfortunately, just like with the Boston Bombing, CNN rushed a story out without getting its facts straight, though at least this time it was somewhat more substantial than pure speculation.
The top priority of most news outlets is to get a story published before competitors get the scoop. Now that someone flipped a switch and news sources officially believe any claim made anonymously on Twitter, this is resulting in a lot of misinformation. When I hear people in the industry discussing the way technology has altered news reporting I'm struck by the disconnect between what the reporters want and what the public wants.
Reporters want countable readers and somewhere to direct blame if the story ends up being false. In other words, they want to be the first to break a story and are happy with anonymous or unverified sources. The public (or at least the people I know) don't care at all whether they hear about the details of this plane crash now, tomorrow, or Monday - they want accurate information, not prompt misinformation.
One rumor I heard was that ILS (or some portion of it) wasn't functioning on the runway the plane was landing on (28L) so the pilot was making a manual approach without the automated glidepath alerts he'd normally have. If this is true, then this gives the story a technology/geek tie-in, and touches on issues like whether or not humans (pilots in particular) have become too reliant on machines and when the machines fail, humans don't have enough experience without them to be an adequate back up.
I don't think we need extra excuses to talk about this here. The plane itself is more impressive technology than the entire field of computer programming.
Unfortunately, most airplane accidents and incidents are due to pilot error, ATC error and maintenance mechanic error (I think in this order). Problems with hardware or firmware that are unrecoverable in spite of following proper procedures are pretty damn rare. For example, AF447 was not directly caused by any hardware failing - it was due to the pilots not following procedures and good practice.
If you read the black box transcript from AF447 the most notable single problem was that two of the three qualified pilots in the cockpit believed that the stick was being pushed forward, when in fact it was being pulled back.
When a plane stalls, a common panicked reaction is to pull back on the stick in an attempt to point the plane back into the sky. A lot of training goes into eliminating this instinct, because the solution is actually the opposite - point the noise toward the ground to regain speed. IIRC, the copilot was pulling back on the stick for the last several minutes even as the pilot and the alternate pilot (or a flight engineer or something, I forget) were saying things like, "we're pushing on the stick, why aren't we gaining airspeed?"
The communication problem was largely caused by an major Airbus design flaw: the sticks between the left and right seats aren't linked. In other planes, the pilot would have known the copilot had the stick pulled back because the action would make his own stick move back as well. On AF447, the pilot saw nothing other than the copilot's hand on the stick and assumed he was doing the right thing, and in the understandable confusion as they struggled to gain control of the plane the copilot never verbally corrected the misconception.
Certainly pilot error in response to some external factors that aren't that uncommon (like a pitot tube freezing) was the direct cause of the crash of AF447, but a more sensible flight control design would have likely prevented the pilot error.
You may call it Independence Day, but over here it's just the anniversary of when we finally got shot of those troublesome colonies started by religious fanatics.
Rationalize all you want - we beat you. As for those religious fanatics, you should have known better than to go up against them They were the same variety that beheaded your king in 1649.
No, we didn't beat them, as you so childishly state. We were born a couple hundred years after a war to which we have no personal connection.
Start screen and full screen apps at not meant for screens this big.
In the desktop 8.1 is supposed to finally make text DPI scaling unclunky.
The test with the biggest difference was memory usage, with Firefox using half the memory of Chrome. This matches comparisons I have done. If you ever have to use an older computer with 2GB of RAM Chrome is pretty much unusable while Firefox works fine. I have an SSD so I turned off virtual memory. With 8GB of RAM I would have to close Chrome if I want to play a game but have no problems with Firefox.
Firefox has always been slimmer than Chrome.
This guy went from EA to MS to now Zynga. Notice a trend?
EA: Hemorrhaging money, dominant market share, in decline
MS: Record profits, dominant market share, in decline
Zynga: Hemorrhaging money, large share of market with no customer loyalty, in decline
I'm going to go with "in decline"
I'm a third gen native as well, now living elsewhere.
First, regarding the article, it's obvious that it's objectively wrong about the idea that people don't want to live in the valley because house prices in the valley are absurdly high and climbing. The market has spoken and it has conclusively proven TFA to be incorrect.
Second, regarding your comment...yeah, I largely agree. I miss a lot of things about the bay area, but whenever I go back it's sad to see what the place has become. I think new residents are the real problem. While San Jose/Mountain View/etc. are suburban, they were never at all like suburbs elsewhere in the country. They had character and above all, uniqueness. With all the overpaid, uncultured, unintelligent, fresh out of college people coming in to work at places like Google, Facebook, etc. there's a perceived demand for endless clones of hipster friendly restaurants and coffee houses that are essentially repeating the same half dozen archetypes found in any college town.
Suppose that I as a private person collected data about people, did not correct errors, and passed it around to the world as I see fit. If a credit agency can do that and be immune from suits or criminal charges what concept in American law permits a credit bureau to do it? Seems like equal before the law resides in the toilet.
You can take them to court, represent yourself, and beat them. Maybe the answer is for everyone with credit history errors to sue.
I don't understand. What does this do that Google Docs/Drive doesn't already do?
Will this get us pixel-perfect wysiwyg editing of Microsoft Documents?
Somehow, I doubt it. Google Docs/Drive doesn't even get that right for PDF documents. I doubt it will get that right for Microsoft Word Documents, which by design are much much worst than PDF documents.
This is Google. They like to make redundant products where they'll get the main concept right but half a half-assed implementation which gets improved for a few iterations before it's abandoned and eventually taken off the market for a somewhat inferior alternative with more social networking features and less core functionality.
I'm also a Sprint customer who uses Google Voice. Regarding your three points:
1. This is why I use GV. Useful.
2. GV's transcription has such amazingly low accuracy that it's good for comedy, but not for understanding about 50% of messages. Late 1990s Dragon Naturally Speaking was far more accurate. Even Siri makes maybe a tenth as many mistakes. When I compare to the recorded voicemail I hear clear, normal American accents speaking clearly where my messages show up as things like "Easter...go between store nine fig pie hand turkey...Eugene pizazz." As another power has mentioned, Google has the worst voice transcription available.
3. I already use other email-SMS bridge services when necessary and never switched.
Here in the UK we enjoy almost uninterrupted mains power. No brownouts (a brownout perhaps every eight months which is usually due to maintenance, extreme weather or emergency works), no requirement for external generators nor for a UPS for your desktop PC.
I understand that the power supply in the US is patchy at best, with frequent brownouts. I think you guys really do need a stable source of power. Nuclear is a good way to supply this. Focusing on renewables won't begin to replace this, nor will it give an easily modulatable power supply that reacts to user demand. Sure they take a long time to build, and there's legislation preventing waste processing being done that would wring out more power from the same uranium. So you end up with large waste disposal sites where you wastefully allow spent rods to decay needlessly. That's assuming you still are building old-style reactors. Newer ones have much less waste, more power and frankly are less dangerous.
Gas Power? Coal Power? Great, Cheap to build but pollute like crazy. Not to mention coal burners actually more radioactive than nuclear power. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Solution lots of smallish pebble-bed nuclear reactors to do the heavy lifting, augmented with solar, with the odd gas & coal power stations taking up the slack.
I like a lot of what you say, but your "patchy at best" lead in isn't very convincing. An average American home that hasn't just been through a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake might see 5 minutes without power per year and no brownouts in the occupants' lifetimes. Yes, these things happen, but they're isolated and rare. The brownouts in California about a decade ago, which were the only widespread American brownouts in recent history, were caused by Enron manipulating power markets, not a lack of real power.
Google employees are on average quite young and in my experience naive beyond their youth. I think they're particularly ill-suited to the kind of experience-based critical thinking necessary to evaluate applicants.
What, no computer fraud? I wonder how the prosecutor missed that - he could have accused him of HACKING and CYBERTERRORISM!!!!11111!
What's hacking? Do you mean CYBERHACKING?!
Only if you consider American citizens enemies of the American government.
Apparently you confuse the Taliban, al Qaida, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, et. al., with American citizens. You tell the world and everybody knows, including the very terrorists against whom you are trying to protect the American people. He could have gone to the inspector general or Congress, but didn't. Who knows what the damage will be?
The Inspector General and Congress are part of the problem.
Terrorism isn't dangerous on its own. It never was and never will be. The point of terrorism is to provoke a disproportionate response that harms the target more than the terrorists would be able to do directly. The world's terrorists' primary partners are western governments. The United States have spent over a trillion dollars in the last 10 years to "fight terrorism," with absolutely no indication that they're doing anything other than breeding resentment and planting the seeds for greater terrorism in the future. If you want to know why world leaders are willing to spend so much money to "fight" something that causes similar physical harm to bee stings, look at who received those trillion dollars and their relationships with governments.
Additionally, it's extremely unlikely that anything Snowden shared about spying will have any impact on our espionage efforts against "terrorists." So far it's all been information about spying on Americans and foreign noncombatants. Furthermore, everyone who's cared to pay attention in the last twenty years already believed the strong but indirect evidence of exactly this sort of spying. In other words: the terrorists already knew about these programs, or something like them. The only people who see this as a revelation are naive American citizens and our allies, and the only thing in jeopardy is the NSA's unjustified unaccountability.