Sounds like the situation could improve if Linux exposed a more stable API toward drivers.
Allowing and partially supporting hidden APIs is a mistake that has been often repeated in the computing industry. This is something where I think the kernel developers should learn from Apple. Apple, during old MacOS days used to deliberately, repeatedly and gratuitously change their hidden API calls even with minor point releases. This meant that software which used the API in ways that it shouldn't (in this case, by providing a binary blob) would break often and quickly. Users would be unhappy with their software and vendors would be forced to change. Software developers learned to read and respect the documentation. When they rewrote their O/S and even migrated to completely different architectures this meant that, merely by reimplementing the well defined published interfaces, almost all Apple third party software vendor's software was compatible.
I think that somewhat perversely, the actual mistake is that the unsupported linux APIs are too stable. This is the same mistake as Microsoft has often made and is something where the Linux Kernel developers and other free software vendors could learn from Apple. Microsoft's main benefit is plausible deniability when they want to have hidden interfaces for their own software. Free software doesn't need or benefit from such underhand tactics. There's no need to repeat Microsoft's mistake.
If this engineer knows that will never happen (through no fault of his own, higher-ups would have decided this) then at least he's making an effort. People can get upset all they want, but nothing other than good is going to come out of this, whether it's exactly what would be ideal or not. Some help is better than none.
Right; I'm not getting upset about him. We love him and if he ever gets kicked out by NVIDIA, I'm sure there are lots of us here who will want to hear about it and offer him a job. What upsets us is that NVIDIA clearly has people who understand that we are upset and why we are upset and they still don't do anything. From my point of view this makes things even worse.
NVIDIA; please: even if it's incomplete and misses your latest fastest newest stuff, please provide the Linux developers; both kernel and Noveau; with publishable open documentation which tells them how to set up the rest of the features and at the very least provide good, reliable and colour tunable 2D and low level support for your cards. Preferably provide full, documented access to any feature older than two years.
This can have no possible bad influence on your competitive advantage and will go a long way to making those of us using Linux happier.
"Spending money on research", should actually read 'spending money on researchers'. Microsoft's research deparment is infamous for buying up the best; locking them away in a guilded cage and making sure they never deliver something to the real world. Now that might seem great; the guys get to do fundamental long term research; but these are not physicists. Microsoft typically picks people, like those that started Haskell, who have had very deep theoretical insights and are very close to delivering those to the real world. Their existing research gets blocked and they go off on a tangent.
This adds up to Microsoft actually blocking research in total. It also means that whilst Microsoft does tend to get key patents (also with the aim of blocking innovation), their research doesn't even tend to conribute to their own development. This makes sense, if you think about it, since there's almost no legal way to transform the computing industry to give Microsoft a better position than the one they have already.
He can't stop you from filing, but he can get it dismissed with prejudice, with an order that you have to pay his legal fees. Ultimately it costs him nothing, but it's still a pain in the ass to reach that point.
This is not quite as simple as it seems. If your case is even somewhat reasonable then costs aren't normally awarded in either direction. All you have to do is claim that your neigbour made a persistent noise whenever you were the only person nearby and nobody can prove it either way. Even once you do get costs awarded, you will often find that it's "reasonable" costs and that the person paying can get at least some of what you have done excluded ("Why did you need to use a courier to hand-deliver the letter? the mail would be cheaper.")
This tends to be done by rich assholes for whom even the whole of your costs is pretty much nothing. They don't care about paying a few kilo dollars. The people they do this to tend to be poor people for whom even having to do that temporarily is problem. Around where I live the local asshole is a lawyer who represents himself and so really doesn't care. It seems he wins just often enough to cover his costs from all the other cases he does and anyway it provides entertainment for the junior members of his practice when they are low on other cases.
Lost office sales must have convinced them to do this as a way to push people to cloud services, once they're on the cloud MS can find some way to wring cash out of them.......
Oooh ooh ooh.. Classic Slashdot business plan. I know this one:
1. build web office suite
2. get lots of people using it for free
3. ????
4. profit
Next Microsoft will be releasing Office under a GPLv3 compatible copyleft license!!!
FRAND is just another patent cartel and we have no reason to care about it. FRAND standards organisations should be seen as a form of illegal cartel.
Even funnier is that Apple and Microsoft, who have completely failed to get licenses for these FRAND patents go around attempting to mug people with knives and start crying like babies when companies like Motorola that have actually done some serious research in their lives pull out a combat shotgun. "Want to make my day?".
Not to be too much of a shill, but this is one area Intel seems to always be better.
Their Gfx performance may not be up to the other two, but their support is better.
Maybe Intel should takeover nVidia:-) *
-nB
I actually have what was supposed to be an okay Intel chip in the machine as well (built in on the motherboard). It was fine from the driver point of view but failed when it came to driving my big monitor properly and stably. Next time I probably will go with an Intel discrete solution, however.
Yes; seems like I'm a bloody "lucky" winner. I bought a reasonably top end AMD card specifically because they promised open source support. Of course it turns out that only the proprietary driver works properly. Fine "support is coming; they do the right thing and give over the documentation; install it for now and to free later; I don't mind". Except that because it's stupid proprietary code it doesn't get automatically distributed by my distro vendor (today that's Ubuntu; who knows tomorrow). Every time I get an X-org update it breaks.
I really don't care about the high speed graphics most of the time. The free driver will be fine. Just make sure they have the specs so that the colours can be made to come out right on decent monitors and I will buy your stuff. AMD; you almost have our goodwill; You've already made the investment; Just go that last few inches; get it finished and make sure you fully cooperate with the developers. We will pay extra for your stuff. We will be glad to never see NVIDIA again. You will get better integration to Android. This will be worth it.
On the other hand, maybe Nokia is just that stupid.
The general feeling seems to be that Nokia didn't get such an agreement. Tommi Ahonen's explanation is that Stephen Elop had just come from Microsoft where he drank their coolaid by the litre. He thought (thinks?) that Windows Phone is the whole future of the mobile market and so just getting in at the beginning is a great deal. Remember that Microsoft has always had grandiose plans (think Cairo) that don't pan out (think Vista). As an executive it's difficult to see what will fail and what will succeed and all his MS buddies will be being ver careful to keep him optimistic so he could have a completely unrealistic view of the future.
This is slashdot, not a courtroom. Who gives a shit.
Actually, part of the fun of Slashdot is identifying other posters on their assumptions, lies, debating tricks, misdirection, ad hominem attacks, use of correlation as a sign of causation, failure to use a car analogy and so on. If you have the right attitude it's even fun (if a bit painful) when other people do it to you. Look at this and you learn a fair bit. For example, a repeat post of the same material which has already been discredited is actually modded much higher than the original. Why the hell? How did he achieve that.
Why is cpu6502 reposting the same thing anyway? To me it looks like he wrote up a post in an editor and then cut and paste it again forgetting that he had posted it before. How could he forget that? Is he really posting on so many accounts in parallel, or does he just have some really good shit. On the other hand, it could be because he's part of one of the Astroturf groups? His post is actually pretty valid if you ignore the wrong number in it. I don't see how it fits into the months corporate targets.
If you start asking questions like "why the inquisition" next you'll be asking "why am I posting on Slashdot". You don't want to go there.
It will run 7.8, an update that has most (if not all) of the non-hardware-specific features. The summary is incorrect.
This is not the era of feature phones. We do not just put a table of check boxes side by side. As Stephen Elop said:
With respect to comparisons to other ecosystem shifts and things like that, the real thing that one must focus on is the quality of products in the market, the momentum that one already has
This decision kills all momentym and means Windows Phone starts from zero. The software which works on Windows 8 will not work on Windows 7.8. "Just a recompile" is the difference between Linux which has many applications and SCO UNIX which is dead.
If you are a developer, this is the moment to get off the Wintanic and into a lifeboat before they get the engines started and head towards the iceberg again.
Because Balmer is fat and sweaty and touches himself at night. That's why.
Partly; yes; it's because their managment are idiots. But there's a deeper reason, and it's the reason why IBM took so long to release a decent PC in the first place and ended up having to buy in a system from MS. The are afraid of cannibalizing their main market. They want to "differentiate" from market to market. That means that the x86 tablet gets a stylus whilst the ARM tablets don't get access to tradiitional apps. That means that you will get a "Windows XX - Pro" edition which costs $2000 but is the only way to get some of the "power user" features.
When Apple came out with one phone which did everything for everybody, suddenly you could just add a rubber cover and use your business phone (which needed a calendar) for sport (where you need non-scratch glass). That destroyed a whole market which was used to providing separate phones for each different group of people. Microsoft wants to reinstate that kind of division. I expect the same success as IBM had in blocking the development of personal computers.
Linus Torvalds can criticize all he wants. It doesn't make him right, or certainly doesn't enable him to see more clearly.
Linus Torvalds is right about whether Linus Torvalds feels put out by Nvidia by definition. Nvidia has to deal with that by making Linus happy. As long as they don't I, as a person who has influence over the purchase of lots of Linux hardware, will avoid their products. That doesn't mean I will rule them out where there is no alternative, but it does mean I'm writing working on an AMD drivein monitor. It does mean that wherever there is a choice I will avoid them. This does mean that I, personally cost them hundreds to thousands of euros yearly. There are tens of thousands of people who think like me and thousands of those who cost them real money/
Simply put, they want to put some corporate people towards making Linus happy. I don't care why he's unhappy; What I care about is that it makes him less likely to be well disposed to looking after that hardware in future. That's a real financial risk from my point of view and I'd like to minimize that risk. If Nvidia makes him unhappy and others don't I'm going to prefer them. Allowing this to happen is straight incompetence and nothing more.
What point are you trying to make? That killing foreign soldiers is a crime? What bullshit.
Oh it is. "without due process of law". There is a very specific due process of law in the US which makes it okay in general. That is the proper declaration of war by Congress. There are other situations which also make it okay; for example self defence. Outside of those, your constitution clearly and directly requires "due process of law" which means, for example, a proper court case. It never ceases to amaze me how, with your frankly excellent constitution, you are coming to so completely fail at both democracy and law. Whilst the English fuck up of a system manages to more consistently deliver freedom, democracy and common sense. Someone who is able to read the words "No person shall" and understand the words "No person (except a foreigner) shall" is a real problem.
Think about the two stage process which has already been proposed. 1) declare the person's citizenship invalid; 2) kill the person as an enemy combattant.
Many great Americans have fought and died for your freedom. The freedom of other people too. The US constitution belongs somewhat to the past, but if you ignore the wisdom in it so gratuitiously then you are betraying them and your own country.
IMO, the keyboard cover is just what is needed in the tablet space. It is the number 1 selling accessory for the iPad.
For me personally; as a person who still reads my mail over SSH; I agree. but..
But I can't shake the feeling that we're gradually building a laptop yet again.
This is right 100%. It's a design disaster. The thing about not having the keyboard as standard is that the application designer can never even begin to think he can rely on it being there. This means that all iPad apps work perfectly without keyboards. Even if you have an Android "Transformer" tablet, the fact that most Android tablets don't have keyboards means that all your applications work with or without the keyboard. With the Microsoft tablet the app makers will lose that fear. It's a perfect example where adding more makes things worse. My recent post about Microsoft's social ineptitude just begins to feel so prescient.
Microsoft has killed their partners chances in the market by making it clear that there's a "real" device and the "clone" devices. Now they killed their own device by providing the most terrible screen layout and adding a completely stupid keyboard to it. It's not as if Swype hadn't already solv ed the problem of typing fast on touch screens. Surely Microsoft could have afforded to use that.
This bit is absolutely right; but it doesn't agree with the bit of the constitution you claimed to quote. I think you must have done a misquote. The constitution actually reads:
"No person who is for sure 100% known to have American citizenship shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law (or being mistaken for a foreigner); nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation (except for foreign property)."
It's shocking the way that people make these kinds of basic mistake.
My work machines are mostly self built Linux (occasionally other miscellaneous such as OpenBSD; never Windows) so I have no reason to think that they are any worse (or better) than my home machines. However, the more important point is that my bank decisively doesn't rely on the security of my computer. Any important function is verified by sending an SMS explaining the transaction and containing a code. Nothing goes forward till I type in that code.
I guess it's true that, in the last few years the world changed and now it's practical to carry a home-banking capable device with you as well as your work computer (I do, but that's paid for by work, so what's the difference?). If you go on business travel, however, it's still much easier to just be able to take one laptop and use that for both work and personal stuff. I just try not to do anything which I would be embarrassed about.
We always insisted on source. But then, a) we were bigger than you and b) we were doing serious work. Don't think that the fact that the systems were "proprietary" had any influence on the fact that the serious people needed the source. Admittedly, for difficult suppliers, source is sometimes stored in escrow for the day when they were unable to fix our problems within SLA. Amateurs have never needed the source just as amateurs often get by with a 50cent aluminium Walmart screwdriver.
To me, computers are a tool, not a religion. So I am OK with a "black box" that works better than an "open box" any day.
The tool analogy is great and people often make it. There's alot of sense to it. As long as you are only involved in very basic or simplistic consumer level computing, that is fine. However, if you think in terms of cars, there comes a point where any serious use ends up wanting to travel long distances, wanting to travel through wild areas and wanting to transport non standard goods. At that point, you want a car where you know you can find spares. You want a vehicle where you know that in every little village in Azerbaijan you will be able to get a person who can fix your car.
With things like device drivers and graphics, you will come accross strange problems where a piece of code outside the device driver interacts with a piece inside in an unexpected way. If you have the source to both, you will be able to debug that problem much more easily. This means, that your normal programming team will be able to see what's gooing wrong and, most likely, find a work around even if the bug is inside the device driver and they aren't capable of fixing it. It's similar to having a vehicle where the local service people are able to swap and replace parts themselves, rather than one where you have to have it taken back to the original manufacturer to make every fix.
It's good to think about computers as tools, but you have to understand that they are more like fully automated drilling machines than like simple screwdrivers. Even if you personally don't have to understand them, someone else likely will. If you bought a drilling machine, you would expect to get the service manual with it. The source code serves in the same way in software and you should insist on it for anything you rely on.
There is another important difference; with computers one solution tends to end up as the basis for another more complex one. The solutions add and add, often without much review or chance to rebuild. This means that even if a system seems like a one time non business critical solution, you should always bear in mind the possibility that something else more important gets layered on top of it later.
I used one for a few minutes and it makes my phone look junky.
This comment was brought to you courtesy Waggener Edstrom, a Microsoft marketing partner.
It's true these astroturf fanboi posts are tedious and pathetic, and it's definitely worth pointing out; if nobody does they seem to keep coming and coming. However, the main weakness of Windows Phone is that it looks great in the shop, but when you actually take it home and use it it turns out to have fundamental basic features missing (beware; Tommi Ahonen articles are long and have detailed analysis sometimes even a bit too much for the casual reader. They may be difficult to read but definitely repay study and reading around his site.). Think about thinks like forward facing cameras and bluetooth file transfers being missing from all the early Lumia models for example. Think about the short battery life and WiFi failures. These are the kind of things you just assume have to work on any modern smartphone and would never test in the shop.
An astroturf which points directly towards this weakness seems a little improbable. Maybe you are right and they are trying to fly below the radar, however?
My understanding is that very large companies are doing this to save money rather than to snoop on your https sessions.
That's probably true for some situations. Lots of financial companies have to do this because they have a duty to record all communication for later investigative use, e.g. against insider trading. Retail banking companies often do this to help monitor sending of personal data outside the company.
There is a much more practical solution; Use two bank accounts. The one you use from work has amounts of money and credit limits you can afford to lose. It's also a bank account with sensible securiy (mine sends the transaction info by SMS for verification).
(Mod parent interesting - lots of people think this way)
If you are a beginning interface designer, that's the way it seems. Tiles may even seem better since they have more space and so let you represent the application better. A more experienced interface designer will realise that once you have tens or hundreds of applications screen size becomes precious and small regular icons are much better. The regularity of icons allows users to get used to standard actions and most efficiently use space. This is not even some new discovery, AOL made the same mistake as Microsoft years ago and people learned from that.
Good design is pretty difficult to do. Most of us will get it wrong and, if you look at early Android designs you can see how even a company with real user interface experties can end up with a very derivative design. However, most people can easily recognise designs which are better than others. Companies like Google are able to iterate towards good design. Microsoft is one of the few which shows real social failure and, as put best in this internal Microsoft video shows a real ability to make better things into worse things.
It takes a serious level of social ineptitude to give your major new product release the same colour as shit. Microsoft fails to learn from the Zune becuase the kind of people who go to work for them are the kind of people who just don't want to take humanity into account. The tile is a symptom of failure. The fonts in Windows phone, which are designed to look cool at first glance but are unusable long term, are the real heart of the matter. It all comes down to a total contempt for their own users and human beings in general.
Look at China until the last few years. Unsurprisingly, the recent push in China for patents (even internal ones - they tend to ignore foreign patents) corresponds with a collapse in the Chinese growth rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like the situation could improve if Linux exposed a more stable API toward drivers.
Allowing and partially supporting hidden APIs is a mistake that has been often repeated in the computing industry. This is something where I think the kernel developers should learn from Apple. Apple, during old MacOS days used to deliberately, repeatedly and gratuitously change their hidden API calls even with minor point releases. This meant that software which used the API in ways that it shouldn't (in this case, by providing a binary blob) would break often and quickly. Users would be unhappy with their software and vendors would be forced to change. Software developers learned to read and respect the documentation. When they rewrote their O/S and even migrated to completely different architectures this meant that, merely by reimplementing the well defined published interfaces, almost all Apple third party software vendor's software was compatible.
I think that somewhat perversely, the actual mistake is that the unsupported linux APIs are too stable. This is the same mistake as Microsoft has often made and is something where the Linux Kernel developers and other free software vendors could learn from Apple. Microsoft's main benefit is plausible deniability when they want to have hidden interfaces for their own software. Free software doesn't need or benefit from such underhand tactics. There's no need to repeat Microsoft's mistake.
If this engineer knows that will never happen (through no fault of his own, higher-ups would have decided this) then at least he's making an effort. People can get upset all they want, but nothing other than good is going to come out of this, whether it's exactly what would be ideal or not. Some help is better than none.
Right; I'm not getting upset about him. We love him and if he ever gets kicked out by NVIDIA, I'm sure there are lots of us here who will want to hear about it and offer him a job. What upsets us is that NVIDIA clearly has people who understand that we are upset and why we are upset and they still don't do anything. From my point of view this makes things even worse.
NVIDIA; please: even if it's incomplete and misses your latest fastest newest stuff, please provide the Linux developers; both kernel and Noveau; with publishable open documentation which tells them how to set up the rest of the features and at the very least provide good, reliable and colour tunable 2D and low level support for your cards. Preferably provide full, documented access to any feature older than two years.
This can have no possible bad influence on your competitive advantage and will go a long way to making those of us using Linux happier.
"Spending money on research", should actually read 'spending money on researchers'. Microsoft's research deparment is infamous for buying up the best; locking them away in a guilded cage and making sure they never deliver something to the real world. Now that might seem great; the guys get to do fundamental long term research; but these are not physicists. Microsoft typically picks people, like those that started Haskell, who have had very deep theoretical insights and are very close to delivering those to the real world. Their existing research gets blocked and they go off on a tangent.
This adds up to Microsoft actually blocking research in total. It also means that whilst Microsoft does tend to get key patents (also with the aim of blocking innovation), their research doesn't even tend to conribute to their own development. This makes sense, if you think about it, since there's almost no legal way to transform the computing industry to give Microsoft a better position than the one they have already.
He can't stop you from filing, but he can get it dismissed with prejudice, with an order that you have to pay his legal fees. Ultimately it costs him nothing, but it's still a pain in the ass to reach that point.
This is not quite as simple as it seems. If your case is even somewhat reasonable then costs aren't normally awarded in either direction. All you have to do is claim that your neigbour made a persistent noise whenever you were the only person nearby and nobody can prove it either way. Even once you do get costs awarded, you will often find that it's "reasonable" costs and that the person paying can get at least some of what you have done excluded ("Why did you need to use a courier to hand-deliver the letter? the mail would be cheaper.")
This tends to be done by rich assholes for whom even the whole of your costs is pretty much nothing. They don't care about paying a few kilo dollars. The people they do this to tend to be poor people for whom even having to do that temporarily is problem. Around where I live the local asshole is a lawyer who represents himself and so really doesn't care. It seems he wins just often enough to cover his costs from all the other cases he does and anyway it provides entertainment for the junior members of his practice when they are low on other cases.
Lost office sales must have convinced them to do this as a way to push people to cloud services, once they're on the cloud MS can find some way to wring cash out of them.......
Oooh ooh ooh.. Classic Slashdot business plan. I know this one:
Next Microsoft will be releasing Office under a GPLv3 compatible copyleft license!!!
FRAND is just another patent cartel and we have no reason to care about it. FRAND standards organisations should be seen as a form of illegal cartel.
Even funnier is that Apple and Microsoft, who have completely failed to get licenses for these FRAND patents go around attempting to mug people with knives and start crying like babies when companies like Motorola that have actually done some serious research in their lives pull out a combat shotgun. "Want to make my day?".
Not to be too much of a shill, but this is one area Intel seems to always be better. Their Gfx performance may not be up to the other two, but their support is better. Maybe Intel should takeover nVidia :-) *
-nB
I actually have what was supposed to be an okay Intel chip in the machine as well (built in on the motherboard). It was fine from the driver point of view but failed when it came to driving my big monitor properly and stably. Next time I probably will go with an Intel discrete solution, however.
Thanks for the comment anyway.
Yeah, only losers have choices.
Yes; seems like I'm a bloody "lucky" winner. I bought a reasonably top end AMD card specifically because they promised open source support. Of course it turns out that only the proprietary driver works properly. Fine "support is coming; they do the right thing and give over the documentation; install it for now and to free later; I don't mind". Except that because it's stupid proprietary code it doesn't get automatically distributed by my distro vendor (today that's Ubuntu; who knows tomorrow). Every time I get an X-org update it breaks.
I really don't care about the high speed graphics most of the time. The free driver will be fine. Just make sure they have the specs so that the colours can be made to come out right on decent monitors and I will buy your stuff. AMD; you almost have our goodwill; You've already made the investment; Just go that last few inches; get it finished and make sure you fully cooperate with the developers. We will pay extra for your stuff. We will be glad to never see NVIDIA again. You will get better integration to Android. This will be worth it.
On the other hand, maybe Nokia is just that stupid.
The general feeling seems to be that Nokia didn't get such an agreement. Tommi Ahonen's explanation is that Stephen Elop had just come from Microsoft where he drank their coolaid by the litre. He thought (thinks?) that Windows Phone is the whole future of the mobile market and so just getting in at the beginning is a great deal. Remember that Microsoft has always had grandiose plans (think Cairo) that don't pan out (think Vista). As an executive it's difficult to see what will fail and what will succeed and all his MS buddies will be being ver careful to keep him optimistic so he could have a completely unrealistic view of the future.
This is slashdot, not a courtroom. Who gives a shit.
Actually, part of the fun of Slashdot is identifying other posters on their assumptions, lies, debating tricks, misdirection, ad hominem attacks, use of correlation as a sign of causation, failure to use a car analogy and so on. If you have the right attitude it's even fun (if a bit painful) when other people do it to you. Look at this and you learn a fair bit. For example, a repeat post of the same material which has already been discredited is actually modded much higher than the original. Why the hell? How did he achieve that.
Why is cpu6502 reposting the same thing anyway? To me it looks like he wrote up a post in an editor and then cut and paste it again forgetting that he had posted it before. How could he forget that? Is he really posting on so many accounts in parallel, or does he just have some really good shit. On the other hand, it could be because he's part of one of the Astroturf groups? His post is actually pretty valid if you ignore the wrong number in it. I don't see how it fits into the months corporate targets.
If you start asking questions like "why the inquisition" next you'll be asking "why am I posting on Slashdot". You don't want to go there.
It will run 7.8, an update that has most (if not all) of the non-hardware-specific features. The summary is incorrect.
This is not the era of feature phones. We do not just put a table of check boxes side by side. As Stephen Elop said:
With respect to comparisons to other ecosystem shifts and things like that, the real thing that one must focus on is the quality of products in the market, the momentum that one already has
This decision kills all momentym and means Windows Phone starts from zero. The software which works on Windows 8 will not work on Windows 7.8. "Just a recompile" is the difference between Linux which has many applications and SCO UNIX which is dead.
If you are a developer, this is the moment to get off the Wintanic and into a lifeboat before they get the engines started and head towards the iceberg again.
Why does M$ do any of the dumb shit they do?
Because Balmer is fat and sweaty and touches himself at night. That's why.
Partly; yes; it's because their managment are idiots. But there's a deeper reason, and it's the reason why IBM took so long to release a decent PC in the first place and ended up having to buy in a system from MS. The are afraid of cannibalizing their main market. They want to "differentiate" from market to market. That means that the x86 tablet gets a stylus whilst the ARM tablets don't get access to tradiitional apps. That means that you will get a "Windows XX - Pro" edition which costs $2000 but is the only way to get some of the "power user" features.
When Apple came out with one phone which did everything for everybody, suddenly you could just add a rubber cover and use your business phone (which needed a calendar) for sport (where you need non-scratch glass). That destroyed a whole market which was used to providing separate phones for each different group of people. Microsoft wants to reinstate that kind of division. I expect the same success as IBM had in blocking the development of personal computers.
Linus Torvalds can criticize all he wants. It doesn't make him right, or certainly doesn't enable him to see more clearly.
Linus Torvalds is right about whether Linus Torvalds feels put out by Nvidia by definition. Nvidia has to deal with that by making Linus happy. As long as they don't I, as a person who has influence over the purchase of lots of Linux hardware, will avoid their products. That doesn't mean I will rule them out where there is no alternative, but it does mean I'm writing working on an AMD drivein monitor. It does mean that wherever there is a choice I will avoid them. This does mean that I, personally cost them hundreds to thousands of euros yearly. There are tens of thousands of people who think like me and thousands of those who cost them real money/
Simply put, they want to put some corporate people towards making Linus happy. I don't care why he's unhappy; What I care about is that it makes him less likely to be well disposed to looking after that hardware in future. That's a real financial risk from my point of view and I'd like to minimize that risk. If Nvidia makes him unhappy and others don't I'm going to prefer them. Allowing this to happen is straight incompetence and nothing more.
Well isn't it a bit strange then that iPads and android devices have virtual keyboards if they're never used for anything?
Says a man in reply to a post containing an admission of using SSH for email.
What point are you trying to make? That killing foreign soldiers is a crime? What bullshit.
Oh it is. "without due process of law". There is a very specific due process of law in the US which makes it okay in general. That is the proper declaration of war by Congress. There are other situations which also make it okay; for example self defence. Outside of those, your constitution clearly and directly requires "due process of law" which means, for example, a proper court case. It never ceases to amaze me how, with your frankly excellent constitution, you are coming to so completely fail at both democracy and law. Whilst the English fuck up of a system manages to more consistently deliver freedom, democracy and common sense. Someone who is able to read the words "No person shall" and understand the words "No person (except a foreigner) shall" is a real problem.
Think about the two stage process which has already been proposed. 1) declare the person's citizenship invalid; 2) kill the person as an enemy combattant.
Many great Americans have fought and died for your freedom. The freedom of other people too. The US constitution belongs somewhat to the past, but if you ignore the wisdom in it so gratuitiously then you are betraying them and your own country.
IMO, the keyboard cover is just what is needed in the tablet space. It is the number 1 selling accessory for the iPad.
For me personally; as a person who still reads my mail over SSH; I agree. but..
But I can't shake the feeling that we're gradually building a laptop yet again.
This is right 100%. It's a design disaster. The thing about not having the keyboard as standard is that the application designer can never even begin to think he can rely on it being there. This means that all iPad apps work perfectly without keyboards. Even if you have an Android "Transformer" tablet, the fact that most Android tablets don't have keyboards means that all your applications work with or without the keyboard. With the Microsoft tablet the app makers will lose that fear. It's a perfect example where adding more makes things worse. My recent post about Microsoft's social ineptitude just begins to feel so prescient.
Microsoft has killed their partners chances in the market by making it clear that there's a "real" device and the "clone" devices. Now they killed their own device by providing the most terrible screen layout and adding a completely stupid keyboard to it. It's not as if Swype hadn't already solv ed the problem of typing fast on touch screens. Surely Microsoft could have afforded to use that.
Killing foreigners? Okay.
This bit is absolutely right; but it doesn't agree with the bit of the constitution you claimed to quote. I think you must have done a misquote. The constitution actually reads:
"No person who is for sure 100% known to have American citizenship shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law (or being mistaken for a foreigner); nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation (except for foreign property)."
It's shocking the way that people make these kinds of basic mistake.
My work machines are mostly self built Linux (occasionally other miscellaneous such as OpenBSD; never Windows) so I have no reason to think that they are any worse (or better) than my home machines. However, the more important point is that my bank decisively doesn't rely on the security of my computer. Any important function is verified by sending an SMS explaining the transaction and containing a code. Nothing goes forward till I type in that code.
I guess it's true that, in the last few years the world changed and now it's practical to carry a home-banking capable device with you as well as your work computer (I do, but that's paid for by work, so what's the difference?). If you go on business travel, however, it's still much easier to just be able to take one laptop and use that for both work and personal stuff. I just try not to do anything which I would be embarrassed about.
We always insisted on source. But then, a) we were bigger than you and b) we were doing serious work. Don't think that the fact that the systems were "proprietary" had any influence on the fact that the serious people needed the source. Admittedly, for difficult suppliers, source is sometimes stored in escrow for the day when they were unable to fix our problems within SLA. Amateurs have never needed the source just as amateurs often get by with a 50cent aluminium Walmart screwdriver.
To me, computers are a tool, not a religion. So I am OK with a "black box" that works better than an "open box" any day.
The tool analogy is great and people often make it. There's alot of sense to it. As long as you are only involved in very basic or simplistic consumer level computing, that is fine. However, if you think in terms of cars, there comes a point where any serious use ends up wanting to travel long distances, wanting to travel through wild areas and wanting to transport non standard goods. At that point, you want a car where you know you can find spares. You want a vehicle where you know that in every little village in Azerbaijan you will be able to get a person who can fix your car.
With things like device drivers and graphics, you will come accross strange problems where a piece of code outside the device driver interacts with a piece inside in an unexpected way. If you have the source to both, you will be able to debug that problem much more easily. This means, that your normal programming team will be able to see what's gooing wrong and, most likely, find a work around even if the bug is inside the device driver and they aren't capable of fixing it. It's similar to having a vehicle where the local service people are able to swap and replace parts themselves, rather than one where you have to have it taken back to the original manufacturer to make every fix.
It's good to think about computers as tools, but you have to understand that they are more like fully automated drilling machines than like simple screwdrivers. Even if you personally don't have to understand them, someone else likely will. If you bought a drilling machine, you would expect to get the service manual with it. The source code serves in the same way in software and you should insist on it for anything you rely on.
There is another important difference; with computers one solution tends to end up as the basis for another more complex one. The solutions add and add, often without much review or chance to rebuild. This means that even if a system seems like a one time non business critical solution, you should always bear in mind the possibility that something else more important gets layered on top of it later.
I used one for a few minutes and it makes my phone look junky.
This comment was brought to you courtesy Waggener Edstrom, a Microsoft marketing partner.
It's true these astroturf fanboi posts are tedious and pathetic, and it's definitely worth pointing out; if nobody does they seem to keep coming and coming. However, the main weakness of Windows Phone is that it looks great in the shop, but when you actually take it home and use it it turns out to have fundamental basic features missing (beware; Tommi Ahonen articles are long and have detailed analysis sometimes even a bit too much for the casual reader. They may be difficult to read but definitely repay study and reading around his site.). Think about thinks like forward facing cameras and bluetooth file transfers being missing from all the early Lumia models for example. Think about the short battery life and WiFi failures. These are the kind of things you just assume have to work on any modern smartphone and would never test in the shop.
An astroturf which points directly towards this weakness seems a little improbable. Maybe you are right and they are trying to fly below the radar, however?
My understanding is that very large companies are doing this to save money rather than to snoop on your https sessions.
That's probably true for some situations. Lots of financial companies have to do this because they have a duty to record all communication for later investigative use, e.g. against insider trading. Retail banking companies often do this to help monitor sending of personal data outside the company.
There is a much more practical solution; Use two bank accounts. The one you use from work has amounts of money and credit limits you can afford to lose. It's also a bank account with sensible securiy (mine sends the transaction info by SMS for verification).
tiles...icons...whats the difference?
(Mod parent interesting - lots of people think this way)
If you are a beginning interface designer, that's the way it seems. Tiles may even seem better since they have more space and so let you represent the application better. A more experienced interface designer will realise that once you have tens or hundreds of applications screen size becomes precious and small regular icons are much better. The regularity of icons allows users to get used to standard actions and most efficiently use space. This is not even some new discovery, AOL made the same mistake as Microsoft years ago and people learned from that.
Good design is pretty difficult to do. Most of us will get it wrong and, if you look at early Android designs you can see how even a company with real user interface experties can end up with a very derivative design. However, most people can easily recognise designs which are better than others. Companies like Google are able to iterate towards good design. Microsoft is one of the few which shows real social failure and, as put best in this internal Microsoft video shows a real ability to make better things into worse things.
It takes a serious level of social ineptitude to give your major new product release the same colour as shit. Microsoft fails to learn from the Zune becuase the kind of people who go to work for them are the kind of people who just don't want to take humanity into account. The tile is a symptom of failure. The fonts in Windows phone, which are designed to look cool at first glance but are unusable long term, are the real heart of the matter. It all comes down to a total contempt for their own users and human beings in general.
Look at China until the last few years. Unsurprisingly, the recent push in China for patents (even internal ones - they tend to ignore foreign patents) corresponds with a collapse in the Chinese growth rate.