I've used it for a few days in a VM. I did not like it one bit.
The Metro isn't just like the Start Menu with bells and whistles. It's like running a few special programmes that you've launched inside the Start Menu, full screen only. While other programmes are inexplicable relegated to a separate (and hidden, when running a Metro app) desktop view. And the Start Menu now takes up the entire screen when you open it. And the Metro/Start Menu is now dominated by Microsoft software and cloud services, while rival programmes are hidden away.
And also everything now seems to be hidden. You want something, you have to mouse up against an invisible spot in this corner of the screen, or halfway up that side. After 3 days using it (and without RTFM), I still wasn't sure what I was doing to invoke some menu functions- I would almost be ritualistically rubbing the cursor up and down the side of the screen in a way that I suspected, but wasn't sure, would work and hoping for the best.
I had one of those moments a couple of days ago, funnily enough. I was playing a game on my Android phone. When you selected a character, you could get info about each character by touching and holding the portrait of each one- obviously the equivalent of hovering a mouse cursor for a context tooltip. But every time I did that, my finger was in the way- I had to try to read the information around my own finger. Yes that's a shitty GUI design- but it's also a fundamental issue with touchscreens.
I mean, say you want to do something pretty basic like drag a window around the screen. I've got pretty large hands- if I touch any part of the screen on this laptop I'm using right now, my hand covers about a third of the screen. So I've got to precisely move something around on screen, without being able to see most of the thing I'm moving, or a large fraction of anything else on screen.
What's wrong with a mouse/trackpad/trackball/nipple again?
If the loss of life doesn't bother you, then maybe an appeal to the cost is a better argument.
TFA aside (he's never going to get a working rocket for $10 mill, full stop), it costs hundreds of millions to get something into space. If they blew up 90% of the time, NASA would have no money left and nothing to show for it. A manned mission to Mars would cost billions- nobody would be willing to spend billions if there was a 50:50 chance that it would achieve nothing. Not when you can spend the same limited pot of money on other, less risky projects and get a far more reliable source of scientific research out of them.
Fair enough, but the point still stands somewhat. When I bought a netbook, I bought one with Xandros- and Ubuntu worked with it out of the box. And this was at a time when wireless drivers were still a very flaky subject. Buying a netbook with Linux (even Xandros) gave me at least a fighting chance that Linux would work relatively pain free.
You joke, but the big benefit of computers sold with Linux pre-loaded (any Linux- even crap) is that there's a good chance that it'll be 100% Linux-compatible hardware. Makes life far easier when installing your actual distro of choice.
Anyone who follows politics, anywhere in the world, knows- what a politician claims to believe during an election and what they actually do after an election are more or less completely unrelated.
Check out the UK Tories' "no reorganization of the NHS" or "we support House of Lords reform (for real this time!)", or the Lib Dems' "we'll reduce University tuition fees", or Blair's Labour's "we'll implement proportional representation", or Obama's "I'll shut down Guantanamo", or...well, anything.
Lobby your elected politicians, not the ones touting for election. At least they'll admit to you when they don't intend to do anything about something...
The fact that apps can be written in the exact same programming language for Win Phone 8 and Firefox OS is a point in Mozilla's favour, not against them.
They're banking on cross-compatibility between the other platforms to ensure that they get a decent ecosystem very quickly. That's presumably what both Mozilla and MS picked HTML5- maximum cross-platform capabilities.
I see HTC Dreams selling on eBay and Amazon for £60-£100 used. A Raspberry Pi is something like £20. So by using your old Dream instead of selling it and buying a Pi, you're losing between £40-£80.
So no, it'd be more expensive to use the old smartphone. Although using the smartphone is certainly a lazier, and hackier method (both good things).
The Crown Estate is essentially nationalised property- land and business interests owned and operated by the government, the profits going straight into government coffers (except for that inexplicable chunk that gets paid into the Windsor Household bank account).
Are you arguing that government business should be funded by nationalisation of commercial interests?
I'm just spelling it out as I detected a whiff of "small government free-marketism/anarchism" (choose your poison) in your response, and I was wondering if you realised the incompatibility of the two positions.
Royalist hogwash. That's usually based on the fact that the "Crown Estate" brings in revenue for the government, only a smallish fraction of which is given to the Royals. But it's a fact of history that George III gave that all income and debt from the Crown Estate to Parliament in exchange for Parliament also taking over the funding of the military and civil government, which was previously funded by the monarch out of his Crown Estate income.
Seeing as the cost of civil government and the military far exceeds what the Crown Estate makes, it's nuts to say that we make money out of the Royals. That's counting the income and not counting the outgoings.
Better safer more permanent disposal methods & locations need to be found. The bottom of the southern end of the Mariana Trench, where one tectonic plate of the Earth's crust subsumes under the other and back under the Earth's mantle sounds quite a bit more permanent.
And "Desktop" systems seem to be receeding back into the niches that need them... business, developers, gamers, power-users. Casual users will basically abandon them (and already largely have) for laptops, tablets, and portables.
Desktops aren't receding at all. Casual users aren't abandoning them. Didn't you read TFA? (I know, I know).
Sales have stopped growing. They've shrunk by 0.1%, but then we are in the middle of the longest and deepest global economic crash since the Second World War, so don't read too deeply into that. Tablet sales have sky-rocketed, but desktop sales haven't been touched.
PCs have had colossal growth over the last decade- that's partly because there were literally billions of potential users who didn't have one yet. Now that boom has finished, we're into a "steady market" phase- where people already have computers, and only buy replacements as needed. And even that is cooling off, as computers don't improve as drastically year-on-year any more- it used to be that a computer was obsolete 2 years after you bought it, now there are machines from 2007 which are still perfectly useful and usable.
That's going to hurt the forecasts of the Dells and HPs of this world- but it's not a judgement on the desktop/laptop form factor itself. That's here to stay.
The article might as well have cut to the chase- cost.
Japan's non-vacuum-tube, low-speed mag-lev came in at $100 million per kilometre. A 4,000 mph vacuum-tube railway will cost a lot more. Compare with conventional high-speed railways (which are far far slower) at about $10 million per kilometre- which are already considered way too prohibitively expensive to build in any quantity. If you could keep the cost at $100 mill per km, that'd make a London to New York line cost about half a trillion US dollars. Just for the set-up cost. Excluding the cost of maintaining 5,500 km of vacuum tubes UNDER THE OCEAN. Got that money spare?
That's without getting into minor performance issues, such as the huge breaking distance or colossal turning circle for something travelling at 4,000 mph. With conventional rail or aircraft it's fairly trivial to connect up a network of cities on a continent. Try playing join-the-dots with European cities with a network with these limitations instead.
And yet the Wii's game line up still sports such classic blockbusters as "Now: That's What I call Music Dance & Sing", "Tamagotchi: Party On!" and "My Aquarium".
Honestly, if the Wii's games catalogue is a result of "careful vetting", I dread to think what their vetting rejects.
The points in their favour is that they're using off-the-shelf software (Android) which already has a huge base of compatible hardware (via the existing Android devices). There's also already a lot of professional (albeit "causal") games for the platform, and a lot of game companies with established Android development teams.
On the price-point front- there are Android phones at or near $100 (not necessarily good ones). When you bear in mind that with a smartphone you're paying for a screen, touchscreen interface, batteries, telephony radio receivers, camera, and not to mention the general miniaturization and ergonomic engineering. With this all they're promising is an ARM desktop with no harddrive, with USB 2.0, and WiFi/Bluetooth. $100 still sounds pretty nuts, but it's not completely implausible.
All of your points are completely sensible and on the money. But if we're being kind to them, you can justify some of them: - Every game must have free-to-play content: they're basically demanding that all games must come with a demo, or follow the old Shareware model. Not that unreasonable. - Android- it's only a buzzword if they're not using it. Android is a fairly sensible choice for what they're setting out to do, so it's not that weird that they've picked it. - "Rooting"- they're just using the lingo. It seems what they really mean is "we'll support users being able to get root privileges on their device, in a Linux sense". Which is fair enough. - $99 price point- there are already Android smartphones with or near a $100 price tag. A lot of the expense in a smartphone can be given over to the screen, the battery, the general miniaturization. If they're happy with a bulky box which runs of the mains (which they are), then $99 isn't completely insane (although it's still pretty unbelievable).
Much else (unrelated screenshots, appeal to "fringe culture", general buzzword frenzy) can be put down to an over excitable marketing team. Which is something many of us are familiar with...
Also, at 99 cents, the people who do good games will probably split their game up into 5-10 "episodes" in order to charge the $5/10 they wanted in the first place.
I don't know if you meant that in a bad way, but that actually sounds pretty interesting to me. Almost a return to the old "Shareware" days, where you got the first couple of levels free, before needing to fork out £10 for the rest of the game. You can buy a game for £1, and if it gets its hooks into you, you'll come back for more. If it was a pile of crap (and a lot of full price commercial games are certainly that), you're only out £1 rather than £15.
Anyway, the model that I would presume this would be following would be that of other digital games retailers- such as Steam on the PC, or -Box Live (and the Wii/PS3 equivalents). The huge catalogue of freebies, cheap games and indy content would be great, but that's not to say full games (at full prices) wouldn't be bought. Looking at XBLA, there are quite a few games on there for $10, $15 and so forth. Just because this runs Android as the operating system, it doesn't necessarily mean people's attitudes to gaming on it will be the same as their attitudes to gaming on their phones...
Slashdot Mirror
I've used it for a few days in a VM. I did not like it one bit.
The Metro isn't just like the Start Menu with bells and whistles. It's like running a few special programmes that you've launched inside the Start Menu, full screen only. While other programmes are inexplicable relegated to a separate (and hidden, when running a Metro app) desktop view. And the Start Menu now takes up the entire screen when you open it. And the Metro/Start Menu is now dominated by Microsoft software and cloud services, while rival programmes are hidden away.
And also everything now seems to be hidden. You want something, you have to mouse up against an invisible spot in this corner of the screen, or halfway up that side. After 3 days using it (and without RTFM), I still wasn't sure what I was doing to invoke some menu functions- I would almost be ritualistically rubbing the cursor up and down the side of the screen in a way that I suspected, but wasn't sure, would work and hoping for the best.
It isn't monumentally awful. But it is not good.
Sounds like hell.
I had one of those moments a couple of days ago, funnily enough. I was playing a game on my Android phone. When you selected a character, you could get info about each character by touching and holding the portrait of each one- obviously the equivalent of hovering a mouse cursor for a context tooltip. But every time I did that, my finger was in the way- I had to try to read the information around my own finger. Yes that's a shitty GUI design- but it's also a fundamental issue with touchscreens.
I mean, say you want to do something pretty basic like drag a window around the screen. I've got pretty large hands- if I touch any part of the screen on this laptop I'm using right now, my hand covers about a third of the screen. So I've got to precisely move something around on screen, without being able to see most of the thing I'm moving, or a large fraction of anything else on screen.
What's wrong with a mouse/trackpad/trackball/nipple again?
If the loss of life doesn't bother you, then maybe an appeal to the cost is a better argument.
TFA aside (he's never going to get a working rocket for $10 mill, full stop), it costs hundreds of millions to get something into space. If they blew up 90% of the time, NASA would have no money left and nothing to show for it. A manned mission to Mars would cost billions- nobody would be willing to spend billions if there was a 50:50 chance that it would achieve nothing. Not when you can spend the same limited pot of money on other, less risky projects and get a far more reliable source of scientific research out of them.
Fair enough, but the point still stands somewhat. When I bought a netbook, I bought one with Xandros- and Ubuntu worked with it out of the box. And this was at a time when wireless drivers were still a very flaky subject. Buying a netbook with Linux (even Xandros) gave me at least a fighting chance that Linux would work relatively pain free.
You joke, but the big benefit of computers sold with Linux pre-loaded (any Linux- even crap) is that there's a good chance that it'll be 100% Linux-compatible hardware. Makes life far easier when installing your actual distro of choice.
I hope you like paper, because I feel a patent for "viewing newsletters on a mobile device" coming on.
Anyone who follows politics, anywhere in the world, knows- what a politician claims to believe during an election and what they actually do after an election are more or less completely unrelated.
Check out the UK Tories' "no reorganization of the NHS" or "we support House of Lords reform (for real this time!)", or the Lib Dems' "we'll reduce University tuition fees", or Blair's Labour's "we'll implement proportional representation", or Obama's "I'll shut down Guantanamo", or...well, anything.
Lobby your elected politicians, not the ones touting for election. At least they'll admit to you when they don't intend to do anything about something...
The fact that apps can be written in the exact same programming language for Win Phone 8 and Firefox OS is a point in Mozilla's favour, not against them.
They're banking on cross-compatibility between the other platforms to ensure that they get a decent ecosystem very quickly. That's presumably what both Mozilla and MS picked HTML5- maximum cross-platform capabilities.
They're also backed by phone maker Alcatel- who are bigger in terms of Revenue than either HTC or Motorola Mobility.
So says Slashdot, Debian will run on the G1:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/11/13/2240244/debian-running-on-the-t-mobile-g1
Debian obviously supports most any server functionality you care to mention, and runs fine from a CLI.
I see HTC Dreams selling on eBay and Amazon for £60-£100 used. A Raspberry Pi is something like £20. So by using your old Dream instead of selling it and buying a Pi, you're losing between £40-£80.
So no, it'd be more expensive to use the old smartphone. Although using the smartphone is certainly a lazier, and hackier method (both good things).
Forget recent tech news, Asus has had a tablet with dockable full keyboard for more than a year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_Pad_Transformer
And swivel-screen touchscreens have been around forever. Dell has one:
http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/dell-inspiron-duo-hybrid-windows-7-tablet-and-netbook-15-09-2010/
As do HP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Pavilion_TX1000_Series_Tablet_PC
Unless I've missed something, Richard Branson isn't actually royalty...
The Crown Estate is essentially nationalised property- land and business interests owned and operated by the government, the profits going straight into government coffers (except for that inexplicable chunk that gets paid into the Windsor Household bank account).
Are you arguing that government business should be funded by nationalisation of commercial interests?
I'm just spelling it out as I detected a whiff of "small government free-marketism/anarchism" (choose your poison) in your response, and I was wondering if you realised the incompatibility of the two positions.
(Personally- I'm all for that. Nationalise away!)
It's sad but true that there are few enough A-grade open source games that run on Linux that when one comes out, it is genuinely newsworthy for nerds.
Personally, I'm glad Slashdot keeps me updated on new Linux game releases. Where else will?
Trolling, or cutting edge insight? I'm genuinely intrigued- what has the US government sold to British Royalty?
Royalist hogwash. That's usually based on the fact that the "Crown Estate" brings in revenue for the government, only a smallish fraction of which is given to the Royals. But it's a fact of history that George III gave that all income and debt from the Crown Estate to Parliament in exchange for Parliament also taking over the funding of the military and civil government, which was previously funded by the monarch out of his Crown Estate income.
Seeing as the cost of civil government and the military far exceeds what the Crown Estate makes, it's nuts to say that we make money out of the Royals. That's counting the income and not counting the outgoings.
Better safer more permanent disposal methods & locations need to be found. The bottom of the southern end of the Mariana Trench, where one tectonic plate of the Earth's crust subsumes under the other and back under the Earth's mantle sounds quite a bit more permanent.
Ah, dumping radioactive waste into the depths of the ocean. What could possibly go wrong?
And "Desktop" systems seem to be receeding back into the niches that need them... business, developers, gamers, power-users. Casual users will basically abandon them (and already largely have) for laptops, tablets, and portables.
Desktops aren't receding at all. Casual users aren't abandoning them. Didn't you read TFA? (I know, I know).
Sales have stopped growing. They've shrunk by 0.1%, but then we are in the middle of the longest and deepest global economic crash since the Second World War, so don't read too deeply into that. Tablet sales have sky-rocketed, but desktop sales haven't been touched.
PCs have had colossal growth over the last decade- that's partly because there were literally billions of potential users who didn't have one yet. Now that boom has finished, we're into a "steady market" phase- where people already have computers, and only buy replacements as needed. And even that is cooling off, as computers don't improve as drastically year-on-year any more- it used to be that a computer was obsolete 2 years after you bought it, now there are machines from 2007 which are still perfectly useful and usable.
That's going to hurt the forecasts of the Dells and HPs of this world- but it's not a judgement on the desktop/laptop form factor itself. That's here to stay.
The article might as well have cut to the chase- cost.
Japan's non-vacuum-tube, low-speed mag-lev came in at $100 million per kilometre. A 4,000 mph vacuum-tube railway will cost a lot more. Compare with conventional high-speed railways (which are far far slower) at about $10 million per kilometre- which are already considered way too prohibitively expensive to build in any quantity. If you could keep the cost at $100 mill per km, that'd make a London to New York line cost about half a trillion US dollars. Just for the set-up cost. Excluding the cost of maintaining 5,500 km of vacuum tubes UNDER THE OCEAN. Got that money spare?
That's without getting into minor performance issues, such as the huge breaking distance or colossal turning circle for something travelling at 4,000 mph. With conventional rail or aircraft it's fairly trivial to connect up a network of cities on a continent. Try playing join-the-dots with European cities with a network with these limitations instead.
And yet the Wii's game line up still sports such classic blockbusters as "Now: That's What I call Music Dance & Sing", "Tamagotchi: Party On!" and "My Aquarium".
Honestly, if the Wii's games catalogue is a result of "careful vetting", I dread to think what their vetting rejects.
The points in their favour is that they're using off-the-shelf software (Android) which already has a huge base of compatible hardware (via the existing Android devices). There's also already a lot of professional (albeit "causal") games for the platform, and a lot of game companies with established Android development teams.
On the price-point front- there are Android phones at or near $100 (not necessarily good ones). When you bear in mind that with a smartphone you're paying for a screen, touchscreen interface, batteries, telephony radio receivers, camera, and not to mention the general miniaturization and ergonomic engineering. With this all they're promising is an ARM desktop with no harddrive, with USB 2.0, and WiFi/Bluetooth. $100 still sounds pretty nuts, but it's not completely implausible.
All of your points are completely sensible and on the money. But if we're being kind to them, you can justify some of them:
- Every game must have free-to-play content: they're basically demanding that all games must come with a demo, or follow the old Shareware model. Not that unreasonable.
- Android- it's only a buzzword if they're not using it. Android is a fairly sensible choice for what they're setting out to do, so it's not that weird that they've picked it.
- "Rooting"- they're just using the lingo. It seems what they really mean is "we'll support users being able to get root privileges on their device, in a Linux sense". Which is fair enough.
- $99 price point- there are already Android smartphones with or near a $100 price tag. A lot of the expense in a smartphone can be given over to the screen, the battery, the general miniaturization. If they're happy with a bulky box which runs of the mains (which they are), then $99 isn't completely insane (although it's still pretty unbelievable).
Much else (unrelated screenshots, appeal to "fringe culture", general buzzword frenzy) can be put down to an over excitable marketing team. Which is something many of us are familiar with...
Also, at 99 cents, the people who do good games will probably split their game up into 5-10 "episodes" in order to charge the $5/10 they wanted in the first place.
I don't know if you meant that in a bad way, but that actually sounds pretty interesting to me. Almost a return to the old "Shareware" days, where you got the first couple of levels free, before needing to fork out £10 for the rest of the game. You can buy a game for £1, and if it gets its hooks into you, you'll come back for more. If it was a pile of crap (and a lot of full price commercial games are certainly that), you're only out £1 rather than £15.
Anyway, the model that I would presume this would be following would be that of other digital games retailers- such as Steam on the PC, or -Box Live (and the Wii/PS3 equivalents). The huge catalogue of freebies, cheap games and indy content would be great, but that's not to say full games (at full prices) wouldn't be bought. Looking at XBLA, there are quite a few games on there for $10, $15 and so forth. Just because this runs Android as the operating system, it doesn't necessarily mean people's attitudes to gaming on it will be the same as their attitudes to gaming on their phones...
Hmmm, lets see, did it make the front pages of today's tabloids?
http://www.frontpagestoday.co.uk/2012/07/10/headlines.cfm?PaperCountry=UK
I shouldn't even reply to ACs really...