Honestly, how does it make HP any money to turn off the built-in Windows wifi manager on a new laptop and replace it with one that they've written themselves? Nobody pays them for it, and man-hours to code these things aren't free.
Worse rubbish by the sounds of it. At least Office Starter was a useful, usable piece of software. It sounds like they're replacing it with shovelware that does nothing but pester you to give it your credit card or go to some free web-app suite.
I only hope to high heaven that it's easy to uninstall (not dug in deeper than an Internet Explorer flavoured burrowing tick).
But actually in my case, it does happen relatively frequently on start-up for on Acer desktop. Maybe once in every 10 reboots. It's some conflict with the graphics driver that I can't seem to shift, so you could lay the blame at Nvidia's doorstep instead if you want, or Acer's. But it always behaves itself perfectly whenever I boot to the Xubuntu partition, so I'm not inclined to be too generous to Microsoft.
On the other hand, it amuses me endlessly that my Linux boot is beating my Windows boot on a driver issue. One of the signs of the apocalypse I think.
You're making it up as you go along. Samsung will be the chief manufacturer of Windows 8 tablets, you say? So we'll completely ignore the fact that they've spent an absolute fortune to become the number 1 manufacturer of Android tablets; they'll start making a rival product for a rival brand. Dell/HP/Lenovo just quietly exiting the consumer market and going pure enterprise? Because obviously they have no desire to stick around and compete for the largest and most lucrative section of the market- they'll politely step aside now that Microsoft have indicated they'd like to make that money for themselves! And it isn't like MS Surface might have enterprise applications, no siree!
Complete nonsense. Dell/HP/Lenovo/Samsung will compete tooth-and-nail to keep a share of the consumer market. And the enterprise market. They like money. As corporations, making money is their raison d'etre. If their current business model stops working, they'll start flailing around for a new one.
Every tech commentator loved the Lumia, and first impressions from many users was positive. But the things still don't sell well. Nokia is if anything an even bigger power-brand in some countries than MS ("nokia" is used as a generic term for mobile phone in some places, as in "biro" for pen), so it isn't a name recognition problem.
Something can have wow-factor on the expo circuit and still flop in the market. MS is still "late to the party", compared to Android and iOS. Many people are already thoroughly entrenched in their tablet choices (as in their phone choices); they've got to persuade people to move.
If MS goes closes the hardware it's pretty much game over for anyone who doesn't get a contract with MS or Apple, and the competitive hardware market disappears.
Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Sony and Samsung are not going to slink away silently you know. If they lose access to Windows as their prime product, you see how quickly they start plugging something else.
I don't want to sound too hopeful, but yeah- Linux seems set to gain. We know that some of these companies aren't averse to Linux, either from their netbook experiments or their contact with Android, WebOS and so forth. And combined these companies have got a huge market presence and a lot of money to burn; if they put their mind towards peddling Linux (rather than just playing with it on the side as they do now), the game would be considerably changed.
For one thing, laptops (which feature a huge amount of clever miniaturisation and portability tricks, not the least of which is a big battery) will always be considerably more expensive than clunky, cumbersome, cable-infested desktops. Not a problem for rich ol' you and your high performance laptops, perhaps, but that does matter to the rest of us. My employer has something like 50,000 workstations at a rough estimate, and about 80% of those will be desktops. Why? Because a £100 price difference for the same spec is about £4 million for 40,000 units, and nobody wants to spend an extra £4 million every 4 years unless you have to.
Personally at home- I have a powerful quad-core gaming desktop with fancy graphics and whatnot. It would have cost me about £200 more for a similarly spec'ed laptop. My netbook was £200. So for the same money, I could have either a powerful gaming computer AND and an ultra-portable laptop, or just the one giant laptop.
Samsung suffer from some serious product schizophrenia sometimes (in a similar way as do Google). They have a successful and highly entrenched Android division. They also have Tizen development under way, and they have their own smartphone OS, Bada, as well as proprietary no=name OS' for feature phones. They even used to develop for Symbian.
Android is working for them; it would be suicide to abandon it for yet another new OS now, just as they've taken the lead.
I've never bought that argument. I can't see what MS would want them for, considering they've already got mature smartphone and secure email systems. What value does BlackBerry bring? The brand (hoho)?
My money would be on them being bought by a tech giant without an existing smartphone division, and without a big Android investment. Dell, for example. Or Lenovo. HP, if they hadn't already tried and failed with WebOS.
I bought an Xperia X10 Mini Pro because it was the only Android device I could find with a slide-out keyboard. The actual Android portion of it has been as fine as you'd expect, but from the Sony side:
1) They've refused to release an official update beyond 2.1. Among other things, this means that it doesn't have the feature of saving apps to memory card- a colossal draw back. There's no technical reason for this, they just don't want to support their old phones. 2) Hardware build quality is poor. The slide-out keyboard sticks and warps the case when you try to slide it. 3) Wifi keeps freezing, and needs to be constantly reset. I've downloaded a 3rd party app which resets the Wifi every time it freezes, but it's not good.
I wouldn't buy a Sony again. Not when what they're basically peddling (Android smartphones) are available from plenty of better companies than them.
Microsoft and its OEMs have an entirely symbiotic relationship. MS can't exist in its current form without its OEMs.
The nightmare (for MS- dream for some of us) scenario would be for MS to make a lurch towards own-brand primary hardware, upset their OEMs by consistently undercutting them, and the OEMs abandoning ship (as basically happened with IBM, when most of their OEMs defected to Windows). And in this little fantasy, what's the main "third OS"- the OS which stands as a permissively licensed, mature competitor? Voila! Year of the Linux Desktop!
Am I the only one relishing the thought of buying one of these ultra-cheap subsidised Microsoft tablets, reformatting it, and loading it up with Android/Tizen/whatever?
I would take some degree of joy at seeing the splash logo of my favourite distro's logo right there next to the moulded plastic Windows logo on the case. And extra joy if the devices were heavily subsidised at the thought that Microsoft were paying for me to use a competitor's OS.
I wouldn't even care if the set-up wasn't very good!
The reason OS/2 failed was because OEMs didn't want to support a competitor.
With MS doing this and charging licensing fees it will only make companies like Asus prefer Andriod tablets instead. No one wants competitors and to invest a lot of money and therefore risk to help someone who is actively stealing customers out.
I don't want to come across all shilly, but- Google are sort of in that boat too, after buying Motorola M. Android's main developer is now also one of Android's main device manufacturers.
The whole thing is slightly mitigated buy the fact that Google don't own Android (the Open Handset Alliance do, which all the main manufacturers belong to). But not very. Android is and always will be Google's baby.
The beauty of Linux is that even if one distro does something that gets on your nerves, there are others to choose from. Don't like Ubuntu? Go Mint, Fedora, SUSE, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware...
If Canonical want to turn Ubuntu into a Mac clone, they can knock themselves out. It might even work for them. For those that don't want a Mac clone, they can just not use it.
Depending on the specs, the laptop could be worth more than $900 (that model is $900 with the absolute lowest hardware options, about $2000 for top spec). Top prize also includes a Nokia N9 phone, which is what, $400? And I doubt most people are going to spend 40 hours a week for the full three weeks working on this. Lets say 1 hour a day for about three weeks is 20 hours work, I'd say that's not a bad little prize for an amateur's competition.
As sibling poster pointed out, there's also no reason you can't go on to sell your programme for cash once the competition is done. Ubuntu Software Centre only takes 20% of the sale price for themselves, which is less than the 30% taken by Apple App Store and Android Market.
You know this site is (at least nominally) a news site primarily about Linux and programming, right? And you realise that Ubuntu still is the single most popular Linux distribution, right? So don't you think that when the main backer behind the biggest Linux distribution announces a programming contest with quite nice prizes might qualify as relevant news for this website?
Also- bugger off. Don't read it if you're not interested.
When was the last time you used it? These days it looks very shiny, reminiscent of Steam, including a "featured" advertising bar, a "what's new" bar, and am optional "recommended for you" section (I actually preferred it back when it was a bit more utilitarian, but I certainly do appreciate all the extra features). The front page is now mostly paid programmes, and it's possible to filter by "for purchase". If you just filter by category, it contains both free and paid for programmes in the result. All programmes give you "similar to this" recommendations, and user reviews.
Basically- I disagree with you. I think it's a fairly slick bit of software these days, comparable with Steam and Impulse (I haven't used the Apple's iTunes programme for so long I don't know how it compares- but I remember it used to be borderline unusable back in the day).
Incidentally, I seem to remember that Coca-Cola was one of the companies not getting involved. They, like a number of "big brand" companies, complained that this is nothing but an attempt to extort money out of them on threat of losing their precious trademarks to someone else (which is probably a pretty fair assessment of the whole thing).
Which of course is doubly embarrassing if the TLD you had applied for was ".porn" or something similar. Nothing wrong with that per se, but the CEO applying for it probably doesn't appreciate having his family address visible to every religious fundamentalist and whatnot out there in the world.
Again, temperature has nothing to do with it. The reason earthly life does poorly at sub-zero temperatures is because it is below the freezing point of our body's solvent (water). Different freezing points for different liquids mean different habitable temperatures for hypothetical life. Since Titan is the perfect temperature for liquid methane, a potential methane-based life form would also find that the moon's surface is the perfect temperature. Earthly temperatures would literally boil their blood.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, how does it make HP any money to turn off the built-in Windows wifi manager on a new laptop and replace it with one that they've written themselves? Nobody pays them for it, and man-hours to code these things aren't free.
Worse rubbish by the sounds of it. At least Office Starter was a useful, usable piece of software. It sounds like they're replacing it with shovelware that does nothing but pester you to give it your credit card or go to some free web-app suite.
I only hope to high heaven that it's easy to uninstall (not dug in deeper than an Internet Explorer flavoured burrowing tick).
I was more shooting for a "funny", you know.
But actually in my case, it does happen relatively frequently on start-up for on Acer desktop. Maybe once in every 10 reboots. It's some conflict with the graphics driver that I can't seem to shift, so you could lay the blame at Nvidia's doorstep instead if you want, or Acer's. But it always behaves itself perfectly whenever I boot to the Xubuntu partition, so I'm not inclined to be too generous to Microsoft.
On the other hand, it amuses me endlessly that my Linux boot is beating my Windows boot on a driver issue. One of the signs of the apocalypse I think.
You're making it up as you go along. Samsung will be the chief manufacturer of Windows 8 tablets, you say? So we'll completely ignore the fact that they've spent an absolute fortune to become the number 1 manufacturer of Android tablets; they'll start making a rival product for a rival brand. Dell/HP/Lenovo just quietly exiting the consumer market and going pure enterprise? Because obviously they have no desire to stick around and compete for the largest and most lucrative section of the market- they'll politely step aside now that Microsoft have indicated they'd like to make that money for themselves! And it isn't like MS Surface might have enterprise applications, no siree!
Complete nonsense. Dell/HP/Lenovo/Samsung will compete tooth-and-nail to keep a share of the consumer market. And the enterprise market. They like money. As corporations, making money is their raison d'etre. If their current business model stops working, they'll start flailing around for a new one.
Every tech commentator loved the Lumia, and first impressions from many users was positive. But the things still don't sell well. Nokia is if anything an even bigger power-brand in some countries than MS ("nokia" is used as a generic term for mobile phone in some places, as in "biro" for pen), so it isn't a name recognition problem.
Something can have wow-factor on the expo circuit and still flop in the market. MS is still "late to the party", compared to Android and iOS. Many people are already thoroughly entrenched in their tablet choices (as in their phone choices); they've got to persuade people to move.
If MS goes closes the hardware it's pretty much game over for anyone who doesn't get a contract with MS or Apple, and the competitive hardware market disappears.
Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Sony and Samsung are not going to slink away silently you know. If they lose access to Windows as their prime product, you see how quickly they start plugging something else.
I don't want to sound too hopeful, but yeah- Linux seems set to gain. We know that some of these companies aren't averse to Linux, either from their netbook experiments or their contact with Android, WebOS and so forth. And combined these companies have got a huge market presence and a lot of money to burn; if they put their mind towards peddling Linux (rather than just playing with it on the side as they do now), the game would be considerably changed.
Honest question (because I enjoy a good anti-Microsoft story as good as the next man)- what did they do to Toshiba?
Then you have no imagination.
For one thing, laptops (which feature a huge amount of clever miniaturisation and portability tricks, not the least of which is a big battery) will always be considerably more expensive than clunky, cumbersome, cable-infested desktops. Not a problem for rich ol' you and your high performance laptops, perhaps, but that does matter to the rest of us. My employer has something like 50,000 workstations at a rough estimate, and about 80% of those will be desktops. Why? Because a £100 price difference for the same spec is about £4 million for 40,000 units, and nobody wants to spend an extra £4 million every 4 years unless you have to.
Personally at home- I have a powerful quad-core gaming desktop with fancy graphics and whatnot. It would have cost me about £200 more for a similarly spec'ed laptop. My netbook was £200. So for the same money, I could have either a powerful gaming computer AND and an ultra-portable laptop, or just the one giant laptop.
Is that a bit like saying "herpes isn't as bad as AIDs, so stop complaining about me giving you herpes"?
Samsung suffer from some serious product schizophrenia sometimes (in a similar way as do Google). They have a successful and highly entrenched Android division. They also have Tizen development under way, and they have their own smartphone OS, Bada, as well as proprietary no=name OS' for feature phones. They even used to develop for Symbian.
Android is working for them; it would be suicide to abandon it for yet another new OS now, just as they've taken the lead.
Windows 7 still gives me BSODs every now and again. Some things never go out of fashion!
I've never bought that argument. I can't see what MS would want them for, considering they've already got mature smartphone and secure email systems. What value does BlackBerry bring? The brand (hoho)?
My money would be on them being bought by a tech giant without an existing smartphone division, and without a big Android investment. Dell, for example. Or Lenovo. HP, if they hadn't already tried and failed with WebOS.
Personally, it's a decision that I still regret.
I bought an Xperia X10 Mini Pro because it was the only Android device I could find with a slide-out keyboard. The actual Android portion of it has been as fine as you'd expect, but from the Sony side:
1) They've refused to release an official update beyond 2.1. Among other things, this means that it doesn't have the feature of saving apps to memory card- a colossal draw back. There's no technical reason for this, they just don't want to support their old phones.
2) Hardware build quality is poor. The slide-out keyboard sticks and warps the case when you try to slide it.
3) Wifi keeps freezing, and needs to be constantly reset. I've downloaded a 3rd party app which resets the Wifi every time it freezes, but it's not good.
I wouldn't buy a Sony again. Not when what they're basically peddling (Android smartphones) are available from plenty of better companies than them.
Microsoft and its OEMs have an entirely symbiotic relationship. MS can't exist in its current form without its OEMs.
The nightmare (for MS- dream for some of us) scenario would be for MS to make a lurch towards own-brand primary hardware, upset their OEMs by consistently undercutting them, and the OEMs abandoning ship (as basically happened with IBM, when most of their OEMs defected to Windows). And in this little fantasy, what's the main "third OS"- the OS which stands as a permissively licensed, mature competitor? Voila! Year of the Linux Desktop!
Am I the only one relishing the thought of buying one of these ultra-cheap subsidised Microsoft tablets, reformatting it, and loading it up with Android/Tizen/whatever?
I would take some degree of joy at seeing the splash logo of my favourite distro's logo right there next to the moulded plastic Windows logo on the case. And extra joy if the devices were heavily subsidised at the thought that Microsoft were paying for me to use a competitor's OS.
I wouldn't even care if the set-up wasn't very good!
The reason OS/2 failed was because OEMs didn't want to support a competitor.
With MS doing this and charging licensing fees it will only make companies like Asus prefer Andriod tablets instead. No one wants competitors and to invest a lot of money and therefore risk to help someone who is actively stealing customers out.
I don't want to come across all shilly, but- Google are sort of in that boat too, after buying Motorola M. Android's main developer is now also one of Android's main device manufacturers.
The whole thing is slightly mitigated buy the fact that Google don't own Android (the Open Handset Alliance do, which all the main manufacturers belong to). But not very. Android is and always will be Google's baby.
News is "Ford Fiesta better than Fiat Panda". News is not "Ford Fiesta worse than BMW 7 series".
Of course Ivy Bridge is better. It'd be pretty shocking if it weren't.
My guess is that it's because it's the only mainstream phone that runs Linux (not counting Android). Which is a sad, sad thing in and of itself.
The beauty of Linux is that even if one distro does something that gets on your nerves, there are others to choose from. Don't like Ubuntu? Go Mint, Fedora, SUSE, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware...
If Canonical want to turn Ubuntu into a Mac clone, they can knock themselves out. It might even work for them. For those that don't want a Mac clone, they can just not use it.
Depending on the specs, the laptop could be worth more than $900 (that model is $900 with the absolute lowest hardware options, about $2000 for top spec). Top prize also includes a Nokia N9 phone, which is what, $400? And I doubt most people are going to spend 40 hours a week for the full three weeks working on this. Lets say 1 hour a day for about three weeks is 20 hours work, I'd say that's not a bad little prize for an amateur's competition.
As sibling poster pointed out, there's also no reason you can't go on to sell your programme for cash once the competition is done. Ubuntu Software Centre only takes 20% of the sale price for themselves, which is less than the 30% taken by Apple App Store and Android Market.
You know this site is (at least nominally) a news site primarily about Linux and programming, right? And you realise that Ubuntu still is the single most popular Linux distribution, right? So don't you think that when the main backer behind the biggest Linux distribution announces a programming contest with quite nice prizes might qualify as relevant news for this website?
Also- bugger off. Don't read it if you're not interested.
When was the last time you used it? These days it looks very shiny, reminiscent of Steam, including a "featured" advertising bar, a "what's new" bar, and am optional "recommended for you" section (I actually preferred it back when it was a bit more utilitarian, but I certainly do appreciate all the extra features). The front page is now mostly paid programmes, and it's possible to filter by "for purchase". If you just filter by category, it contains both free and paid for programmes in the result. All programmes give you "similar to this" recommendations, and user reviews.
Basically- I disagree with you. I think it's a fairly slick bit of software these days, comparable with Steam and Impulse (I haven't used the Apple's iTunes programme for so long I don't know how it compares- but I remember it used to be borderline unusable back in the day).
It is:
http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/application-results/strings-1200utc-13jun12-en
Incidentally, I seem to remember that Coca-Cola was one of the companies not getting involved. They, like a number of "big brand" companies, complained that this is nothing but an attempt to extort money out of them on threat of losing their precious trademarks to someone else (which is probably a pretty fair assessment of the whole thing).
Which of course is doubly embarrassing if the TLD you had applied for was ".porn" or something similar. Nothing wrong with that per se, but the CEO applying for it probably doesn't appreciate having his family address visible to every religious fundamentalist and whatnot out there in the world.
Again, temperature has nothing to do with it. The reason earthly life does poorly at sub-zero temperatures is because it is below the freezing point of our body's solvent (water). Different freezing points for different liquids mean different habitable temperatures for hypothetical life. Since Titan is the perfect temperature for liquid methane, a potential methane-based life form would also find that the moon's surface is the perfect temperature. Earthly temperatures would literally boil their blood.
Obviously it's all wild speculation, mind. Try the wikipedia article if you want to know the details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry#Non-water_solvents