Te hoped that writing a paper saying so would reassure Microsoft's critics in the technical community that Redmond wasn't planning to lock down the PC in order to satisfy Hollywood. And by making it clear that the people behind Microsoft's "trusted computing" push were not fans of DRM, Biddle hoped he could persuade the technical community to consider other, more benign applications of the technology he was building.
snip
It didn't work out that way. "I almost got fired over the paper," Biddle told Ars. "It was extremely controversial." Biddle tried to get buy-in from senior Microsoft executives prior to releasing the paper. But he says they didn't really understand the paper's implications—and particularly how it could strain relationships with content companies—until after it was released. Once the paper was released, Microsoft's got stuck in bureaucratic paralysis. Redmond neither repudiated Biddle's paper nor allowed him to publicly defend it.
At the same time, "the community we thought would draw a connection never drew the connection," Biddle said, referring to anti-DRM activists. "Microsoft was taking so much heat around security and trustworthy computing, that I was not allowed to go out and talk about any of this stuff publicly. I couldn't explain 'guys, we're totally on your side. What we want is a program that's open.'"
The so called "community" is and was rabidly anti-Microsoft regardless of the actual merits of the case. There are umpteen journalists(eg. Farhad Manjoo of Slate), who railed endlessly against Palladium, but when Apple implemented the Palladium spec to the letter in the iPhone and iPad, locked out developers and users from their own machines, the exact same people went "OOH SHINY" were falling all over themselves singing its praises.
Now we have the slow decimation of user and developer freedom led over the past 5 years by the iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook,locked bootloaders on Android phones like the Droid, tablets etc., Windows Phone and now Windows RT. As they say, the first cut is the deepest, the war was lost when the public started buying iDevices in droves and they *still* can't keep them in stock. Now everyone can say if it's okay for the market leader Apple to do it, so can we. This is the harm with the "raise hell if it's MS, ignore and pump it if it's Apple etc." attitude of the community and Slashdot is no different for the most part. If, instead of playing fanboys and haters, if pundits and tech folks actually stood for openness like RMS did, we might have had a different future today.
The cat is out of the bag though. Apple charging 30% of even the services offered through apps is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Surface Pro won't be available for Christmas. Coming to your point, it matches a lot of use case in Enterprise. Supports AD and Group Policy. Can push apps and updates while pushing them to desktops and laptops, take meeting notes. Can easily get away with using it on business trips for most folks. iPads are bought but only for executives who think they're playthings meant for playing Fruit Ninja and thus cannot be trusted with a regular employee.
>I mean seriously, just to pick from your spin list. #3 - active digitizer. Hasn't that failed to be a selling point for 15+ years?
That doesn't really mean it will continue to fail, especially with devices becoming faster and getting more capable. For example, the Galaxy Note II is selling quite well with one. A device like the Surface wasn't technologically possible 10 years ago.
Which cheap laptop has the features of Surface like 1080p screen, pen with active digitizer, SSD etc? Even if there is, it's not a full replacement for the use cases of Surface though.
Remoting works properly only on WiFi and will have annoying lag on 3G/4G which is not to mention expensive and comes with bandwidth limits and limits on tethering, and also is a huge battery drain. The Surface Pro is a very useful machine even when totally offline like when not in a coverage area or a bad signal area or building. The Chromebook essentially turns into a paperweight without a constant network connection.
Not to mention charging and carrying around a Chromebook and Nexus 10 together and the charging cables/adapters/covers is cumbersome when you can walk out with just one device.
The applications using Qt (all KDE apps) are not rendering correctly on a MacBookPro with Retina screen. The text is blurry like if it was upsized with a very bad filter
I don't think they would care too much about the couple of thousand hostile neckbeards left on this site, though. I just do it for the sake of being a Devil's advocate and poking holes in the logic of otherwise intelligent people who have become extremely biased. Microsoft sucks quite a lot, just not as much as this site thinks it does, though.
Even the first post troll, shill or whatever he, she or it was has deemed Slashdot unworthy of their attention and effort anymore. Also, I'm not new here, thought not as old as you, I've been reading this site since 10 years.
Forgot to add that I feel flattered and honored that you deemed me worthy enough to check out my previous posts. Hopefully you learnt some things from them other that the misconception you stated.
You're a well known MS hater and Apple fanboi/zealot. You post short uninspiring snippets in unrelated discussions to boost Apple's bottomline at the expense of Linux. You're probably an AAPL shareholder looking at your posts.
With that out of the way, Surface is not targeting the Nexus 7 or even the iPad, or even the big ultrabooks. Perhaps you got confused with Surface RT. Pro is a different machine.
It's trying to define a new category in the market, like the iPad did, and remember how people on here said it was an oversized iPod Touch and not enough power for a tablet? Remember how that ended up?
Also, your sample size of the developers in your company that are probably fellow Appleheads is so laughably pico compared to the billion strong PC market and even the Windows shops out there that it doesn't warrant a response.
Some people don't need that much storage when everything is in the cloud or they're browsing. I could totally imagine my mother or sister not using 40GB of storage. Touch apps are usually not that big and music and video streaming apps like XBox Music, Netflix etc. are popular these days. Why should they be forced to pay extra now when they can always put in a SD card later if they need more storage?
Can the iPad or a Android Transformer or Nexus do any of the following?
1) It has a fully powered USB 3.0 port, connect any and all your devices you want to, even simultaneously with a powered hub 2) You can connect a Nexus tablet or phone and develop and test Android applications on it with Eclipse. 3) Has an active real digitizer and comes with Pen input, great for classroom and meeting use, especially combined with One Note 4) Can run the real Photoshop and not the lite crippled touch based stuff available for the iPad 5) Can run touch apps and browsing for couch use, although an additional cheap 7" tablet might be good for couch, bed and bathroom use. 6) Does not consume 32GB+, perhaps around 15-20GB. 7) Put in or swap through one or multiple 32GB/64GB/128GB SDXC cards. Upgrade to higher capacity or more in the future as prices come down. 8) Use real touch optimized apps and games on it, like Fruit Ninja. The Macbook Air fails at this. 9) Comes with builtin Defender(MSE) that's barely noticeable in daily use. Disable it if you're a capable geek trying to optimize the system. 10) Comes with a 1080p touch screen and a mini display port supporting a monitor upto 2560x1644 resolution 11) Alleged trainwreck UI is specially optimized for a device like the Surface. 12) Does not come with a BIOS. Comes with UEFI which has many more features but boots very very fast, like in 7 or 8 seconds. Update your hate machine. 13) Steve Ballmer? Ok you got me, Surface sucks if you're attracted to Steve Ballmer who you seem unhealthily obsessed with. Stay away. If not, there's some cool hardware and software in there.
The 13" Macbook Pro has a bigger and more powerful battery, I am guessing. The MBA is a better comparison and it's in line with the Surface's battery life. Not to mention the full HD screen on the Surface and the digitizer. Those eat battery.
Anyone else tired of the constant negative stream of non-sequitir flamebait summaries and articles on Windows 8 or even Microsoft/Apple on Slashdot and any and all positive or neutral news being totally ignored?
Let's see...
Monday - Windows 8 PCs Still Throttled By Crapware
Tuesday - Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a $248 Win8 PC.
Thursday - NPD Group Analysts Say Windows 8 Sales Sluggish
Friday - Why Microsoft's Surface Pro Could Fail
Also, note how news on Tuesday that Microsoft has sold 40M Windows 8 licenses so far completely missed Slashdot's front page... only to be briefly mentioned two days later in the NPD story summary. But when there was a rumor that Windows 8 sales were below expectations, there it was hanging on the front page.
Also Slashdot totally ignored the following:
The NPD survey didn't include the biggest sales day of the year, Black Friday.
Only if Secure Boot can be disabled in the bios settings. Microsoft requires OEMs to have that option to get Windows 8 certification, but that rule certainly doesn't apply to itself. However, I do expect it to have the bootloader unlocked.
It'd be fun if it was locked, just to look at the Slashdot posts that simultaneously predict that it's DoA like the Kin and that no one is going to buy it and then in the same breath claim that the locked boot loader will kill Linux and the govt should step in to unlock it.
Looking at the comments, the Linux folks seem to think it's a terrible expensive device that does nothing right, why would want to buy it?
Anyone else tired of the constant negative stream of non-sequitir flamebait summaries and articles on Windows 8 or even Microsoft/Apple on Slashdot and any and all positive or neutral news being totally ignored?
After driving away all the folks with half a clue, even the echochamber seems to be losing interest in constantly talking to itself on Slashdot, with only 33 comments after half an hour of posting inspite of the flamebait title and summary, just hastening the steady descent of Slashdot into irrelevance.
Your point was about bloat in Windows 8 over Windows 7. The UI is not part of the point and whether it is good or bad is completely orthogonal to my post which asked for any proof about the bloat. The worst UI in the world could be the fastest and the best one could be the most bloated.
Stop moving the goalposts. I know bashing on Windows 8 for anything is cool on here but do you think Slashdotters are idiots? So, are you in effect agreeing that your own +5 informative karmawhoring circlejerking GP post is full of shit when you said Windows 8 was more bloated than Windows 7?
Can't find it now but there was one hands on demo video that showed a Samsung Android dual or quad core phone lagging while scrolling through photos while a single core Windows Phone zips through them like butter.
Hope you can do your own research instead of getting trapped in the anti-MS news bubble and circlejerk of hate and hence becoming ignorant as a result.
Just as irrelevant since Windows Server takes the most of the profits in the Server OS market. Also, Windows 8(supposed to be DoA according to Slashdot) has overtaken the web usage of Android in just 10 days after launch. So much for the so called post-PC world.
Slashdot Mirror
"thus preventing Romanian hackers from installing undetectable bootkits on your dad's computer"
Fixed that for you
Te hoped that writing a paper saying so would reassure Microsoft's critics in the technical community that Redmond wasn't planning to lock down the PC in order to satisfy Hollywood. And by making it clear that the people behind Microsoft's "trusted computing" push were not fans of DRM, Biddle hoped he could persuade the technical community to consider other, more benign applications of the technology he was building.
snip
It didn't work out that way. "I almost got fired over the paper," Biddle told Ars. "It was extremely controversial." Biddle tried to get buy-in from senior Microsoft executives prior to releasing the paper. But he says they didn't really understand the paper's implications—and particularly how it could strain relationships with content companies—until after it was released. Once the paper was released, Microsoft's got stuck in bureaucratic paralysis. Redmond neither repudiated Biddle's paper nor allowed him to publicly defend it.
At the same time, "the community we thought would draw a connection never drew the connection," Biddle said, referring to anti-DRM activists. "Microsoft was taking so much heat around security and trustworthy computing, that I was not allowed to go out and talk about any of this stuff publicly. I couldn't explain 'guys, we're totally on your side. What we want is a program that's open.'"
The so called "community" is and was rabidly anti-Microsoft regardless of the actual merits of the case. There are umpteen journalists(eg. Farhad Manjoo of Slate), who railed endlessly against Palladium, but when Apple implemented the Palladium spec to the letter in the iPhone and iPad, locked out developers and users from their own machines, the exact same people went "OOH SHINY" were falling all over themselves singing its praises.
See http://www.salon.com/2002/07/11/palladium/ and http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/new_ipad_how_apple_s_tablet_strategy_parallels_its_unbeatable_ipod_success_.html
Now we have the slow decimation of user and developer freedom led over the past 5 years by the iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook,locked bootloaders on Android phones like the Droid, tablets etc., Windows Phone and now Windows RT. As they say, the first cut is the deepest, the war was lost when the public started buying iDevices in droves and they *still* can't keep them in stock. Now everyone can say if it's okay for the market leader Apple to do it, so can we. This is the harm with the "raise hell if it's MS, ignore and pump it if it's Apple etc." attitude of the community and Slashdot is no different for the most part. If, instead of playing fanboys and haters, if pundits and tech folks actually stood for openness like RMS did, we might have had a different future today.
The cat is out of the bag though. Apple charging 30% of even the services offered through apps is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Surface Pro won't be available for Christmas. Coming to your point, it matches a lot of use case in Enterprise. Supports AD and Group Policy. Can push apps and updates while pushing them to desktops and laptops, take meeting notes. Can easily get away with using it on business trips for most folks. iPads are bought but only for executives who think they're playthings meant for playing Fruit Ninja and thus cannot be trusted with a regular employee.
>I mean seriously, just to pick from your spin list. #3 - active digitizer. Hasn't that failed to be a selling point for 15+ years?
That doesn't really mean it will continue to fail, especially with devices becoming faster and getting more capable. For example, the Galaxy Note II is selling quite well with one. A device like the Surface wasn't technologically possible 10 years ago.
Which cheap laptop has the features of Surface like 1080p screen, pen with active digitizer, SSD etc? Even if there is, it's not a full replacement for the use cases of Surface though.
Remoting works properly only on WiFi and will have annoying lag on 3G/4G which is not to mention expensive and comes with bandwidth limits and limits on tethering, and also is a huge battery drain. The Surface Pro is a very useful machine even when totally offline like when not in a coverage area or a bad signal area or building. The Chromebook essentially turns into a paperweight without a constant network connection.
Not to mention charging and carrying around a Chromebook and Nexus 10 together and the charging cables/adapters/covers is cumbersome when you can walk out with just one device.
Is the Droid font package Free?
Is the blurry fonts issue fixed yet?
https://trac.macports.org/ticket/36410
The applications using Qt (all KDE apps) are not rendering correctly on a MacBookPro with Retina screen. The text is blurry like if it was upsized with a very bad filter
Hook me up with some of your ex-colleagues then.
I don't think they would care too much about the couple of thousand hostile neckbeards left on this site, though. I just do it for the sake of being a Devil's advocate and poking holes in the logic of otherwise intelligent people who have become extremely biased. Microsoft sucks quite a lot, just not as much as this site thinks it does, though.
Even the first post troll, shill or whatever he, she or it was has deemed Slashdot unworthy of their attention and effort anymore. Also, I'm not new here, thought not as old as you, I've been reading this site since 10 years.
Forgot to add that I feel flattered and honored that you deemed me worthy enough to check out my previous posts. Hopefully you learnt some things from them other that the misconception you stated.
You're a well known MS hater and Apple fanboi/zealot. You post short uninspiring snippets in unrelated discussions to boost Apple's bottomline at the expense of Linux. You're probably an AAPL shareholder looking at your posts.
With that out of the way, Surface is not targeting the Nexus 7 or even the iPad, or even the big ultrabooks. Perhaps you got confused with Surface RT. Pro is a different machine.
It's trying to define a new category in the market, like the iPad did, and remember how people on here said it was an oversized iPod Touch and not enough power for a tablet? Remember how that ended up?
Also, your sample size of the developers in your company that are probably fellow Appleheads is so laughably pico compared to the billion strong PC market and even the Windows shops out there that it doesn't warrant a response.
Hopefully you're comparing the unlocked price and not the on-contract prices.
Anyway, that's for a 5.5" 1280x768 display.
The Surface is 10.6" 1920x1080.
That's around 4 times more area and twice the pixels. No idea how much more it would cost though.
Some people don't need that much storage when everything is in the cloud or they're browsing. I could totally imagine my mother or sister not using 40GB of storage. Touch apps are usually not that big and music and video streaming apps like XBox Music, Netflix etc. are popular these days. Why should they be forced to pay extra now when they can always put in a SD card later if they need more storage?
Can the iPad or a Android Transformer or Nexus do any of the following?
1) It has a fully powered USB 3.0 port, connect any and all your devices you want to, even simultaneously with a powered hub
2) You can connect a Nexus tablet or phone and develop and test Android applications on it with Eclipse.
3) Has an active real digitizer and comes with Pen input, great for classroom and meeting use, especially combined with One Note
4) Can run the real Photoshop and not the lite crippled touch based stuff available for the iPad
5) Can run touch apps and browsing for couch use, although an additional cheap 7" tablet might be good for couch, bed and bathroom use.
6) Does not consume 32GB+, perhaps around 15-20GB.
7) Put in or swap through one or multiple 32GB/64GB/128GB SDXC cards. Upgrade to higher capacity or more in the future as prices come down.
8) Use real touch optimized apps and games on it, like Fruit Ninja. The Macbook Air fails at this.
9) Comes with builtin Defender(MSE) that's barely noticeable in daily use. Disable it if you're a capable geek trying to optimize the system.
10) Comes with a 1080p touch screen and a mini display port supporting a monitor upto 2560x1644 resolution
11) Alleged trainwreck UI is specially optimized for a device like the Surface.
12) Does not come with a BIOS. Comes with UEFI which has many more features but boots very very fast, like in 7 or 8 seconds. Update your hate machine.
13) Steve Ballmer? Ok you got me, Surface sucks if you're attracted to Steve Ballmer who you seem unhealthily obsessed with. Stay away. If not, there's some cool hardware and software in there.
Can your iPad run Eclipse or Visual Studio? Or the real Photoshop and not the super crippled lite version? Or the real Matlab?
Does it have a full USB 3.0 port? Can you connect a Nexus to it and debug your Android app that you're developing in Eclipse on it?
Can you run two applications side by side on it? Like a chat or twitter client beside your browser?
Does it have a proper digitizer to take accurate notes on? Does it have a SDXC slot to add or swap 64 or 128GB microsd cards?
Summary failed to mention that the Surface Pro is much more expensive than a Raspberry Pi.
The 13" Macbook Pro has a bigger and more powerful battery, I am guessing. The MBA is a better comparison and it's in line with the Surface's battery life. Not to mention the full HD screen on the Surface and the digitizer. Those eat battery.
Anyone else tired of the constant negative stream of non-sequitir flamebait summaries and articles on Windows 8 or even Microsoft/Apple on Slashdot and any and all positive or neutral news being totally ignored?
Let's see...
Monday - Windows 8 PCs Still Throttled By Crapware
Tuesday - Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a $248 Win8 PC.
Thursday - NPD Group Analysts Say Windows 8 Sales Sluggish
Friday - Why Microsoft's Surface Pro Could Fail
Also, note how news on Tuesday that Microsoft has sold 40M Windows 8 licenses so far completely missed Slashdot's front page... only to be briefly mentioned two days later in the NPD story summary. But when there was a rumor that Windows 8 sales were below expectations, there it was hanging on the front page.
Also Slashdot totally ignored the following:
The NPD survey didn't include the biggest sales day of the year, Black Friday.
Black Friday boosts Windows 8 net use in US above 2% http://microsoft-news.com/black-friday-boosts-windows-8-net-use-in-us-above-2/
Windows 8 sells 4 million copies in 3 days. 40 million in a month. Some apps get more than 1 million downloads and some apps go over $25K revenue.
Windows 8 overtakes all of Android web traffic in just 10 days http://www.androidauthority.com/windows-8-has-more-web-traffic-129925/
New tagline:
Slashdot, Fox News for tech zealots, Stuff that doesn't matter.
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot, tabloid for neckbeards, news that doesn't matter.
Only if Secure Boot can be disabled in the bios settings. Microsoft requires OEMs to have that option to get Windows 8 certification, but that rule certainly doesn't apply to itself. However, I do expect it to have the bootloader unlocked.
It'd be fun if it was locked, just to look at the Slashdot posts that simultaneously predict that it's DoA like the Kin and that no one is going to buy it and then in the same breath claim that the locked boot loader will kill Linux and the govt should step in to unlock it.
Looking at the comments, the Linux folks seem to think it's a terrible expensive device that does nothing right, why would want to buy it?
Don't forget the pressure sensitive digitizer with pen included and palm rest detection. That ain't cheap.
It's going to be very useful for meeting and class notes, especially when combined with One Note.
Not to mention digital art work and photography.
Anyone else tired of the constant negative stream of non-sequitir flamebait summaries and articles on Windows 8 or even Microsoft/Apple on Slashdot and any and all positive or neutral news being totally ignored?
After driving away all the folks with half a clue, even the echochamber seems to be losing interest in constantly talking to itself on Slashdot, with only 33 comments after half an hour of posting inspite of the flamebait title and summary, just hastening the steady descent of Slashdot into irrelevance.
Last one out turn off the lights.
Your point was about bloat in Windows 8 over Windows 7. The UI is not part of the point and whether it is good or bad is completely orthogonal to my post which asked for any proof about the bloat. The worst UI in the world could be the fastest and the best one could be the most bloated.
Stop moving the goalposts. I know bashing on Windows 8 for anything is cool on here but do you think Slashdotters are idiots? So, are you in effect agreeing that your own +5 informative karmawhoring circlejerking GP post is full of shit when you said Windows 8 was more bloated than Windows 7?
http://wmpoweruser.com/quadcore-samsung-galaxy-s3-still-said-to-be-laggy/
http://wmpoweruser.com/intel-android-dual-core-so-poor-having-a-second-core-is-actually-a-detriment/
Can't find it now but there was one hands on demo video that showed a Samsung Android dual or quad core phone lagging while scrolling through photos while a single core Windows Phone zips through them like butter.
Hope you can do your own research instead of getting trapped in the anti-MS news bubble and circlejerk of hate and hence becoming ignorant as a result.
Just as irrelevant since Windows Server takes the most of the profits in the Server OS market. Also, Windows 8(supposed to be DoA according to Slashdot) has overtaken the web usage of Android in just 10 days after launch. So much for the so called post-PC world.
WP7 and WP8 don't even run on the same kernel. They are mutually incompatible. How stupid can you be?
Did he say or imply that they do? How stupid can you be?