Touch does break the flow: 1- there's not much that Touch can do intuitively that a mouse can't do intuitively too 2- the travel time to go touch your screen with your finger is much higher than reaching for a mouse or an alt-cokebottle key combination 3- ditto for the effort required 4- the precision of gestures (touching and sliding) at arms' length is not very good
It's not even a "nice extra". It's a pain: breaks the flow, leaves smudges on the screen, requires learning yet another way to handle a PC.
It's a step backwards that MS is trying to force on desktop users in the hope that training users to the MS version of Touch will give MS an opportunity to recover from their big fail in tablets and smartphones.
Not so true about pictures. 1- High-end smartphones (iP4s, iP5, GS3, GNote2...) take okay pictures. For a blog or email, or even regular-size prints, they are more then "good enough". 2- smartphone video compares even more favorably to regular cameras 3- and above all let you have something to take pictures *all the time*. My brother has a semi-expensive camera, and a shitty smartphone that even went through the wash once. The pictures we get of the nephews are more often take with his smartphone, because that's what he always has with him.
Now, if you want to get arty or A4-size, sure, get a true camera. If you want to shoot un-arty slices of life for friends and family, no need.
1- build a very mature OS/Office/Entreprise business with slow growth 2- build a faster growth Entertainment business with, at last, OK results 3- sell 2- 4- watch 1- stagnate 5- ??? 6- Profits !
MS have a monopoly rent on entreprise OS and software. The only thing they can do is use that rent while it lasts to try and become relevant in the mobile space. Even being an also-ran would be better than the non-entity they are right now. I think their best chance is to pull an Apple, integrate hardware and software, either by buying Nokia outright or keeping them straightjacketed by whatever exclusive deal and right of first refusal they have on takeovers.
The article is wrong in that MS can do *nothing* about Wintel PCs falling out of favor, so *nothing* about Windows on desktops/laptops sales. It's pointless to invest more in Windows. Actually, I'm pretty sure MS could stop doing anything but security updates for desktop/laptop Windows over the next few years, and that would not impact sales. It might even turn out better then pulling another Win8 on users.
MS can try and get more Windows phones and tablets out. They missed their opportunity to preempt competitors like they did in the PC market though, and will never get it back. Android and iOS are good enough and big enough that whatever MS comes up will at best get to par, and OEMs are not dumb enough to let MS once again get all the profits and devalue the hardware business.
I think it's already too late to achieve much success in the general market though, and that the best MS can hope is to milk the market of companies who insist on Windows Everywhere, and can't/won't handle iOS nor Android. Apart from Office, there's *zero* reasons to buy a Windows phone nor tablet these days. RT tablets are inferior to iOS/Android on all scores; and x86 tablets are so expensive you can get an x86 laptop *and* an ARM tablet for the same price.
The Entertainment division is actually one of the few recent MS success stories, had has a lot of similarities to the Mobile market: consumer not entreprise, ecosystem, media-oriented... Getting rid of it makes no sense.
1- Maybe implementing, validating, testing... the fix does take a bit of time ?
2- This sounds so much like a teenager "But Daddy, I know last time I went out I got back past curfew drunk and smelling of cigarettes... but that was LAST TIME, I'm trustworthy now... what's the hold-up ?"
From what they keep saying, it's not voluntary throttling: it's just that the pipes between Free and YouTube are saturated, and *someone* needs to pay to put bigger pipes in place. Free wants Google to do that.
easy: all sites that live thanks to advertising, even to good ones that provide valuable content and have not-too-obnoxious ads (arstechnica comes to mind), no longer make any money at all.
Free is a major French ISP, also just breaking into the mobile phone market with rock-bottom prices. They've always been at the forefront of the price war, and without them we probably still wouldn't have $40 ADSL with unlimited phone, TV..., nor $27/month for mobile with unlimited data/voice/texts, and no restrictions on VOIP, tethering... full net neutrality in fact. So up to now, they've undoubtedly been Good Guys.
They have a long-standing dispute with Google though, about who should pay for bigger tubes between their servers and YouTube, which is unusable at peak time for Free subscribers. Free have been advising their clients to use Dailymotion instead, and don't want to pay for extra bandwidth. Free users are very dissatisfied, and this is becoming a *major* issue.
The ad-blocking move, which seems right now to target mainly Google, is probably mostly a bargaining chip to get Google to pay for better YouTube access for Free.
1- people would rather pay $100 up front and then $100 per month for 2 years (total = $2.500) rather than $600 + $50x25 = $1.850. that's idiotic, but that's the way the mind works. 2- People don't realize they'd pay a lot less by doing a consumer credit on the phone, and getting a no-commitment contract 3- The government is not acting against what are, in effect, usury rates
As opposed to the deficits that came before, or after, or the record deficits nowadays... oh, wait !
You can try and push a political agenda, though Slashdot is arguably not the place to do that. You do need to get your facts straight tough,, or, better,adjust your worldview.
First, those articles are very interesting, thanks to Intel for making them happen.
Second, it's a good thing that Intel is catching up. I'm not a great Intel fan (rooting for the underdogs and all that), but still, I'm impressed.
Third, isn't the OS choice biasing the results a bit ? Would ARM fare better under a more ARM-oriented OS such as Android ? Or is power consumption profile, in the end, fully OS-independent ?
what we know of the guy is "he has a raspi", and an active mind.
For gifts, my personal opinion is that experiences are better than things: concert, play, opera, fancy diner, spa... Unless you're really really sure of an object he'll like, which you don't seem to be.
What I've come up with is: "The ability to understand complex systems, and have simultaneous different incompatible explanations for a given system". Which was shot down in a number of ways by friends, one stating it is "the ability to adapt".
There several dimension to intelligence: understanding vs doing, logical vs intuitive, mathematical vs verbal... no wonder a single number can't capture all dimensoins of intelligence.
Good analogy, it's indeed the same mistake, only the other way around. I remember, back when I was spending much time trying to click my WinMob 6 HD2 little "close" buttons, thinking MS really wanted us to tack a keyboard and mouse onto that thing.
I think MS don't realize that aesthetics is as important as functionality. We don't need the same damn tiles and mysterious hotspots on a desktop screen: there's plenty of room to be more discoverable and information-intensive. They could have come up with unified visual design, without actually making the high-res/KBMS and the low-res/touch version identical.
You're right, RDP is RDP is RDP (there's a guy further down who thinks RDP on Win8 is better over sucky links though, and he might even be right, I'm usign mostly over LAN or wired Internet so I wouldn't know).
Thing is, they took away RDP server in Win7 Home Premium. They put it back in whatever version they're giving us when we upgrade from 7HP to 8.
I wanted to try it out, so I put it on my (non-touch) laptop. The Metro UI is an abomination. I wouldn't even want it on a touch tablet ("live tiles" compare very badly to Android's widget, notifications are a joke...), on a PC, it should be taken out and shot.
Apart form that, the new features are: 1- Remote Desktop server... 2- and that's it. Not even ReadyBoost for SSD, nor some tiered storage like Apple has started doing. 3- and after Jan 31st, you won't even get Media Server.
MS is trying to force-feed Metro UI to their Desktop users, hoping to use that familiarity to get some traction on phones and tablets. The problem are that Metro UI 1) makes no sense on non-touch machines, and 2) lacks severely even on tablets and phones.
Some professions are somewhat easy to assess: you can test pupils before/after, and know if a teacher is good or not (not that teachers like that, mind you ^^) you can value sales rep (that's me) by... sales, or margins, or new accounts
Devs for example are much harder to evaluate. You obviously can't rate by quantity of code. Quality is a pain to evaluate (takes time, is too "soft" to have a firm yardstick, is often voluntarily compromised to get products quicker...). Goal-oriented evaluation is warped: "implementing such and such backend" can mean beautiful code that will scale, is well documented, and easy to maintain, or spaghetti crap that'll break in 6 months.
Plus there are lots of cross-dependencies. A good Java programmer may suck at database stuff, while a very good Java+DB coder may not be very good as a general purpose dev.
1- Netbooks were made to stagnate by Intel and MS. Buyers never had any reason to upgrade, or rather, update, so once everyone vaguely interested got one, the market just died. I'm still happily using my Compaq Mini from 3-4 yrs ago, what's on sale right now isn't significantly better. Now, if I could get more RAM, a bigger screen, an i3... I'd probably upgrade. But MS and Intel have decided I shouldn't be able to.
2- On the contrary, tablets are evolving incredibly fast. I'm on my 4th tablet in 2 years, and actually just sold it to upgrade. And I think I'll stay on the upgrade treadmill for a while, which, coincidentally, let's my "handee-downs" get on it, too.
3- What matters is not that 99.999% of software ever written doesn't run: it's that 90% of the software you actually need does. I can do emails, RSS/Greader, Web, ebooks, video, music, kill-the-time games, even some Google Docs in a pinch. Sure, everyone is missing some apps. But not that many.
4- You can get a keyboard, a mouse, SD cards and even USB sticks in most cases. What's your gripe ?
Indeed. Already, anything DRMed, and by extension, anything in a proprietary format, exists at the mercy of the supplier. Now, anything "in the cloud", whetever its format and/or DRM, even open-format un-DRMed, too.
We need laws to protect our rights. Basic stuff, like DRMed stuff must be opened w/ opener in escrow in case of service discontinuation; proprietary formats must be documented too, in escrow if needs be, and cloud providers must provide one-click backup solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
Touch does break the flow:
1- there's not much that Touch can do intuitively that a mouse can't do intuitively too
2- the travel time to go touch your screen with your finger is much higher than reaching for a mouse or an alt-cokebottle key combination
3- ditto for the effort required
4- the precision of gestures (touching and sliding) at arms' length is not very good
It's not even a "nice extra". It's a pain: breaks the flow, leaves smudges on the screen, requires learning yet another way to handle a PC.
It's a step backwards that MS is trying to force on desktop users in the hope that training users to the MS version of Touch will give MS an opportunity to recover from their big fail in tablets and smartphones.
Not so true about pictures.
1- High-end smartphones (iP4s, iP5, GS3, GNote2...) take okay pictures. For a blog or email, or even regular-size prints, they are more then "good enough".
2- smartphone video compares even more favorably to regular cameras
3- and above all let you have something to take pictures *all the time*. My brother has a semi-expensive camera, and a shitty smartphone that even went through the wash once. The pictures we get of the nephews are more often take with his smartphone, because that's what he always has with him.
Now, if you want to get arty or A4-size, sure, get a true camera. If you want to shoot un-arty slices of life for friends and family, no need.
1- build a very mature OS/Office/Entreprise business with slow growth
2- build a faster growth Entertainment business with, at last, OK results
3- sell 2-
4- watch 1- stagnate
5- ???
6- Profits !
MS have a monopoly rent on entreprise OS and software. The only thing they can do is use that rent while it lasts to try and become relevant in the mobile space. Even being an also-ran would be better than the non-entity they are right now. I think their best chance is to pull an Apple, integrate hardware and software, either by buying Nokia outright or keeping them straightjacketed by whatever exclusive deal and right of first refusal they have on takeovers.
The article is wrong in that MS can do *nothing* about Wintel PCs falling out of favor, so *nothing* about Windows on desktops/laptops sales. It's pointless to invest more in Windows. Actually, I'm pretty sure MS could stop doing anything but security updates for desktop/laptop Windows over the next few years, and that would not impact sales. It might even turn out better then pulling another Win8 on users.
MS can try and get more Windows phones and tablets out. They missed their opportunity to preempt competitors like they did in the PC market though, and will never get it back. Android and iOS are good enough and big enough that whatever MS comes up will at best get to par, and OEMs are not dumb enough to let MS once again get all the profits and devalue the hardware business.
I think it's already too late to achieve much success in the general market though, and that the best MS can hope is to milk the market of companies who insist on Windows Everywhere, and can't/won't handle iOS nor Android. Apart from Office, there's *zero* reasons to buy a Windows phone nor tablet these days. RT tablets are inferior to iOS/Android on all scores; and x86 tablets are so expensive you can get an x86 laptop *and* an ARM tablet for the same price.
The Entertainment division is actually one of the few recent MS success stories, had has a lot of similarities to the Mobile market: consumer not entreprise, ecosystem, media-oriented... Getting rid of it makes no sense.
You make time for gaming, and for doing stuff both of you like.
I don't know what he/she likes that you don't, but what would it take for you to take THAT up ? Nothing doing, right ? same here...
their sysadmin team now."
I laughed
1- Maybe implementing, validating, testing... the fix does take a bit of time ?
2- This sounds so much like a teenager "But Daddy, I know last time I went out I got back past curfew drunk and smelling of cigarettes... but that was LAST TIME, I'm trustworthy now... what's the hold-up ?"
From what they keep saying, it's not voluntary throttling: it's just that the pipes between Free and YouTube are saturated, and *someone* needs to pay to put bigger pipes in place. Free wants Google to do that.
easy: all sites that live thanks to advertising, even to good ones that provide valuable content and have not-too-obnoxious ads (arstechnica comes to mind), no longer make any money at all.
Free is a major French ISP, also just breaking into the mobile phone market with rock-bottom prices. They've always been at the forefront of the price war, and without them we probably still wouldn't have $40 ADSL with unlimited phone, TV..., nor $27/month for mobile with unlimited data/voice/texts, and no restrictions on VOIP, tethering... full net neutrality in fact. So up to now, they've undoubtedly been Good Guys.
They have a long-standing dispute with Google though, about who should pay for bigger tubes between their servers and YouTube, which is unusable at peak time for Free subscribers. Free have been advising their clients to use Dailymotion instead, and don't want to pay for extra bandwidth. Free users are very dissatisfied, and this is becoming a *major* issue.
The ad-blocking move, which seems right now to target mainly Google, is probably mostly a bargaining chip to get Google to pay for better YouTube access for Free.
It does mean the CIA is responsible for torture committed by 3rd-parties it transferred prisoners to, doesn't it ?
the subsidies are easy to fathom:
1- people would rather pay $100 up front and then $100 per month for 2 years (total = $2.500) rather than $600 + $50x25 = $1.850. that's idiotic, but that's the way the mind works.
2- People don't realize they'd pay a lot less by doing a consumer credit on the phone, and getting a no-commitment contract
3- The government is not acting against what are, in effect, usury rates
As opposed to the deficits that came before, or after, or the record deficits nowadays... oh, wait !
You can try and push a political agenda, though Slashdot is arguably not the place to do that. You do need to get your facts straight tough,, or, better,adjust your worldview.
You're funny. The last string of balanced budgets was under Clinton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CBO_-_Revenues_and_Outlays_as_percent_GDP.png
I've tried it, doesn't come close to Word in funvtionnality nor ergonomics nor looks.
First, those articles are very interesting, thanks to Intel for making them happen.
Second, it's a good thing that Intel is catching up. I'm not a great Intel fan (rooting for the underdogs and all that), but still, I'm impressed.
Third, isn't the OS choice biasing the results a bit ? Would ARM fare better under a more ARM-oriented OS such as Android ? Or is power consumption profile, in the end, fully OS-independent ?
what we know of the guy is "he has a raspi", and an active mind.
For gifts, my personal opinion is that experiences are better than things: concert, play, opera, fancy diner, spa... Unless you're really really sure of an object he'll like, which you don't seem to be.
for a while.
What I've come up with is: "The ability to understand complex systems, and have simultaneous different incompatible explanations for a given system". Which was shot down in a number of ways by friends, one stating it is "the ability to adapt".
There several dimension to intelligence: understanding vs doing, logical vs intuitive, mathematical vs verbal... no wonder a single number can't capture all dimensoins of intelligence.
Young programmers see code as a way to show how good they are
Old programmers see code as something that puts money in the bank.
What off topic ?
Good analogy, it's indeed the same mistake, only the other way around. I remember, back when I was spending much time trying to click my WinMob 6 HD2 little "close" buttons, thinking MS really wanted us to tack a keyboard and mouse onto that thing.
I think MS don't realize that aesthetics is as important as functionality. We don't need the same damn tiles and mysterious hotspots on a desktop screen: there's plenty of room to be more discoverable and information-intensive. They could have come up with unified visual design, without actually making the high-res/KBMS and the low-res/touch version identical.
You're right, RDP is RDP is RDP (there's a guy further down who thinks RDP on Win8 is better over sucky links though, and he might even be right, I'm usign mostly over LAN or wired Internet so I wouldn't know).
Thing is, they took away RDP server in Win7 Home Premium. They put it back in whatever version they're giving us when we upgrade from 7HP to 8.
I wanted to try it out, so I put it on my (non-touch) laptop. The Metro UI is an abomination. I wouldn't even want it on a touch tablet ("live tiles" compare very badly to Android's widget, notifications are a joke...), on a PC, it should be taken out and shot.
Which, luckily, you can do easily with http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/, and get back the Desktop shell that the IT gods intended.
Apart form that, the new features are:
1- Remote Desktop server...
2- and that's it. Not even ReadyBoost for SSD, nor some tiered storage like Apple has started doing.
3- and after Jan 31st, you won't even get Media Server.
MS is trying to force-feed Metro UI to their Desktop users, hoping to use that familiarity to get some traction on phones and tablets. The problem are that Metro UI 1) makes no sense on non-touch machines, and 2) lacks severely even on tablets and phones.
This sounds wrong. But I'm shuddering to think what step #2 might be
Some professions are somewhat easy to assess:
you can test pupils before/after, and know if a teacher is good or not (not that teachers like that, mind you ^^)
you can value sales rep (that's me) by... sales, or margins, or new accounts
Devs for example are much harder to evaluate. You obviously can't rate by quantity of code. Quality is a pain to evaluate (takes time, is too "soft" to have a firm yardstick, is often voluntarily compromised to get products quicker...). Goal-oriented evaluation is warped: "implementing such and such backend" can mean beautiful code that will scale, is well documented, and easy to maintain, or spaghetti crap that'll break in 6 months.
Plus there are lots of cross-dependencies. A good Java programmer may suck at database stuff, while a very good Java+DB coder may not be very good as a general purpose dev.
If you can't evaluate, you can't value.
I think you're impressively wrong:
1- Netbooks were made to stagnate by Intel and MS. Buyers never had any reason to upgrade, or rather, update, so once everyone vaguely interested got one, the market just died. I'm still happily using my Compaq Mini from 3-4 yrs ago, what's on sale right now isn't significantly better. Now, if I could get more RAM, a bigger screen, an i3... I'd probably upgrade. But MS and Intel have decided I shouldn't be able to.
2- On the contrary, tablets are evolving incredibly fast. I'm on my 4th tablet in 2 years, and actually just sold it to upgrade. And I think I'll stay on the upgrade treadmill for a while, which, coincidentally, let's my "handee-downs" get on it, too.
3- What matters is not that 99.999% of software ever written doesn't run: it's that 90% of the software you actually need does. I can do emails, RSS/Greader, Web, ebooks, video, music, kill-the-time games, even some Google Docs in a pinch. Sure, everyone is missing some apps. But not that many.
4- You can get a keyboard, a mouse, SD cards and even USB sticks in most cases. What's your gripe ?
Indeed. Already, anything DRMed, and by extension, anything in a proprietary format, exists at the mercy of the supplier.
Now, anything "in the cloud", whetever its format and/or DRM, even open-format un-DRMed, too.
We need laws to protect our rights. Basic stuff, like DRMed stuff must be opened w/ opener in escrow in case of service discontinuation; proprietary formats must be documented too, in escrow if needs be, and cloud providers must provide one-click backup solutions.