All of this rhetoric about "this is what the customers want" is nonsense. You're an Apple user, you're stuck with what Apple wants to sell you: end of story.
Oh rubbish, the 13" MacBook Pro and 13" MacBook Air have the same starting price (the Pro has a faster processor and more storage but the Air has an SSD) and yet many people choose the less-upgradeable Air simply because they don't ever upgrade their laptops anyway.
Wow cool. Typing commands. It's like I've returned to my roots on an old Commodore 64! How primitive.
Next I bet Microsoft will come-out a Model T and call it "progress". Damn idjits
So you enter search strings with a mouse do you? I mean since using a keyboard to type in what you're looking for is so primitive.
And one more thing, if Apple is driving this headlong rush towards smartphone/tablet interfaces being out on desktop (and I'm looking at you too, Ubuntu) then why isn't OSX that way?
On the other hand, though, Windows _does_ have that strong hand, and their getting Windows ready for lockdown points to a future in which I may have to jump through a lot of hoops just to, say, boot a USB Live linux system.
So you build your own system or you buy a Mac. Even if you ignore all the reasons why they wouldn't/can't do it motherboard makers aren't going to lock their boards to Windows, the only ones that would conceivably do that and have any reason to are system builders that are actually selling Windows systems.
High profile, perhaps, but effective? Not the US ones, certainly, and neither the EU ones: the former turned into a mere slap on the wrist and the latter... well, Microsoft has been fined in 2004, I meant 2006, or was it 2008 or finally in 2012. Now that's what I call effective.
The fines aren't the resolution, they are just a deterrent. In the US the effectiveness is clearly in the fact that they had to expose the APIs that they previously kept private, so that was accomplished. In the EU it was the browser ballot, again accomplished. So like i said, you'd have to be pretty ignorant of those cases to think they could just lock down x86.
Conviction doesn't matter if you get far more than what you are fined with. Otherwise speeding fines would make speeding disappear, which they don't.
Rubbish, it's not about fines, it's about stamping out the anti-competitive behavior and that's what the conviction led to.
If you decide to not use the cloud and the police get your device, it's currently more secure on Apple's phone. Must every article turn into a religious war?
More secure on Apple's phone than what? The article suggests any device that provides data encryption is a problem for them: "I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you're done," Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab at the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Department of Justice
Yeah unfortunately for you that has no relevance here, the simple fact is that people who want to do that are a niche part of the market so naturally basic market forces dictate what is available. But you of course have some entitlist mentality whereby there can exist no product that doesn't do what you think it should do, there's products that serve the niche market, why do you so desperately want a WindowsRT tablet? I can't see any reason anyone would want such a device.
Well until Microsoft stops having a monopoly in the x86 desktop market.
Which is to happen before they decide to enable lockdown, thus keeping them as the main player in the Intel desktop market, right? Forgive me for thinking the lockdown will happen first.
Well they can't lock it down first, unless you've been completely ignorant of the extensive high-profile anti-trust suits that themselves were far less anti-competitive than a move like expressly preventing competitors in a market in which they have a monopoly. Clearly you have no understanding of anti-trust law or the previous cases against microsoft in this area, it's well documented, they have been convicted of monopoly abuse multiple times.
Remember windows 8 despite it's graphical crapness is still a full fledged Windows OS.
Then your whole premise is based on a fundamental misunderstanding: Windows 8 does not run on ARM, only Windows RT runs on ARM and that is no more a 'full fledged Windows OS' than iOS is 'a full fledged OSX OS' or Android is 'a full fledged Linux distribution'.
Well until Microsoft stops having a monopoly in the x86 desktop market.
Microsoft has already declared the preferred configuration by requiring it on ARM.
Sure, you can't just get an ipad and run whatever software you want, you can't get a Windows RT device and run whatever software you want, so just get one of the myriad of Android tablets with unlocked bootloaders if you want to do that.
The uproar was there. The vendors heard, and they provided a product. You can buy off the shelf hardware unlocked CPUs which we couldn't do for about a year of the Pentium 4 era where your ability to overclock depending on you not buying Intel and modifying your AMD device using a steady hand and a pencil.
Precisely! There is such a product, but that doesn't mean every product has to have that capability. It's for a niche market for it so obviously products meant for the mass market don't serve that purpose, it's very simple, supply and demand.
Locked GPU pipelines are following a similar trend by releasing open source CUDA compilers and both Nvidia and AMD now supporting OpenCL to some extent.
No they aren't, they were/are artificially locked to be sold at lowered pricepoints to protect the value of high end products.
I'm not sure what you mean by fixed BIOSes
I mean that you can't just install whatever BIOS you want.
The product I want is a personal computing device in tablet format.
And you are clearly a minority, but you know what? There are products there for you, it's just that not every product can do that because clearly very few people want to. The free market works!
What is with this idea that suddenly hardware and software need to be mated? It's a complete change in concept for the industry.
What are you on about? They don't have to be, no one is saying they have to be.
I buy a motherboard I install the software I want on it, be it Linux or Windows. Even my brief foray into Macs had me running a dual booted system.
And that is not changing, so what's your problem?
iOS is not over the counter software, that's why I'm not complaining. If the software is not sold to me why would I care, but if it is sold to me why should I be limited to installing it only on one specific piece of hardware?
You aren't, what product are you even referring to that does this? Windows 8 doesn't do it and Windows RT isn't sold, so what are you complaining about?
Why are you so ready to accept software lock-down with open arms?
What are you talking about? I don't have any devices with software lockdown and have no foreseeable reason to buy any such device. Not sure what you're trying to get at with that comment, it makes no sense.
What happened to the idea of being able to run anyone's compatible software on the hardware you own without a small company sponsored encryption key in the way? I mean running any software on any hardware is the foundation of the PC.
Nothing happened to it at all, the only people who believe things have changed are those who don't understand it, no one is stopping you from doing anything. You don't use secureboot now and if you don't want to run an OS with an encryption key then you wouldn't use secureboot because of the nature of it. So what are you complaining about?
I have to agree, i see a lot of mocking about how it has low marketshare, but not much in the way of objective criticism. The biggest problem was they were too late to the party so people are already familiar with Android and iOS as the defacto choice.
It's one thing to not manufacture an ARM tablet because consumers don't want them, but it's quite another to manufacture and sell them, then explicitly prohibit the user from doing something with their device which it should be perfectly capable of doing for no other reason than vendor lock-in.
So where was the uproar over locked CPU multipliers? Or locked GPU pipelines? Or fixed BIOSes?
ARM Windows devices have Secure Boot enabled with no option to disable. This means you can't install Android on it if you want to like you can on say an iPad.
So buy an iPad if that's what you want. There are devices that let you hack around so if that's what you want to do then buy them and support the companies that provide you the products you want. Are you also complaining about the inability to install iOS on an Android tablet? There's no reason they couldn't allow that, but they do prevent it. Just like with CPUs there are ones that have unlocked multipliers so if that's what you want then buy them, but of course most people don't care about that, the product you want exists so why are you complaining about the existence of a product that you don't want?!
If they got my passwords now, I dont care. After the hassles i have had with D3 from day 1 I dont even care anymore,
Yeah i gave up on it too, the having to wait to play because the servers were full, the lag, the crashes...there's no reason it couldn't have just been an offline game like its predecessors. Very disappointed with it.
Well he said: I have local copies of all my google docs, so yes, he probably uses Chrome and has enabled offline access, otherwise he wouldn't have local copies of all of his google docs now would he?
Offline access stores the files in Chrome (probably in Local Storage), not in the Drive directory.
Yes, but my post was in response to this: I hate to break it to you, but Google Drive doesn't actually copy the docs down to your machine If you enable offline access the files are copied to your machine.
Of course, as a Convicted Monopolist, Microsoft can report these Linuxes as viruses or trojans and refuse to run Linux virtual machines.
No, as a convicted monopolist they are under much more scrutiny than other companies such that they don't abuse their position. I don't understand this perception that they are a convicted monopolist and somehow that means they can get away with anti-competitive practices, it means the opposite, they are a convicted monopolist so every competitive move they make is scrutinized by the US and EU.
I'd sure as hell like a CPU with an unlocked multiplier...but of course I know the demand for such a thing is very low and as such they are much more expensive because they target a tiny market segment. It sucks sure, but niche products for niche markets.
What the linux distro distributors have failed to do, the Linux Kernel folks should pick up the slack
How? What can they do? They are kernel developers, not bootloader developers. Maybe GRUB and LILO developers could get involved but i don't see why the kernel developers have any interest/responsibility in it.
Do not forget, there exists a spokeperson for Linux - Linus Torvalds
And don't forget Linux is just a kernel, Linus is the spokesman for the kernel.
So why haven't they stopped Microsoft requiring 'Windows Boot' on ARM?
Because they obviously don't have a monopoly there, in fact they don't even have any presence in that market additionally the product they are releasing there is not the same as the one in which they have a monopoly. It's the same deal with Windows Phones, they don't have to open that up and provide all their private APIs because they don't have a monopoly in that market. They have a monopoly in x86 desktop/laptop computers (a market that doesn't include ARM computers) - it's all there in the EU and US DOJ filings.
I hate to break it to you, but Google Drive doesn't actually copy the docs down to your machine; the files you see are just metadata that references the file in Google Docs.
He's got a legitimate point if your the kind of person that lives in fear of the feds kicking down your door and throwing you in jail for 20 years for backing up your VHS collection.
What i don't get is why they don't innovate in software and just build the controller? That way people that have Android tablets/phones could use it without an external display and additional device or plug the HDMI out (or some sort of AirPlay-like feature on the Nexus Q) to their TV if they want it on the big screen. Not to mention the rate at which ARM SoCs seem to become obsolete these days, do people really want to replace their console at the same rate as their phones?
The problem is that Microsoft is basically screwing over everyone who has a popular application or game digital store, the same way Apple screwed over the growl team by implementing that in-OS and the Instapaper guy by including that functionality in the OS.
You're comparing the wrong things here, Apple did that with iOS and Microsoft is doing that with Windows RT but neither have done that on their desktop operating systems (Windows 8 and OSX). There's been enough negativity surrounding Windows 8 that i can't imagine Windows RT is going to overtake Android or iOS so i doubt there's any worry about that becoming ubiquitous.
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All of this rhetoric about "this is what the customers want" is nonsense. You're an Apple user, you're stuck with what Apple wants to sell you: end of story.
Oh rubbish, the 13" MacBook Pro and 13" MacBook Air have the same starting price (the Pro has a faster processor and more storage but the Air has an SSD) and yet many people choose the less-upgradeable Air simply because they don't ever upgrade their laptops anyway.
Wow cool. Typing commands. It's like I've returned to my roots on an old Commodore 64! How primitive.
Next I bet Microsoft will come-out a Model T and call it "progress". Damn idjits
So you enter search strings with a mouse do you? I mean since using a keyboard to type in what you're looking for is so primitive.
And one more thing, if Apple is driving this headlong rush towards smartphone/tablet interfaces being out on desktop (and I'm looking at you too, Ubuntu) then why isn't OSX that way?
It is, these big touch-friendly UIs.
Then tell us, how do you disable Metro and return to the regular start menu?
He said Metro Apps aren't mandatory (as in you can run any non-Metro desktop apps you want), that doesn't have anything to do with the start screen.
get to pay more for an operating system that offers virtually no benefit.
More than what?
On the other hand, though, Windows _does_ have that strong hand, and their getting Windows ready for lockdown points to a future in which I may have to jump through a lot of hoops just to, say, boot a USB Live linux system.
So you build your own system or you buy a Mac. Even if you ignore all the reasons why they wouldn't/can't do it motherboard makers aren't going to lock their boards to Windows, the only ones that would conceivably do that and have any reason to are system builders that are actually selling Windows systems.
High profile, perhaps, but effective? Not the US ones, certainly, and neither the EU ones: the former turned into a mere slap on the wrist and the latter... well, Microsoft has been fined in 2004, I meant 2006, or was it 2008 or finally in 2012. Now that's what I call effective.
The fines aren't the resolution, they are just a deterrent. In the US the effectiveness is clearly in the fact that they had to expose the APIs that they previously kept private, so that was accomplished. In the EU it was the browser ballot, again accomplished. So like i said, you'd have to be pretty ignorant of those cases to think they could just lock down x86.
Conviction doesn't matter if you get far more than what you are fined with. Otherwise speeding fines would make speeding disappear, which they don't.
Rubbish, it's not about fines, it's about stamping out the anti-competitive behavior and that's what the conviction led to.
If you decide to not use the cloud and the police get your device, it's currently more secure on Apple's phone. Must every article turn into a religious war?
More secure on Apple's phone than what? The article suggests any device that provides data encryption is a problem for them:
"I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you're done," Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab at the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Department of Justice
First they came for the communists...
Yeah unfortunately for you that has no relevance here, the simple fact is that people who want to do that are a niche part of the market so naturally basic market forces dictate what is available. But you of course have some entitlist mentality whereby there can exist no product that doesn't do what you think it should do, there's products that serve the niche market, why do you so desperately want a WindowsRT tablet? I can't see any reason anyone would want such a device.
Well until Microsoft stops having a monopoly in the x86 desktop market.
Which is to happen before they decide to enable lockdown, thus keeping them as the main player in the Intel desktop market, right? Forgive me for thinking the lockdown will happen first.
Well they can't lock it down first, unless you've been completely ignorant of the extensive high-profile anti-trust suits that themselves were far less anti-competitive than a move like expressly preventing competitors in a market in which they have a monopoly. Clearly you have no understanding of anti-trust law or the previous cases against microsoft in this area, it's well documented, they have been convicted of monopoly abuse multiple times.
Remember windows 8 despite it's graphical crapness is still a full fledged Windows OS.
Then your whole premise is based on a fundamental misunderstanding: Windows 8 does not run on ARM, only Windows RT runs on ARM and that is no more a 'full fledged Windows OS' than iOS is 'a full fledged OSX OS' or Android is 'a full fledged Linux distribution'.
For now.
Well until Microsoft stops having a monopoly in the x86 desktop market.
Microsoft has already declared the preferred configuration by requiring it on ARM.
Sure, you can't just get an ipad and run whatever software you want, you can't get a Windows RT device and run whatever software you want, so just get one of the myriad of Android tablets with unlocked bootloaders if you want to do that.
The uproar was there. The vendors heard, and they provided a product. You can buy off the shelf hardware unlocked CPUs which we couldn't do for about a year of the Pentium 4 era where your ability to overclock depending on you not buying Intel and modifying your AMD device using a steady hand and a pencil.
Precisely! There is such a product, but that doesn't mean every product has to have that capability. It's for a niche market for it so obviously products meant for the mass market don't serve that purpose, it's very simple, supply and demand.
Locked GPU pipelines are following a similar trend by releasing open source CUDA compilers and both Nvidia and AMD now supporting OpenCL to some extent.
No they aren't, they were/are artificially locked to be sold at lowered pricepoints to protect the value of high end products.
I'm not sure what you mean by fixed BIOSes
I mean that you can't just install whatever BIOS you want.
The product I want is a personal computing device in tablet format.
And you are clearly a minority, but you know what? There are products there for you, it's just that not every product can do that because clearly very few people want to. The free market works!
What is with this idea that suddenly hardware and software need to be mated? It's a complete change in concept for the industry.
What are you on about? They don't have to be, no one is saying they have to be.
I buy a motherboard I install the software I want on it, be it Linux or Windows. Even my brief foray into Macs had me running a dual booted system.
And that is not changing, so what's your problem?
iOS is not over the counter software, that's why I'm not complaining. If the software is not sold to me why would I care, but if it is sold to me why should I be limited to installing it only on one specific piece of hardware?
You aren't, what product are you even referring to that does this? Windows 8 doesn't do it and Windows RT isn't sold, so what are you complaining about?
Why are you so ready to accept software lock-down with open arms?
What are you talking about? I don't have any devices with software lockdown and have no foreseeable reason to buy any such device. Not sure what you're trying to get at with that comment, it makes no sense.
What happened to the idea of being able to run anyone's compatible software on the hardware you own without a small company sponsored encryption key in the way? I mean running any software on any hardware is the foundation of the PC.
Nothing happened to it at all, the only people who believe things have changed are those who don't understand it, no one is stopping you from doing anything. You don't use secureboot now and if you don't want to run an OS with an encryption key then you wouldn't use secureboot because of the nature of it. So what are you complaining about?
I don't see very much Windows Phone hate.
I have to agree, i see a lot of mocking about how it has low marketshare, but not much in the way of objective criticism. The biggest problem was they were too late to the party so people are already familiar with Android and iOS as the defacto choice.
Well worst case is that you can indeed do what he wants.
It's one thing to not manufacture an ARM tablet because consumers don't want them, but it's quite another to manufacture and sell them, then explicitly prohibit the user from doing something with their device which it should be perfectly capable of doing for no other reason than vendor lock-in.
So where was the uproar over locked CPU multipliers? Or locked GPU pipelines? Or fixed BIOSes?
ARM Windows devices have Secure Boot enabled with no option to disable. This means you can't install Android on it if you want to like you can on say an iPad.
So buy an iPad if that's what you want. There are devices that let you hack around so if that's what you want to do then buy them and support the companies that provide you the products you want. Are you also complaining about the inability to install iOS on an Android tablet? There's no reason they couldn't allow that, but they do prevent it. Just like with CPUs there are ones that have unlocked multipliers so if that's what you want then buy them, but of course most people don't care about that, the product you want exists so why are you complaining about the existence of a product that you don't want?!
If they got my passwords now, I dont care. After the hassles i have had with D3 from day 1 I dont even care anymore,
Yeah i gave up on it too, the having to wait to play because the servers were full, the lag, the crashes...there's no reason it couldn't have just been an offline game like its predecessors. Very disappointed with it.
Well he said: I have local copies of all my google docs, so yes, he probably uses Chrome and has enabled offline access, otherwise he wouldn't have local copies of all of his google docs now would he?
Offline access stores the files in Chrome (probably in Local Storage), not in the Drive directory.
Yes, but my post was in response to this:
I hate to break it to you, but Google Drive doesn't actually copy the docs down to your machine
If you enable offline access the files are copied to your machine.
Of course, as a Convicted Monopolist, Microsoft can report these Linuxes as viruses or trojans and refuse to run Linux virtual machines.
No, as a convicted monopolist they are under much more scrutiny than other companies such that they don't abuse their position. I don't understand this perception that they are a convicted monopolist and somehow that means they can get away with anti-competitive practices, it means the opposite, they are a convicted monopolist so every competitive move they make is scrutinized by the US and EU.
I'd sure as hell like a CPU with an unlocked multiplier...but of course I know the demand for such a thing is very low and as such they are much more expensive because they target a tiny market segment. It sucks sure, but niche products for niche markets.
What the linux distro distributors have failed to do, the Linux Kernel folks should pick up the slack
How? What can they do? They are kernel developers, not bootloader developers. Maybe GRUB and LILO developers could get involved but i don't see why the kernel developers have any interest/responsibility in it.
Do not forget, there exists a spokeperson for Linux - Linus Torvalds
And don't forget Linux is just a kernel, Linus is the spokesman for the kernel.
So why haven't they stopped Microsoft requiring 'Windows Boot' on ARM?
Because they obviously don't have a monopoly there, in fact they don't even have any presence in that market additionally the product they are releasing there is not the same as the one in which they have a monopoly. It's the same deal with Windows Phones, they don't have to open that up and provide all their private APIs because they don't have a monopoly in that market. They have a monopoly in x86 desktop/laptop computers (a market that doesn't include ARM computers) - it's all there in the EU and US DOJ filings.
I hate to break it to you, but Google Drive doesn't actually copy the docs down to your machine; the files you see are just metadata that references the file in Google Docs.
Only if you don't set up offline access.
He's got a legitimate point if your the kind of person that lives in fear of the feds kicking down your door and throwing you in jail for 20 years for backing up your VHS collection.
What i don't get is why they don't innovate in software and just build the controller? That way people that have Android tablets/phones could use it without an external display and additional device or plug the HDMI out (or some sort of AirPlay-like feature on the Nexus Q) to their TV if they want it on the big screen. Not to mention the rate at which ARM SoCs seem to become obsolete these days, do people really want to replace their console at the same rate as their phones?
The problem is that Microsoft is basically screwing over everyone who has a popular application or game digital store, the same way Apple screwed over the growl team by implementing that in-OS and the Instapaper guy by including that functionality in the OS.
You're comparing the wrong things here, Apple did that with iOS and Microsoft is doing that with Windows RT but neither have done that on their desktop operating systems (Windows 8 and OSX).
There's been enough negativity surrounding Windows 8 that i can't imagine Windows RT is going to overtake Android or iOS so i doubt there's any worry about that becoming ubiquitous.