They spend most of it talking about the reasons not to get a new TV, especially 4K. 4K will be a mainstream product someday, but right now the pricing and limited programming means that it's strictly for well-heeled early adopters. If you need to watch a video like this to decide whether to buy 4K, you can't afford it. A slightly harder question is whether to wait another couple of years for 4K to become affordable, and they didn't even talk about that question or what the affordability timeframe is likely to be. (They talk about whether to buy 4K but not when to buy it.)
They leave the most important reason for getting a new TV until the very end, almost as an afterthought: size. If you currently have a 40-45" TV, moving up to the 55-60" class will be a major upgrade. If you have more than one TV in the house (or want an additional one) it's an easier call: you buy a bigger one for the primary viewing space and move the current living room set to a secondary space where it replaces whatever old or tiny thing that is there now.
In my opinion, upgrading to get Smart TV capability is a terrible reason. Much better to buy an external device (Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV, etc.) to do that, an option that they also mention in the video. No streaming device will be useful for more than a few years because the technology is evolving so quickly, whereas the TV will continue to be useful, at least in a secondary role, until it breaks.
They didn't even mention 3D. For most people it's a non-issue, but there might be a small number of 3D fans who would enjoy upgrading to get it, especially if they have some 3D movie that they love.
The Haswell chips are considerably more expensive than ARM, so there could be a market for less expensive RT devices. But there probably won't be, because Android and iOS already occupy that space.
Writing email in Thunderbird doesn't necessarily make somebody old. It could be a workplace where that program is a corporate standard, and sysadmins do the kind of Serious Work (TM) where you need an actual computer rather than a phone or tablet.
So far as I've been able to tell, young people still use textspeak on their smartphones. It has become part of the culture in SMS, IM, and Twitter. Email isn't the place for it, though, especially if you're not sending the email from a phone.
That is why, on a crowded road like that, you're not just watching the car in front of you. You are also watching the car in front of it and the car in front of that one. It is a reason that SUVs make the road less safe for everybody; they take away your ability to see the traffic beyond them.
Kids are writing iPad apps. But they're not writing them ON an iPad; they're using a desktop or laptop Mac as the development platform. I don't see that changing.
The iPad, and all tablets like it, are not good programming platforms; for that you need a real keyboard and a larger display. But they have real strengths as textbook replacements and light notetaking devices, which is all that many students need. Engineering students and serious writers will probably continue to need something more like a conventional laptop (or a hybrid tablet/laptop device) for some time to some.
Van Gogh's work is notable in its use of the third dimension. The paint stands off the canvas, and the texture of that paint is a significant part of the effect of the work. For most artists a good 2D print is good enough, but Van Gogh is an exception, and that is why the museum chose his work as their first use of this technology.
Air travel is a fast way to transport people from LA to SF. But it is not an efficient one.
Like rail, auto, truck, and bus transportation, air travel receives taxpayer subsidies. Airlines don't pay the full costs of airports or air traffic control. And nearly all of them have gone through bankruptcy reorganization and written off costs that way, which is another form of subsidy.
The environmental impact of air travel is also horrendous. Airplanes consume a LOT of energy, and throwing out pollution at high altitude is very damaging to the atmosphere.
The expensive part of building high speed rail is land acquisition. Musk believes that the Hyperloop could be built without much need to acquire land by building it on highway right of ways, and that's the main reason that his projected costs are dramatically lower. If he is correct that a useful high speed transit option can be built that way, and if the technology works, then the Hyperloop is something we should be building.
Wouldn't know about Walmart, but a human cut some keys for me earlier this year at Home Depot. I guess I don't live in your jurisdiction. We also still have a few surviving smaller hardware stores around here, and they do their keys by hand as well.
The EPA mileage figures in the US are measured under controlled conditions, but they are controlled conditions that attempt to have some resemblance to real world results. The conditions have been adjusted a few times over the years to bring them closer to reality. But as they say in the fine print, Your Mileage May Vary. Driving with a lead foot will lower your mileage; hypermiling techniques will raise it.
I think the current EU set of controlled conditions are farther from real life results than the EPA ones. That was certainly not the case when the EPA first started publishing fuel economy ratings; their first iteration was wildly optimistic.
The manufacturers are REQUIRED to err in the direction of caution. The US and EU government rules on speedometer accuracy allow the readings to be higher than actual speed but not lower. To get an accurate reading on speed, drive your car over a measured mile course (the mileposts on interstate highways are good enough for this purpose, though not quite as accurate as an officially posted measured mile) and time your travel and do the math, or drive a flat straight mile and use your GPS for a speed indication (curves and hills will introduce some error). Once you have the correction factors for your particular car, you can use your speedometer for everyday speed checks. (The factors will change slightly with tire wear, and possibly more substantially if you buy new tires.)
Parts of Sony never went evil in the first place or stepped away from it years ago. Their camera division continues to crank out solid products, and they started supporting standard SD cards (in addition to their proprietary Memory Sticks) a while ago. Their Creative Software division (the former Sonic Foundry) has continued its line of quality audio and video editing products under Sony ownership, and they add support for competitors' new pro video products just as quickly as for Sony's own. The PS3 is the only first generation Blu-Ray player that has kept up with all current Blu-Ray features and will play all current discs. (Lots of people bought the PS3 primarily or even totally for that purpose, not for gaming.) They also still make decent A/V receivers, speakers, and televisions, none of which have ever been entangled in any particularly evil behavior.
This doesn't mean that the PS3 online problems and the CD rootkit weren't major errors. They were. And the company's former emphasis on proprietary formats (Beta, Memory Stick, UMD...) was a problem. But those are far from the whole story about Sony.
The Surface Pro is actually pretty close to that point. An upgrade with the next generation of Intel processors will bring it even closer, and solve one of the biggest shortcomings - poor battery life.
Let's see....
Full Windows OS? Check.
Included input devices? Excellent with optional Type Cover. Pen support is built in and the pen is included.
Wireless? 802.11 dual band a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0. Check.
USB port for traditional input devices? Check.
DisplayPort to connect larger screens and projectors? Check.
Processing power? Marginal (1.7 to 2.6GHz dual core i5) but good enough for many users.
RAM? Marginal (4GB) and not expandable. Microsoft should step this up in the next iteration.
Storage? Marginal (128GB maximum) but it also has a MicroSDXC slot.
Battery life? 4-5 hours. A serious weakness.
Weight? 2 pounds, 2.5 with the Type Cover. Decent but room for improvement.
Price: $999 for the 128GB model, $130 for the Type Cover, and perhaps some $30 adapters for the DisplayPort.
Bottom line: if you have $1200 to spend this is a good multipurpose device. Whether you think this price point is "very expensive" is a personal judgement; it's a bit pricier than a MacBook Air (equal if you don't include the Type Cover) and it's more flexible. The build quality is solid though repairability is an issue. The next generation Surface Pro with a Haswell CPU (and hopefully a RAM bump to 8GB and a 256GB storage option) will be even better.
Large marketing expenses for the launch of a major new product are normal business. The problem is not that Microsoft spent the money; it's that they spent the money on a product that people didn't want. Surface RT delivered too little for too high a price; by the time the product came to market its 720p+ display and dual-core CPU were inadequate for its $500 price point, and there was little app support. If Microsoft had been serious about entering this market it should have been priced at $299 at launch, and quickly followed by a Surface RT+ with quad core and 1080p display as an upsell product. The build quality of Surface RT is outstanding - the VaporMG shell looks good, it feels very solid in the hand, and the engineering of the magnetic snap-on covers is slick - but that just wasn't enough to get people to pay a premium price for it.
Surface RT was probably doomed from the start in any case. The inherent problem is that developers don't want a third platform to exist and succeed; that means 50% extra effort for every product they develop. The developer's ideal world would have a single platform, but they grudgingly accept the need for two to limit the monopoly power of the platform owner.
Surface Pro and its successors will see some success among people who want to use their desktop software in a portable form factor. Full Windows devices will always cost more, weigh more, and have less battery life than devices using an OS purely designed for mobile, so they are likely to remain a niche market that will never achieve iPad-like sales numbers. But there is money to be made there, since the devices will sell at higher price points than the more mass-market tablets.
No, the problem lies in the British courts. Giving one company total ownership of the word "sky" is stupid. SkyDrive is in a product category that BSkyB isn't in and that it has no plans to enter, and BSkyB is not a pervasive brand on the level of Coca-Cola. (Branding ANYTHING with the name Coca-Cola would be seen as infringing, and rightly so, but Coca-Cola is also not an ordinary English language word like Sky is.) An intelligent court would have seen the SkyDrive brand as non-infringing.
The sad fact to me is that Microsoft isn't appealing this stupid decision. But they have probably decided that the EU courts will favor the local company over the big American bully, even when the American company is right on the facts. They should have also gone to the courts for Metro, but presumably didn't because the Metro store chain in Germany is a major seller of Microsoft products and Microsoft didn't want to antagonize them.
Wrong analogy. Internet service is more like the classic phone company. There are a small number of internet providers and a large number of customers, and the cost of entry is high, so the market power belongs to the providers rather than the customers. There are laws preventing the phone company from stopping you from using your telephone service for any legal purpose.
The landlord analogy doesn't hold up anyway. There are many laws that restrict a landlord's right to evict tenants, or to refuse to rent to them in the first place. You may disagree with the existence of those laws, but they are the law of the land in many places.
Who said they don't have the original source photos? It still takes a lot of time to process 40,000 pictures and re-upload them, not to mention the problem with their competitors getting a free ride on their efforts.
Google Fiber subscribers are their customers; they are paying money to Google. Google Business users (unless they're in the grandfathered free tier) are customers. Anybody who buys non-free things from the Google Play store is a customer; Google is getting a cut even if they are not the actual provider of the goods or services.
Differentiating residential and business use is reasonable. Businesses can be expected to make more use of their available bandwidth, especially upstream bandwidth, and to do so during the business day when bandwidth may be scarce, so making them pay more is not unreasonable. What is unreasonable is defining all types of servers as business use. Vanity web servers and web servers for small unincorporated organizations are not business use. Personal email servers are not business use. Servers to offer pictures and videos to friends are not business use. Game servers for gaming with your friends are not business use.
Google is using the defense that "everybody else is doing it so it's reasonable for us to make the same restriction". But that just means that everybody else is being just as unreasonable and evil as they are trying to be. A key difference is that Comcast et.al. have never stated "don't be evil" as one of their corporate values (if anything, being evil is part of their corporate DNA), whereas Google promised us that they would be a different and better company. Now they are letting us down, and the people have a right to be displeased with their actions.
Google is selling out one of its groups of customers this time. We'll just have to see whether they also choose to do so in other ways.
Cattle are/have been working animals in many times and places. We usually call them oxen when they are used to work, but most oxen are castrated males just like the steers we raise for meat. Cattle are slow so they're not quite as generally useful as horses, but they can pull a lot of weight so they can be effective for plowing and other similar tasks, and have also been used to draw wagons.
You are correct that the balance of our uses of cattle have been for food, whereas horses have primarily been used for work. In traditional societies, cattle are mostly raised for milk in places where feed is common enough to allow domestication of cattle in one place (though unless you are Hindu you stew the cows when their milking days are done and use the male calves for veal), or for meat in areas of sparse feed where they must be ranged. Horses have widely been eaten, and the Mongolians used mare's milk to make kumis. (Mares are much more difficult to milk than cows and are also less productive, so milking horses is not a widespread practice.)
Slashdot Mirror
It should have had 4GB of RAM. 2GB really isn't enough to run Windows well. Aside from that it looks like a decent value.
They spend most of it talking about the reasons not to get a new TV, especially 4K. 4K will be a mainstream product someday, but right now the pricing and limited programming means that it's strictly for well-heeled early adopters. If you need to watch a video like this to decide whether to buy 4K, you can't afford it. A slightly harder question is whether to wait another couple of years for 4K to become affordable, and they didn't even talk about that question or what the affordability timeframe is likely to be. (They talk about whether to buy 4K but not when to buy it.)
They leave the most important reason for getting a new TV until the very end, almost as an afterthought: size. If you currently have a 40-45" TV, moving up to the 55-60" class will be a major upgrade. If you have more than one TV in the house (or want an additional one) it's an easier call: you buy a bigger one for the primary viewing space and move the current living room set to a secondary space where it replaces whatever old or tiny thing that is there now.
In my opinion, upgrading to get Smart TV capability is a terrible reason. Much better to buy an external device (Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV, etc.) to do that, an option that they also mention in the video. No streaming device will be useful for more than a few years because the technology is evolving so quickly, whereas the TV will continue to be useful, at least in a secondary role, until it breaks.
They didn't even mention 3D. For most people it's a non-issue, but there might be a small number of 3D fans who would enjoy upgrading to get it, especially if they have some 3D movie that they love.
The Haswell chips are considerably more expensive than ARM, so there could be a market for less expensive RT devices. But there probably won't be, because Android and iOS already occupy that space.
It is a reduction in thickness. I don't know that this will ever catch on for tablets, but it will enable thinner designs for Ultrabooks and hybrids.
Where are those mod points when you need them?
Writing email in Thunderbird doesn't necessarily make somebody old. It could be a workplace where that program is a corporate standard, and sysadmins do the kind of Serious Work (TM) where you need an actual computer rather than a phone or tablet.
So far as I've been able to tell, young people still use textspeak on their smartphones. It has become part of the culture in SMS, IM, and Twitter. Email isn't the place for it, though, especially if you're not sending the email from a phone.
That is why, on a crowded road like that, you're not just watching the car in front of you. You are also watching the car in front of it and the car in front of that one. It is a reason that SUVs make the road less safe for everybody; they take away your ability to see the traffic beyond them.
Kids are writing iPad apps. But they're not writing them ON an iPad; they're using a desktop or laptop Mac as the development platform. I don't see that changing.
The iPad, and all tablets like it, are not good programming platforms; for that you need a real keyboard and a larger display. But they have real strengths as textbook replacements and light notetaking devices, which is all that many students need. Engineering students and serious writers will probably continue to need something more like a conventional laptop (or a hybrid tablet/laptop device) for some time to some.
And to prevent new competitors from appearing, as the difficulties that Tesla has been facing in various states shows.
He was refuting the reply that said that Microsoft should specify an i5 as the minimum system requirement for Windows, not the original post.
Van Gogh's work is notable in its use of the third dimension. The paint stands off the canvas, and the texture of that paint is a significant part of the effect of the work. For most artists a good 2D print is good enough, but Van Gogh is an exception, and that is why the museum chose his work as their first use of this technology.
Air travel is a fast way to transport people from LA to SF. But it is not an efficient one.
Like rail, auto, truck, and bus transportation, air travel receives taxpayer subsidies. Airlines don't pay the full costs of airports or air traffic control. And nearly all of them have gone through bankruptcy reorganization and written off costs that way, which is another form of subsidy.
The environmental impact of air travel is also horrendous. Airplanes consume a LOT of energy, and throwing out pollution at high altitude is very damaging to the atmosphere.
The expensive part of building high speed rail is land acquisition. Musk believes that the Hyperloop could be built without much need to acquire land by building it on highway right of ways, and that's the main reason that his projected costs are dramatically lower. If he is correct that a useful high speed transit option can be built that way, and if the technology works, then the Hyperloop is something we should be building.
Wouldn't know about Walmart, but a human cut some keys for me earlier this year at Home Depot. I guess I don't live in your jurisdiction. We also still have a few surviving smaller hardware stores around here, and they do their keys by hand as well.
The EPA mileage figures in the US are measured under controlled conditions, but they are controlled conditions that attempt to have some resemblance to real world results. The conditions have been adjusted a few times over the years to bring them closer to reality. But as they say in the fine print, Your Mileage May Vary. Driving with a lead foot will lower your mileage; hypermiling techniques will raise it.
I think the current EU set of controlled conditions are farther from real life results than the EPA ones. That was certainly not the case when the EPA first started publishing fuel economy ratings; their first iteration was wildly optimistic.
The manufacturers are REQUIRED to err in the direction of caution. The US and EU government rules on speedometer accuracy allow the readings to be higher than actual speed but not lower. To get an accurate reading on speed, drive your car over a measured mile course (the mileposts on interstate highways are good enough for this purpose, though not quite as accurate as an officially posted measured mile) and time your travel and do the math, or drive a flat straight mile and use your GPS for a speed indication (curves and hills will introduce some error). Once you have the correction factors for your particular car, you can use your speedometer for everyday speed checks. (The factors will change slightly with tire wear, and possibly more substantially if you buy new tires.)
Parts of Sony never went evil in the first place or stepped away from it years ago. Their camera division continues to crank out solid products, and they started supporting standard SD cards (in addition to their proprietary Memory Sticks) a while ago. Their Creative Software division (the former Sonic Foundry) has continued its line of quality audio and video editing products under Sony ownership, and they add support for competitors' new pro video products just as quickly as for Sony's own. The PS3 is the only first generation Blu-Ray player that has kept up with all current Blu-Ray features and will play all current discs. (Lots of people bought the PS3 primarily or even totally for that purpose, not for gaming.) They also still make decent A/V receivers, speakers, and televisions, none of which have ever been entangled in any particularly evil behavior.
This doesn't mean that the PS3 online problems and the CD rootkit weren't major errors. They were. And the company's former emphasis on proprietary formats (Beta, Memory Stick, UMD...) was a problem. But those are far from the whole story about Sony.
The Surface Pro is actually pretty close to that point. An upgrade with the next generation of Intel processors will bring it even closer, and solve one of the biggest shortcomings - poor battery life.
Let's see....
Full Windows OS? Check.
Included input devices? Excellent with optional Type Cover. Pen support is built in and the pen is included.
Wireless? 802.11 dual band a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0. Check.
USB port for traditional input devices? Check.
DisplayPort to connect larger screens and projectors? Check.
Processing power? Marginal (1.7 to 2.6GHz dual core i5) but good enough for many users.
RAM? Marginal (4GB) and not expandable. Microsoft should step this up in the next iteration.
Storage? Marginal (128GB maximum) but it also has a MicroSDXC slot.
Battery life? 4-5 hours. A serious weakness.
Weight? 2 pounds, 2.5 with the Type Cover. Decent but room for improvement.
Price: $999 for the 128GB model, $130 for the Type Cover, and perhaps some $30 adapters for the DisplayPort.
Bottom line: if you have $1200 to spend this is a good multipurpose device. Whether you think this price point is "very expensive" is a personal judgement; it's a bit pricier than a MacBook Air (equal if you don't include the Type Cover) and it's more flexible. The build quality is solid though repairability is an issue. The next generation Surface Pro with a Haswell CPU (and hopefully a RAM bump to 8GB and a 256GB storage option) will be even better.
Large marketing expenses for the launch of a major new product are normal business. The problem is not that Microsoft spent the money; it's that they spent the money on a product that people didn't want. Surface RT delivered too little for too high a price; by the time the product came to market its 720p+ display and dual-core CPU were inadequate for its $500 price point, and there was little app support. If Microsoft had been serious about entering this market it should have been priced at $299 at launch, and quickly followed by a Surface RT+ with quad core and 1080p display as an upsell product. The build quality of Surface RT is outstanding - the VaporMG shell looks good, it feels very solid in the hand, and the engineering of the magnetic snap-on covers is slick - but that just wasn't enough to get people to pay a premium price for it.
Surface RT was probably doomed from the start in any case. The inherent problem is that developers don't want a third platform to exist and succeed; that means 50% extra effort for every product they develop. The developer's ideal world would have a single platform, but they grudgingly accept the need for two to limit the monopoly power of the platform owner.
Surface Pro and its successors will see some success among people who want to use their desktop software in a portable form factor. Full Windows devices will always cost more, weigh more, and have less battery life than devices using an OS purely designed for mobile, so they are likely to remain a niche market that will never achieve iPad-like sales numbers. But there is money to be made there, since the devices will sell at higher price points than the more mass-market tablets.
No, the problem lies in the British courts. Giving one company total ownership of the word "sky" is stupid. SkyDrive is in a product category that BSkyB isn't in and that it has no plans to enter, and BSkyB is not a pervasive brand on the level of Coca-Cola. (Branding ANYTHING with the name Coca-Cola would be seen as infringing, and rightly so, but Coca-Cola is also not an ordinary English language word like Sky is.) An intelligent court would have seen the SkyDrive brand as non-infringing.
The sad fact to me is that Microsoft isn't appealing this stupid decision. But they have probably decided that the EU courts will favor the local company over the big American bully, even when the American company is right on the facts. They should have also gone to the courts for Metro, but presumably didn't because the Metro store chain in Germany is a major seller of Microsoft products and Microsoft didn't want to antagonize them.
Those are the official EPA numbers for the cars. As always, your mileage may vary.
Wrong analogy. Internet service is more like the classic phone company. There are a small number of internet providers and a large number of customers, and the cost of entry is high, so the market power belongs to the providers rather than the customers. There are laws preventing the phone company from stopping you from using your telephone service for any legal purpose.
The landlord analogy doesn't hold up anyway. There are many laws that restrict a landlord's right to evict tenants, or to refuse to rent to them in the first place. You may disagree with the existence of those laws, but they are the law of the land in many places.
Who said they don't have the original source photos? It still takes a lot of time to process 40,000 pictures and re-upload them, not to mention the problem with their competitors getting a free ride on their efforts.
Google Fiber subscribers are their customers; they are paying money to Google. Google Business users (unless they're in the grandfathered free tier) are customers. Anybody who buys non-free things from the Google Play store is a customer; Google is getting a cut even if they are not the actual provider of the goods or services.
Differentiating residential and business use is reasonable. Businesses can be expected to make more use of their available bandwidth, especially upstream bandwidth, and to do so during the business day when bandwidth may be scarce, so making them pay more is not unreasonable. What is unreasonable is defining all types of servers as business use. Vanity web servers and web servers for small unincorporated organizations are not business use. Personal email servers are not business use. Servers to offer pictures and videos to friends are not business use. Game servers for gaming with your friends are not business use.
Google is using the defense that "everybody else is doing it so it's reasonable for us to make the same restriction". But that just means that everybody else is being just as unreasonable and evil as they are trying to be. A key difference is that Comcast et.al. have never stated "don't be evil" as one of their corporate values (if anything, being evil is part of their corporate DNA), whereas Google promised us that they would be a different and better company. Now they are letting us down, and the people have a right to be displeased with their actions.
Google is selling out one of its groups of customers this time. We'll just have to see whether they also choose to do so in other ways.
Cattle are/have been working animals in many times and places. We usually call them oxen when they are used to work, but most oxen are castrated males just like the steers we raise for meat. Cattle are slow so they're not quite as generally useful as horses, but they can pull a lot of weight so they can be effective for plowing and other similar tasks, and have also been used to draw wagons.
You are correct that the balance of our uses of cattle have been for food, whereas horses have primarily been used for work. In traditional societies, cattle are mostly raised for milk in places where feed is common enough to allow domestication of cattle in one place (though unless you are Hindu you stew the cows when their milking days are done and use the male calves for veal), or for meat in areas of sparse feed where they must be ranged. Horses have widely been eaten, and the Mongolians used mare's milk to make kumis. (Mares are much more difficult to milk than cows and are also less productive, so milking horses is not a widespread practice.)