Yes, running the company into the ground what with those massive record profits, and selling 600 million copies of Windows 7, and 200 million copies of Office 2010, and the number one selling console in the world even 7 years after its debut. Their fall is really meteoric!
The iPad 3 is $629 for the least expensive model with 3G/4G capability. WinRT tablets are going to be considerably more expensive.
From the source's source, the "computex vendors" said models will start at $549 (not $600, which the source rounded to). That's $50 more expensive than the base model 16 GB iPad with no 3G. Without even knowing the specs, that's a phenomenal deal for someone like because Windows RT comes with the full Office preinstalled. If I want iWork on my iPad, that's another $30, and they aren't even full-featured office apps.
I still haven't seen a good solution to the catch 22 that a journal cannot gain a reputation without first being reputable. No one with any concern about their academic career will publish in a no-name, no-eyes journal. As it is, it's hard enough to get people to read and care about your work by publishing in top tier journals. How do you expect academics to justify to themselves that the work they've spent months to years on doesn't deserve a better venue for dissemination?
You just said that you would not hire the US worker that is asking for the fair $120k if you could underpay an H-1B by $30k.
No, he said he wouldn't hire anyone at $120k because it doesn't fit his budget. That is to say, if there were no H-1Bs he still wouldn't hire an American at $120k because he can't afford it.
Google derives 96% of its revenue from advertising. All those shiny "free" Google services you love to play with are the result of their ability to monetize information they gather about you. Without tracking, there is no Google. Just keep that in mind.
Everything in the taskbar, start menu, and system tray is very conducive to touch.
Okay... so you've said it works well with touch, but I don't understand how it doesn't work well with keyboard+mouse. The targets are nice and big and easy to click, and they scale well with resolution so they aren't too big. The mouse is capable of all operations a finger is, and honestly I think panning through the metro is easier with the mouse wheel than it is with a finger. Keyboard shortcuts make things easier, but you don't even have to know them; I can navigate the entire UI with just a mouse.
So again, I'm not seeing the keyboard+mouse deficiency everyone keeps harping on.
Chances are, if they have to spend on marketing, they're not delivering the best product for the best price.
Every product needs marketing. Being the best product at the best price is not enough. Look at Linux, best product for the best price according to many, and still no one uses it. The marketplace isn't about a feature/price ratio that everyone calculates in their head and then goes with the best one. People make decisions to alleviate problems in their life, problems that are either emotional or physical. Marketing speaks to these problems and whichever product speaks to you best wins your money. Even the color of the packaging plays a major role in speaking to your subconscious. Hell, sometimes marketing even goes so far as to convince you that you have a problem you really don't have. All these factors play into which product you choose.
Human beings are emotional creatures, and as much as you might insist you are completely rational and pragmatic in your decisions and they are 100% ruled by a fact-based comparisons of feature charts and price per unit comparisons, I'm willing to bet you are swayed by marketing to some degree regardless.
Advertising isn't always about getting you to buy a product then and there. While that's nice, it can be much more subtle than that. For instance I've never seen a TV ad for mouth wash and rushed out to the store right after to buy some. But the next time I did actually want to buy mouthwash, I went to the grocery store and was confronted with about half a dozen brands. Which one do I buy? Well, probably the one that is more familiar to me, the one I have seen advertised the most.
Why exactly do you feel you need touch for Windows 8? The whole thing can be used just fine with Keyboard and Mouse. There are tons of keyboard and mouse shortcuts and in many ways its even faster and easier to use with keyboard and mouse.
What would be really cool and useful is a wide (15"-30") touchscreen interface that either replaced my keyboard and mouse, or was at an angle right behind them.
If you really want you can do this with windows 8. You can dock the start screen on a close up touch monitor, launch apps from that and send them to any monitor you want.
Seeing as that Steve Jobs didn't personally invent any of these things, and all were in fact not even invented at Apple, I'm pretty sure they would have found their way to the masses without him. He was a hell of a salesman, and maybe it would have taken longer and the results not as polished/shiny, but I find it hard to believe if Steve Jobs had never been born, today there would not exist personal computers and GUIs. Please.
1) DemomanDeveloper registered his account recently
2) DemomanDeveloper seems to be pro Microsoft and anti Google
So you've proven he has a bias and maybe at best you've proven he's a troll. Still need to prove he's astroturfing. You are aware astroturfing does not mean holds a particular bias, correct?
Then again, Nokia has a strong presence around the globe. For instance, this report indicates that Windows Phone is outselling iPhone in Russia, and there were reports recently (admittedly which originated from Microsoft so obviously to be taken with a large dose of salt) that Windows Phone is outselling the iPhone in China as well.
Again, that doesn't make him an idiot, it makes him ignorant. Why should he expect that walking around with a mobile computer could lead to data corruption, given that we live in a world where we constantly walk around with computational devices (smartphones, tablets)?
The guy used the tools he knows to get his work done. It might not be the most efficient way, but that doesn't make him an idiot, just ignorant. Maybe instead of being a dick you could educate him as to the more appropriate solution and why his is dangerous/inefficient?
There is no good reason to think they're a representative sample.
There's no good reason to think Microsoft doesn't employ a competent statistician who makes sure the sample is representative.
badmouthing from the tech community ensured that Vista was pretty much DOA
The tech community has been badmouthing Microsoft products constantly since the 90s, and that hasn't made any dent in their marketshare. Vista was DOA because it was a bad product. You're really overstating your influence.
You still haven't explained exactly how that's a problem. I press the start button to access programs I want to start. The visibilty of the desktop is immaterial to the task I want to accomplish by pressing the start button. With the start menu, and its tiny rectangle, I have a fixed 10 recently used programs. With the start screen, the number of items scales with resolution, so it actually takes advantage of the size of your monitor rather than wasting it by displaying information you're not even using in the current context.
What advantages does metro give you that weren't already present in desktop gadgets?
Not really sure what you mean by this. "Metro" is a design language, so I don't see how that relates to desktop gadgets in any form. Do you perhaps mean live tiles? At their essence they really are just gadgets, but they remove the redundancy of having a launcher icon as well. It's kind of like the OSX dock and dashboard combined into one. I really only ever look at my desktop when I need to open a file on it, so checking on my gadgets then is no different from checking the start screen now. Live tiles also make my start screen feel a little more personal. Instead of having a "Pictures" icon, I have an icon with my actual photographs. Instead of having a "Music" icon, I have an icon of my favorite bands. I like that extra touch.
I also like that I can arrange the live tiles into nice little groupings. Can't really do that with gadgets since then they'd be scattered all over my desktop. You can kind of do it with something like OSX dashboard, but there was no real analogue for that in Windows unless you went third party.
How has metro improved your workflow over Win 7?
Honestly, since there aren't too many metro apps out there yet, and most metro apps are written for leisure, I can't really tell you how it affects my workflow. But it doesn't really matter much since there is a desktop.
My workflow consists mostly of running Visual Studio, Matlab, Photoshop, TexWorks, Opera, Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. So I'm on the desktop most of the time when I'm in work mode. This is why I honestly don't see it as such a big deal; everyone here acts like the start screen is the end of the world, but working from the desktop you just forget it's there. Like I said, I don't have much of a need to go into the start menu. All the apps I want to launch are pinned on the taskbar, and when I want to launch an app that isn't there, I hit up the full app list. This is one aspect which I find much more efficient than search in the start menu, which feels shoehorned into an old paradigm from 1995. Full screen search provides more room for results.
I'm usually in the start screen "metro land" when I'm not working. The various apps they provide are intuitive, beautiful, and fun to use. There aren't too many third party apps out there yet but I'm sure there will be. Metro doesn't fit into my workflow, since I usually have many apps open side by side, but that's why there'd still a desktop after all.
How is the current design better on a NON touch screen desktop or laptop (which is over 90% of the PCs sold ATM) than Win 7?
Again, I don't really see why people think this is a touch screen only interface. Just because it's touch friendly, doesn't mean it isn't mouse+keyboard friendly. There are keyboard shortcuts for virtually everything, so I barely have to lift my hand from the keyboard, and when I'm using the mouse there are various gestures which replicate all the touch functionality. One thing I especially like is the large icons in the start screen. They're easy to target with a mouse, and very recognizable, so I find it much quicker to navigate than the old start menu.
what benefits has Win 8 given you?
It's basically taken something I never use anymore, the start menu, and turned it into something that I actually access. It's separted out the functionality of the start menu into parts - app launching and searching - which are more useful on their own than they were together. With its 2D fullscreen design I can access more apps at once from the start screen than I could from the start menu, and I can group tiles in ways that make sense to me. And with the fullscreen design of the new desktop search, I can see more results at once like I said before.
Because frankly i could find nice things about every previous release of the last decade
This is what Microsoft's data shows the majority of people using their start menu for. The start menu is no longer an application launcher, it's an application searcher, and the only reason it's in the start menu is for legacy reasons. Thus in Windows 8 there's a completely revamped search, which is much more useful in my opinion. You can still press the windows key and type a few characters, and there are all the results.
Problems are relative. The problems we come up with here obviously mean nothing to the majority of tech buyers out there. Is it a problem for me that I can only install Apps from the Appstore on my iPad? Yes. Is it a problem for my mom? No. It doesn't make the complaints we have not legitimate... it just means it's less and less likely anyone is going to care.
This is most evident on places like Slashdot, which are dominated by young males 18-35. From OSX to iOS to Windows 8 to Office 2010 and the Ribbon to the iPad to the iPhone to locked bootloaders on Android to custom Android skins (Sense etc.), almost every decision in mainstream tech is cast as "boneheaded" or "backwards" here. Yet almost everything Slashdot has a problem with, the general population eats it up.
No, you didn't grasp my point: he's not missing anything by not knowing CS. Many places ask for a BS, but don't give a specific field. If he has a BS and lots of related experience, he could easily turn that into a job and not feel under-qualified lacking of a CS degree.
Your complaints about the super bar can all be alleviated by choosing "small icons" and "never combine" options. It acts just like Windows XP except the windows are grouped and you can rearrange them.
I especially want to be able to have a more or less complete list of installed programs in a hierarchical layout that's accessible from one place.
This would be the apps list. It's quickly accessible, contains all apps in alphabetical order, and shows all the icons at once instead of being buried in folders. I like it much better for accessing all my programs than the "All Programs" list in the start menu.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, running the company into the ground what with those massive record profits, and selling 600 million copies of Windows 7, and 200 million copies of Office 2010, and the number one selling console in the world even 7 years after its debut. Their fall is really meteoric!
The iPad 3 is $629 for the least expensive model with 3G/4G capability. WinRT tablets are going to be considerably more expensive.
From the source's source, the "computex vendors" said models will start at $549 (not $600, which the source rounded to). That's $50 more expensive than the base model 16 GB iPad with no 3G. Without even knowing the specs, that's a phenomenal deal for someone like because Windows RT comes with the full Office preinstalled. If I want iWork on my iPad, that's another $30, and they aren't even full-featured office apps.
I still haven't seen a good solution to the catch 22 that a journal cannot gain a reputation without first being reputable. No one with any concern about their academic career will publish in a no-name, no-eyes journal. As it is, it's hard enough to get people to read and care about your work by publishing in top tier journals. How do you expect academics to justify to themselves that the work they've spent months to years on doesn't deserve a better venue for dissemination?
For $90k I can find pretty much anyone to do any job, US or foreign.
You just said that you would not hire the US worker that is asking for the fair $120k if you could underpay an H-1B by $30k.
No, he said he wouldn't hire anyone at $120k because it doesn't fit his budget. That is to say, if there were no H-1Bs he still wouldn't hire an American at $120k because he can't afford it.
Google derives 96% of its revenue from advertising. All those shiny "free" Google services you love to play with are the result of their ability to monetize information they gather about you. Without tracking, there is no Google. Just keep that in mind.
Everything in the taskbar, start menu, and system tray is very conducive to touch.
Okay... so you've said it works well with touch, but I don't understand how it doesn't work well with keyboard+mouse. The targets are nice and big and easy to click, and they scale well with resolution so they aren't too big. The mouse is capable of all operations a finger is, and honestly I think panning through the metro is easier with the mouse wheel than it is with a finger. Keyboard shortcuts make things easier, but you don't even have to know them; I can navigate the entire UI with just a mouse.
So again, I'm not seeing the keyboard+mouse deficiency everyone keeps harping on.
Chances are, if they have to spend on marketing, they're not delivering the best product for the best price.
Every product needs marketing. Being the best product at the best price is not enough. Look at Linux, best product for the best price according to many, and still no one uses it. The marketplace isn't about a feature/price ratio that everyone calculates in their head and then goes with the best one. People make decisions to alleviate problems in their life, problems that are either emotional or physical. Marketing speaks to these problems and whichever product speaks to you best wins your money. Even the color of the packaging plays a major role in speaking to your subconscious. Hell, sometimes marketing even goes so far as to convince you that you have a problem you really don't have. All these factors play into which product you choose.
Human beings are emotional creatures, and as much as you might insist you are completely rational and pragmatic in your decisions and they are 100% ruled by a fact-based comparisons of feature charts and price per unit comparisons, I'm willing to bet you are swayed by marketing to some degree regardless.
Advertising isn't always about getting you to buy a product then and there. While that's nice, it can be much more subtle than that. For instance I've never seen a TV ad for mouth wash and rushed out to the store right after to buy some. But the next time I did actually want to buy mouthwash, I went to the grocery store and was confronted with about half a dozen brands. Which one do I buy? Well, probably the one that is more familiar to me, the one I have seen advertised the most.
What would be really cool and useful is a wide (15"-30") touchscreen interface that either replaced my keyboard and mouse, or was at an angle right behind them.
If you really want you can do this with windows 8. You can dock the start screen on a close up touch monitor, launch apps from that and send them to any monitor you want.
Seeing as that Steve Jobs didn't personally invent any of these things, and all were in fact not even invented at Apple, I'm pretty sure they would have found their way to the masses without him. He was a hell of a salesman, and maybe it would have taken longer and the results not as polished/shiny, but I find it hard to believe if Steve Jobs had never been born, today there would not exist personal computers and GUIs. Please.
You proven two things:
1) DemomanDeveloper registered his account recently
2) DemomanDeveloper seems to be pro Microsoft and anti Google
So you've proven he has a bias and maybe at best you've proven he's a troll. Still need to prove he's astroturfing. You are aware astroturfing does not mean holds a particular bias, correct?
Then again, Nokia has a strong presence around the globe. For instance, this report indicates that Windows Phone is outselling iPhone in Russia, and there were reports recently (admittedly which originated from Microsoft so obviously to be taken with a large dose of salt) that Windows Phone is outselling the iPhone in China as well.
Again, that doesn't make him an idiot, it makes him ignorant. Why should he expect that walking around with a mobile computer could lead to data corruption, given that we live in a world where we constantly walk around with computational devices (smartphones, tablets)?
The guy is an idiot.
The guy used the tools he knows to get his work done. It might not be the most efficient way, but that doesn't make him an idiot, just ignorant. Maybe instead of being a dick you could educate him as to the more appropriate solution and why his is dangerous/inefficient?
There is no good reason to think they're a representative sample.
There's no good reason to think Microsoft doesn't employ a competent statistician who makes sure the sample is representative.
badmouthing from the tech community ensured that Vista was pretty much DOA
The tech community has been badmouthing Microsoft products constantly since the 90s, and that hasn't made any dent in their marketshare. Vista was DOA because it was a bad product. You're really overstating your influence.
Wow, then maybe you could refrain from making snide remarks on something you know nothing about?
You still haven't explained exactly how that's a problem. I press the start button to access programs I want to start. The visibilty of the desktop is immaterial to the task I want to accomplish by pressing the start button. With the start menu, and its tiny rectangle, I have a fixed 10 recently used programs. With the start screen, the number of items scales with resolution, so it actually takes advantage of the size of your monitor rather than wasting it by displaying information you're not even using in the current context.
What advantages does metro give you that weren't already present in desktop gadgets?
Not really sure what you mean by this. "Metro" is a design language, so I don't see how that relates to desktop gadgets in any form. Do you perhaps mean live tiles? At their essence they really are just gadgets, but they remove the redundancy of having a launcher icon as well. It's kind of like the OSX dock and dashboard combined into one. I really only ever look at my desktop when I need to open a file on it, so checking on my gadgets then is no different from checking the start screen now. Live tiles also make my start screen feel a little more personal. Instead of having a "Pictures" icon, I have an icon with my actual photographs. Instead of having a "Music" icon, I have an icon of my favorite bands. I like that extra touch.
I also like that I can arrange the live tiles into nice little groupings. Can't really do that with gadgets since then they'd be scattered all over my desktop. You can kind of do it with something like OSX dashboard, but there was no real analogue for that in Windows unless you went third party.
How has metro improved your workflow over Win 7?
Honestly, since there aren't too many metro apps out there yet, and most metro apps are written for leisure, I can't really tell you how it affects my workflow. But it doesn't really matter much since there is a desktop.
My workflow consists mostly of running Visual Studio, Matlab, Photoshop, TexWorks, Opera, Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. So I'm on the desktop most of the time when I'm in work mode. This is why I honestly don't see it as such a big deal; everyone here acts like the start screen is the end of the world, but working from the desktop you just forget it's there. Like I said, I don't have much of a need to go into the start menu. All the apps I want to launch are pinned on the taskbar, and when I want to launch an app that isn't there, I hit up the full app list. This is one aspect which I find much more efficient than search in the start menu, which feels shoehorned into an old paradigm from 1995. Full screen search provides more room for results.
I'm usually in the start screen "metro land" when I'm not working. The various apps they provide are intuitive, beautiful, and fun to use. There aren't too many third party apps out there yet but I'm sure there will be. Metro doesn't fit into my workflow, since I usually have many apps open side by side, but that's why there'd still a desktop after all.
How is the current design better on a NON touch screen desktop or laptop (which is over 90% of the PCs sold ATM) than Win 7?
Again, I don't really see why people think this is a touch screen only interface. Just because it's touch friendly, doesn't mean it isn't mouse+keyboard friendly. There are keyboard shortcuts for virtually everything, so I barely have to lift my hand from the keyboard, and when I'm using the mouse there are various gestures which replicate all the touch functionality. One thing I especially like is the large icons in the start screen. They're easy to target with a mouse, and very recognizable, so I find it much quicker to navigate than the old start menu.
what benefits has Win 8 given you?
It's basically taken something I never use anymore, the start menu, and turned it into something that I actually access. It's separted out the functionality of the start menu into parts - app launching and searching - which are more useful on their own than they were together. With its 2D fullscreen design I can access more apps at once from the start screen than I could from the start menu, and I can group tiles in ways that make sense to me. And with the fullscreen design of the new desktop search, I can see more results at once like I said before.
Because frankly i could find nice things about every previous release of the last decade
W
This is what Microsoft's data shows the majority of people using their start menu for. The start menu is no longer an application launcher, it's an application searcher, and the only reason it's in the start menu is for legacy reasons. Thus in Windows 8 there's a completely revamped search, which is much more useful in my opinion. You can still press the windows key and type a few characters, and there are all the results.
Problems are relative. The problems we come up with here obviously mean nothing to the majority of tech buyers out there. Is it a problem for me that I can only install Apps from the Appstore on my iPad? Yes. Is it a problem for my mom? No. It doesn't make the complaints we have not legitimate... it just means it's less and less likely anyone is going to care.
This is most evident on places like Slashdot, which are dominated by young males 18-35. From OSX to iOS to Windows 8 to Office 2010 and the Ribbon to the iPad to the iPhone to locked bootloaders on Android to custom Android skins (Sense etc.), almost every decision in mainstream tech is cast as "boneheaded" or "backwards" here. Yet almost everything Slashdot has a problem with, the general population eats it up.
No, you didn't grasp my point: he's not missing anything by not knowing CS. Many places ask for a BS, but don't give a specific field. If he has a BS and lots of related experience, he could easily turn that into a job and not feel under-qualified lacking of a CS degree.
I especially want to be able to have a more or less complete list of installed programs in a hierarchical layout that's accessible from one place .
This would be the apps list. It's quickly accessible, contains all apps in alphabetical order, and shows all the icons at once instead of being buried in folders. I like it much better for accessing all my programs than the "All Programs" list in the start menu.
To start Word, Windows Key, w, o, r, d, enter.
Doing this will still open word in Windows 8