Move your mouse to the top of the screen until it looks like a hand. Click, and you will be able to drag the window around. If you drag it to the bottom of the screen and let go, it will be closed.
I usually disagree with people when they say that UI elements in Windows 8, but this is one where there really truely is no help to steer you to finding this. I think this is because the preferred way to close metro apps is to simply leave them (via start button), and let the Windows memory manager handle their lifecycle.
4) At some point I somehow managed to launch the Finances application. Suddendly my screen is full of stock tickers. I don't know how to close it. Alt+f4 doesn't work. Esc doesn't work. Finally, Win+D seemed to work. I still don't know why that app started.
Alt+f4 absolutely does work. I have to wonder about the truth of the rest of your statements now.
Go up one level to "Computers and Accessories". You'll see the Samsung Chromebook at 11 behind an iPad screen protector, a cheap HDMI cable, and the chart topping Apple TV. The Amazon best sellers list is indiciatve of what's selling on Amazon. Not much else.
Sorry, I don't give a damn about your "shill-free" stamp of approval. I prefer to address the merits of an argument rather than resort to ad hominem attacks. As to the merits of your post...
When I said "better" I was thinking in purely a performance context. If you want to get to the subjective nature of computing devices and how one might be better for one user and not the next, please read the parting words of my post you responded to. The point of the parent's post seemed to be that capability wise the surface pro was on par with a 2 year old netbook. This is absurd. He writes that his netbook is fine "for him" at running a series of performance related tasks, at which the Surface Pro excels performance wise compared to any 2 year old netbook.
There is a very subjective element to the surface pro which is its form factor. If the tablet form factor does not work for you, then the conversation simply stops there. There is no reason at all to buy the surface pro over any machine regardless of the specs if you do not want a tablet form factor. But there is a very strong narrative running on Slashdot that the Surface Pro is not good for anything, and this is just not the case, as I've experienced using mine over the past two months.
Also, with respect to "better speced" no, you cannot. Part of the value of the Surface Pro is its touch screen and active digitizer, as well as tablet form factor which lends to it being thinner and lighter than even the MacBook Air. If you can find me a better speced ultrabook, with a touch screen, with an active digitizer, under 2 lbs, and under 0.5 inches thick then you have a point. But if you're going to pick processor power and battery life as the only specs by which to compare, you are purposefully ignoring the strengths of the Surface Pro.
Care to back that up? No official sales but there are estimates 400,000 sold in one month. For a $1000 machine available only in 2 countries, that's quite a few units in my opinion. And no matter whether that number is subjectively big enough for you, that's at least $400M in Microsoft's bank account that wasn't there last month, so I'd say its working out for them so far.
So is arguably worse than existing Android/iOS tablets on price and hardware.
Which might clue you in that perhaps Surface RT is not meant for the enterprise. Which is why Microsoft offers
1. Powerful yet expensive core i5 powered tables capable of ultrabook type computing, with all the enterprise benefits of Windows (Surface Pro)
2. Light and cheap atom powered tablets that can at least run legacy x86 applications but have the battery life of ARM powered devices (Latitude 10)
Windows RT is microsoft's answer to the iPad home market. It's lacking apps now, yeah that's a given as Metro is a new platform. But there's nothing specifically that Windows RT cannot do that iPad can. Windows RT outshines iPad in several areas like being able to use two apps side by side, being able to use multiple accounts, having an open filesystem for using USB drives, and being able to view flash content like Hulu. It's probably not on equal footing yet, mostly because of the apps, but that will grow in time. But don't confuse Surface RT as Microsoft's answer to the iPad in the enterprise. Windows 8 tablets are for that purpose.
Surface Pro can do all that faster and better (because I guarantee you it's more powerful than your two year old $250 netbook probably running an atom or an old core i3), plus it has a touch screen and active digitizer for handwriting. Since you won't spec out or identify your mystery netbook, I'm also willing to bet it has a larger display, weighs less, and is thinner. As for the screen, you might not care about the higher resolution (which is indeed noticeable not under a microscope) but it's also incredible IPS quality compared to the cheap bottom barrel TN panels that come with most Netbooks.
I have a stack of ~$250 2 year old netbooks next to me right now from various manufacturers we used for educational purposes. They are thick, heavy, pieces of cheap plastic compared to the Surface Pro. Take special note of this last bit; netbooks are cheap and their construction and build quality is correspondingly so. Surface Pro is a solid device built from better materials, and it looks and feels as much. If your amazing netbook is anything like the ones I have (and please, I'd love to know specifically which one you're talking about because I pretty much have them all from that time period), for $250 It's also got a slow as hell HDD, or a small slow SSD (even smaller than the Pro's). Please let me know which one yours has.
And by the way, the Pro works fine in bed with the kick stand. I watch netflix and hulu every night on mine. Honestly it sounds like you've never used or seen a Surface Pro tablet. If that's the case, please keep your assessments about how useful it is to yourself. And by all means stick to your 2 year old netbook if it fulfills your computing needs.
If you think this has nothing to do with nerds, you're note paying attention.
The very heart of these lawsuits is the bittorrent protocol, IP address tracking, and wireless networks. These lawsuits are a dirty disgusting consequence of the technology *we* created. And the reason nerds should be more interested in these lawsuits than others is because we fully understand how absolutely absurd it is to say just because you saw an IP address on a tracker doesn't mean the subscriber to the account that was assigned that address is an infringer.
So while the Prenda lawsuits are not failing on the technical lack of merits of their absurd claims, it is nice to see this law firm imploding nonetheless.
There are a number of problems with this subpoena.
First, once Cooper and Godfread filed their notice of removal, the state court lost all jurisdiction over the matter (at least unless or until the case is sent back) and all proceedings in state court halted by operation of law — including the obligation to respond to outstanding discovery. Prenda Law would need to re-issue the subpoena in the federal proceeding.
Second, though I am looking into it, it's not clear to me whether Prenda Law followed the requisite procedure under the Uniform Interstate Discovery Act required for them to serve a subpoena on a California company in an Illinois case. We'll see.
Third, the subpoena is ridiculously overbroad. It asks for the IP addresses of everyone who visited the sites, not just people who made specified comments — let alone comments that could plausibly be deemed defamatory. Moreover, it demands IP addresses for a period in 2011 before Prenda Law existed, and therefore before it plausibly could have been defamed or wronged.
Fourth, under emerging doctrines governing attempts to discover the identity of anonymous commenters, it is doubtful that Prenda Law can justify its broad subpoena. Prenda's lawsuit, as I earlier pointed out, is a mish-mash of complaints about statements of fact (which could conceivably be defamatory) and statements of opinion (which cannot). Under these circumstances a court should quash the overbroad subpoena under the increasingly prevalent rule that a plaintiff must make some sort of preliminary showing to discover information about the identities of anonymous speakers.
Intimidate who exactly? The group of people they are targeting have already been victims of what basically amount to legal extortion from Prenda and other trolls. That's why this commonity exists in the first place. These people weren't intimidated by threat of lawsuit under weak legal theories then, and they won't be intimidated by threat of lawsuit under weak legal theories now. These are probably the *worst* people to possibly go after, as they are most the most savvy of anyone to this sordid and convoluted history of Prenda law.
I still cannot fathom what the actual logic is behind these lawsuits. Traffic to FTC has increased 10x since the lawsuits were filed, and there has been almost daily coverage on far more popular sites like Techdirt, Arstechnica, Pophat, Boing Boing, Torrentfreak, and of course Slashdot. This is the Streisand effect in action.
Microsoft does *not* do the same thing. That's what this is all about. Microsoft scans email for viruses and spam. It does not go the extra step of delivering ads based on the contents. That is the problem.
AFAIK Bing / MS Mail (whatever its called now) has historically scanned email in the same way as google
And you would be wrong.
Here is Microsoft's statement on what Outlook does not do:
Outlook.com only scans the contents of your email to help protect you and display, categorize, and sort your mail appropriately. Just like the postal service sorts and scans mail and packages for dangerous explosives and biohazards, Outlook.com scans your mail to help prevent spam, gray mail, phishing scams, viruses, malware, and other dangers and annoyances.
Microsoft and its email services, including Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Office 365, do not use the content of customers’ private emails, communications, or documents to target advertising.
Microsoft does target ads through tracking cookies, like Google, yes. But they offer, like Google, a nice way to opt out of this. This site shows all the information they have on you and a centralized way to opt out of it all: https://choice.microsoft.com/en-US
As for Bing, one of the nicer points of its privacy policy over Google is this statement:
We store search terms (and the cookie IDs associated with search terms) separately from any account information that directly identifies the user, such as name, e-mail address, or phone numbers. We have technological safeguards in place designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data and we remove the entirety of the IP address after 6 months, cookies and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months.
I don't believe Google has a similar clause in their privacy policy.
Finally, it's worth remembering that Google earns 96% of their revenue from advertising. They are an advertising company and thrive on delivering relevant ads to you. When it comes down to it, when the choice is between your privacy and their company, your interests will always lose.
First, Many of those tablets cost $200 (Nexus). It is a lot more acceptable to have a sealed $200 device than a sealed $1000 device, regardless of form factor.
I'm not sure I see the connection between price and acceptable levels of serviceability. Is it that if it's cheap and breaks, you can buy another so it's no big deal; but if it's expensive then you should be able to repair it? I'm sorry, but I'm not sure many people agree with you. The iPad and iPad mini received almost as bad a score (2/10 each), and yet they are wildly successful. It seems that the only people that have a problem with this practice are people like you that like to take things apart.
Second, Almost no other computing device is sealed to this extent with an inch wide strip of tar like adhesive that needs a heat-gun to pry apart (who knows how well it will go back together).
Again, the aforementioned market-leading iPads are sealed in this way. Whether it's the $300 version or the $900 version the response to a broken iPad is the same for the vast majority of users: send it back for warranty repair. If it's out of warranty, pay to have it fixed. Even something with a 7/10 repairability rating like the Nexus 7 is too complicated for most people.
Third. It isn't even about repairs. If this was pure reliable solid state, it wouldn't be a big deal, those parts could run for decades. But this has two fans, meaning they will accumulate dust/have bearing failures, and in few years need replacing/cleaning, it has batteries with short finite life that will fail in few years, the SSD is small size and has an OS with propensity to write a lot to it (swap files) etc, and has a significant chance of failure.
Aside from the fans, almost every mobile phone and tablet today has a solid state drive and a battery, which are not user replaceable. Fans are unique the Surface, but I've yet to own a laptop where the fan was the first component to give. And yes the Surface is expensive but it doesn't change the reaction to what should be done when something goes wrong: send it back for repairs. Microsoft offers a very reasonable support plan for $99 that covers accidental damage for two years. This is a much more preferable option for the vast majority of people than servicing something like fans and batteries themselves.
This. The surface was labeled a "brick" by many reviews for being only 0.1" thicker than an iPad. I imagine with a core i5, getting it down to 0.5" thick was an incredible challenge given the cooling needs of the processor. To be 0.5" thick *and* be easy to service with all the requisite clips and connectors seems like an impossible task.
There's a direct trade-off between thinness/weight and repairability. As it stands the device is already being heavily criticized for being just 0.5" thick and weighing 2 lbs. To get it even at that point, apparently glue had to be used in place of a lot of fasteners that make repairing easy. Now I expect we'll see the same people criticizing it for weight/thickness also criticizing it for not having a removable battery, hard drive, and memory, all of which add weight/thickness. Dell's Latitude 10 comes in fixed and removable battery configurations, the later weighs 0.04 lbs more. Keep in mind while it's not much, the margin between Surface and its closet competitors like iPad are 0.1" thickness and 0.5 lbs, so every bit counts.
So like everything there's a choice. Do you want a core i5 processor or do you want a long battery life? Do you want a super thin machine, or do you want an easy to repair machine?
John Steele. He's pretty much the mastermind behind Prenda, the torrent scanning company, the litigation tactics, the shell companies, and all the underhanded pseudo-legal tactics inbetween. He's managed to use patsies like Gibbs to file briefs, but many indications point to Steele actually authoring many of the motions that make it to the judge and simply using Gibbs' electronic signature. The buck seems to stop at Steele in this operation, and with the heat on Gibbs, everyone is hoping he will roll over like a dog on Steele, implicating him in this whole mess.
Then "by definition" almost anything with a microprocessor is a PC. Having a turing complete instruction set isn't exactly a high bar. My friend's arduino-controlled art installation is a turing complete computer. Does that make it a PC?
You might say that, but here’s the catch: the boxes are already there. I needn’t create a box because Microsoft is entering an established market. Sure, Surface brings something new into the game, but as far as pre-existing boxes go, it’s neither here nor there. And its own new box, should it create one, seems to be rather small.
The same was said of the iPad when it was released. The boxes were smartphone and laptop. They called it a terrible smartphone because it was too large, and a terrible laptop because it didn't run laptop apps. But the iPad came into its own.
And its own new box, should it create one, seems to be rather small.
I'm not so sure about that. In a survey of 10,000 IT professionals in 17 countries, 32% indicated they wanted a Windows tablet as their next work tablet. Combined, Apple and Android got 38%. Maybe they don't want specifically the Surface, but this is good news for Microsoft nonetheless, and it still points to the same niche of people who want a tablet but also want to run legacy Windows applications.
However Surface is not a very good tablet
Maybe for what you expect from a tablet. If you think a tablet is just a thin, light media consumption device, then yes by definition Surface is a bad tablet. I want more out of my tablets: namely raw computing power and handwriting support. In that sense iPad is a bad tablet for me.
why exactly do you consider Surface better than a full-blown laptop?
My use for Surface is three-fold: run matlab, interface with data acquisition systems, and take handwritten notes. The data acquisition system has linux and windows support, but it's all x86, and the drivers are proprietary. So I at least need an x86 tablet which takes iPad and Android (most?) out of the running. I need a tablet because they're more comfortable to use standing and one handed. 2 lbs isn't a dealbreaker here. The digitizer on Surface enables precise notes, which also takes iPad out of the running if it wasn't already. Above all once data is collected I need to analyze with Matlab, usually on the spot. There's a potential to port this functionality over to Python, but that would take a *lot* of work, when it's already in place and working as-is.
So if not for Surface, the ideal setup is either a convertible tablet, which I've tried, and which for the most part are larger and heavier; or a laptop and a tablet, which I've also tried, and which combined are heavier and more expensive.
I'm not sure that's the only reason (although it may be one), since they are available in limited retail stores like BestBuy and Staples, soon to be Costco I think was rumored.
Our senses and our muscles work on a logarithmic scale. Twice the intensity works as four times brighter or louder. So a one-third increase in mass can be perceived as muchheavier if you try to hold it like the iPad. Your hand won’t tire in one-third less time. You’ll be lucky to hold it the same way half as long as na iPad.
Interesting physiology lesson, but I don't think it will work out that way. I regularly work with a 3lb tablet (Motion Computing LE1700) which I can use just fine for extended periods (2-3 hours at a time). A 2lb tablet should work even better. Maybe if you have to stand for 8 hours straight a 2lb tablet is no good, and in that case it may be too much, but that's not my use case.
Also, a new contender in the market should be better than the established competition. Surface Pro isn’t.
Another example of creating a box and trying to stuff Surface in it. I might just as easily say the iPad isn't up to the task of the Surface because of its slow processor, limited operating system, lack of built in ports, non-expandable memory, lack of a digitizer, and lack of a kickstand. The aforementioned make Surface more appealing to me than iPad, and no other tablet offers a package even remotely as appealing to me. Yes, iPad is thinner and had longer battery life. If those were the only aspects to consider it would win hands down. But even with the iPad there are compromises being made.
You say "Why settle for a lower battery life when you can get a higher battery life?" and I hear "Why settle for a thinner, lighter machine when you can get a thicker, heavier machine."
The trade-off between size/weight and battery life is very direct, which is unfortunate because both are important for portability. But depending on how you use your device, size/weight may be more important than battery life.
Slashdot Mirror
Move your mouse to the top of the screen until it looks like a hand. Click, and you will be able to drag the window around. If you drag it to the bottom of the screen and let go, it will be closed.
I usually disagree with people when they say that UI elements in Windows 8, but this is one where there really truely is no help to steer you to finding this. I think this is because the preferred way to close metro apps is to simply leave them (via start button), and let the Windows memory manager handle their lifecycle.
4) At some point I somehow managed to launch the Finances application. Suddendly my screen is full of stock tickers. I don't know how to close it. Alt+f4 doesn't work. Esc doesn't work. Finally, Win+D seemed to work. I still don't know why that app started.
Alt+f4 absolutely does work. I have to wonder about the truth of the rest of your statements now.
Go up one level to "Computers and Accessories". You'll see the Samsung Chromebook at 11 behind an iPad screen protector, a cheap HDMI cable, and the chart topping Apple TV. The Amazon best sellers list is indiciatve of what's selling on Amazon. Not much else.
Sorry, I don't give a damn about your "shill-free" stamp of approval. I prefer to address the merits of an argument rather than resort to ad hominem attacks. As to the merits of your post...
When I said "better" I was thinking in purely a performance context. If you want to get to the subjective nature of computing devices and how one might be better for one user and not the next, please read the parting words of my post you responded to. The point of the parent's post seemed to be that capability wise the surface pro was on par with a 2 year old netbook. This is absurd. He writes that his netbook is fine "for him" at running a series of performance related tasks, at which the Surface Pro excels performance wise compared to any 2 year old netbook.
There is a very subjective element to the surface pro which is its form factor. If the tablet form factor does not work for you, then the conversation simply stops there. There is no reason at all to buy the surface pro over any machine regardless of the specs if you do not want a tablet form factor. But there is a very strong narrative running on Slashdot that the Surface Pro is not good for anything, and this is just not the case, as I've experienced using mine over the past two months.
Also, with respect to "better speced" no, you cannot. Part of the value of the Surface Pro is its touch screen and active digitizer, as well as tablet form factor which lends to it being thinner and lighter than even the MacBook Air. If you can find me a better speced ultrabook, with a touch screen, with an active digitizer, under 2 lbs, and under 0.5 inches thick then you have a point. But if you're going to pick processor power and battery life as the only specs by which to compare, you are purposefully ignoring the strengths of the Surface Pro.
Care to back that up? No official sales but there are estimates 400,000 sold in one month. For a $1000 machine available only in 2 countries, that's quite a few units in my opinion. And no matter whether that number is subjectively big enough for you, that's at least $400M in Microsoft's bank account that wasn't there last month, so I'd say its working out for them so far.
So is arguably worse than existing Android/iOS tablets on price and hardware.
Which might clue you in that perhaps Surface RT is not meant for the enterprise. Which is why Microsoft offers
1. Powerful yet expensive core i5 powered tables capable of ultrabook type computing, with all the enterprise benefits of Windows (Surface Pro)
2. Light and cheap atom powered tablets that can at least run legacy x86 applications but have the battery life of ARM powered devices (Latitude 10)
This is what enterprise is now interested in. That's why 32% of mobile tech workers want a Windows tablet as their next device, compared to 26% for iPad and a mere 12% for Android. (Source: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Forrester_2013_Mobile_Workforce_Adoption_Trends_Feb2013.pdf)
Windows RT is microsoft's answer to the iPad home market. It's lacking apps now, yeah that's a given as Metro is a new platform. But there's nothing specifically that Windows RT cannot do that iPad can. Windows RT outshines iPad in several areas like being able to use two apps side by side, being able to use multiple accounts, having an open filesystem for using USB drives, and being able to view flash content like Hulu. It's probably not on equal footing yet, mostly because of the apps, but that will grow in time. But don't confuse Surface RT as Microsoft's answer to the iPad in the enterprise. Windows 8 tablets are for that purpose.
Then you're looking for something like the Dell Latitude 10. $500 with an Atom Z2760. Can run x86 apps, half the price of Surface Pro.
Surface Pro can do all that faster and better (because I guarantee you it's more powerful than your two year old $250 netbook probably running an atom or an old core i3), plus it has a touch screen and active digitizer for handwriting. Since you won't spec out or identify your mystery netbook, I'm also willing to bet it has a larger display, weighs less, and is thinner. As for the screen, you might not care about the higher resolution (which is indeed noticeable not under a microscope) but it's also incredible IPS quality compared to the cheap bottom barrel TN panels that come with most Netbooks.
I have a stack of ~$250 2 year old netbooks next to me right now from various manufacturers we used for educational purposes. They are thick, heavy, pieces of cheap plastic compared to the Surface Pro. Take special note of this last bit; netbooks are cheap and their construction and build quality is correspondingly so. Surface Pro is a solid device built from better materials, and it looks and feels as much. If your amazing netbook is anything like the ones I have (and please, I'd love to know specifically which one you're talking about because I pretty much have them all from that time period), for $250 It's also got a slow as hell HDD, or a small slow SSD (even smaller than the Pro's). Please let me know which one yours has.
And by the way, the Pro works fine in bed with the kick stand. I watch netflix and hulu every night on mine. Honestly it sounds like you've never used or seen a Surface Pro tablet. If that's the case, please keep your assessments about how useful it is to yourself. And by all means stick to your 2 year old netbook if it fulfills your computing needs.
Rtfa. Windows phone has as much as 13% in Italy, 6.7% in the U.K., and 6.8% in Germany. It's doing much better in Europe than the US.
If you think this has nothing to do with nerds, you're note paying attention.
The very heart of these lawsuits is the bittorrent protocol, IP address tracking, and wireless networks. These lawsuits are a dirty disgusting consequence of the technology *we* created. And the reason nerds should be more interested in these lawsuits than others is because we fully understand how absolutely absurd it is to say just because you saw an IP address on a tracker doesn't mean the subscriber to the account that was assigned that address is an infringer.
So while the Prenda lawsuits are not failing on the technical lack of merits of their absurd claims, it is nice to see this law firm imploding nonetheless.
There are a number of problems with this subpoena.
First, once Cooper and Godfread filed their notice of removal, the state court lost all jurisdiction over the matter (at least unless or until the case is sent back) and all proceedings in state court halted by operation of law — including the obligation to respond to outstanding discovery. Prenda Law would need to re-issue the subpoena in the federal proceeding.
Second, though I am looking into it, it's not clear to me whether Prenda Law followed the requisite procedure under the Uniform Interstate Discovery Act required for them to serve a subpoena on a California company in an Illinois case. We'll see.
Third, the subpoena is ridiculously overbroad. It asks for the IP addresses of everyone who visited the sites, not just people who made specified comments — let alone comments that could plausibly be deemed defamatory. Moreover, it demands IP addresses for a period in 2011 before Prenda Law existed, and therefore before it plausibly could have been defamed or wronged.
Fourth, under emerging doctrines governing attempts to discover the identity of anonymous commenters, it is doubtful that Prenda Law can justify its broad subpoena. Prenda's lawsuit, as I earlier pointed out, is a mish-mash of complaints about statements of fact (which could conceivably be defamatory) and statements of opinion (which cannot). Under these circumstances a court should quash the overbroad subpoena under the increasingly prevalent rule that a plaintiff must make some sort of preliminary showing to discover information about the identities of anonymous speakers.
Intimidate who exactly? The group of people they are targeting have already been victims of what basically amount to legal extortion from Prenda and other trolls. That's why this commonity exists in the first place. These people weren't intimidated by threat of lawsuit under weak legal theories then, and they won't be intimidated by threat of lawsuit under weak legal theories now. These are probably the *worst* people to possibly go after, as they are most the most savvy of anyone to this sordid and convoluted history of Prenda law.
I still cannot fathom what the actual logic is behind these lawsuits. Traffic to FTC has increased 10x since the lawsuits were filed, and there has been almost daily coverage on far more popular sites like Techdirt, Arstechnica, Pophat, Boing Boing, Torrentfreak, and of course Slashdot. This is the Streisand effect in action.
Granted *Microsoft* ... does the same thing.
Microsoft does *not* do the same thing. That's what this is all about. Microsoft scans email for viruses and spam. It does not go the extra step of delivering ads based on the contents. That is the problem.
AFAIK Bing / MS Mail (whatever its called now) has historically scanned email in the same way as google
And you would be wrong.
Here is Microsoft's statement on what Outlook does not do:
Outlook.com only scans the contents of your email to help protect you and display, categorize, and sort your mail appropriately. Just like the postal service sorts and scans mail and packages for dangerous explosives and biohazards, Outlook.com scans your mail to help prevent spam, gray mail, phishing scams, viruses, malware, and other dangers and annoyances. Microsoft and its email services, including Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Office 365, do not use the content of customers’ private emails, communications, or documents to target advertising.
http://www.scroogled.com/OurPosition
This has been Microsoft's position since at least 2010.
Microsoft does target ads through tracking cookies, like Google, yes. But they offer, like Google, a nice way to opt out of this. This site shows all the information they have on you and a centralized way to opt out of it all: https://choice.microsoft.com/en-US
As for Bing, one of the nicer points of its privacy policy over Google is this statement:
We store search terms (and the cookie IDs associated with search terms) separately from any account information that directly identifies the user, such as name, e-mail address, or phone numbers. We have technological safeguards in place designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data and we remove the entirety of the IP address after 6 months, cookies and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months.
http://www.microsoft.com/privacystatement/en-us/bing/default.aspx
I don't believe Google has a similar clause in their privacy policy.
Finally, it's worth remembering that Google earns 96% of their revenue from advertising. They are an advertising company and thrive on delivering relevant ads to you. When it comes down to it, when the choice is between your privacy and their company, your interests will always lose.
Um, Al Gore invented the freaking internet. What exactly have *you* done recently?
First, Many of those tablets cost $200 (Nexus). It is a lot more acceptable to have a sealed $200 device than a sealed $1000 device, regardless of form factor.
I'm not sure I see the connection between price and acceptable levels of serviceability. Is it that if it's cheap and breaks, you can buy another so it's no big deal; but if it's expensive then you should be able to repair it? I'm sorry, but I'm not sure many people agree with you. The iPad and iPad mini received almost as bad a score (2/10 each), and yet they are wildly successful. It seems that the only people that have a problem with this practice are people like you that like to take things apart.
Second, Almost no other computing device is sealed to this extent with an inch wide strip of tar like adhesive that needs a heat-gun to pry apart (who knows how well it will go back together).
Again, the aforementioned market-leading iPads are sealed in this way. Whether it's the $300 version or the $900 version the response to a broken iPad is the same for the vast majority of users: send it back for warranty repair. If it's out of warranty, pay to have it fixed. Even something with a 7/10 repairability rating like the Nexus 7 is too complicated for most people.
Third. It isn't even about repairs. If this was pure reliable solid state, it wouldn't be a big deal, those parts could run for decades. But this has two fans, meaning they will accumulate dust/have bearing failures, and in few years need replacing/cleaning, it has batteries with short finite life that will fail in few years, the SSD is small size and has an OS with propensity to write a lot to it (swap files) etc, and has a significant chance of failure.
Aside from the fans, almost every mobile phone and tablet today has a solid state drive and a battery, which are not user replaceable. Fans are unique the Surface, but I've yet to own a laptop where the fan was the first component to give. And yes the Surface is expensive but it doesn't change the reaction to what should be done when something goes wrong: send it back for repairs. Microsoft offers a very reasonable support plan for $99 that covers accidental damage for two years. This is a much more preferable option for the vast majority of people than servicing something like fans and batteries themselves.
This. The surface was labeled a "brick" by many reviews for being only 0.1" thicker than an iPad. I imagine with a core i5, getting it down to 0.5" thick was an incredible challenge given the cooling needs of the processor. To be 0.5" thick *and* be easy to service with all the requisite clips and connectors seems like an impossible task.
There's a direct trade-off between thinness/weight and repairability. As it stands the device is already being heavily criticized for being just 0.5" thick and weighing 2 lbs. To get it even at that point, apparently glue had to be used in place of a lot of fasteners that make repairing easy. Now I expect we'll see the same people criticizing it for weight/thickness also criticizing it for not having a removable battery, hard drive, and memory, all of which add weight/thickness. Dell's Latitude 10 comes in fixed and removable battery configurations, the later weighs 0.04 lbs more. Keep in mind while it's not much, the margin between Surface and its closet competitors like iPad are 0.1" thickness and 0.5 lbs, so every bit counts.
So like everything there's a choice. Do you want a core i5 processor or do you want a long battery life? Do you want a super thin machine, or do you want an easy to repair machine?
John Steele. He's pretty much the mastermind behind Prenda, the torrent scanning company, the litigation tactics, the shell companies, and all the underhanded pseudo-legal tactics inbetween. He's managed to use patsies like Gibbs to file briefs, but many indications point to Steele actually authoring many of the motions that make it to the judge and simply using Gibbs' electronic signature. The buck seems to stop at Steele in this operation, and with the heat on Gibbs, everyone is hoping he will roll over like a dog on Steele, implicating him in this whole mess.
Then "by definition" almost anything with a microprocessor is a PC. Having a turing complete instruction set isn't exactly a high bar. My friend's arduino-controlled art installation is a turing complete computer. Does that make it a PC?
You might say that, but here’s the catch: the boxes are already there. I needn’t create a box because Microsoft is entering an established market. Sure, Surface brings something new into the game, but as far as pre-existing boxes go, it’s neither here nor there. And its own new box, should it create one, seems to be rather small.
The same was said of the iPad when it was released. The boxes were smartphone and laptop. They called it a terrible smartphone because it was too large, and a terrible laptop because it didn't run laptop apps. But the iPad came into its own.
And its own new box, should it create one, seems to be rather small.
I'm not so sure about that. In a survey of 10,000 IT professionals in 17 countries, 32% indicated they wanted a Windows tablet as their next work tablet. Combined, Apple and Android got 38%. Maybe they don't want specifically the Surface, but this is good news for Microsoft nonetheless, and it still points to the same niche of people who want a tablet but also want to run legacy Windows applications.
However Surface is not a very good tablet
Maybe for what you expect from a tablet. If you think a tablet is just a thin, light media consumption device, then yes by definition Surface is a bad tablet. I want more out of my tablets: namely raw computing power and handwriting support. In that sense iPad is a bad tablet for me.
why exactly do you consider Surface better than a full-blown laptop?
My use for Surface is three-fold: run matlab, interface with data acquisition systems, and take handwritten notes. The data acquisition system has linux and windows support, but it's all x86, and the drivers are proprietary. So I at least need an x86 tablet which takes iPad and Android (most?) out of the running. I need a tablet because they're more comfortable to use standing and one handed. 2 lbs isn't a dealbreaker here. The digitizer on Surface enables precise notes, which also takes iPad out of the running if it wasn't already. Above all once data is collected I need to analyze with Matlab, usually on the spot. There's a potential to port this functionality over to Python, but that would take a *lot* of work, when it's already in place and working as-is.
So if not for Surface, the ideal setup is either a convertible tablet, which I've tried, and which for the most part are larger and heavier; or a laptop and a tablet, which I've also tried, and which combined are heavier and more expensive.
I'm not sure that's the only reason (although it may be one), since they are available in limited retail stores like BestBuy and Staples, soon to be Costco I think was rumored.
Our senses and our muscles work on a logarithmic scale. Twice the intensity works as four times brighter or louder. So a one-third increase in mass can be perceived as muchheavier if you try to hold it like the iPad. Your hand won’t tire in one-third less time. You’ll be lucky to hold it the same way half as long as na iPad.
Interesting physiology lesson, but I don't think it will work out that way. I regularly work with a 3lb tablet (Motion Computing LE1700) which I can use just fine for extended periods (2-3 hours at a time). A 2lb tablet should work even better. Maybe if you have to stand for 8 hours straight a 2lb tablet is no good, and in that case it may be too much, but that's not my use case.
Also, a new contender in the market should be better than the established competition. Surface Pro isn’t.
Another example of creating a box and trying to stuff Surface in it. I might just as easily say the iPad isn't up to the task of the Surface because of its slow processor, limited operating system, lack of built in ports, non-expandable memory, lack of a digitizer, and lack of a kickstand. The aforementioned make Surface more appealing to me than iPad, and no other tablet offers a package even remotely as appealing to me. Yes, iPad is thinner and had longer battery life. If those were the only aspects to consider it would win hands down. But even with the iPad there are compromises being made.
You say "Why settle for a lower battery life when you can get a higher battery life?" and I hear "Why settle for a thinner, lighter machine when you can get a thicker, heavier machine."
The trade-off between size/weight and battery life is very direct, which is unfortunate because both are important for portability. But depending on how you use your device, size/weight may be more important than battery life.