That usage you have there IS a niche. Not as in "Very few people would use it" but as in "A small part of the use case of that class of device (computer)".
I hate to break it to you, but most people spend most of their time on computers doing very simple stuff: web browsing, Facebook, email, chat, simple games. Since all of this can be done on a tablet, and often more conveniently, people are buying tablets. For the occasional instance where they have to write up a real document in Word, they still have the 7-year-old Core 2 Duo laptop in the corner. They just don't see any need to replace it any time soon (even if it is still running XP).
The Surface was dead before it ever launched. The reason is that there is no tablet market, there's an iPad market.
I don't see that as being the case. There is a tablet market, it's just that the iPad was the first tablet not to suck, so it got first-mover advantage on top of the cachet of the Apple brand name. Now that we're starting to see decent, and less expensive, tablets from other vendors (Nexus 7), sales are starting to pick up.
Most people have no use for tablets. There are niche uses (the in medicine) but by and large there just isn't a real use for tablets. People are not going to be able to get rid of their computers because tablets are lousy for content creation, even basic content like writing an e-mail or forum post.
So they are trying to get in to a market that just isn't there. Tablets are going to fade away as the fad passes. People will find that their smartphone is just more convenient for the "small" computing needs and that a laptop or maybe desktop are better when you need to do some work or the like.
I disagree. Tablets are great if you want a portable device that can surf the web, read e-books, and play simple games. And the popularity of the iPad shows that a lot of people want these things. Of course the "post-PC era" nonsense is way overblown; tablets won't replace real computers for the reasons you specified. But they will supplement them.
On the other hand, there really aren't that many people who have the urge to fire up a copy of Office on their tablets, so Microsoft's ace in the hole probably isn't nearly as compelling as they think it is.
I don't see any real need for Ultra-HD for TV or movie content, except for wealthy videophiles; unless you have a massive front-projection screen, it's not going to make much of a visible difference. (And even then, 1080p at a good bitrate is more than adequate for the average home theater setup.)
But it's really time that the average pixel density on monitors went up, and the prevalence of Ultra-HD would be a good thing for this reason. I currently use a 32" 1080p HDTV as my PC monitor, and it works well, but at a monitor viewing distance you can see the pixels, and text is less than razor-sharp. If I could get 4x the pixels in the same size (and set the Windows 7 DPI to 200% so that the text isn't too tiny to read), it would be a near-perfect monitor.
I would not be surprised if Apple chooses 3840x2160 for its Retina Display resolution on desktop Macs. It has a couple of advantages: there are already existing video cards (including newer Intel integrated GPUs) that support it, and it would be easier to convince panel factories to gear up for production when they think there might be a wider market (Ultra-HDTV) for their products as well.
No, you don't really need anything above 1080p for TV or movie content unless you have a giant front projection screen. But I would really like higher pixel density on my monitor, so I hope that Ultra-HD becomes mainstream for that reason. (Some video cards – and Intel's newest integrated GPUs – already support this resolution, so that's a good start.)
I would wager that Android on the desktop would suffer from the same problems that other distributions suffer from.. drivers for one. All Android would be is a distro that updates infrequently and has an integrated app store.
The app store is a really big deal... one of the major reasons people don't use desktop Linux is the fact that it doesn't run many of the programs they want to use. There are probably more apps for Android by now than for desktop Linux, and certainly more apps that the average person would be interested in using.
Drivers are a chicken-and-egg problem... a lot of vendors don't bother with drivers for Linux because it's a small market, and it remains a small market in part because driver support sucks. But Android, by solving some of the other barriers to Linux-kernel adoption, could help break that logjam.
*facepalm* It's called linux, Android is based off it.
Android is based on the Linux kernel. And the reason it's been successful (aside from Google's marketing muscle, which is a not inconsiderable factor) is that it blasted away the 20 layers of worthless legacy shit that sits on top of the kernel on desktops, and replaced it with a new stack that (to borrow an Apple term) "just works". Well, at least for most users, most of the time – but that's more than can be said about [spit] desktop Linux.
What does this mean? Just that vendors should be using the newer versions of SSL that were rebranded TLS? Or is there another, competing technology that is recommended instead?
It looks nicer than XP, runs faster thanks to hardware acceleration, supports newer hardware that XP doesn't, has full 64-bit support, and will be supported with security patches until 2020 (XP's support runs out in 2014).
I don't have any disks >2T, I don't have an SSD, and I don't have more than 4G of RAM.
That places you in a minority among computer enthusiasts (i.e. the sort of people who read Slashdot). Even consumer-focused systems are increasingly moving to SSDs, since the hard drive has long been the major bottleneck in system performance during normal use.
Then again... Microsoft may be doing something smart, avoiding a trap that many large established companies fall in to. Large established companies tend to innovate less and more commonly merely offer what customers ask for and/or incremental improvements. This has historically allowed small innovative companies to come in with radically different things and get a foothold in the market, maybe even disrupt the market.
The problem is that the new innovative companies have already come in and disrupted the market. Tablets and smartphones are now a mature product. Microsoft already lost its first-mover advantage in those fields. Windows 8 is the equivalent of bolting the barn door after the horses have left. All they are doing is angering and alienating their existing customer base (which indeed mostly just wanted incremental improvements) with no guarantee of picking back up the casual users who already jumped ship. They have failed to make a convincing case for why their new product (WinRT) is better than iOS or Android.
Does anyone know if Android, as it now stands, is ready for use on "real" computing devices (desktops and laptops)? In other words, is there any support built in for full multitasking, running apps in resizable and movable windows, a taskbar, and other essentials?
If so, then Android could be a serious contender, especially if ported to x86. If not, then Android still needs work before it's ready for prime time on devices other than phones and tablets.
I think Adobe may serve as a bellwether here. When/if a full version of Photoshop is ported to Android, we will know the platform has arrived. Photoshop used to run on PowerPC Macs, so there shouldn't be too many mandatory x86-isms scattered throughout the code.
There were recent rumors that Microsoft Office might be ported to iOS and Android, but those are apparently not true. Had Microsoft been broken up into an apps division and an OS division in the first antitrust case, as it should have been, I'll be they would have already taken that plunge.
that's what you deserve for running XP on your POS system in 2012.
First of all, XP is still reasonably secure if you keep it up-to-date with patches (which will still be available until mid-2014).
Secondly, it doesn't matter what OS the POS terminal was running here; it sounds like the PIN pads themselves (which probably use a small embedded controller) were the targets of the hack.
Simberg is best known for a fabricated "Reuters" article allegedly from 1945 which, unbelievably, was taken seriously and cited by both Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Basically, it was a lame satire about the Iraqi resistance which (falsely) claimed that similar things had happened in Germany after WWII.
Why do we have to have the one brand that rules them all?
There are already several good brands of Android tablets on the market. Competition among brands is going quite well, and isn't the problem. The question is why anyone would want a third tablet OS. If you care about openness you go with Android; if you want the most apps and smoothest UI, you go with iOS. I don't see where WinRT fits in here.
The Surface Pro is a different story – I can see that appealing to businesses who want a tablet with decent touch support combined with legacy compatibility. But Windows on ARM looks to be dead on arrival.
This is disappointing, but not surprising. Microsoft knows that most experienced Windows users don't want any part of Windows 8. But they are convinced that Windows 8 is a vital part of their business strategy going forward. So they are doing whatever they can to bribe, force, or coerce users to switch to Windows 8. They don't want Windows 7 to become the new XP, even though they profited handsomely for many years from XP licenses. The power user/business desktop just isn't cool enough for Steve Ballmer, Steven Sinofsky, and the other myopic decision-makers at MS these days.
Is that limitation legally enforceable? If you buy the product off the shelf (as opposed to as part of a bulk contract), then you bought it. Aside from the standard limitations of copyright law (no redistributing binaries), where does MS get the authorization to further limit what you can do with your purchase? If this was permitted, you'd see it in other fields ("Business model" cars that cost three times as much as "consumer" cars).
If you're complaining that the RT version of windows only runs certain apps... well ya. It is a different chipset. You expect differently?
For my part, I don't have a problem with the lack of binary compatibility (which, as noted, stems from the use of different hardware). My problem is with the closed nature of the system: you can't sideload Metro applications (everything must go through the MS App Store), and no one except Microsoft is allowed to write desktop applications at all.
How is it not compression? It reduces the data size being transferred and is recoverable on the other end.
No, it slightly increases the data size being transferred, thus allowing it to be recoverable on the other end if there are minor losses.
Here's an example of how it might work. Say you have a packet that holds 1024 bytes of payload data, plus a few extra for overhead. (Probably not realistic, but this is just to lay out the principles involved.) Now, you could send all 1024 bytes as straight data, but then if even 1 bit is wrong, the whole packet must be re-sent, adding latency. Instead, you send (say) only 896 bytes of actual data, and 128 bytes of recovery data. You break up the data into 64-byte blocks. Thus you have 14 blocks of actual data. The other 2 blocks consist of recovery data, generated by some sort of mathematical equation too complicated to describe here (and which frankly I don't understand myself). Here's the trick: on the receiving end, any 14 of the 16 blocks is enough to recover the whole 896-byte original datagram. Doesn't matter which 2 blocks are bad, as long as no more than 2 are bad, you can recover the whole thing.
This could be useful in an environment where packet loss is very high. A similar method is currently used when transmitting large binary files on Usenet, since many Usenet servers do not have 100% propagation and/or retention.
With coded TCP, blocks of packets are clumped together and then transformed into algebraic equations (PDF) that describe the packets. If part of the message is lost, the receiver can solve the equation to derive the missing data.
It's been a while since I read the paper on exactly how it works, but isn't this basically the same principle as the par2 file recovery slices that have been used for Usenet binaries for quite some time?
The new Trinity, and now these FX Procs, are perfect for "the 99%," that is to say for what 99% of people do with their machines: surf the web, check email, maybe do some photo editing or piecing together home movies.
If you're building a "good enough" system for a non-technical user, why in the world would you even consider a Vishera FX CPU? It's expensive, power-hungry, and has a high TDP. And it doesn't even have integrated graphics, so you'd have to add the expense of a discrete graphics card.
For an inexperienced user who doesn't need much processing power, a Bobcat board will get the job done for cheap, and if that isn't quite good enough, the Pentium G630T is very competitively priced and (with its 35W TDP) very efficient. For enthusiasts, especially gamers, the Sandy/Ivy Bridge "K" series CPUs offer better performance, better efficiency, and more overclocking headroom, for only a little more cash. (In fact, if you have a Micro Center in your area, you can score an i5-2500K for $160, or an i5-3570K for $190.)
What's the intended audience for Vishera – people who do a lot of x264 encoding and don't want to step up to a server CPU or a Sandy Bridge-E? I'm having a hard time seeing a substantial audience for this thing.
AMD FX-8350 Review: Does Piledriver Fix Bulldozer's Flaws?
No. It still guzzles power like crazy compared to Sandy/Ivy Bridge, and its single-threaded performance still sucks royally. (And that's still very important since many, many programs cannot and will not ever support full multithreading.)
The 3-year-old doesn't have 15+ years of muscle memory on doing things the old Windows desktop way.
People who start out using OSX seem to like it. I once had to troubleshoot a system using OSX and wanted to throw it through the window – everything was just wrong compared to what I was used to.
Yes, in time, you could learn to do things differently – but unless there's a good reason, why should I? And if Microsoft is going to throw everything topsy-turvy, take away the reasons why I use their OS, then why should my next OS choice be theirs? If I'm getting screwed up anyway, why wouldn't I take the chance to screw them back by jumping ship?
Slashdot Mirror
That usage you have there IS a niche. Not as in "Very few people would use it" but as in "A small part of the use case of that class of device (computer)".
I hate to break it to you, but most people spend most of their time on computers doing very simple stuff: web browsing, Facebook, email, chat, simple games. Since all of this can be done on a tablet, and often more conveniently, people are buying tablets. For the occasional instance where they have to write up a real document in Word, they still have the 7-year-old Core 2 Duo laptop in the corner. They just don't see any need to replace it any time soon (even if it is still running XP).
The Surface was dead before it ever launched. The reason is that there is no tablet market, there's an iPad market.
I don't see that as being the case. There is a tablet market, it's just that the iPad was the first tablet not to suck, so it got first-mover advantage on top of the cachet of the Apple brand name. Now that we're starting to see decent, and less expensive, tablets from other vendors (Nexus 7), sales are starting to pick up.
Most people have no use for tablets. There are niche uses (the in medicine) but by and large there just isn't a real use for tablets. People are not going to be able to get rid of their computers because tablets are lousy for content creation, even basic content like writing an e-mail or forum post.
So they are trying to get in to a market that just isn't there. Tablets are going to fade away as the fad passes. People will find that their smartphone is just more convenient for the "small" computing needs and that a laptop or maybe desktop are better when you need to do some work or the like.
I disagree. Tablets are great if you want a portable device that can surf the web, read e-books, and play simple games. And the popularity of the iPad shows that a lot of people want these things. Of course the "post-PC era" nonsense is way overblown; tablets won't replace real computers for the reasons you specified. But they will supplement them.
On the other hand, there really aren't that many people who have the urge to fire up a copy of Office on their tablets, so Microsoft's ace in the hole probably isn't nearly as compelling as they think it is.
I don't see any real need for Ultra-HD for TV or movie content, except for wealthy videophiles; unless you have a massive front-projection screen, it's not going to make much of a visible difference. (And even then, 1080p at a good bitrate is more than adequate for the average home theater setup.)
But it's really time that the average pixel density on monitors went up, and the prevalence of Ultra-HD would be a good thing for this reason. I currently use a 32" 1080p HDTV as my PC monitor, and it works well, but at a monitor viewing distance you can see the pixels, and text is less than razor-sharp. If I could get 4x the pixels in the same size (and set the Windows 7 DPI to 200% so that the text isn't too tiny to read), it would be a near-perfect monitor.
I would not be surprised if Apple chooses 3840x2160 for its Retina Display resolution on desktop Macs. It has a couple of advantages: there are already existing video cards (including newer Intel integrated GPUs) that support it, and it would be easier to convince panel factories to gear up for production when they think there might be a wider market (Ultra-HDTV) for their products as well.
No, you don't really need anything above 1080p for TV or movie content unless you have a giant front projection screen. But I would really like higher pixel density on my monitor, so I hope that Ultra-HD becomes mainstream for that reason. (Some video cards – and Intel's newest integrated GPUs – already support this resolution, so that's a good start.)
I would wager that Android on the desktop would suffer from the same problems that other distributions suffer from.. drivers for one. All Android would be is a distro that updates infrequently and has an integrated app store.
The app store is a really big deal... one of the major reasons people don't use desktop Linux is the fact that it doesn't run many of the programs they want to use. There are probably more apps for Android by now than for desktop Linux, and certainly more apps that the average person would be interested in using.
Drivers are a chicken-and-egg problem... a lot of vendors don't bother with drivers for Linux because it's a small market, and it remains a small market in part because driver support sucks. But Android, by solving some of the other barriers to Linux-kernel adoption, could help break that logjam.
*facepalm* It's called linux, Android is based off it.
Android is based on the Linux kernel. And the reason it's been successful (aside from Google's marketing muscle, which is a not inconsiderable factor) is that it blasted away the 20 layers of worthless legacy shit that sits on top of the kernel on desktops, and replaced it with a new stack that (to borrow an Apple term) "just works". Well, at least for most users, most of the time – but that's more than can be said about [spit] desktop Linux.
And that is going to work out just about as well.
Wake me up when they have Photoshop and MS Office.
The death knell for SSL is getting louder
What does this mean? Just that vendors should be using the newer versions of SSL that were rebranded TLS? Or is there another, competing technology that is recommended instead?
Linux on the desktop is fragmented shit with essentially no commercial software available.
Why are you running Win7?
It looks nicer than XP, runs faster thanks to hardware acceleration, supports newer hardware that XP doesn't, has full 64-bit support, and will be supported with security patches until 2020 (XP's support runs out in 2014).
I don't have any disks >2T, I don't have an SSD, and I don't have more than 4G of RAM.
That places you in a minority among computer enthusiasts (i.e. the sort of people who read Slashdot). Even consumer-focused systems are increasingly moving to SSDs, since the hard drive has long been the major bottleneck in system performance during normal use.
Then again ... Microsoft may be doing something smart, avoiding a trap that many large established companies fall in to. Large established companies tend to innovate less and more commonly merely offer what customers ask for and/or incremental improvements. This has historically allowed small innovative companies to come in with radically different things and get a foothold in the market, maybe even disrupt the market.
The problem is that the new innovative companies have already come in and disrupted the market. Tablets and smartphones are now a mature product. Microsoft already lost its first-mover advantage in those fields. Windows 8 is the equivalent of bolting the barn door after the horses have left. All they are doing is angering and alienating their existing customer base (which indeed mostly just wanted incremental improvements) with no guarantee of picking back up the casual users who already jumped ship. They have failed to make a convincing case for why their new product (WinRT) is better than iOS or Android.
Does anyone know if Android, as it now stands, is ready for use on "real" computing devices (desktops and laptops)? In other words, is there any support built in for full multitasking, running apps in resizable and movable windows, a taskbar, and other essentials?
If so, then Android could be a serious contender, especially if ported to x86. If not, then Android still needs work before it's ready for prime time on devices other than phones and tablets.
I think Adobe may serve as a bellwether here. When/if a full version of Photoshop is ported to Android, we will know the platform has arrived. Photoshop used to run on PowerPC Macs, so there shouldn't be too many mandatory x86-isms scattered throughout the code.
There were recent rumors that Microsoft Office might be ported to iOS and Android, but those are apparently not true. Had Microsoft been broken up into an apps division and an OS division in the first antitrust case, as it should have been, I'll be they would have already taken that plunge.
that's what you deserve for running XP on your POS system in 2012.
First of all, XP is still reasonably secure if you keep it up-to-date with patches (which will still be available until mid-2014).
Secondly, it doesn't matter what OS the POS terminal was running here; it sounds like the PIN pads themselves (which probably use a small embedded controller) were the targets of the hack.
Simberg is best known for a fabricated "Reuters" article allegedly from 1945 which, unbelievably, was taken seriously and cited by both Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Basically, it was a lame satire about the Iraqi resistance which (falsely) claimed that similar things had happened in Germany after WWII.
Microsoft announced that Office will be available for iOS and Android in March 2013.
If this is true, then someone, somewhere in Microsoft is starting to contemplate the possibility that Windows may not be the OS of the future.
Why do we have to have the one brand that rules them all?
There are already several good brands of Android tablets on the market. Competition among brands is going quite well, and isn't the problem. The question is why anyone would want a third tablet OS. If you care about openness you go with Android; if you want the most apps and smoothest UI, you go with iOS. I don't see where WinRT fits in here.
The Surface Pro is a different story – I can see that appealing to businesses who want a tablet with decent touch support combined with legacy compatibility. But Windows on ARM looks to be dead on arrival.
This is disappointing, but not surprising. Microsoft knows that most experienced Windows users don't want any part of Windows 8. But they are convinced that Windows 8 is a vital part of their business strategy going forward. So they are doing whatever they can to bribe, force, or coerce users to switch to Windows 8. They don't want Windows 7 to become the new XP, even though they profited handsomely for many years from XP licenses. The power user/business desktop just isn't cool enough for Steve Ballmer, Steven Sinofsky, and the other myopic decision-makers at MS these days.
Is that limitation legally enforceable? If you buy the product off the shelf (as opposed to as part of a bulk contract), then you bought it. Aside from the standard limitations of copyright law (no redistributing binaries), where does MS get the authorization to further limit what you can do with your purchase? If this was permitted, you'd see it in other fields ("Business model" cars that cost three times as much as "consumer" cars).
If you're complaining that the RT version of windows only runs certain apps... well ya. It is a different chipset. You expect differently?
For my part, I don't have a problem with the lack of binary compatibility (which, as noted, stems from the use of different hardware). My problem is with the closed nature of the system: you can't sideload Metro applications (everything must go through the MS App Store), and no one except Microsoft is allowed to write desktop applications at all.
How is it not compression? It reduces the data size being transferred and is recoverable on the other end.
No, it slightly increases the data size being transferred, thus allowing it to be recoverable on the other end if there are minor losses.
Here's an example of how it might work. Say you have a packet that holds 1024 bytes of payload data, plus a few extra for overhead. (Probably not realistic, but this is just to lay out the principles involved.) Now, you could send all 1024 bytes as straight data, but then if even 1 bit is wrong, the whole packet must be re-sent, adding latency. Instead, you send (say) only 896 bytes of actual data, and 128 bytes of recovery data. You break up the data into 64-byte blocks. Thus you have 14 blocks of actual data. The other 2 blocks consist of recovery data, generated by some sort of mathematical equation too complicated to describe here (and which frankly I don't understand myself). Here's the trick: on the receiving end, any 14 of the 16 blocks is enough to recover the whole 896-byte original datagram. Doesn't matter which 2 blocks are bad, as long as no more than 2 are bad, you can recover the whole thing.
This could be useful in an environment where packet loss is very high. A similar method is currently used when transmitting large binary files on Usenet, since many Usenet servers do not have 100% propagation and/or retention.
With coded TCP, blocks of packets are clumped together and then transformed into algebraic equations (PDF) that describe the packets. If part of the message is lost, the receiver can solve the equation to derive the missing data.
It's been a while since I read the paper on exactly how it works, but isn't this basically the same principle as the par2 file recovery slices that have been used for Usenet binaries for quite some time?
The new Trinity, and now these FX Procs, are perfect for "the 99%," that is to say for what 99% of people do with their machines: surf the web, check email, maybe do some photo editing or piecing together home movies.
If you're building a "good enough" system for a non-technical user, why in the world would you even consider a Vishera FX CPU? It's expensive, power-hungry, and has a high TDP. And it doesn't even have integrated graphics, so you'd have to add the expense of a discrete graphics card.
For an inexperienced user who doesn't need much processing power, a Bobcat board will get the job done for cheap, and if that isn't quite good enough, the Pentium G630T is very competitively priced and (with its 35W TDP) very efficient. For enthusiasts, especially gamers, the Sandy/Ivy Bridge "K" series CPUs offer better performance, better efficiency, and more overclocking headroom, for only a little more cash. (In fact, if you have a Micro Center in your area, you can score an i5-2500K for $160, or an i5-3570K for $190.)
What's the intended audience for Vishera – people who do a lot of x264 encoding and don't want to step up to a server CPU or a Sandy Bridge-E? I'm having a hard time seeing a substantial audience for this thing.
AMD FX-8350 Review: Does Piledriver Fix Bulldozer's Flaws?
No. It still guzzles power like crazy compared to Sandy/Ivy Bridge, and its single-threaded performance still sucks royally. (And that's still very important since many, many programs cannot and will not ever support full multithreading.)
The 3-year-old doesn't have 15+ years of muscle memory on doing things the old Windows desktop way.
People who start out using OSX seem to like it. I once had to troubleshoot a system using OSX and wanted to throw it through the window – everything was just wrong compared to what I was used to.
Yes, in time, you could learn to do things differently – but unless there's a good reason, why should I? And if Microsoft is going to throw everything topsy-turvy, take away the reasons why I use their OS, then why should my next OS choice be theirs? If I'm getting screwed up anyway, why wouldn't I take the chance to screw them back by jumping ship?