Was it expensive to maintain this functionality? It seems like the.doc format shouldn't be changing much these days, making it fairly cheap to keep around. Was the difficulty that Google is adding a bunch of features that aren't supported by those formats (doesn't seem likely?). Did they have to pay a licensing fee to Microsoft to use them? There must be a reason to remove them, simply deleting them because they're old doesn't make much sense, especially if people are still using them.
I don't think there's a license fee. If there was, MS would have tried to go after the open-source implementations at some point in the past. In fact, I believe that a couple years ago, the European Union required MS to release documentation on their legacy binary Office formats to the public.
What this is about, I suspect, is QA costs. Having these export formats means that every time substantial changes are made, the legacy export features must be tested. And they have to be tested with a substantial variety of documents to make sure nothing breaks, if Google wants to provide a solid experience. (Businesses would be very unhappy if they exported a PPT and the slides were all messed up because, say, one particular type of vector image wasn't properly ported back to legacy mode.) So Google can't just leave it in, since it might break at any time in the future, and as long as it stays in, it will suck up time and effort that could be spent on more important things. They decided that with everything from Office 2000 on up supporting the XML formats, it was time to pull the plug on legacy export. (Legacy import, AFAIK, should continue unaffected.)
We used it at work because so many of our customers could read what we created. By requiring the strange.XML.ZIP format from Microsoft that isn't widely supported, we, like most people, will have to switch to another product if we want other people to be able to open our documents.
Are you or your customers still running Office 97?
Every version of MS Office from 2000 onward supports the new XML formats if the Compatibility Pack is installed. And if you've been interacting with anyone who uses Office 2007 or above, you will probably already have been receiving documents in these formats, since that is what newer versions of Office default to when you save.
As noted in the original article: "Microsoft offers a free Compatibility Pack for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. If you have this pack, youâ(TM)ll be able to you open, edit, and save files using the.xxxX file formats in newer versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint."
In other words, even if you are sticking with an old version of Office because you hate the Ribbon (or love Clippy), you can still have interoperability with the documents downloaded from Google Docs.
As far as I know, importing the old formats will still be permitted. (At least that's what the documentation says.) It's just exporting that is being removed. And at this point, given the fact that everything from Office 2000 on up supports XML, there's really no good reason for anyone to be creating more documents in the legacy Office 97-2003 binary formats. Making these crappy formats read-only probably saves Google on QA, and helps hasten their well-deserved demise.
What we need is a better standard than SVG for static vector images.
In what ways does SVG fall short? It's a widely supported open standard, which does pretty much everything you need for 2D vector graphics. It can even be tweaked by hand, since it's XML-based. (I've done a couple of simple SVGs entirely in Notepad.)
Well, and significantly improved tools for producing them.
Adobe Illustrator has supported both import and export of SVG files for some time. And while Inkscape is far from perfect, it's a workable free solution for most non-professional users. Are there other, better vector editing tools that don't allow the creation of SVGs?
I think it's crazy that Windows still does not support vector icons (SVG or a similar format). Instead, Windows icon files contain about a half dozen different sizes of raster images (each at multiple color depths!), maxing out at 256x256, and then scales these bitmaps as needed if there isn't an exact match.
256x256 is good enough for icons even on high-DPI displays, but this is still an incredibly clumsy and inelegant way of doing things. I can understand why you'd want a custom 16x16 icon because at that small size, scaling down a vector image usually won't work, and you need a hand-drawn substitute. But there is no good reason why two different bitmaps should be needed to render the same icon at 48x48 and 256x256. A single SVG could handle both quite nicely, and could handle even higher resolutions than that if needed.
One of the arguments to leave XP behind is that it can't work at all beyond 100 DPI or the apps will break. I assumed Windows 8 Modern UI took care of this? This issue alone made me weary of a macbook as 200 DPI will not run so great in bootcamp with Windows with most of the apps all misrendered.
Windows 7 does DPI scaling pretty well. There are a handful of misbehaved apps that break, but unless you're unlucky enough to regularly use one of these, you'll be fine. The usual stuff will work fine.
I don't know what happened with Windows 8 Metro. According to their blog, it was supposed to scale based on the screen resolution. But Metro has been such a clusterf*** that nothing would surprise me at this point.
That's the catch here, we've designed for a single pixel to take up a certain fraction of your personal field of view, suddenly higher density displays come along, to which we initially ask, why, was there something wrong with the old pixel densities?
Yes, there was. The existing low-density displays require ugly (and often patented) hacks like hinting and subpixel rendering to display fonts at normal point sizes. When the pixel density is increased enough, this all becomes unnecessary. And it looks a lot better when it's done right. Have you ever tried using the new iPad? To me, it was a revelation: with a web page or PDF fully zoomed out, the letters were still incredibly sharp and clear, with none of the usual "cloudiness" that results from standard anti-aliasing techniques.
ClearType on Windows is very nice, but it's still just a hack compared to real high-DPI display. I am looking forward to cheap 4K TVs in smaller sizes (32" or so) so that I can use one of them as a desktop monitor. We've been held back by repurposed 1080p HDTV panels for too long.
Note: I haven't actually checked this font for quality hinting yet, and the comment about "in this world of retina displays" worries me, because Apple just punts on hinting.
Hinting is a hack, required because of the inherent problems with rasterizing vector fonts at low resolutions. When you do this, something needs to give, since there simply aren't enough pixels to represent the image with good fidelity; it's basically trying to cram 20 pounds of information in a 10-pound bag. Increasing the DPI enough makes hinting unnecessary.
He may or may not be a troll, but I work for a HUGE company, and they dumped all the Crack-Berrys and went all-in on windows phones. I was not surprised that they did that, as we are microsoft to the core
The problem is that Windows Phones actually aren't any better at integrating with real Windows infrastructure than iPhones, Android devices, or BlackBerries are. If Microsoft had added real domain/GPO features to Windows Phones, they could have made a good business case. But as things are, everyone has ActiveSync (support for Exchange servers) so this is no advantage for WP.
Atari computers, back in the early 1980s, showed us the problem of rolling your own hardware, operating system, and software.
They didn't. Atari 8-bit computers used CPUs and interface chips from MOS Technologies (which was actually owned by their competitor Commodore), though they did have some ICs like the POKEY sound chip custom-fabbed. The BASIC interpreter was licensed from Microsoft, just like on Apple and Commodore computers, though all of these companies made their own customizations.
But many of the supposed map flaws I have seen are NOT legitimate. At least half of the supposed "errors" on the Apple map fail sites are people not understanding that Apple Maps renders differently, or not understanding a 2D projection onto 3D terrain because they have not seen it.
Translation: "You're holding it wrong!"
People expect things to work the way they did before. By and large, they like the way things were before. Apple is now doing things in a different, less understandable fashion, so from a user experience perspective it is broken.
You can only get so close without massive crowdsourcing of corrections.
"Crowdsourcing of corrections" = using your customers as beta testers.
That's why this whole situation is news, and why Apple has received so much pushback. Apple's long-time slogan has been that "it just works". It's supposed to be the other companies who treat consumers as beta testers like this. Apple's customers are now being exposed to Apple's internal politics and development cycle for no good reason that they can see.
ianal, but I was under the impression that calif was a right-to-work state.
"Right-to-work" is a conservative euphemism for union-busting laws (Taft-Hartley state option). It has nothing to do with an actual "right to work" as most people would interpret the term. California does have a ban on most non-compete agreements, but that's a completely unrelated legal issue.
Giving MS the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they are hashing the passwords in their database at all, I have to wonder if this might mean that there is some kind of weird legacy algorithm at work here. After all, Hotmail is an old Microsoft service, dating from the time period (roughly 1995-2005) when Microsoft was totally allergic to anything resembling industry standards. Perhaps they are using an old NTLM-style hash that only takes inputs up to 16 characters, because they never got around to updating the back end.
From the article: "During my reporting for Fast Company's feature on design at Microsoft, which was part of our October design issue, I spoke with a number of designers, Apple veterans, and industry insiders hostile towards Apple's approach to software design."
As long as consumers like it, why should anyone care what "designers, Apple veterans, and industry insiders" think?
From the article: "It's also why many industry leaders are excited for Windows 8. For the design of its new operating system, Microsoft took a surprisingly refreshing approach, distancing itself from skeuomorphism while emphasizing a flat user interface that's minimalist to the core. Sure, real-life visual metaphors still exist in the UI--an envelope to represent the mail app, a camera to denote the photo app--but the icons are without embellishments: no bevel, no 3-D flourishes, no glossiness and no drop shadow. It's Microsoft's stripped-down UI that many find appealing--a welcome alternative to Apple's approach to software design."
And yet in the real world, virtually everyone loves iOS, while Windows 8 is shaping up to be an epic flop. If these "insiders" are so out of touch with reality, maybe they need to be replaced. Were these, by any chance, people who got fired by Apple for not getting it? If that's the kind of people Microsoft is hiring now, I guess Windows 8 starts to become at least understandable, if not forgivable.
In this article, linked from the original article posted, we finally get the real answer as to why some UI designers don't like "skeuomorphism":
"But aside from aesthetic reaons, it is hard to see how these designs will ever evolve beyond derivative representations. Will they just change color and increase their visual fidelity?"
And there you have it: designers don't like it because it makes them redundant. It's really that simple. The idea that there might actually be an optimal UI, and that once you get there you might not need to pull the rug out from under users every year, is anathema to the "UI designer" crowd.
I would not build any new system that didn't have a SSD. This applies to both desktops and laptops, but the advantages on a laptop are even greater. Mechanical HDDs for laptops are slower than on desktops (due to the requirements of form factor, power consumption, noise, heat, etc.) so there is a bigger relative jump in performance than there would be on a desktop. And there's also the durability issue! SSDs are immune to vibration and shock; laptop mechanical HDDs, though they are better than they used to be, can still be blown out of commission by enough rough handling. For people who routinely carry their laptops from place to place, this is perhaps the biggest improvement of all.
Many users will be fine with a 128GB SSD and no secondary drive. You only really need more than that if you're storing a ton of videos or music, or a SHIT-ton of high-resolution photos, or are installing a bunch of A-list games or high-end CAD software (but people like that are already buying or building multi-thousand dollar desktop workstations).
Perhaps you don't realize, but the physical keys are roughly the same size as the on-screen ones.
Being able to feel the keys (and press down on only the one you want) is a huge difference. Maybe when touch screens get haptic feedback, they'll catch up. But until then, on devices smaller than tablet size, a physical keyboard is the only good option for me.
choice of the Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, Nokia Lumia 920, or the upcoming iPhone 5
None of these phones have real keyboards. To those of us with large fingers, that's a deal-breaker when selecting a phone; on-screen keyboards are simply unusable with a screen that small. As much as it sucks in other ways, the BlackBerry at least did offer a hardware keyboard. Yahoo should offer at least one Android phone with an actual keyboard (maybe the Samsung Epic 4G?)
You are entitled to free speech, but in most civilised countries, there is a line drawn between free speech, and incitement.
In the United States, the relevant case law is Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). Under this interpretation of the First Amendment, speech can only be banned if it is intended to incite "imminent lawless action" and is likely to do so. The classic case would be the leader of an angry mob telling them to attack or kill someone. Does the Innocence of Muslims video qualify? Almost certainly not. While Nakoula may well have intended it to rile up the Islamic community in the US and overseas, it did not pose an imminent threat of lawless action. The reactions of hostile third parties cannot be used as a justification to prohibit free speech; as the Supreme Court put it in Brown v. Louisiana (1966), there is "no heckler's veto".
The innocence of muslims has crossed that line by a very long distance indeed, and imho, it's on a par with Westboro Baptist Church turning up to protest at a dead soldiers funeral. [...] The people who created the video should not be able to hide behind the claim of 'free speech'. It isn't free speech, it's hate speech plain and simple.
The WBC protests are also protected free speech in the United States under the First Amendment. You mentioned that you are posting from the UK, so one thing that may be confusing you is that in the US, there is no such legal category as "hate speech". It's all protected by the Constitution. The idea is that if you allowed the government to decide that certain speech was "hate speech" and suppress it, there would be a slippery slope that would inevitably lead to the repression of open and free political discourse.
If you believe that the gold defines value rather than the paper currency...
Why would you believe something that stupid? Gold is just another commodity. Gold prices in 1999-2001 were about $275 an ounce. The current spot price fluctuates, but when I just checked it was about $1770. Does that mean that the price of everything else has gone up in the past decade by a factor of 6.4x? Of course not, don't be silly. Even things that grow faster than inflation (tuition, medical care) haven't gone up in price that fast. Nowhere close.
But, frankly, if you're still on XP, the only lazy around is you. Stop bitching about people not bothering to support your antique setup
To the average user, a computer is an appliance: why should they have to replace it when it's not broken? And, frankly, this position has quite a bit going for it. Why should users have to pay more money just because MS decided they couldn't be bothered to keep their browser up to date in XP?
Is there any source for this statement besides The Inquirer? They're basically a tech tabloid and have gotten a lot of things wrong (or overly sensationalized) in the past. I checked Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, both of which covered Intel's presentations this week. No mention of this. I did a Google search for "clover trail" "Windows 8 chip" and found ONLY the Inquirer article and other articles and blog posts directly quoting and linking to it. No reliable third-party tech sites saying the same thing.
This doesn't make sense in terms of Intel's overall philosophy. They have always been good about Linux support for nearly everything else – they don't want to get themselves tied in too closely with Microsoft, for fear that this would reduce their leverage.
I think this story is bullshit. A generous interpretation would be that the reporter heard that the chip ran Windows 8 and that Linux *currently* did not have the necessary support for the "new P-states and C-states" in Clover Trail, and misinterpreted that as saying that only Windows 8 will ever be officially supported. A less generous interpretation is that the Inquirer knowingly made up this crap to get more page hits. In any case, I expect Intel to make their actual position clear soon enough, now that this story seems to have gone viral.
You can buy a PS3 for less and still have a very good gaming experience.
In one question: is the WiiU a better gaming console than a PS3?
Nintendo hardware has seldom been leading-edge at any time, going back to the original NES. They succeed because of their software library. It's really that simple, and I see no reason it won't continue with the Wii U. As long as the rest of the industry continues to crank out cookie-cutter FPSes and MMORPGs, Nintendo will continue to have a profitable niche as the novice-friendly, family-friendly console maker.
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Was it expensive to maintain this functionality? It seems like the .doc format shouldn't be changing much these days, making it fairly cheap to keep around. Was the difficulty that Google is adding a bunch of features that aren't supported by those formats (doesn't seem likely?). Did they have to pay a licensing fee to Microsoft to use them? There must be a reason to remove them, simply deleting them because they're old doesn't make much sense, especially if people are still using them.
I don't think there's a license fee. If there was, MS would have tried to go after the open-source implementations at some point in the past. In fact, I believe that a couple years ago, the European Union required MS to release documentation on their legacy binary Office formats to the public.
What this is about, I suspect, is QA costs. Having these export formats means that every time substantial changes are made, the legacy export features must be tested. And they have to be tested with a substantial variety of documents to make sure nothing breaks, if Google wants to provide a solid experience. (Businesses would be very unhappy if they exported a PPT and the slides were all messed up because, say, one particular type of vector image wasn't properly ported back to legacy mode.) So Google can't just leave it in, since it might break at any time in the future, and as long as it stays in, it will suck up time and effort that could be spent on more important things. They decided that with everything from Office 2000 on up supporting the XML formats, it was time to pull the plug on legacy export. (Legacy import, AFAIK, should continue unaffected.)
We used it at work because so many of our customers could read what we created. By requiring the strange .XML.ZIP format from Microsoft that isn't widely supported, we, like most people, will have to switch to another product if we want other people to be able to open our documents.
Are you or your customers still running Office 97?
Every version of MS Office from 2000 onward supports the new XML formats if the Compatibility Pack is installed. And if you've been interacting with anyone who uses Office 2007 or above, you will probably already have been receiving documents in these formats, since that is what newer versions of Office default to when you save.
As noted in the original article: "Microsoft offers a free Compatibility Pack for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. If you have this pack, youâ(TM)ll be able to you open, edit, and save files using the .xxxX file formats in newer versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint."
In other words, even if you are sticking with an old version of Office because you hate the Ribbon (or love Clippy), you can still have interoperability with the documents downloaded from Google Docs.
As far as I know, importing the old formats will still be permitted. (At least that's what the documentation says.) It's just exporting that is being removed. And at this point, given the fact that everything from Office 2000 on up supports XML, there's really no good reason for anyone to be creating more documents in the legacy Office 97-2003 binary formats. Making these crappy formats read-only probably saves Google on QA, and helps hasten their well-deserved demise.
What we need is a better standard than SVG for static vector images.
In what ways does SVG fall short? It's a widely supported open standard, which does pretty much everything you need for 2D vector graphics. It can even be tweaked by hand, since it's XML-based. (I've done a couple of simple SVGs entirely in Notepad.)
Well, and significantly improved tools for producing them.
Adobe Illustrator has supported both import and export of SVG files for some time. And while Inkscape is far from perfect, it's a workable free solution for most non-professional users. Are there other, better vector editing tools that don't allow the creation of SVGs?
A 9" tablet with a 1920x1280 screen and SD card storage for $269? That's definitely worth considering... if they can get CyanogenMod running on it.
I think it's crazy that Windows still does not support vector icons (SVG or a similar format). Instead, Windows icon files contain about a half dozen different sizes of raster images (each at multiple color depths!), maxing out at 256x256, and then scales these bitmaps as needed if there isn't an exact match.
256x256 is good enough for icons even on high-DPI displays, but this is still an incredibly clumsy and inelegant way of doing things. I can understand why you'd want a custom 16x16 icon because at that small size, scaling down a vector image usually won't work, and you need a hand-drawn substitute. But there is no good reason why two different bitmaps should be needed to render the same icon at 48x48 and 256x256. A single SVG could handle both quite nicely, and could handle even higher resolutions than that if needed.
One of the arguments to leave XP behind is that it can't work at all beyond 100 DPI or the apps will break. I assumed Windows 8 Modern UI took care of this? This issue alone made me weary of a macbook as 200 DPI will not run so great in bootcamp with Windows with most of the apps all misrendered.
Windows 7 does DPI scaling pretty well. There are a handful of misbehaved apps that break, but unless you're unlucky enough to regularly use one of these, you'll be fine. The usual stuff will work fine.
I don't know what happened with Windows 8 Metro. According to their blog, it was supposed to scale based on the screen resolution. But Metro has been such a clusterf*** that nothing would surprise me at this point.
That's the catch here, we've designed for a single pixel to take up a certain fraction of your personal field of view, suddenly higher density displays come along, to which we initially ask, why, was there something wrong with the old pixel densities?
Yes, there was. The existing low-density displays require ugly (and often patented) hacks like hinting and subpixel rendering to display fonts at normal point sizes. When the pixel density is increased enough, this all becomes unnecessary. And it looks a lot better when it's done right. Have you ever tried using the new iPad? To me, it was a revelation: with a web page or PDF fully zoomed out, the letters were still incredibly sharp and clear, with none of the usual "cloudiness" that results from standard anti-aliasing techniques.
ClearType on Windows is very nice, but it's still just a hack compared to real high-DPI display. I am looking forward to cheap 4K TVs in smaller sizes (32" or so) so that I can use one of them as a desktop monitor. We've been held back by repurposed 1080p HDTV panels for too long.
I always found 7-segment displays to be the easiest type of speedometer to read. No fancy font needed.
Note: I haven't actually checked this font for quality hinting yet, and the comment about "in this world of retina displays" worries me, because Apple just punts on hinting.
Hinting is a hack, required because of the inherent problems with rasterizing vector fonts at low resolutions. When you do this, something needs to give, since there simply aren't enough pixels to represent the image with good fidelity; it's basically trying to cram 20 pounds of information in a 10-pound bag. Increasing the DPI enough makes hinting unnecessary.
He may or may not be a troll, but I work for a HUGE company, and they dumped all the Crack-Berrys and went all-in on windows phones. I was not surprised that they did that, as we are microsoft to the core
The problem is that Windows Phones actually aren't any better at integrating with real Windows infrastructure than iPhones, Android devices, or BlackBerries are. If Microsoft had added real domain/GPO features to Windows Phones, they could have made a good business case. But as things are, everyone has ActiveSync (support for Exchange servers) so this is no advantage for WP.
Atari computers, back in the early 1980s, showed us the problem of rolling your own hardware, operating system, and software.
They didn't. Atari 8-bit computers used CPUs and interface chips from MOS Technologies (which was actually owned by their competitor Commodore), though they did have some ICs like the POKEY sound chip custom-fabbed. The BASIC interpreter was licensed from Microsoft, just like on Apple and Commodore computers, though all of these companies made their own customizations.
But many of the supposed map flaws I have seen are NOT legitimate. At least half of the supposed "errors" on the Apple map fail sites are people not understanding that Apple Maps renders differently, or not understanding a 2D projection onto 3D terrain because they have not seen it.
Translation: "You're holding it wrong!"
People expect things to work the way they did before. By and large, they like the way things were before. Apple is now doing things in a different, less understandable fashion, so from a user experience perspective it is broken.
You can only get so close without massive crowdsourcing of corrections.
"Crowdsourcing of corrections" = using your customers as beta testers.
That's why this whole situation is news, and why Apple has received so much pushback. Apple's long-time slogan has been that "it just works". It's supposed to be the other companies who treat consumers as beta testers like this. Apple's customers are now being exposed to Apple's internal politics and development cycle for no good reason that they can see.
ianal, but I was under the impression that calif was a right-to-work state.
"Right-to-work" is a conservative euphemism for union-busting laws (Taft-Hartley state option). It has nothing to do with an actual "right to work" as most people would interpret the term. California does have a ban on most non-compete agreements, but that's a completely unrelated legal issue.
Giving MS the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they are hashing the passwords in their database at all, I have to wonder if this might mean that there is some kind of weird legacy algorithm at work here. After all, Hotmail is an old Microsoft service, dating from the time period (roughly 1995-2005) when Microsoft was totally allergic to anything resembling industry standards. Perhaps they are using an old NTLM-style hash that only takes inputs up to 16 characters, because they never got around to updating the back end.
From the article: "During my reporting for Fast Company's feature on design at Microsoft, which was part of our October design issue, I spoke with a number of designers, Apple veterans, and industry insiders hostile towards Apple's approach to software design."
As long as consumers like it, why should anyone care what "designers, Apple veterans, and industry insiders" think?
From the article: "It's also why many industry leaders are excited for Windows 8. For the design of its new operating system, Microsoft took a surprisingly refreshing approach, distancing itself from skeuomorphism while emphasizing a flat user interface that's minimalist to the core. Sure, real-life visual metaphors still exist in the UI--an envelope to represent the mail app, a camera to denote the photo app--but the icons are without embellishments: no bevel, no 3-D flourishes, no glossiness and no drop shadow. It's Microsoft's stripped-down UI that many find appealing--a welcome alternative to Apple's approach to software design."
And yet in the real world, virtually everyone loves iOS, while Windows 8 is shaping up to be an epic flop. If these "insiders" are so out of touch with reality, maybe they need to be replaced. Were these, by any chance, people who got fired by Apple for not getting it? If that's the kind of people Microsoft is hiring now, I guess Windows 8 starts to become at least understandable, if not forgivable.
In this article, linked from the original article posted, we finally get the real answer as to why some UI designers don't like "skeuomorphism":
"But aside from aesthetic reaons, it is hard to see how these designs will ever evolve beyond derivative representations. Will they just change color and increase their visual fidelity?"
And there you have it: designers don't like it because it makes them redundant. It's really that simple. The idea that there might actually be an optimal UI, and that once you get there you might not need to pull the rug out from under users every year, is anathema to the "UI designer" crowd.
I would not build any new system that didn't have a SSD. This applies to both desktops and laptops, but the advantages on a laptop are even greater. Mechanical HDDs for laptops are slower than on desktops (due to the requirements of form factor, power consumption, noise, heat, etc.) so there is a bigger relative jump in performance than there would be on a desktop. And there's also the durability issue! SSDs are immune to vibration and shock; laptop mechanical HDDs, though they are better than they used to be, can still be blown out of commission by enough rough handling. For people who routinely carry their laptops from place to place, this is perhaps the biggest improvement of all.
Many users will be fine with a 128GB SSD and no secondary drive. You only really need more than that if you're storing a ton of videos or music, or a SHIT-ton of high-resolution photos, or are installing a bunch of A-list games or high-end CAD software (but people like that are already buying or building multi-thousand dollar desktop workstations).
Perhaps you don't realize, but the physical keys are roughly the same size as the on-screen ones.
Being able to feel the keys (and press down on only the one you want) is a huge difference. Maybe when touch screens get haptic feedback, they'll catch up. But until then, on devices smaller than tablet size, a physical keyboard is the only good option for me.
choice of the Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, Nokia Lumia 920, or the upcoming iPhone 5
None of these phones have real keyboards. To those of us with large fingers, that's a deal-breaker when selecting a phone; on-screen keyboards are simply unusable with a screen that small. As much as it sucks in other ways, the BlackBerry at least did offer a hardware keyboard. Yahoo should offer at least one Android phone with an actual keyboard (maybe the Samsung Epic 4G?)
You are entitled to free speech, but in most civilised countries, there is a line drawn between free speech, and incitement.
In the United States, the relevant case law is Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). Under this interpretation of the First Amendment, speech can only be banned if it is intended to incite "imminent lawless action" and is likely to do so. The classic case would be the leader of an angry mob telling them to attack or kill someone. Does the Innocence of Muslims video qualify? Almost certainly not. While Nakoula may well have intended it to rile up the Islamic community in the US and overseas, it did not pose an imminent threat of lawless action. The reactions of hostile third parties cannot be used as a justification to prohibit free speech; as the Supreme Court put it in Brown v. Louisiana (1966), there is "no heckler's veto".
The innocence of muslims has crossed that line by a very long distance indeed, and imho, it's on a par with Westboro Baptist Church turning up to protest at a dead soldiers funeral. [...] The people who created the video should not be able to hide behind the claim of 'free speech'. It isn't free speech, it's hate speech plain and simple.
The WBC protests are also protected free speech in the United States under the First Amendment. You mentioned that you are posting from the UK, so one thing that may be confusing you is that in the US, there is no such legal category as "hate speech". It's all protected by the Constitution. The idea is that if you allowed the government to decide that certain speech was "hate speech" and suppress it, there would be a slippery slope that would inevitably lead to the repression of open and free political discourse.
If you believe that the gold defines value rather than the paper currency...
Why would you believe something that stupid? Gold is just another commodity. Gold prices in 1999-2001 were about $275 an ounce. The current spot price fluctuates, but when I just checked it was about $1770. Does that mean that the price of everything else has gone up in the past decade by a factor of 6.4x? Of course not, don't be silly. Even things that grow faster than inflation (tuition, medical care) haven't gone up in price that fast. Nowhere close.
But, frankly, if you're still on XP, the only lazy around is you. Stop bitching about people not bothering to support your antique setup
To the average user, a computer is an appliance: why should they have to replace it when it's not broken? And, frankly, this position has quite a bit going for it. Why should users have to pay more money just because MS decided they couldn't be bothered to keep their browser up to date in XP?
Is there any source for this statement besides The Inquirer? They're basically a tech tabloid and have gotten a lot of things wrong (or overly sensationalized) in the past. I checked Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, both of which covered Intel's presentations this week. No mention of this. I did a Google search for "clover trail" "Windows 8 chip" and found ONLY the Inquirer article and other articles and blog posts directly quoting and linking to it. No reliable third-party tech sites saying the same thing.
This doesn't make sense in terms of Intel's overall philosophy. They have always been good about Linux support for nearly everything else – they don't want to get themselves tied in too closely with Microsoft, for fear that this would reduce their leverage.
I think this story is bullshit. A generous interpretation would be that the reporter heard that the chip ran Windows 8 and that Linux *currently* did not have the necessary support for the "new P-states and C-states" in Clover Trail, and misinterpreted that as saying that only Windows 8 will ever be officially supported. A less generous interpretation is that the Inquirer knowingly made up this crap to get more page hits. In any case, I expect Intel to make their actual position clear soon enough, now that this story seems to have gone viral.
You can buy a PS3 for less and still have a very good gaming experience. In one question: is the WiiU a better gaming console than a PS3?
Nintendo hardware has seldom been leading-edge at any time, going back to the original NES. They succeed because of their software library. It's really that simple, and I see no reason it won't continue with the Wii U. As long as the rest of the industry continues to crank out cookie-cutter FPSes and MMORPGs, Nintendo will continue to have a profitable niche as the novice-friendly, family-friendly console maker.