At least some of those enthusiastic early reviewers quickly fell out of love with their free samples, after using them in anger instead of on a timetable.
Remember as well the astonishing hatred for Google and to a lesser extent Apple throughout the tech reviewer|journalist community. A lot of them were desperate for ANY alternative phone OS to back at Googles expense. Think carefully though, how many who's opinion you respect were more than lukewarm about WP7?
I find the whole Metro look fugly and the tiles (those things everyone else calls widgets and does with more variety) incredibly wasteful of homescreen space. I's a small screen and I want high information density, not a fscking monster tile telling me I have 5 email waiting, my Xperia does that in a single launch icon.
BTW I also find the very similar look in parts of Android 4 ugly, I don't need to hate Microsoft to hate Metro. Unlike WP7/8 I can theme away those bits, along with all the crapware Sony installed on my phone.
What you're suggesting is there's a massive market just waiting to use full strength (except it won't be) Office on a tablet. In my reality there may be a large market for viewing Office documents, a smaller need for fairly limited edits that will suit cloud computing and for substantial data entry a tablet is a terrible input device. Those that want to work in Office will just buy a laptop with a real keyboard as normal.
It doesn't matter how much you're saving in licence fees if you don't need the licence at all and for the tablet market very few buyers need this Office licence. Also try not to pretend Win8 RT is a $200 OS. Frankly it's so cut down they'd be lucky to justify $50 and in this market $50 is too high a tax on the hardware.
I'm forced to assume they set it so ludicrously high to make the inevitable OEM 'loyalty' discount impossible to resist. I can only hope they've misjudged this badly, that OEMs will decide to avoid Win8 rather than agree whatever restrictive terms (dropping Android?) come with that discount.
There's nothing wrong with it as a training weapon, I've done 12/13th century stuff and you learn with wooden weapons, then and now.
But for many swords how you use them is seriously dependent on their mass, from use of momentum against your enemy and his weapon to the simple fact that you can't move the blade as fast and expect to keep fighting long. For some periods swordplay is a full contact 'sport' where knocking the other guy down is part of the art and the weapon supplies part of the force.
While I'll agree that speed difference less of a problem in single combat than pitched battle the speeds are still going to be wrong. That's realism I don't feel like abandoning, which is my main problem with this whole scheme. There's a serious danger here of their own uncanny valley, where it superficially feels realistic enough to regularly remind you it's false because the little things aren't quite right. Though I'd say the lack of controller halting force feedback might make that a purely theoretical problem.
Really? Some of us have done it with real (if blunted) steel weapons. I love my bastard sword. Once you have you won't want to waste time on a 'realistic' virtual version with some lightweight controller - or bit of wood or cane. Maybe a rapier would work but nothing weightier.
TBH this isn't an input problem, just get a Wii controller and treat it like a sword. It's the simulation after you've read it. The next step of making it feel real is beyond most gamer budgets, they should just buy a weapon and join a recreation society.
True but for non techie users just working which of the various Linux install packages to download will stop them dead. Steam should remove that roadstop and maybe we'll stop needing to hack configurations or guess which dependencies the installer didn't deal with.
I gave up trying to install games for my wife under Kununtu, it's been easier running many under Wine than getting native builds to work.
...and often the conversation is to organise meetings of groups of people. Groups that may first be simultaneously available at the time you arrange. That's true even in offices. I'll agree that automatically picking email for every conversation in a workplace is insane though.
Phone calls and personal meetings are not always interchangeable with email, they serve different, if overlapping purposes.
My email has been 'a conversation' since the I first used it in the early 90's. Maybe with some of the more crippled web based services people are now suffering with it's not so obvious. Stuff like Gmail feels like a step back from the threaded clients I've used for all that time, too much missing or poorly implemented.
When people ask whether email is going away I'm completely dumbfounded. It ain't broke and IMHO works better than the alternatives where absolute, instant response isn't needed. Mostly it's not noticeably slower anyway. When I desperately need a little more speed IM does a good imitation of a very poorly featured email exchange.
Entertaining isn't it. Not long since the their competitors were bitching about Googles own and paid results not being conspicuously enough marked. Google changed that and it didn't magically drive business to the complainers. Now the same leeches have told the EU that marking them conspicuously gives Google an unfair advantage!
After wading through 400 pages of self serving complaints from Microsoft fronts and ineffective businesses it seems the EU aren't really convinced they need to leap into action. 2 vague 'it's unfair' claims they've basically asked Google to justify, discredit or promise not to do, 2 contractual limitations they need to remove that probably won't noticeably affect their business.
The complainants still can't accept that they have to fight for market share by being good at what they do, that they're failing all by themselves.
Microsoft were done for breaking the terms of their licence. That's why Google have made it clear they don't have a licence or believe they need one. If they win on that point then all Oracles complaints about fragmenting Java also come to nought, since its only the licence that forbids it.
Doing it this way also allows Googles defences to be ruled on. Not sure it will set a precedent but winning on any of them should discourage future lawsuits. Win on all of them and even crazy Larry E might think twice about an appeal.
The only downside is they can't really win on both copyrightability and being innocent of copying unless the judge feels unusually energetic. I can live with that and I believe the court really wants to avoid setting a hard precedent with different unforeseen consequences.
The tokeniser uses some ROM space, RAM use is temporary and not at runtime - so irrelevant. The ROM space is why the original ZX80 BASIC used direct token input, it had a tiny ROM. It remained in there on the ZX81 then the Spectrum because Sinclair never allowed enough time to rewrite the interpreter rather than any need to save space. Which sadly meant BASIC on it was pitifully slow and didn't improve till the 128.
Given the poor quality of the Spectrum keyboards (and the ZX ones before it) it was probably an advantage anyway. Just drove me crazy and one of the reasons I refused to program any Sinclair machines.
On my SyncMaster 2343BW enabling Dynamic Contrast drives me crazy with the brightness changes and I've yet to see it improve an image in any way. On a windowed display it's got no chance of doing the right thing anyway. Does anyone actually leave this enabled?
After several years wasting my time I finally gave up trying to get Google to correct the many errors on my local map. Businesses labeled anything from a street to a mile from their real location, roads names sometimes completely fictional and equally misplaced and copious scatterings of other errors. I live in a large city in England, no excuses there, just plain lack of care.
I'd like to believe this might push them to try harder, to actually solicit and act on feedback. The truth is Google seem incapable of finishing anything they offer the public and accuracy is something only needed for tracking advertising clicks. Given how often Maps has failed me seems like an ideal time to follow Wikipedia. Not running Maps on my phone is a bonus all by itself, with its autoloading instance at powerup and multiple services designed to restart each other if you try to unload the app.
The problem is every other phone already has a version of integrated contacts&media. Sometimes many versions to choose from.
Maybe it really is a killer app, it's not WP7s killer app and I don't believe for a moment WP7s version is enough better to make it a sales driver. Having tried at least 6 different approaches on Android, for me its a counter productive idea that buries the gold in the cruft. Having contacts directly launch into all the possible channels does work for me, but I don't need WP7 for that.
"Oracle has expensive lawyers too, and clearly they think they can win."
Very expensive lawyers that happen to be the same very expensive lawyers that failed so catastrophically in SCO vs 'the world'. Expensive lawyers recycling the same delusional copyright theory they invented (and I chose that word deliberately) for SCO.... and when I say 'recycling' I really mean 'exactly the same'.
Invented while thinking they had a direct share of the bazillions it would generate. Hope they're giving Larry a good discount. Not because they're cheating him with recycled work but because that work was systematically shredded long ago, only waiting on a judge to rubber stamp it.
The only viable claims Oracle might have had were patents. That's not worked out so well.
VS may well be a good IDE, it's a fscking awful text editor and at some point in any non-trivial project there's a metric tonne of typing involved. So I always find myself dropping out of it to get the heavy lifting done in JED (other programmers editors are available;)
You missed the 'Amazon' option (as did Nokia), combine 1&2. Take Android and fork their own version, just like Amazon did.
Last year Nokia stated that Googles insistence on bundling Google Maps as the default if they wanted any of the apps package played a large part in killing the Android option. However Nokia was well positioned to replace all but the Market with their own services and that would be less risky than completely going alone.
Worse still, shipping with G Maps doesn't stop users using a Nokia map service anyway, or any other service they want to supply. I have an Orange phone here that openly puts it's own mapping app on the home screen to catch unwary users. My Xperia tries so very hard to entice me to use Sony servers, while running fairly stock Android.
The reality is few users would have voluntarily switched to Nokia versions but they'd still have a business. Instead they decided selling their homegrown maps service to Microsoft was more important than actually selling hardware. Or more likely Microsoft plant Elop simply vetoed any non Microsoft future.
Remember, this is all about forcing their way into the tablet market, by leveraging their desktop monopoly. That monopoly is safe, manufacturers will supply PCs with Win8 when Microsoft tells them to whatever happens, the majority will continue dumbly consuming media on their laptops without even noticing the OS is now dumbed down. And in Microsofts dreams they'll pick a tablet running the same disneyfied UI as their desktop or laptop.
So yes, Microsoft can afford to screw over the desktop. That's the nature of a monopoly and most of their users really don't need a fully usable PC anyway.
Will it succeed in buying tablet share? IMHO too little, too late. All the tablet OSes are so dumbed down there's no compelling reason to pick one over another. If the choice is using the same OS as your PC or your phone there's no obvious winner there, I doubt Microsoft will drive many choices this way. If WP7 had a decent market share maybe that would be different, like Win8 it was too late to market to succeed.
In the long term, if Metro actually succeeds it can only make competition like Chrome look viable to users on the desktop. I can see a future where Win9 has to differentiate itself from Chrome and Android on the desktop by reverting back to classic windows. But by then the mass market will find that an alien concept. Microsoft was going to lose control sometime, this abuse of monopoly just brings it a little earlier.
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Smart plants don't just cut&paste from the handly cribsheet of promotional 1 liners, they rephrase so it's not so obviously a paided post.
At least some of those enthusiastic early reviewers quickly fell out of love with their free samples, after using them in anger instead of on a timetable.
Remember as well the astonishing hatred for Google and to a lesser extent Apple throughout the tech reviewer|journalist community. A lot of them were desperate for ANY alternative phone OS to back at Googles expense. Think carefully though, how many who's opinion you respect were more than lukewarm about WP7?
I find the whole Metro look fugly and the tiles (those things everyone else calls widgets and does with more variety) incredibly wasteful of homescreen space. I's a small screen and I want high information density, not a fscking monster tile telling me I have 5 email waiting, my Xperia does that in a single launch icon.
BTW I also find the very similar look in parts of Android 4 ugly, I don't need to hate Microsoft to hate Metro. Unlike WP7/8 I can theme away those bits, along with all the crapware Sony installed on my phone.
What you're suggesting is there's a massive market just waiting to use full strength (except it won't be) Office on a tablet. In my reality there may be a large market for viewing Office documents, a smaller need for fairly limited edits that will suit cloud computing and for substantial data entry a tablet is a terrible input device. Those that want to work in Office will just buy a laptop with a real keyboard as normal.
It doesn't matter how much you're saving in licence fees if you don't need the licence at all and for the tablet market very few buyers need this Office licence. Also try not to pretend Win8 RT is a $200 OS. Frankly it's so cut down they'd be lucky to justify $50 and in this market $50 is too high a tax on the hardware.
I'm forced to assume they set it so ludicrously high to make the inevitable OEM 'loyalty' discount impossible to resist. I can only hope they've misjudged this badly, that OEMs will decide to avoid Win8 rather than agree whatever restrictive terms (dropping Android?) come with that discount.
There's nothing wrong with it as a training weapon, I've done 12/13th century stuff and you learn with wooden weapons, then and now.
But for many swords how you use them is seriously dependent on their mass, from use of momentum against your enemy and his weapon to the simple fact that you can't move the blade as fast and expect to keep fighting long. For some periods swordplay is a full contact 'sport' where knocking the other guy down is part of the art and the weapon supplies part of the force.
While I'll agree that speed difference less of a problem in single combat than pitched battle the speeds are still going to be wrong. That's realism I don't feel like abandoning, which is my main problem with this whole scheme. There's a serious danger here of their own uncanny valley, where it superficially feels realistic enough to regularly remind you it's false because the little things aren't quite right. Though I'd say the lack of controller halting force feedback might make that a purely theoretical problem.
Really? Some of us have done it with real (if blunted) steel weapons. I love my bastard sword. Once you have you won't want to waste time on a 'realistic' virtual version with some lightweight controller - or bit of wood or cane. Maybe a rapier would work but nothing weightier.
TBH this isn't an input problem, just get a Wii controller and treat it like a sword. It's the simulation after you've read it. The next step of making it feel real is beyond most gamer budgets, they should just buy a weapon and join a recreation society.
True but for non techie users just working which of the various Linux install packages to download will stop them dead. Steam should remove that roadstop and maybe we'll stop needing to hack configurations or guess which dependencies the installer didn't deal with.
I gave up trying to install games for my wife under Kununtu, it's been easier running many under Wine than getting native builds to work.
...and often the conversation is to organise meetings of groups of people. Groups that may first be simultaneously available at the time you arrange. That's true even in offices. I'll agree that automatically picking email for every conversation in a workplace is insane though.
Phone calls and personal meetings are not always interchangeable with email, they serve different, if overlapping purposes.
My email has been 'a conversation' since the I first used it in the early 90's. Maybe with some of the more crippled web based services people are now suffering with it's not so obvious. Stuff like Gmail feels like a step back from the threaded clients I've used for all that time, too much missing or poorly implemented.
When people ask whether email is going away I'm completely dumbfounded. It ain't broke and IMHO works better than the alternatives where absolute, instant response isn't needed. Mostly it's not noticeably slower anyway. When I desperately need a little more speed IM does a good imitation of a very poorly featured email exchange.
The 1st Android phone, the HTC G1, had a hard keyboard and trackball. It launched with Android 1.5
Entertaining isn't it. Not long since the their competitors were bitching about Googles own and paid results not being conspicuously enough marked. Google changed that and it didn't magically drive business to the complainers. Now the same leeches have told the EU that marking them conspicuously gives Google an unfair advantage!
After wading through 400 pages of self serving complaints from Microsoft fronts and ineffective businesses it seems the EU aren't really convinced they need to leap into action. 2 vague 'it's unfair' claims they've basically asked Google to justify, discredit or promise not to do, 2 contractual limitations they need to remove that probably won't noticeably affect their business.
The complainants still can't accept that they have to fight for market share by being good at what they do, that they're failing all by themselves.
So what's the point?
Microsoft were done for breaking the terms of their licence. That's why Google have made it clear they don't have a licence or believe they need one. If they win on that point then all Oracles complaints about fragmenting Java also come to nought, since its only the licence that forbids it.
Doing it this way also allows Googles defences to be ruled on. Not sure it will set a precedent but winning on any of them should discourage future lawsuits. Win on all of them and even crazy Larry E might think twice about an appeal.
The only downside is they can't really win on both copyrightability and being innocent of copying unless the judge feels unusually energetic. I can live with that and I believe the court really wants to avoid setting a hard precedent with different unforeseen consequences.
The tokeniser uses some ROM space, RAM use is temporary and not at runtime - so irrelevant. The ROM space is why the original ZX80 BASIC used direct token input, it had a tiny ROM. It remained in there on the ZX81 then the Spectrum because Sinclair never allowed enough time to rewrite the interpreter rather than any need to save space. Which sadly meant BASIC on it was pitifully slow and didn't improve till the 128.
Given the poor quality of the Spectrum keyboards (and the ZX ones before it) it was probably an advantage anyway. Just drove me crazy and one of the reasons I refused to program any Sinclair machines.
On my SyncMaster 2343BW enabling Dynamic Contrast drives me crazy with the brightness changes and I've yet to see it improve an image in any way. On a windowed display it's got no chance of doing the right thing anyway. Does anyone actually leave this enabled?
After several years wasting my time I finally gave up trying to get Google to correct the many errors on my local map. Businesses labeled anything from a street to a mile from their real location, roads names sometimes completely fictional and equally misplaced and copious scatterings of other errors. I live in a large city in England, no excuses there, just plain lack of care.
I'd like to believe this might push them to try harder, to actually solicit and act on feedback. The truth is Google seem incapable of finishing anything they offer the public and accuracy is something only needed for tracking advertising clicks. Given how often Maps has failed me seems like an ideal time to follow Wikipedia. Not running Maps on my phone is a bonus all by itself, with its autoloading instance at powerup and multiple services designed to restart each other if you try to unload the app.
Now Nokia came with product that apparently has a great battery life, and nobody seems to care.
I see a phone with a just above average battery life. Why should I care?
The problem is every other phone already has a version of integrated contacts&media. Sometimes many versions to choose from.
Maybe it really is a killer app, it's not WP7s killer app and I don't believe for a moment WP7s version is enough better to make it a sales driver. Having tried at least 6 different approaches on Android, for me its a counter productive idea that buries the gold in the cruft. Having contacts directly launch into all the possible channels does work for me, but I don't need WP7 for that.
No, Sun got money off Microsoft for violating the terms of their licence to Java.
Android doesn't have Java a licence to violate. That's a large part of why it's not going well for Oracle.
"Oracle has expensive lawyers too, and clearly they think they can win."
Very expensive lawyers that happen to be the same very expensive lawyers that failed so catastrophically in SCO vs 'the world'. Expensive lawyers recycling the same delusional copyright theory they invented (and I chose that word deliberately) for SCO.... and when I say 'recycling' I really mean 'exactly the same'.
Invented while thinking they had a direct share of the bazillions it would generate. Hope they're giving Larry a good discount. Not because they're cheating him with recycled work but because that work was systematically shredded long ago, only waiting on a judge to rubber stamp it.
The only viable claims Oracle might have had were patents. That's not worked out so well.
VS may well be a good IDE, it's a fscking awful text editor and at some point in any non-trivial project there's a metric tonne of typing involved. So I always find myself dropping out of it to get the heavy lifting done in JED (other programmers editors are available ;)
You missed the 'Amazon' option (as did Nokia), combine 1&2. Take Android and fork their own version, just like Amazon did.
Last year Nokia stated that Googles insistence on bundling Google Maps as the default if they wanted any of the apps package played a large part in killing the Android option. However Nokia was well positioned to replace all but the Market with their own services and that would be less risky than completely going alone.
Worse still, shipping with G Maps doesn't stop users using a Nokia map service anyway, or any other service they want to supply. I have an Orange phone here that openly puts it's own mapping app on the home screen to catch unwary users. My Xperia tries so very hard to entice me to use Sony servers, while running fairly stock Android.
The reality is few users would have voluntarily switched to Nokia versions but they'd still have a business. Instead they decided selling their homegrown maps service to Microsoft was more important than actually selling hardware. Or more likely Microsoft plant Elop simply vetoed any non Microsoft future.
Remember, this is all about forcing their way into the tablet market, by leveraging their desktop monopoly. That monopoly is safe, manufacturers will supply PCs with Win8 when Microsoft tells them to whatever happens, the majority will continue dumbly consuming media on their laptops without even noticing the OS is now dumbed down. And in Microsofts dreams they'll pick a tablet running the same disneyfied UI as their desktop or laptop.
So yes, Microsoft can afford to screw over the desktop. That's the nature of a monopoly and most of their users really don't need a fully usable PC anyway.
Will it succeed in buying tablet share? IMHO too little, too late. All the tablet OSes are so dumbed down there's no compelling reason to pick one over another. If the choice is using the same OS as your PC or your phone there's no obvious winner there, I doubt Microsoft will drive many choices this way. If WP7 had a decent market share maybe that would be different, like Win8 it was too late to market to succeed.
In the long term, if Metro actually succeeds it can only make competition like Chrome look viable to users on the desktop. I can see a future where Win9 has to differentiate itself from Chrome and Android on the desktop by reverting back to classic windows. But by then the mass market will find that an alien concept. Microsoft was going to lose control sometime, this abuse of monopoly just brings it a little earlier.