The article says that smartphones and tablets are not personal computers. If you consider the "PC" as only in the mold of a beige box with a display and keyboard/mouse tethered to it, then yes smartphones and tablets are not personal computers. However, I disagree. A personal computer is a general purpose computer intended for use by one person. How is a smartphone or tablet not a personal computer? In fact, a smartphone or tablet is, in some ways, more a personal computer than the beige box "PC" because it has more of a one-on-one interaction with the user.
Yeah, a smartphone surely is a "personal computer" but not a "PC". The term PC (or "Personal Computer") has a very specific meaning.
Almost all of these discussions boil down to a confusion about a description ("a personal computer") and a name for a very specific kind of personal computer ("a PC").
Not completely, but very much as with starch in vegetables there's a natural limit to how much you can eat of it. Compared to "food products" (or beverages!) there's actually not much sugar in fruits.
This study proves that further calorie restriction doesn't extend the lifespan compared to an already healthy diet. *Both* though extend the lifespan compared to eating enough to become obese.
I'm just saying this because there'll be enough people who will take this as a prove that over-eating is fine. It isn't.
By the way, a diet consisting of all the fruits, vegetables and meat you can eat is totally fine. It's very hard to become obese when you avoid sugars, starch and other carbohydrates. Sadly, almost everything ready-made you can buy is full to the brim of these.
I don't know if you knew this or not but it's actually illegal. Oh and by the way, no, getting high to make yourself feel better about all your problems and pretending that it makes them go away is not healthy at any usage frequency.
It's not illegal where I live.
But I agree that "getting high to make yourself feel better about all your problems and pretending that it makes them go away is not healthy at any usage frequency".
Just that there're lots of people who don't do this to make problems go away at all. It's basically a harmless bit of fun and relaxing to wind off after a day of work. What's wrong with that? It's the same with having a bit of wine or beer or whatever in the evening.
if you have nothing better to do in life than sit around and inhale a drug to "get high" and have psychodelic hallucinations then you're probably not destined for greatness
Just that nobody calls those users "stoners" who aren't stoned all day long but only enjoy a reefer now and then to relax.
It's like calling everyone a drunkard who drinks a glas of wine now and then.
So can someone explain what makes this text editor so popular? Is it features, feel, performance, configurability? A careful balance of all of these?
How does it compare to some of Linux' standard GUI text editors? Say gEdit, kate, geany?
Well, it's a bit of a modern looking, even somewhat stylish, but limited reinvention of Emacs. It has lots of useful features, about a million shortcuts and you can easily write simple extensions in any language you like (you can feed the selected text, current line etc. to snippets of sh, php, perl, tcl, python, ruby or whatever you want and then do something with what your script returns). And bind that to shortcuts. It also comes already with lots of useful things and modes for a bunch of languages. And it still manages to look and feel quite minimalistic.
I would have been totally happy with the current Textmate just cared for. There are lots of things you could improve it in without totally rewriting it.
If you use more than one programming language using one IDE often isn't really an option. And then you're maybe editing other text files anyway. A good editor *is* a useful thing to have.
Just last week I read the UK has to "ask permission" before they can rollout rural broadband expansion.
These things are heavily regulated in the EU. Seems a pretty good way of dealing with this, since broadband (and this is *real* broadband) seems to be much cheaper and competitive in the EU than in the US. I'm paying 20 Euros a month for 50 Gbit with unlimited traffic and a flat landline and I can choose between half a dozen suppliers. What about you?
Even U.S. states do not need to do that. They just do it.
You surly meant to say "they just don't", I guess.
that without something else that allows everyone to easily store, sync and backup their data "owning" your data is a mostly meaningless feature.
What we need is some kind of peer-to-peer cloud and syncing *protocol*, with distributed storage. Back in the good old days email and Usenet offered something like that.
But just requiring people to run their own servers will never work. Because 99% of people just lack the knowledge, motivation and time to implement and use anything like that. Not seeing this problem is idiotic.
We're apes using tools. Using (and making) tools is to us as flying is to birds. Of course you'd need to be an idiot to allow yourself being exploited by your employer.
Apart from that this must be a bit US-specific. There's a certain Protestant work ethic that isn't there in this way in most other places. My employer has my email and my mobile phone number, and he knows he can call me at any time when there is an emergency, but this happens maybe once a year. I'm indeed very happy that the internet and a smartphone (or whatever) allows me then to act from where I am. Much better than going there actually. Especially when I'm on vacation. And he knows very well that he won't get out more of me if he'd start to pester me daily or so. Working 24/7? For someone else? For what kind of money? I really can't believe it.
Then use something like the keychain in OS X, which encrypts the passwords. You can't even look at them without typing your account password.
If something like this would be part of every OS (with a nice UI of course, and browser integration and sync over all your devices) nobody would need any external SSO. Which are a bad idea anyway, not least because you can be tracked over all sites you're using it on.
One of these reasons would be that a micro-USB plug is in no way mechanically able to hold a docked device reliably. It also offers just data and power, no video, no audio.
But I totally agree that Apple moving from one proprietary but well supported connector to another proprietary but not yet supported connector seems to overstretch it a bit.
I really would like some sane standard for docking connectors (and I don't think micro-USB works here at all). But nobody seems to care very much, except Apple (and of course Apple has its very own reasons to do that, no doubt).
Interestingly, the July Wired has an article about Eugene Kaspersky pushing for and ITU takeover of the internet and an end to anonymity.
It's not paranoid if it's reality.
It's not a theory if it's documented.
Sometimes I think an complete end to anonymity and having total transparency instead would be an option. If someone abuses this, you look up his location and go sort it out with him.
Of course it wouldn't work this way because people of power who want to abuse this would still be able to hide. We would need a kind of communism in which everyone has the same power and access to the same data, with no exceptions. Wouldn't work that good probably.
Still, thinking that you actually can be truly anonymous without *huge* effort is wishful thinking. You're basically hiding successfully from your peers only. Following the trail at least to whoever pays for the net access you're using is trivial if you can get your hands at the data. The data is there anyway. It's just that only *them* can use it. What's good about that either?
I have long thought that Google should actually *add* something useful by requiring a real name. Like giving out free S/MIME certificates for these users. This way you could have encrypted email and authenticated identity. You know, sometimes not being anonymous and even being able that it *is* you who's talking is useful.
Google just requiring real names and not helping you to prove it is just worthless. It takes away the freedom to use an assumed name without adding the feature of authentication.
Mention that that is for the low storage, low capability mongoloid version. The high end one of north of $800. That's getting close to ultrabook territory. The x86 surface could easily dominate up there. I certainly know that it's the first "tablet" I actually would want.
You will get also only a low storage, low capability mongoloid version of the Surface Pro for your $1000 or so. The high end one with an SSD large enough to actually install some of your old Windows software, with enough RAM to run them, and 3G will be well north of that again.
I agree - My boss was quite excited when he heard about the X86 tablets - Being able to run AutoCAD, MasterCAM and the like on a (reasonable) portable device would be awesome; especially if it was fanless(and thus not prone to sucking up dust in the machine shop environment). Especially if you can simply drop it in a dock and continue work on a larger screen and keyboard.
Run that and it will drain its battery in two hours. And I'm pretty sure it will have a fan anyway. And if you're using desktop apps on such a high resolution small screen (which may or may not scale somewhat gracefully to all these DPI) you'll be holding the included stylus a lot.
As others have said, this is just the bad old Windows Tablet PC.
Useful to take photos of documents. A tablet gets used as a replacement for lots of paper stuff and the ability to "scan in" paper and have it on the tablet is nice to have. Using your smartphone for that and transferring the photos is just not the same, especially if you're handling the tablet anyway.
If you are already paying $900 for a media consumption device that lacks the capability of running heavy-weight apps, you might as well pay a hundred bucks more and get an ultrabook or an x86 tablet that can do everything and will give you a viable laptop replacement alternative.
You're forgetting here that for this you also will just get the very basic version of your Intel tablet. Running "everything Windows" on a tablet with low RAM and a small SSD (and even 64GB would be small here) isn't a viable laptop replacement alternative. It's a Netbook 2.0. And still an expensive one.
HP's track record with tablets is not all that impressive, but this is a big blow to Windows 8
Quite the opposite. Window RT is a monumentally stupid idea. HP not supporting it is nothing but good. The level of consumer confusion it will create is disastrous. "Why does this work on your tablet and not mine" why does my tablet not have an arm, or need an arm?
If microsoft wants to gradually trend the market towards having split arm and x86 business at the same time they can do it themselves, no one in their right mind should be producing windows arm anything.
WinRT is there because MS knows just too well that the Intel tablet will cost $1000, run four hours on a charge and comes with a stylus to peck at buttons in old Windows software running on a high-res 11" screen. They need to grow some Metro apps, they need to stop the gap until Intel will deliver something more power-efficient. And until then they sell a cheaper, lighter, longer-running ARM tablet, too. Of course this one has no apps at all, but "You can just buy the Intel version." -- "It's too expensive" -- "So buy the ARM version." -- "But it has no apps!!!" -- "What about the Intel version then?"
I bet that at MS they were developing the ARM and the Intel version side by side and couldn't decide which of both to push. Each of them had something they needed and lacked something else they also needed. So they just come with both now.
HP probably knows (or fears) that the ARM version will be dropped in a couple of years anyway. They also think that the Intel version will be the safer bet. It's a PC after all and are they selling PCs or not?
Innovation does not mean buying out new startups with promising technology.
It means investing in people, technology, and software, building towards a hoped-for future.
Neither Apple nor MicroSoft have done much innovating in the past 25 years. All they've done is fine tune, repackage, and buy startups that were promising or a threat.
"Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of better and, as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself. Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something different (Lat. innovare: "to change") rather than doing the same thing better." (Wikipedia)
The fact is that Windows became "good enough" for most users years ago, and everything since then has been either incremental improvements or actual degradation. There hasn't been any major positive "paradigm shift" on the desktop and there won't be. Some users will find that they don't need a full-fledged PC and will transition to tablets, but many, perhaps a majority, still need the power and/or flexibility that only a complete desktop OS can offer. This is Microsoft's niche. They need to focus on it and stop chasing phantoms.
The problem is that globally this just isn't true. Very much like in many countries cell phones were there before some sane coverage with landlines, there are huge populations and even businesses who will just go straight into smartphones and tablets without bothering with PCs.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says that smartphones and tablets are not personal computers. If you consider the "PC" as only in the mold of a beige box with a display and keyboard/mouse tethered to it, then yes smartphones and tablets are not personal computers. However, I disagree. A personal computer is a general purpose computer intended for use by one person. How is a smartphone or tablet not a personal computer? In fact, a smartphone or tablet is, in some ways, more a personal computer than the beige box "PC" because it has more of a one-on-one interaction with the user.
Yeah, a smartphone surely is a "personal computer" but not a "PC". The term PC (or "Personal Computer") has a very specific meaning.
Almost all of these discussions boil down to a confusion about a description ("a personal computer") and a name for a very specific kind of personal computer ("a PC").
Why is this so hard to understand?
ITT we avoid sugars by eating fruits? /sarcasm ;)
Not completely, but very much as with starch in vegetables there's a natural limit to how much you can eat of it. Compared to "food products" (or beverages!) there's actually not much sugar in fruits.
This study proves that further calorie restriction doesn't extend the lifespan compared to an already healthy diet. *Both* though extend the lifespan compared to eating enough to become obese.
I'm just saying this because there'll be enough people who will take this as a prove that over-eating is fine. It isn't.
By the way, a diet consisting of all the fruits, vegetables and meat you can eat is totally fine. It's very hard to become obese when you avoid sugars, starch and other carbohydrates. Sadly, almost everything ready-made you can buy is full to the brim of these.
I mean, really.
Bombing is done much better with cruise missiles or ballistic missiles.
For spying there are satellites or drones (if you need to get close quickly).
I'm pretty sure that we *won't* see a hypersonic bomber for quite a while, if ever.
I don't know if you knew this or not but it's actually illegal. Oh and by the way, no, getting high to make yourself feel better about all your problems and pretending that it makes them go away is not healthy at any usage frequency.
It's not illegal where I live.
But I agree that "getting high to make yourself feel better about all your problems and pretending that it makes them go away is not healthy at any usage frequency".
Just that there're lots of people who don't do this to make problems go away at all. It's basically a harmless bit of fun and relaxing to wind off after a day of work. What's wrong with that? It's the same with having a bit of wine or beer or whatever in the evening.
they are as dumb and dense as rocks
if you have nothing better to do in life than sit around and inhale a drug to "get high" and have psychodelic hallucinations then you're probably not destined for greatness
Just that nobody calls those users "stoners" who aren't stoned all day long but only enjoy a reefer now and then to relax.
It's like calling everyone a drunkard who drinks a glas of wine now and then.
You surely meant to say "50 Mbit", I guess.
Yes. God. I must have been drunk.
So can someone explain what makes this text editor so popular? Is it features, feel, performance, configurability? A careful balance of all of these?
How does it compare to some of Linux' standard GUI text editors? Say gEdit, kate, geany?
Well, it's a bit of a modern looking, even somewhat stylish, but limited reinvention of Emacs. It has lots of useful features, about a million shortcuts and you can easily write simple extensions in any language you like (you can feed the selected text, current line etc. to snippets of sh, php, perl, tcl, python, ruby or whatever you want and then do something with what your script returns). And bind that to shortcuts. It also comes already with lots of useful things and modes for a bunch of languages. And it still manages to look and feel quite minimalistic.
I would have been totally happy with the current Textmate just cared for. There are lots of things you could improve it in without totally rewriting it.
If you use more than one programming language using one IDE often isn't really an option. And then you're maybe editing other text files anyway. A good editor *is* a useful thing to have.
These things are heavily regulated in the EU. Seems a pretty good way of dealing with this, since broadband (and this is *real* broadband) seems to be much cheaper and competitive in the EU than in the US. I'm paying 20 Euros a month for 50 Gbit with unlimited traffic and a flat landline and I can choose between half a dozen suppliers. What about you?
You surly meant to say "they just don't", I guess.
that without something else that allows everyone to easily store, sync and backup their data "owning" your data is a mostly meaningless feature.
What we need is some kind of peer-to-peer cloud and syncing *protocol*, with distributed storage. Back in the good old days email and Usenet offered something like that.
But just requiring people to run their own servers will never work. Because 99% of people just lack the knowledge, motivation and time to implement and use anything like that. Not seeing this problem is idiotic.
You missed Otherland.
We're apes using tools. Using (and making) tools is to us as flying is to birds. Of course you'd need to be an idiot to allow yourself being exploited by your employer.
Apart from that this must be a bit US-specific. There's a certain Protestant work ethic that isn't there in this way in most other places. My employer has my email and my mobile phone number, and he knows he can call me at any time when there is an emergency, but this happens maybe once a year. I'm indeed very happy that the internet and a smartphone (or whatever) allows me then to act from where I am. Much better than going there actually. Especially when I'm on vacation. And he knows very well that he won't get out more of me if he'd start to pester me daily or so. Working 24/7? For someone else? For what kind of money? I really can't believe it.
Then use something like the keychain in OS X, which encrypts the passwords. You can't even look at them without typing your account password.
If something like this would be part of every OS (with a nice UI of course, and browser integration and sync over all your devices) nobody would need any external SSO. Which are a bad idea anyway, not least because you can be tracked over all sites you're using it on.
One of these reasons would be that a micro-USB plug is in no way mechanically able to hold a docked device reliably. It also offers just data and power, no video, no audio.
But I totally agree that Apple moving from one proprietary but well supported connector to another proprietary but not yet supported connector seems to overstretch it a bit.
I really would like some sane standard for docking connectors (and I don't think micro-USB works here at all). But nobody seems to care very much, except Apple (and of course Apple has its very own reasons to do that, no doubt).
Interestingly, the July Wired has an article about Eugene Kaspersky pushing for and ITU takeover of the internet and an end to anonymity.
It's not paranoid if it's reality.
It's not a theory if it's documented.
Sometimes I think an complete end to anonymity and having total transparency instead would be an option. If someone abuses this, you look up his location and go sort it out with him.
Of course it wouldn't work this way because people of power who want to abuse this would still be able to hide. We would need a kind of communism in which everyone has the same power and access to the same data, with no exceptions. Wouldn't work that good probably.
Still, thinking that you actually can be truly anonymous without *huge* effort is wishful thinking. You're basically hiding successfully from your peers only. Following the trail at least to whoever pays for the net access you're using is trivial if you can get your hands at the data. The data is there anyway. It's just that only *them* can use it. What's good about that either?
I have long thought that Google should actually *add* something useful by requiring a real name. Like giving out free S/MIME certificates for these users. This way you could have encrypted email and authenticated identity. You know, sometimes not being anonymous and even being able that it *is* you who's talking is useful.
Google just requiring real names and not helping you to prove it is just worthless. It takes away the freedom to use an assumed name without adding the feature of authentication.
Mention that that is for the low storage, low capability mongoloid version. The high end one of north of $800. That's getting close to ultrabook territory. The x86 surface could easily dominate up there. I certainly know that it's the first "tablet" I actually would want.
You will get also only a low storage, low capability mongoloid version of the Surface Pro for your $1000 or so. The high end one with an SSD large enough to actually install some of your old Windows software, with enough RAM to run them, and 3G will be well north of that again.
I agree - My boss was quite excited when he heard about the X86 tablets - Being able to run AutoCAD, MasterCAM and the like on a (reasonable) portable device would be awesome; especially if it was fanless(and thus not prone to sucking up dust in the machine shop environment). Especially if you can simply drop it in a dock and continue work on a larger screen and keyboard.
Run that and it will drain its battery in two hours. And I'm pretty sure it will have a fan anyway. And if you're using desktop apps on such a high resolution small screen (which may or may not scale somewhat gracefully to all these DPI) you'll be holding the included stylus a lot.
As others have said, this is just the bad old Windows Tablet PC.
Useful to take photos of documents. A tablet gets used as a replacement for lots of paper stuff and the ability to "scan in" paper and have it on the tablet is nice to have. Using your smartphone for that and transferring the photos is just not the same, especially if you're handling the tablet anyway.
If you are already paying $900 for a media consumption device that lacks the capability of running heavy-weight apps, you might as well pay a hundred bucks more and get an ultrabook or an x86 tablet that can do everything and will give you a viable laptop replacement alternative.
You're forgetting here that for this you also will just get the very basic version of your Intel tablet. Running "everything Windows" on a tablet with low RAM and a small SSD (and even 64GB would be small here) isn't a viable laptop replacement alternative. It's a Netbook 2.0. And still an expensive one.
HP's track record with tablets is not all that impressive, but this is a big blow to Windows 8
Quite the opposite. Window RT is a monumentally stupid idea. HP not supporting it is nothing but good. The level of consumer confusion it will create is disastrous. "Why does this work on your tablet and not mine" why does my tablet not have an arm, or need an arm?
If microsoft wants to gradually trend the market towards having split arm and x86 business at the same time they can do it themselves, no one in their right mind should be producing windows arm anything.
WinRT is there because MS knows just too well that the Intel tablet will cost $1000, run four hours on a charge and comes with a stylus to peck at buttons in old Windows software running on a high-res 11" screen. They need to grow some Metro apps, they need to stop the gap until Intel will deliver something more power-efficient. And until then they sell a cheaper, lighter, longer-running ARM tablet, too. Of course this one has no apps at all, but "You can just buy the Intel version." -- "It's too expensive" -- "So buy the ARM version." -- "But it has no apps!!!" -- "What about the Intel version then?"
I bet that at MS they were developing the ARM and the Intel version side by side and couldn't decide which of both to push. Each of them had something they needed and lacked something else they also needed. So they just come with both now.
HP probably knows (or fears) that the ARM version will be dropped in a couple of years anyway. They also think that the Intel version will be the safer bet. It's a PC after all and are they selling PCs or not?
This is true for the kind of business environment that grew with PCs.
Innovation does not mean buying out new startups with promising technology.
It means investing in people, technology, and software, building towards a hoped-for future.
Neither Apple nor MicroSoft have done much innovating in the past 25 years. All they've done is fine tune, repackage, and buy startups that were promising or a threat.
"Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of better and, as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself. Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something different (Lat. innovare: "to change") rather than doing the same thing better." (Wikipedia)
The fact is that Windows became "good enough" for most users years ago, and everything since then has been either incremental improvements or actual degradation. There hasn't been any major positive "paradigm shift" on the desktop and there won't be. Some users will find that they don't need a full-fledged PC and will transition to tablets, but many, perhaps a majority, still need the power and/or flexibility that only a complete desktop OS can offer. This is Microsoft's niche. They need to focus on it and stop chasing phantoms.
The problem is that globally this just isn't true. Very much like in many countries cell phones were there before some sane coverage with landlines, there are huge populations and even businesses who will just go straight into smartphones and tablets without bothering with PCs.