The Model S's range, rated by the EPA at 265 miles with the largest battery, finally fits the American conception of driving.
But at $78,500 before a $7,500 tax rebate that doesn't fit the American concept of pricing.
There are plenty of cars in that price range sold in the US every year -- thousands of them. And that's for the high end one. When you look in the $50k range, the number is huge in the US, especially with minivans cresting at $40k these days.
I really wanted one, but couldn't wait that long.:( Stupid waiting lists...
Hybrid electric cars like the Prius C are $20k new, but that's not exactly what you're asking about, I realize.
The battery is a big factor in the Model S' cost. 85 kilowatts of lithium ion batteries ain't cheap.
The Prius isn't really electric in any sense. Its an Atkinson Cycle car, with a battery and electric motor to make it usable in the real world. There's a reason it can't go highway speeds on electric. That's true of all the hybrids. The Volt is the only non-pure-EV that is really still an EV.
I use PayPal for what I find it convenient for - transfer of small payments. Sometimes I buy something online and pay through PayPal, that's what it is for AFAIC, I don't use it for anything else.
On top of that, it makes a very handy point of abstraction between my credit cards, and shifty or untrustworthy sellers. Unlike my credit card information, PayPal payments leave the transaction details in PayPal's systems, not some fly by night's systems. And (most importantly, in my experience) PayPal makes it trivial to stop and permanently block recurring payments. Normal credit cards can't do that -- once a recurring payment is set up, even if your expiration date or security code changes, they can still keep right on billing. The only way to block it if you have a company (*cough*XMRadio) that keeps billing you no matter how often you cancel is to change your credit card account number. If you're lucky enough to have a shady company like that makes it almost impossible to cancel an account and takes PayPal (*cough*angieslist), its a couple clicks to stop and block the recurring payment permanently.
You are wrong on this point, you do not have to download the whole ISO to verify it. Bittorrent combines all the files to be transfered into one big data chunk and then splits up the chunk into pieces which are individually hashed. The resulting.torrent file ends up recording all the hashes from the individual pieces plus a "master" hash which is the hash of all the individual hashes.
Actually, that's explicitly why I said they needed to compromise the source of the torrent, not one of the seeders. I'm quite aware how bittorrent works.
The only thing stupid here is your entire argument. If the distro box got rooted, they could start seeding child porn ANYWAY. They don't need torrents to do it either, they could just start up Apache serve it up on port 80 over HTTP.
Is this a reading comprehension problem, or a knee-jerk response to a "zomg, someone saying something bad about something I use" nerve?
Because, while you're quite correct that they could be serving child porn via any mechanism they wanted on that rooted server, this isn't about the bad guy, this is about the GP's assertion that he's safe using BitTorrent because he only downloads Linux distributions. And, for the same reason you don't see lawsuits about people downloading pirated porn movies via Usenet (because they aren't sharing them back), from the perspective of the person downloading the Linux distribution, the difference between getting it via HTTP and BitTorrent is *huge*, from a legal standpoint. (The laws are VERY different between possession and distribution... and to address another comment someone made to my reply -- the question of intent is completely irrelevant when it comes to something like child pornography. Your reputation is ruined the moment the accusation is made, and very few people win with the "it wasn't mine" argument... most people plea out to little or no jail time and registering as a sex offender.)
The problem is not Bittorrent. The problem is what you use Bittorent for. I I use Bittorent almost exclusivly for down/uploading Linux iso's so I think I'm pretty safe.
No, for the particular use case this guy (and the GP) are talking about, Bittorrent is, in fact, a dumb solution. The downloading isn't the problem, the sharing back of data you didn't originate is.
And more generically, you're wrong anyway. If someone rooted one of the seeds of your Linux ISO and stuck a bunch of child porn in it, you're guilty of both downloading and distributing child pornography at that point. It doesn't matter what you say you were doing, or that you didn't produce the ISO. And you can't really detect there's a problem until you've already downloaded the whole ISO so you can hash the file. Now, maybe you get your.torrent files from somewhere secure, but people get onto distro servers with some regularity.
So, the GP is absolutely right -- using Bittorrent to download and re-seed anything you didn't explicitly produce yourself is, in fact, unsafe, and doing so with content you know is illegal is just plain stupid.
Let's get to the point where no one can make a phone anymore. That seems to be the only way we'll see the patent system get reformed.
Everyone can make phones just fine. But if you're not contributing technology back to the industry (and, thus, have IP to cross license), you don't get to use it for free.
Apple's not playing by the "rules" -- "rules", wrt patent thickets, that have been the standard operating procedure since the origin of the industrial revolution. We're a country of more than farmers and people supporting farmers precisely because of these IP laws.
If Apple develops real, valuable, useful technology, then there's nothing to sue over. Everyone will cross license and they'll be done with it. Apples IP portfolio, in telecommunications technology, happens to be very weak, so they have to pay up.
Life in prison for growing plants, fuck our legal system.
No, life in prison for knowingly and deliberately breaking the law. The stupidity of the law doesn't change the illegality of breaking it. If you don't like the law, "fuck our legal" system is just a juvenile way of whining about it. If more people dislike the law than like the law, the law will change. If it doesn't, well, your opinion is in the minority and them's the breaks.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Anyone care to explain where, precisely, the above amendment specifies that it only applies to indoor, private property?
They're recording photons that have left your property. If you're concerned about it, take measures to ensure the photons that encode the information you're trying to protect do not leave your property. By, you know, doing your illegal act inside. With the blinds closed.
Now that the SCOTUS has decided your property is now public and thus available to police scrutiny without warrant, is there still anyone stupid enough to think this won't eventually creep past the threshold and into your home?
My thoughts exactly. What's with all of this sensational bullshit on Slashdot lately?
The owner realized the same thing Fox News did -- if you present stories in ways to whip up a fringe zealot audience, you may lose a lot of your audience, but the audience you have comes back a lot and consumes a lot of ads.
It was funny in 1995 when the "protesters" were in front of CompUSA on 35th street in Manhattan. It was cute when they were outside PC Expo in 1996. Started to get kinda sad at the Windows 98 launch and went downhill after that.
Now they're just a sideshow attraction.
Well, at least it gave a lot of people a funny story to laugh about later that day.
I'm shocked... during an earnings call reporting a second quarter of missed earnings estimates, a stock price down 20% in a month, and an overall media reaction to your last two rounds of product updates that can be summed up as "meh", and the CEO decides he needs to talk smack about a competitor product?
I. Can't. Believe. It.
Frankly, I think Cook and company needs focus a little bit more on what they can do well in their products, post-Jobs, and a focus a little less on the competition. As someone who would rather not think about how much portfolio value I'm losing every day because of the post-Jobs stagnation at Apple, I can say shareholders are not happy at the moment.
Why the hell aren't Microsoft sending stack traces of crashes back to developers? Are they so incompetent that they've forgotten how software is developed?
I'm not sure any of the certification processes across the various devices do that. Unhandled crashes in production do get sent back, for example, on Windows Phone applications. Given that even standard windows applications will do that, too, if you're using windows error reporting, I'm sure the modern apps do, too. That said, a stacktrace in a crash report without any context isn't very useful, anyway.
You actually do get pretty good reports back about the certification process and what is failing, but if the failure is a generic "the application crashed", Microsoft isn't your QA department. Its not the job of the application verifiers to figure out how you might be logging, or if you crashed and YOU showed the error, or if it dumped back to the OS as an unhandled error. They're not a free QA outsourcing organization.
religion as one of the most arbitrary labels by which people divide themselves when involved in conflict
He's got it backward here -- it's one of the least arbitrary labels, since it reveals what underlying philosophy and values we stand for. It's similar to wars breaking out between existentialists and determinists, but we've found more interesting ways to encapsulate those philosophies in mythological symbolism.
I suspect his point is that going to war over resources makes sense. Going to war over women makes sense. Going to war because you enjoy it makes sense.
Going to war because of a fantasy your parents taught you before you were old enough to think rationally does not make sense. As of yet, I don't think there have been anything but minor skirmishes over the tooth fairy.
The Xbox 360 had serious manufacturing or design issues. Most people think the reason was that MS launched it like software: Release it even though it had bugs and fix them later.
No, the Xbox 360, for about a year of production, had the exact same problem a ton of consumer electronics had -- a shift to lead free solder lead to some dynamics related to heat and failure that wasn't expected. That happened with DVD players, TVs, and a slew of other hardware at the same time.
Just like every other company at the time, the manufacturers of the 360 figured out how to manage heat and solder components properly to not have surface mount parts come loose.
I'm not calling for Texas Secession yet, but it's tempting some days... and not just for Texas. Washington and New York are too far from most places to understand local needs.
The only people who would mind that are people the rest of us would just as soon see secede, as well.
Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
There are a lot of 'ifs' in there that will determine how viable of an ecosystem MS can make. The Write Once, Run Anywhere ideal, IMO, has too many limitations due to the wide ecosystem to ever be a draw for developers. But you make some good points: Seamless integration between devices can be a big selling point. Can MS get there from here?
Well, to some extent its already there. While they weren't doing it even as much as a month ago, most of the built-in Windows 8 modern apps have recently been updated to use the Microsoft-Account based settings synchronization, so they do tend to keep in sync between computers -- the same way Xbox games stay synced between consoles since they added cloud profiles. Skydrive is supported everywhere, so documents -- by default -- are available everywhere (phone, tablet, laptop). IMO, it was a bad judgment call to not support WP7 apps on Windows RT tablets, but there's already a decent set of "write once run in a few places" examples. WP8 and Windows 8 aren't exactly build-compatible, but its already pretty easy to cross compile 90% of an application between them, the same way you can cross-compile XNA-based WP7 and Xbox360 games. I haven't delved into WP8 at all, but from what I've read the gaming APIs are fairly close (but I don't believe identical) to the APIs on Windows RT and Windows, as well as Xbox, so cross compiling games between the platforms should be getting easier.
If I had to put $20 on it, I'd also bet that the next Xbox runs "windows store" apps -- they're very much functional with something like Kinect for interactions, and SmartGlass applications are already.NET based. There's also already a few games for the 360 that have announced they'll have Windows 8 support and you'll be able to pause/resume between them.
So, the answer is... yes. And, to a big extent, they already are. For some reason Microsoft never chose to advertise all the cross-device and cross-platform capabilities you get with their Live properties.
I saw systems doing separate views using a lenticular lens screen (like you see on 3D advertisements) to show different views to different users back in the mid 90's in a university research lab. They claimed it was new, who knows. I saw it again in the early 2000's, again claimed to be new. I've seen it claimed as new twice in a particular large company's R&D division, and these guys are solving the problem in a clunky way. Maybe their lousy solution is new, but the solution space itself sure isn't.
If it was actually a useful solution, it would've entered production any time in the last 18 years since I first saw it.
Sony's "two people playing on a single monitor" capability in their new monitor for the PS3 is the closest I've seen, but it requires active shutter glasses.
Does anyone really believe that the Surface will end up with any reasonable market share of the tablet market?
That's not really the interesting question. The question is, will Windows 8 modern apps, Windows 8 RT and Windows Phone 8 end up with a reasonable share of the market? Because the combination is what will determine the ecosystem size.
Windows 8 will likely, at some point, end up on 300-500 million PCs, like Windows 7. Windows 8 tablets? Who knows. RT tablets? Really who knows. And as much as I like WP, that's an even longer shot. But if a developer says "I can write my software one, against the WinRT APIs, and it'll run on 300 million PCs, 50 million tablets, and some number of phones", it doesn't really matter if Microsoft sells 5 million or 25 million Surface tablets. Especially when people realize "hey, that application I bought runs on all of these... and my settings and data is on all of my devices...".
There's more to an ecosystem than a single device.
Your comment is horse shit. I am the manager of IT services for a school board and we have had access to windows 8 for some time now. We have installed and tested it. Our comments are the same because we experienced the same issues. That is wonderful that you can use short cuts, many of our teachers do not.
Quite the impressive CV you've got there... If the rest of the faculty share your stunning levels of critical thinking ability, I think I've identified the source of the problem there.
The Kinect Gesture challenge over at Kaggle was a competition where the goal was to match gestures with a specified dictionary of previously-recorded gestures.
The problem isn't the resolution, it's the recognition algorithm.
Its a little bit of both, actually. The problem isn't resolution, from a hardware standpoint -- its the point density on the IR projector and the lens on the IR camera that limits how close you can be to a Kinect and still have any accuracy. Once your depth cues go wonky, gesture recognition becomes much harder.
Gesture recognition, while not trivial, is not intrinsically more complicated than whole body tracking. The way Kinect does it is very clever, knowing basically "where can the body have moved from where it last was" which makes the matching process very efficient computationally. Gestures are the same thing. Your joints can only each move one of a limited set of ways from where it was. Just like handwriting recognition is dramatically easier for computers when they can see the order of strokes, the same is true of gestures.
There are 3yr olds who are adept at linux/apple/andriod. Also MS appear to have finally trimmed some of the fat for a change as W8 has a much smaller footprint than its recent predecessors and is considerably faster its just the cludgy replacement for the start menu that's got everyone pissing!
Its anti-Microsoft hate on Slashdot and bloggers looking for eyeballs. Most people haven't seen or used it yet, and it seems half the people griping about it who claimed to have used it are really just repeating things they saw on a video, and haven't actually gotten hands on it. The funniest are the people who are complaining about the UI being too touch or mouse centric, when the number of hotkeys available to do things in Win8 is far higher than Win7. Its a much easier OS to use from just a keyboard.
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The Model S's range, rated by the EPA at 265 miles with the largest battery, finally fits the American conception of driving.
But at $78,500 before a $7,500 tax rebate that doesn't fit the American concept of pricing.
There are plenty of cars in that price range sold in the US every year -- thousands of them. And that's for the high end one. When you look in the $50k range, the number is huge in the US, especially with minivans cresting at $40k these days.
I really wanted one, but couldn't wait that long. :( Stupid waiting lists ...
Hybrid electric cars like the Prius C are $20k new, but that's not exactly what you're asking about, I realize.
The battery is a big factor in the Model S' cost. 85 kilowatts of lithium ion batteries ain't cheap.
The Prius isn't really electric in any sense. Its an Atkinson Cycle car, with a battery and electric motor to make it usable in the real world. There's a reason it can't go highway speeds on electric. That's true of all the hybrids. The Volt is the only non-pure-EV that is really still an EV.
I use PayPal for what I find it convenient for - transfer of small payments. Sometimes I buy something online and pay through PayPal, that's what it is for AFAIC, I don't use it for anything else.
On top of that, it makes a very handy point of abstraction between my credit cards, and shifty or untrustworthy sellers. Unlike my credit card information, PayPal payments leave the transaction details in PayPal's systems, not some fly by night's systems. And (most importantly, in my experience) PayPal makes it trivial to stop and permanently block recurring payments. Normal credit cards can't do that -- once a recurring payment is set up, even if your expiration date or security code changes, they can still keep right on billing. The only way to block it if you have a company (*cough*XMRadio) that keeps billing you no matter how often you cancel is to change your credit card account number. If you're lucky enough to have a shady company like that makes it almost impossible to cancel an account and takes PayPal (*cough*angieslist), its a couple clicks to stop and block the recurring payment permanently.
That alone is worth using PayPal for.
You are wrong on this point, you do not have to download the whole ISO to verify it. Bittorrent combines all the files to be transfered into one big data chunk and then splits up the chunk into pieces which are individually hashed. The resulting .torrent file ends up recording all the hashes from the individual pieces plus a "master" hash which is the hash of all the individual hashes.
Actually, that's explicitly why I said they needed to compromise the source of the torrent, not one of the seeders. I'm quite aware how bittorrent works.
The only thing stupid here is your entire argument. If the distro box got rooted, they could start seeding child porn ANYWAY. They don't need torrents to do it either, they could just start up Apache serve it up on port 80 over HTTP.
Is this a reading comprehension problem, or a knee-jerk response to a "zomg, someone saying something bad about something I use" nerve?
Because, while you're quite correct that they could be serving child porn via any mechanism they wanted on that rooted server, this isn't about the bad guy, this is about the GP's assertion that he's safe using BitTorrent because he only downloads Linux distributions. And, for the same reason you don't see lawsuits about people downloading pirated porn movies via Usenet (because they aren't sharing them back), from the perspective of the person downloading the Linux distribution, the difference between getting it via HTTP and BitTorrent is *huge*, from a legal standpoint. (The laws are VERY different between possession and distribution... and to address another comment someone made to my reply -- the question of intent is completely irrelevant when it comes to something like child pornography. Your reputation is ruined the moment the accusation is made, and very few people win with the "it wasn't mine" argument... most people plea out to little or no jail time and registering as a sex offender.)
The problem is not Bittorrent. The problem is what you use Bittorent for.
I I use Bittorent almost exclusivly for down/uploading Linux iso's so I think I'm pretty safe.
No, for the particular use case this guy (and the GP) are talking about, Bittorrent is, in fact, a dumb solution. The downloading isn't the problem, the sharing back of data you didn't originate is.
And more generically, you're wrong anyway. If someone rooted one of the seeds of your Linux ISO and stuck a bunch of child porn in it, you're guilty of both downloading and distributing child pornography at that point. It doesn't matter what you say you were doing, or that you didn't produce the ISO. And you can't really detect there's a problem until you've already downloaded the whole ISO so you can hash the file. Now, maybe you get your .torrent files from somewhere secure, but people get onto distro servers with some regularity.
So, the GP is absolutely right -- using Bittorrent to download and re-seed anything you didn't explicitly produce yourself is, in fact, unsafe, and doing so with content you know is illegal is just plain stupid.
8 posts so far, 8 fart jokes. I see space exploration is truly inspiring to Slashdot geeks...
I'd be willing to bet a good number of them have been made at NASA and JPL, too.
Fart jokes are like love -- they're a universal language that binds us all together.
Let's get to the point where no one can make a phone anymore. That seems to be the only way we'll see the patent system get reformed.
Everyone can make phones just fine. But if you're not contributing technology back to the industry (and, thus, have IP to cross license), you don't get to use it for free.
Apple's not playing by the "rules" -- "rules", wrt patent thickets, that have been the standard operating procedure since the origin of the industrial revolution. We're a country of more than farmers and people supporting farmers precisely because of these IP laws.
If Apple develops real, valuable, useful technology, then there's nothing to sue over. Everyone will cross license and they'll be done with it. Apples IP portfolio, in telecommunications technology, happens to be very weak, so they have to pay up.
Life in prison for growing plants, fuck our legal system.
No, life in prison for knowingly and deliberately breaking the law. The stupidity of the law doesn't change the illegality of breaking it. If you don't like the law, "fuck our legal" system is just a juvenile way of whining about it. If more people dislike the law than like the law, the law will change. If it doesn't, well, your opinion is in the minority and them's the breaks.
Anyone care to explain where, precisely, the above amendment specifies that it only applies to indoor, private property?
They're recording photons that have left your property. If you're concerned about it, take measures to ensure the photons that encode the information you're trying to protect do not leave your property. By, you know, doing your illegal act inside. With the blinds closed.
Now that the SCOTUS has decided your property is now public and thus available to police scrutiny without warrant, is there still anyone stupid enough to think this won't eventually creep past the threshold and into your home?
My thoughts exactly. What's with all of this sensational bullshit on Slashdot lately?
The owner realized the same thing Fox News did -- if you present stories in ways to whip up a fringe zealot audience, you may lose a lot of your audience, but the audience you have comes back a lot and consumes a lot of ads.
It was funny in 1995 when the "protesters" were in front of CompUSA on 35th street in Manhattan. It was cute when they were outside PC Expo in 1996. Started to get kinda sad at the Windows 98 launch and went downhill after that.
Now they're just a sideshow attraction.
Well, at least it gave a lot of people a funny story to laugh about later that day.
Huh. If you got in even 2 years ago you bought at about 250 and are now at 611. What's not to be happy about?
The fact that it was 720?
In investing, its not whether you win or lose, its how much you win.
I'm shocked... during an earnings call reporting a second quarter of missed earnings estimates, a stock price down 20% in a month, and an overall media reaction to your last two rounds of product updates that can be summed up as "meh", and the CEO decides he needs to talk smack about a competitor product?
I. Can't. Believe. It.
Frankly, I think Cook and company needs focus a little bit more on what they can do well in their products, post-Jobs, and a focus a little less on the competition. As someone who would rather not think about how much portfolio value I'm losing every day because of the post-Jobs stagnation at Apple, I can say shareholders are not happy at the moment.
Why the hell aren't Microsoft sending stack traces of crashes back to developers? Are they so incompetent that they've forgotten how software is developed?
I'm not sure any of the certification processes across the various devices do that. Unhandled crashes in production do get sent back, for example, on Windows Phone applications. Given that even standard windows applications will do that, too, if you're using windows error reporting, I'm sure the modern apps do, too. That said, a stacktrace in a crash report without any context isn't very useful, anyway.
You actually do get pretty good reports back about the certification process and what is failing, but if the failure is a generic "the application crashed", Microsoft isn't your QA department. Its not the job of the application verifiers to figure out how you might be logging, or if you crashed and YOU showed the error, or if it dumped back to the OS as an unhandled error. They're not a free QA outsourcing organization.
He's got it backward here -- it's one of the least arbitrary labels, since it reveals what underlying philosophy and values we stand for. It's similar to wars breaking out between existentialists and determinists, but we've found more interesting ways to encapsulate those philosophies in mythological symbolism.
I suspect his point is that going to war over resources makes sense. Going to war over women makes sense. Going to war because you enjoy it makes sense.
Going to war because of a fantasy your parents taught you before you were old enough to think rationally does not make sense. As of yet, I don't think there have been anything but minor skirmishes over the tooth fairy.
The Xbox 360 had serious manufacturing or design issues. Most people think the reason was that MS launched it like software: Release it even though it had bugs and fix them later.
No, the Xbox 360, for about a year of production, had the exact same problem a ton of consumer electronics had -- a shift to lead free solder lead to some dynamics related to heat and failure that wasn't expected. That happened with DVD players, TVs, and a slew of other hardware at the same time.
Just like every other company at the time, the manufacturers of the 360 figured out how to manage heat and solder components properly to not have surface mount parts come loose.
I'm not calling for Texas Secession yet, but it's tempting some days... and not just for Texas. Washington and New York are too far from most places to understand local needs.
The only people who would mind that are people the rest of us would just as soon see secede, as well.
Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
There are a lot of 'ifs' in there that will determine how viable of an ecosystem MS can make. The Write Once, Run Anywhere ideal, IMO, has too many limitations due to the wide ecosystem to ever be a draw for developers. But you make some good points: Seamless integration between devices can be a big selling point. Can MS get there from here?
Well, to some extent its already there. While they weren't doing it even as much as a month ago, most of the built-in Windows 8 modern apps have recently been updated to use the Microsoft-Account based settings synchronization, so they do tend to keep in sync between computers -- the same way Xbox games stay synced between consoles since they added cloud profiles. Skydrive is supported everywhere, so documents -- by default -- are available everywhere (phone, tablet, laptop). IMO, it was a bad judgment call to not support WP7 apps on Windows RT tablets, but there's already a decent set of "write once run in a few places" examples. WP8 and Windows 8 aren't exactly build-compatible, but its already pretty easy to cross compile 90% of an application between them, the same way you can cross-compile XNA-based WP7 and Xbox360 games. I haven't delved into WP8 at all, but from what I've read the gaming APIs are fairly close (but I don't believe identical) to the APIs on Windows RT and Windows, as well as Xbox, so cross compiling games between the platforms should be getting easier.
If I had to put $20 on it, I'd also bet that the next Xbox runs "windows store" apps -- they're very much functional with something like Kinect for interactions, and SmartGlass applications are already .NET based. There's also already a few games for the 360 that have announced they'll have Windows 8 support and you'll be able to pause/resume between them.
So, the answer is... yes. And, to a big extent, they already are. For some reason Microsoft never chose to advertise all the cross-device and cross-platform capabilities you get with their Live properties.
I saw systems doing separate views using a lenticular lens screen (like you see on 3D advertisements) to show different views to different users back in the mid 90's in a university research lab. They claimed it was new, who knows. I saw it again in the early 2000's, again claimed to be new. I've seen it claimed as new twice in a particular large company's R&D division, and these guys are solving the problem in a clunky way. Maybe their lousy solution is new, but the solution space itself sure isn't.
If it was actually a useful solution, it would've entered production any time in the last 18 years since I first saw it.
Sony's "two people playing on a single monitor" capability in their new monitor for the PS3 is the closest I've seen, but it requires active shutter glasses.
Does anyone really believe that the Surface will end up with any reasonable market share of the tablet market?
That's not really the interesting question. The question is, will Windows 8 modern apps, Windows 8 RT and Windows Phone 8 end up with a reasonable share of the market? Because the combination is what will determine the ecosystem size.
Windows 8 will likely, at some point, end up on 300-500 million PCs, like Windows 7. Windows 8 tablets? Who knows. RT tablets? Really who knows. And as much as I like WP, that's an even longer shot. But if a developer says "I can write my software one, against the WinRT APIs, and it'll run on 300 million PCs, 50 million tablets, and some number of phones", it doesn't really matter if Microsoft sells 5 million or 25 million Surface tablets. Especially when people realize "hey, that application I bought runs on all of these... and my settings and data is on all of my devices...".
There's more to an ecosystem than a single device.
Its Open Source. Surely if anyone cared, someone would've fixed it by now.
Right?
Your comment is horse shit. I am the manager of IT services for a school board and we have had access to windows 8 for some time now. We have installed and tested it. Our comments are the same because we experienced the same issues. That is wonderful that you can use short cuts, many of our teachers do not.
Quite the impressive CV you've got there ... If the rest of the faculty share your stunning levels of critical thinking ability, I think I've identified the source of the problem there.
The Kinect Gesture challenge over at Kaggle was a competition where the goal was to match gestures with a specified dictionary of previously-recorded gestures.
The problem isn't the resolution, it's the recognition algorithm.
Its a little bit of both, actually. The problem isn't resolution, from a hardware standpoint -- its the point density on the IR projector and the lens on the IR camera that limits how close you can be to a Kinect and still have any accuracy. Once your depth cues go wonky, gesture recognition becomes much harder.
Gesture recognition, while not trivial, is not intrinsically more complicated than whole body tracking. The way Kinect does it is very clever, knowing basically "where can the body have moved from where it last was" which makes the matching process very efficient computationally. Gestures are the same thing. Your joints can only each move one of a limited set of ways from where it was. Just like handwriting recognition is dramatically easier for computers when they can see the order of strokes, the same is true of gestures.
There are 3yr olds who are adept at linux/apple/andriod. Also MS appear to have finally trimmed some of the fat for a change as W8 has a much smaller footprint than its recent predecessors and is considerably faster its just the cludgy replacement for the start menu that's got everyone pissing!
Its anti-Microsoft hate on Slashdot and bloggers looking for eyeballs. Most people haven't seen or used it yet, and it seems half the people griping about it who claimed to have used it are really just repeating things they saw on a video, and haven't actually gotten hands on it. The funniest are the people who are complaining about the UI being too touch or mouse centric, when the number of hotkeys available to do things in Win8 is far higher than Win7. Its a much easier OS to use from just a keyboard.