First, you're taking this guy's word that it's unusable.
I'm more likely to take the word of a retired MIT prof than a drooling journalist or fanboi who says "ZOMG, this is the best thing evar". I can at least understand his evaluation criteria.
Do you remember the 1984 128k Macintosh?
I remember 1984. And I remember there were Macintosh computers. But in all honesty, I've used a Mac maybe 4 times in my life. I saw OSX once over someone's shoulder.
And, if a 28 year old example is the best you can come up with, you're going to have to try harder.
Microsoft just made the first FULL desktop OS capable of running on all devices including touch based tablets, and you find that to be a bad move?
From the description of how badly it does both tasks, yes... there's no point in innovating crap. Doing two things badly, well, that's crap, not a feature.
A reasonable user might respond to this dog's breakfast of a user interface by trying to stick with either the familiar desktop or the new tablet. However, this is not possible. Some functions, such as "start an application" or "restart the computer" are available only from the tablet interface. Conversely, when one is comfortably ensconced in a touch/tablet application, an additional click will fire up a Web browser, thereby causing the tablet to disappear in favor of the desktop. Many of the "apps" that show up on the "all apps" menu at the bottom of the screen (accessible only if you swipe down from the top of the screen) dump you right into the desktop on the first click.
It doesn't sound like a roaring success to me.
Or will you credit Microsoft for being the first to head in the direction where we ALL want to go.
Allow me to enlighten you on the definition of "ALL". I have never said "gee, I wish my tablet had the same interface as a desktop OS". I don't know anybody else who owns a tablet who has said that. All would imply that everybody universally wants something.
At best, you can have "some" or "a few". People here on Slashdot have a tendency to say "this is what I want, therefore it's what everybody wants" -- they're often wrong. Most people with tablets want them as a passive device, not a machine to replace the one on their desk.
An Ipad is a toy. When an Ipad can run full photoshop with pressure/tilt sensitive pen... everyone will say "this is brilliant"
If you're doing full blown photoshop, WTF would you want to be doing it on a tablet for? Everyone will say "god, I miss my long battery life".
I use my tablet primarily for entertainment and light web surfing. I'm not remotely interested in trying to get it bumped up to be a replacement/upgrade for my main desktop -- to replace that I'm going to need an 8-core CPU and 16GB of RAM. The battery life on that would be, what, about 5 minutes?
mean while that is exactly what MS has just delivered to everyone this year. Apple will do it next year.
No, experience tells me Apple might take the concept of supporting both desktop OS and Tablet devices, and do it well.
Microsoft has taken two concepts, jammed them together badly, and called it Windows 8. But if you like Win 8, feel free to use it -- my guess is most businesses are just going to skip right past this one, and I'm pondering buying a Win 7 box now so I don't need to deal with Win 8.
What use would it be to invent something that duplicates iOS or Android?
Let's see... copy what people have done successfully and make a useable product, or create something which is getting panned by reviewers as a bad hodge-podge of features that don't work together. I see which choice Microsoft made.
Technology is forged by people who find new ways to do useful things. That doesn't mean imitation, it means re-invention.
Only if you do it right, otherwise you've made the "dogs breakfast" the reviewer mentioned.
Microsoft also has a long legacy of Windows products and users to uphold, and has to merge these two.
How? By pissing off both desktop and tablet users?
Yes, slavishly copying how other people do stuff isn't innovation. Producing something which is unusable is just incompetence, and it sounds like they'd have been better off just ripping everybody else off.
Sometimes, Microsoft just misses the mark by such an extraordinary amount that you have to conclude that either they're out of touch with the rest of the market, or live so much in their own echo chamber that they actually believe they've made something totally awesome.
When a company as big as Microsoft comes to market 5 years too late, with a product offering people can't make sense of, you have to assume there's some real problems going on.
Sucking at both target markets is a lousy strategy. And, to be honest, I'm hard pressed to think of anything which Microsoft has innovated recently -- even things like the Kinect they bought.
I am not sure I could name even 2-3 products which Microsoft created first, and that everybody went "wow, I need one" and that everybody else later copied. In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with one (though I'm sure there has to be some examples).
Can they just charge him with being the world's biggest arrogant douche and get it over with?
Arrogant douche or not, when your national spy agency is accused of giving too much information about a citizen to a foreign power so they can investigate the commercial interests of one of their own companies... well, things might have gone a little too far.
His lawyers have already proved that GCSB's surveillance of the mogul was illegal, and search warrants for the January raid were invalid.
They went outside of their legal mandate so they could go after this guy. They broke the law.
Are you defending the rights of the state to go after people by any means necessary? This is as much about the fact that law enforcement needs to follow the law as anything Dotcom did now.
I don't give a rats ass about what he did or didn't do, but I do expect governments to reign in their security apparatus and make damned sure they're following the law. In this case, they didn't, and now they don't want the evidence of that peeked into.
Well, given how massively complex and difficult it is to fly a helicopter, the fact that it didn't go spiraling into the ground (which I'm sure the human pilots would have tried to avoid) -- I think any form of autonomous flight is pretty impressive.
The aircraft flew at an altitude between 200-400 feet about ground level. As part of the field navigation tests, the aircraft's system was able to autonomously identify a safe landing spot within a forest clearing and then hover 60 feet over the identified landing spot. It achieved this goal within 1 foot of accuracy.
"A risk-minimizing algorithm was used to compute and command a safe trajectory continuously throughout 23 miles of rugged terrain in a single flight, at an average speed of 40 knots," said Matthew Whalley, the Autonomous Rotorcraft Project lead. "No prior knowledge of the terrain was used."
I'd call that pretty impressive -- automated terrain following in a helicopter isn't exactly an easy task.
I'd be willing to bet this falls into the more skillful end for even human pilots, and that even doing it under ideal conditions isn't exactly easy.
Of course, this is just the next in a long line of steps towards Skynet becoming self aware.;-)
"He entered the country illegally and we are going to seek his expulsion for this crime," Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez Bonilla said.
Guatemala government spokesman Francisco Cuevas said McAfee would be expelled to Belize and he expected the process to be completed by early Thursday morning.
I'm quite sure that he was trying to get back to the US or someplace which suited him.
But when you buy a MMO, you have to know that it's not a permanent thing.
Which is why a casual gamer like me looks at a game with an on-line component and says "I'll pass".
I'm too old and lame to feel like getting my ass handed to me by a 12 year old, so any form of online play for me is a negative instead of a positive.
I want to be able to pop a game in the console, and play. I don't want to care if they have decided to shut down the server, or if they have some terrible DRM which requires me to be connected to the internet. If your game can't work on a console which has no internet connection, I am not interested in your product.
This sounds like one of those situations in which someone published a decently successful game, and then decided to leave the players out in the cold as they move onto other things. I suspect an awful lot of people will look at subsequent NCsoft titles and wonder if it will be playable in a few years.
Yes, if you do business in the US (any business) you need to comply with US law. It works the same for Europe and other places.
Yes, and the key thing to remember here is that if the US forces a company to cough up European data, against European laws, then anybody complying with that demand is violating European law.
TFA is basically pointing out that the US could well be forcing companies to comply with the Patriot Act, thereby making them violating the laws of where they're doing business.
So the rational conclusion of anybody who is dealing with an American company is to say "I can only assume you could be bullied into giving up our information, so we won't do business with you".
Yes, you have to adhere to US laws when doing business in the US -- but a US law can't trump a European one when it pertains to a business who is operating there.
The US is free to apply whatever laws they want within their own country. But is is not possible for, say, Microsoft operating cloud services in Europe to guarantee they can be in compliance with both, because it's not possible to be compliant with both.
Months after the research was published, Microsoft U.K. managing director Gordon Frazer was the first to publicly admit that the software giant could not guarantee that European citizen data stored in EU-based data centers would not leave the European Union under any circumstances, including under a Patriot Act request.
"Neither can any other company," Frazer noted.
So you can expect an awful of of European companies to start giving Microsoft UK and other American firms the cold shoulder -- because no matter what you think, the US can't apply their laws to entities in Europe and have them supercede local laws.
The presence of this interpretation if this law makes all US companies into entities you can't trust, because they could be forced to hand over data against the law, and legally compelled to not admit to it. At which point, any of these services are something you simply can't trust with your data.
They got the features right for what any enterprise would want it to do, they just don't get that consumers looking to blow $500 don't give a crap about productivity. their BOSS does.
And what percentage of tablets have been purchased by consumers instead of companies? I'm betting it's a significant chunk, and probably the lion's share.
Microsoft really needs to understand the spreadsheets and Exchange aren't what most consumers are looking to do.
Those "I'm a PC I'm a Mac" ads had it pretty well nailed, it's not all about making TPS reports... it's about fun and entertainment. And Microsoft keeps planting themselves firmly on the boring business stuff, when there's a huge market of people looking for these things for other purposes.
They're too fragile, they don't have a DVD drive, they're harder to type on, the screen is tiny, they get dirty with fingerprints, they don't run 99% of software ever written, everything they do on it is designed to cost money, the browsers don't display pages correctly, the battery life is a lie, most don't have USB flash drive capabilities, they don't work with the majority of printers, and it's difficult to do meaningful work on them in any way shape or form.
I think you're looking at this through the lens of being focused on doing 'meaningful' work -- the vast majority of people using tablets are using them for passive entertainment and the like.
I type a few emails on my tablet, not extensive word processing, spreadsheets, or writing code. I watch digital copies of movies that I get when I buy the Blu Ray. I don't care about 99% of the software ever written. I've never had to spend money on stuff, I just don't bother. I easily get my 10 hours of battery life as advertised. And I've never found myself needing either a USB flash drive or to print from it. These just aren't things I do with that device -- I have access to lots of other computers for that stuff.
It's a device I'm more likely to use from an easy chair, the sofa, a lawn chair, an airplane, or occasionally even a hammock. It's entertainment, with some decent connectivity for when I'm on the road. it's en eBook reader, a video game, and can get me some useful information if I can get to wifi, which is pretty easy. And, I can use Google Voice to call the wife instead of paying hotel rates for long distance. It also gets used for those quick google searches in the living room you'd otherwise not bother getting up to do.
I would argue that you can basically say smart phones are essentially useless for all of the identical reasons you list (and I'd be just as wrong as you), and I bet you have a smart phone. They have all of the same limitations you cite, and yet people have smart phones everywhere you look. I refuse to pay the data plan for a smart phone, so a tablet with wifi is a better fit for me. A smart phone and a tablet are essentially the same thing with a slightly different size.
There is no universal way to decide the utility of a device, and different people do different things. It may be true that a tablet doesn't cover your needs, but you need to understand that your needs are probably not typical.
I've had a tablet for about 2.5 years now, and I get a lot of use out of it. I don't use it to do my job or any serious work, but for all of those other little things, it's a convenient device with a more suitable form factor.
The vast majority of people when using computers much of the time are NOT doing 'meaningful' work -- they're surfing the web, watching You Tube videos, sending a few emails, and playing games.
Seriously, stop making categorical statements as if they were facts instead of just your opinion.. because I can say quite firmly that for me, my tablet doesn't suck, and was money well spent on a device I actually use. Just as I'm sure you can equally say that, for you, it's not a device you'd find a good fit for your needs. Neither is anything other than a subjective evaluation.
I've taken my iPad on about 12 trips by now, and about 8-10 of those I also had my laptop. My laptop sits in the bag in case I need access to something, and has been used exactly once while on the road over the last two years. But my iPad sees 2-4 hours/day of use when I travel.
So, maybe you need to recognize the fact that for many of the people who have bought tablets, it is a better fit than a netbook or a full laptop would be.
Microsoft has no clue what users actually want, film at 11.
When is Microsoft going to learn to make a truly consumer-oriented device other than the XBox? Not with support for Office (that takes up most of your space apparently), not with support for Outlook, but to do the things people are using other tablets for.
Every time they release a product, the marketing is so heavily geared to Office/Outlook/Exchange I have to wonder if Microsoft is aware of the fact that loads of people use computers for things that don't involve their business applications.
If your marketing is focused on how I can do spreadsheets and connect to my corporate Exchange server, then you have no idea of what it is I'd be looking to use this kind of device for. Because I don't want either of those features.
It just always seems Microsoft is so focused on their business tools, that the result is too much focus on that. And it always seems like they launch a product after someone else has been successful with it, and then miss some of the attributes of the other product which make it successful in the first place.
But you would be willing to vote for someone with less integrity, albeit one wearing a sharp suit?
Not on the basis of a sharp suit. But the guy standing outside the grocery store in a pirate suit doesn't immediately make me think "now there's a man I want to represent me".
And the specific issue in TFA about them kvetching about someone using the logo of a sailing vessel? It's a childish, silly publicity stunt that doesn't change my opinion of them -- it makes it seem like one of those farcical parties instead of someone who is trying to actually do something.
This is coming from a geek who is aware of what they're trying to do -- many other people are going to discount them as cranks and loons right off the bat. And if you're causing people to think like that, you're mostly hurting your own self.
You may like to believe that people won't judge them based on what they wear and some of the silly things they do -- but you'd be horribly wrong. Because it seriously detracts from being able to get to the meat of what they're trying to say.
You are basically saying, that if you had to choose between a honest guy in pirate outfit and corrupted crook in expensive suit with good image in mainstream media, you'd choose the later.
No, I'm saying it's awfully difficult to take someone seriously when they're wearing a tri-point hat and an eye patch who is asking for my vote.
And if I know who the Pirate Party is and what they stand for and think this, then there's going to be an awful lot of people who just see these people as clowns.
Issuing a press release about someone else using the image of a sailing ship infringing on your rights -- well, that's the kind of thing that just cements the idea that if they don't seem to be taking it seriously, why should we take them seriously?
It's reasons like this why the various Pirate parties will mostly always not be taken seriously. It's like they do silly things for fun and then expect people to act like they should be treated as a real political party.
I was at the grocery store a while back during an election, and there were two people there dressed in full pirate gear handing out their leaflets. Initially I thought it was a product promotion.
They might as well be the Insane Clown Posse Party if they're just there to do stupid things. I'm not voting for some guy in a pirate outfit.
It matters if you do business with the country issuing the law... Of course, almost no US companies does business with China, so no worries there.
So, when China or someone else passes a similar law, the US will accept that their companies have to hand over the data to the local government because that's how it works?
Or will they basically say their laws and interests trumps everybody else's, and too bad? Because I can't see other sovereign nations accepting that.
But yes, the Data Protection Directive makes it very hard for companies to comply with both PATRIOT and the DPD.
No, it makes it impossible. the PATRIOT act says "no matter what local laws say, you are obligated to do this"... the data protection in other countries says "you are absolutely required to not do that".
Basically, the Americans are saying their laws trumps everybody else, and the cost of doing "systematic business in the United States" is that their laws trump everybody else.
Sadly, the US has decided that, the laws of other countries be damned, if you do enough business here you have to do what we say.
Yet another example of how the US is declining into a xenophobic country, who has no intention of playing nicely with everybody else -- and American businesses might suddenly find themselves as unwelcome entities around the world as you pointed out. (Which of course they would probably go to the WTO or say "Waahh, you won't let us play in your sandbox" to try to force those countries to allow American companies to do business despite the fact that they essentially can't be trusted.)
Essentially the only choice is to treat American owned companies as if they're agents of a hostile, totalitarian state -- because if any other country passed a law that said "if you do systematic business here, you must hand over your data to our government", the US would be up in arms talking about the freedoms they're not prepared to extend to other countries.
I know here in Canada, US owned companies are precluded from some government contracts for this very reason, and pretty much all cloud providers which could host data there are not legally allowed because they open the risk of sensitive data being handed to the Americans without anybody knowing.
I think this will pretty much be the point at which a lot of these US companies who could be in this position will suddenly start finding a lot of doors closed in their face with a "Oh, sorry, since we can't trust you or your government, you can't come in".
Not to put too fine of a point on it, but do you actually know any people?
I didn't use SMS for years, simply because most of the people I knew didn't use it so there was no point -- it's not like I was going to text myself.
Over the last few years, it's one of the primary ways I set up things with friends. It's easier, and someone can always choose to respond to a text or not -- which is easier than phoning someone.
I even get texts from my mother from time to time, so I'd definitely say a lot more people are using it nowadays.
I barely do voice calls on my cell, mostly just texts.
I doubt very much that the people who control the HDMI spec would allow an EFF-endorsed CPU to do this anyway -- the EFF has no interest in enforcing DRM, and HDCP pretty much requires you implement it end to end.
I'm right on the cusp of the baby boomer gen (on the younger side), I'm turning 50 in 4 months, so I'm just entering into this era of my life. I have to say that either I'm not in the norm OR I being an IT professional has helped OR I'm just a jaded old fart because I've certainly grown much more cynical of other people and institutions, not less.
I have to wonder (as with all of these things) if it's correlation or causation.
Do these structures in older people decline... or are we measuring a generation of people who never learned to be skeptical and wary and therefore don't show on brain scan?
I'm more inclined to think that most of the people in this age range simply never developed this trait, not that the level of gullibilty and trust increases with age.
I had a great aunt who was something like 97 when she died, and she'd gotten scammed a few times -- because she was just too damned trusting, and pretty much had always been so.
My guess is that your experience has shaped your responses, and having learned to be wary and cautious, you're not likely to become a naive sap in the new decades (unless you really lose your marbles, but then all bets are off).
When my parents (now in their 70's) decided to get a computer and access to the interwebs, I sat them down and gave them a very stern talking to -- don't believe everything you see, don't ever give out personal or banking info over the phone or internet, don't assume the world is a safe place. That has served them pretty well over the last few years, because they can identify the scams and phishing emails, and when they get phone calls they don't just blindly trust.
But if you've never learned any of this, you're completely unprepared to be skeptical about what people are telling you.
I believe you are prompted with this request for permission because I don't think this is an actual application or voting page from Facebook. This is an application from a social media company called Thuzi.
So, in order to vote on Facebook's privacy policy you need to allow a 3rd party access to your data, and possibly against what you've already chosen as your privacy policy.
So if you already have your permissions a little restrictive and don't allow apps, when you go there you get confronted with this:
Start Now Apps and Games You are about to use Facebook Site Governance, a Start Now app. These apps start with your name, profile picture, other public info and friend list to immediately personalize your experience on Facebook. Opt Out at Any Time There are two ways to stop using this app and its personalization features. The first few times you use it, click Disable in the banner at the top. You can also remove it in App Settings. To opt out of all Start Now apps, visit your Instant Personalization Settings. Learn more about instant personalization.
So, in order to participate in this voting, you need to agree to even more access by this thing just to find out what it looks like.
Facebook really are a bunch of asses aren't they? This is the same setting which wants to be used by apps and games to give them access to all of your data.
Will someone please lock Zuckerface into a room with a bear or something?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more likely to take the word of a retired MIT prof than a drooling journalist or fanboi who says "ZOMG, this is the best thing evar". I can at least understand his evaluation criteria.
I remember 1984. And I remember there were Macintosh computers. But in all honesty, I've used a Mac maybe 4 times in my life. I saw OSX once over someone's shoulder.
And, if a 28 year old example is the best you can come up with, you're going to have to try harder.
From the description of how badly it does both tasks, yes ... there's no point in innovating crap. Doing two things badly, well, that's crap, not a feature.
It doesn't sound like a roaring success to me.
Allow me to enlighten you on the definition of "ALL". I have never said "gee, I wish my tablet had the same interface as a desktop OS". I don't know anybody else who owns a tablet who has said that. All would imply that everybody universally wants something.
At best, you can have "some" or "a few". People here on Slashdot have a tendency to say "this is what I want, therefore it's what everybody wants" -- they're often wrong. Most people with tablets want them as a passive device, not a machine to replace the one on their desk.
If you're doing full blown photoshop, WTF would you want to be doing it on a tablet for? Everyone will say "god, I miss my long battery life".
I use my tablet primarily for entertainment and light web surfing. I'm not remotely interested in trying to get it bumped up to be a replacement/upgrade for my main desktop -- to replace that I'm going to need an 8-core CPU and 16GB of RAM. The battery life on that would be, what, about 5 minutes?
No, experience tells me Apple might take the concept of supporting both desktop OS and Tablet devices, and do it well.
Microsoft has taken two concepts, jammed them together badly, and called it Windows 8. But if you like Win 8, feel free to use it -- my guess is most businesses are just going to skip right past this one, and I'm pondering buying a Win 7 box now so I don't need to deal with Win 8.
Let's see ... copy what people have done successfully and make a useable product, or create something which is getting panned by reviewers as a bad hodge-podge of features that don't work together. I see which choice Microsoft made.
Only if you do it right, otherwise you've made the "dogs breakfast" the reviewer mentioned.
How? By pissing off both desktop and tablet users?
Yes, slavishly copying how other people do stuff isn't innovation. Producing something which is unusable is just incompetence, and it sounds like they'd have been better off just ripping everybody else off.
Sometimes, Microsoft just misses the mark by such an extraordinary amount that you have to conclude that either they're out of touch with the rest of the market, or live so much in their own echo chamber that they actually believe they've made something totally awesome.
When a company as big as Microsoft comes to market 5 years too late, with a product offering people can't make sense of, you have to assume there's some real problems going on.
Sucking at both target markets is a lousy strategy. And, to be honest, I'm hard pressed to think of anything which Microsoft has innovated recently -- even things like the Kinect they bought.
I am not sure I could name even 2-3 products which Microsoft created first, and that everybody went "wow, I need one" and that everybody else later copied. In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with one (though I'm sure there has to be some examples).
*furiously takes notes* ;-)
Arrogant douche or not, when your national spy agency is accused of giving too much information about a citizen to a foreign power so they can investigate the commercial interests of one of their own companies ... well, things might have gone a little too far.
They went outside of their legal mandate so they could go after this guy. They broke the law.
Are you defending the rights of the state to go after people by any means necessary? This is as much about the fact that law enforcement needs to follow the law as anything Dotcom did now.
I don't give a rats ass about what he did or didn't do, but I do expect governments to reign in their security apparatus and make damned sure they're following the law. In this case, they didn't, and now they don't want the evidence of that peeked into.
Well, given how massively complex and difficult it is to fly a helicopter, the fact that it didn't go spiraling into the ground (which I'm sure the human pilots would have tried to avoid) -- I think any form of autonomous flight is pretty impressive.
I'd call that pretty impressive -- automated terrain following in a helicopter isn't exactly an easy task.
I'd be willing to bet this falls into the more skillful end for even human pilots, and that even doing it under ideal conditions isn't exactly easy.
Of course, this is just the next in a long line of steps towards Skynet becoming self aware. ;-)
Well, it's not up to him now, is it?
I'm quite sure that he was trying to get back to the US or someplace which suited him.
Because Belize wasn't about to let him on a plane -- he's a fugitive. How do you think he's going to just up and go back to the US?
The two countries share a border, and he was arrested trying to enter illegally.
As to if they'll send him to the US or Belize ... stay tuned.
Lucky bastard ... I don't suppose if I went to Australia women would suddenly find a Canadian irresistable (eh)?
Which is why a casual gamer like me looks at a game with an on-line component and says "I'll pass".
I'm too old and lame to feel like getting my ass handed to me by a 12 year old, so any form of online play for me is a negative instead of a positive.
I want to be able to pop a game in the console, and play. I don't want to care if they have decided to shut down the server, or if they have some terrible DRM which requires me to be connected to the internet. If your game can't work on a console which has no internet connection, I am not interested in your product.
This sounds like one of those situations in which someone published a decently successful game, and then decided to leave the players out in the cold as they move onto other things. I suspect an awful lot of people will look at subsequent NCsoft titles and wonder if it will be playable in a few years.
Yes, and the key thing to remember here is that if the US forces a company to cough up European data, against European laws, then anybody complying with that demand is violating European law.
TFA is basically pointing out that the US could well be forcing companies to comply with the Patriot Act, thereby making them violating the laws of where they're doing business.
So the rational conclusion of anybody who is dealing with an American company is to say "I can only assume you could be bullied into giving up our information, so we won't do business with you".
Yes, you have to adhere to US laws when doing business in the US -- but a US law can't trump a European one when it pertains to a business who is operating there.
The US is free to apply whatever laws they want within their own country. But is is not possible for, say, Microsoft operating cloud services in Europe to guarantee they can be in compliance with both, because it's not possible to be compliant with both.
So you can expect an awful of of European companies to start giving Microsoft UK and other American firms the cold shoulder -- because no matter what you think, the US can't apply their laws to entities in Europe and have them supercede local laws.
The presence of this interpretation if this law makes all US companies into entities you can't trust, because they could be forced to hand over data against the law, and legally compelled to not admit to it. At which point, any of these services are something you simply can't trust with your data.
And what percentage of tablets have been purchased by consumers instead of companies? I'm betting it's a significant chunk, and probably the lion's share.
Microsoft really needs to understand the spreadsheets and Exchange aren't what most consumers are looking to do.
Those "I'm a PC I'm a Mac" ads had it pretty well nailed, it's not all about making TPS reports ... it's about fun and entertainment. And Microsoft keeps planting themselves firmly on the boring business stuff, when there's a huge market of people looking for these things for other purposes.
I think you're looking at this through the lens of being focused on doing 'meaningful' work -- the vast majority of people using tablets are using them for passive entertainment and the like.
I type a few emails on my tablet, not extensive word processing, spreadsheets, or writing code. I watch digital copies of movies that I get when I buy the Blu Ray. I don't care about 99% of the software ever written. I've never had to spend money on stuff, I just don't bother. I easily get my 10 hours of battery life as advertised. And I've never found myself needing either a USB flash drive or to print from it. These just aren't things I do with that device -- I have access to lots of other computers for that stuff.
It's a device I'm more likely to use from an easy chair, the sofa, a lawn chair, an airplane, or occasionally even a hammock. It's entertainment, with some decent connectivity for when I'm on the road. it's en eBook reader, a video game, and can get me some useful information if I can get to wifi, which is pretty easy. And, I can use Google Voice to call the wife instead of paying hotel rates for long distance. It also gets used for those quick google searches in the living room you'd otherwise not bother getting up to do.
I would argue that you can basically say smart phones are essentially useless for all of the identical reasons you list (and I'd be just as wrong as you), and I bet you have a smart phone. They have all of the same limitations you cite, and yet people have smart phones everywhere you look. I refuse to pay the data plan for a smart phone, so a tablet with wifi is a better fit for me. A smart phone and a tablet are essentially the same thing with a slightly different size.
There is no universal way to decide the utility of a device, and different people do different things. It may be true that a tablet doesn't cover your needs, but you need to understand that your needs are probably not typical.
I've had a tablet for about 2.5 years now, and I get a lot of use out of it. I don't use it to do my job or any serious work, but for all of those other little things, it's a convenient device with a more suitable form factor.
The vast majority of people when using computers much of the time are NOT doing 'meaningful' work -- they're surfing the web, watching You Tube videos, sending a few emails, and playing games.
Seriously, stop making categorical statements as if they were facts instead of just your opinion .. because I can say quite firmly that for me, my tablet doesn't suck, and was money well spent on a device I actually use. Just as I'm sure you can equally say that, for you, it's not a device you'd find a good fit for your needs. Neither is anything other than a subjective evaluation.
I've taken my iPad on about 12 trips by now, and about 8-10 of those I also had my laptop. My laptop sits in the bag in case I need access to something, and has been used exactly once while on the road over the last two years. But my iPad sees 2-4 hours/day of use when I travel.
So, maybe you need to recognize the fact that for many of the people who have bought tablets, it is a better fit than a netbook or a full laptop would be.
Microsoft has no clue what users actually want, film at 11.
When is Microsoft going to learn to make a truly consumer-oriented device other than the XBox? Not with support for Office (that takes up most of your space apparently), not with support for Outlook, but to do the things people are using other tablets for.
Every time they release a product, the marketing is so heavily geared to Office/Outlook/Exchange I have to wonder if Microsoft is aware of the fact that loads of people use computers for things that don't involve their business applications.
If your marketing is focused on how I can do spreadsheets and connect to my corporate Exchange server, then you have no idea of what it is I'd be looking to use this kind of device for. Because I don't want either of those features.
It just always seems Microsoft is so focused on their business tools, that the result is too much focus on that. And it always seems like they launch a product after someone else has been successful with it, and then miss some of the attributes of the other product which make it successful in the first place.
Not on the basis of a sharp suit. But the guy standing outside the grocery store in a pirate suit doesn't immediately make me think "now there's a man I want to represent me".
And the specific issue in TFA about them kvetching about someone using the logo of a sailing vessel? It's a childish, silly publicity stunt that doesn't change my opinion of them -- it makes it seem like one of those farcical parties instead of someone who is trying to actually do something.
This is coming from a geek who is aware of what they're trying to do -- many other people are going to discount them as cranks and loons right off the bat. And if you're causing people to think like that, you're mostly hurting your own self.
You may like to believe that people won't judge them based on what they wear and some of the silly things they do -- but you'd be horribly wrong. Because it seriously detracts from being able to get to the meat of what they're trying to say.
No, I'm saying it's awfully difficult to take someone seriously when they're wearing a tri-point hat and an eye patch who is asking for my vote.
And if I know who the Pirate Party is and what they stand for and think this, then there's going to be an awful lot of people who just see these people as clowns.
Issuing a press release about someone else using the image of a sailing ship infringing on your rights -- well, that's the kind of thing that just cements the idea that if they don't seem to be taking it seriously, why should we take them seriously?
It's reasons like this why the various Pirate parties will mostly always not be taken seriously. It's like they do silly things for fun and then expect people to act like they should be treated as a real political party.
I was at the grocery store a while back during an election, and there were two people there dressed in full pirate gear handing out their leaflets. Initially I thought it was a product promotion.
They might as well be the Insane Clown Posse Party if they're just there to do stupid things. I'm not voting for some guy in a pirate outfit.
So, when China or someone else passes a similar law, the US will accept that their companies have to hand over the data to the local government because that's how it works?
Or will they basically say their laws and interests trumps everybody else's, and too bad? Because I can't see other sovereign nations accepting that.
No, it makes it impossible. the PATRIOT act says "no matter what local laws say, you are obligated to do this" ... the data protection in other countries says "you are absolutely required to not do that".
Basically, the Americans are saying their laws trumps everybody else, and the cost of doing "systematic business in the United States" is that their laws trump everybody else.
Sadly, the US has decided that, the laws of other countries be damned, if you do enough business here you have to do what we say.
Yet another example of how the US is declining into a xenophobic country, who has no intention of playing nicely with everybody else -- and American businesses might suddenly find themselves as unwelcome entities around the world as you pointed out. (Which of course they would probably go to the WTO or say "Waahh, you won't let us play in your sandbox" to try to force those countries to allow American companies to do business despite the fact that they essentially can't be trusted.)
Essentially the only choice is to treat American owned companies as if they're agents of a hostile, totalitarian state -- because if any other country passed a law that said "if you do systematic business here, you must hand over your data to our government", the US would be up in arms talking about the freedoms they're not prepared to extend to other countries.
I know here in Canada, US owned companies are precluded from some government contracts for this very reason, and pretty much all cloud providers which could host data there are not legally allowed because they open the risk of sensitive data being handed to the Americans without anybody knowing.
I think this will pretty much be the point at which a lot of these US companies who could be in this position will suddenly start finding a lot of doors closed in their face with a "Oh, sorry, since we can't trust you or your government, you can't come in".
Not to put too fine of a point on it, but do you actually know any people?
I didn't use SMS for years, simply because most of the people I knew didn't use it so there was no point -- it's not like I was going to text myself.
Over the last few years, it's one of the primary ways I set up things with friends. It's easier, and someone can always choose to respond to a text or not -- which is easier than phoning someone.
I even get texts from my mother from time to time, so I'd definitely say a lot more people are using it nowadays.
I barely do voice calls on my cell, mostly just texts.
I doubt very much that the people who control the HDMI spec would allow an EFF-endorsed CPU to do this anyway -- the EFF has no interest in enforcing DRM, and HDCP pretty much requires you implement it end to end.
I'm not sure you could reconcile those two views.
I don't believe you. ;-)
I have to wonder (as with all of these things) if it's correlation or causation.
Do these structures in older people decline ... or are we measuring a generation of people who never learned to be skeptical and wary and therefore don't show on brain scan?
I'm more inclined to think that most of the people in this age range simply never developed this trait, not that the level of gullibilty and trust increases with age.
I had a great aunt who was something like 97 when she died, and she'd gotten scammed a few times -- because she was just too damned trusting, and pretty much had always been so.
My guess is that your experience has shaped your responses, and having learned to be wary and cautious, you're not likely to become a naive sap in the new decades (unless you really lose your marbles, but then all bets are off).
When my parents (now in their 70's) decided to get a computer and access to the interwebs, I sat them down and gave them a very stern talking to -- don't believe everything you see, don't ever give out personal or banking info over the phone or internet, don't assume the world is a safe place. That has served them pretty well over the last few years, because they can identify the scams and phishing emails, and when they get phone calls they don't just blindly trust.
But if you've never learned any of this, you're completely unprepared to be skeptical about what people are telling you.
So, in order to vote on Facebook's privacy policy you need to allow a 3rd party access to your data, and possibly against what you've already chosen as your privacy policy.
They're not even trying are they?
So if you already have your permissions a little restrictive and don't allow apps, when you go there you get confronted with this:
So, in order to participate in this voting, you need to agree to even more access by this thing just to find out what it looks like.
Facebook really are a bunch of asses aren't they? This is the same setting which wants to be used by apps and games to give them access to all of your data.
Will someone please lock Zuckerface into a room with a bear or something?