I've owned a lot of bikes and was keen to trade in stinkpower for clean, however, the biggest issue still remains, an Electric version costs twice as much as ICE power. My fuel costs are around $20/month so I'm not getting the difference back in any hurry. I'm happy to pay a premium for the novelty, but not double bubble.
Why do all electric cars look ridiculous (except Tesla)? Seriously it's like they give the design job to some goofball from the 70's who is imaging what a car will look like in the space-age 90's. Why can't we get an Electric car that just looks like a normal car?
A school friend of mine became an apprentice locksmith decades ago. Those big old fashioned locks from pre-1980's only had about 14 keys total, all numbered. When someone came to get a copy he didn't have to cut one, just pull a spare out of the box.
Any time I travel outside of Canada, whether to the USA or Europe, I'm always amazed at how far behind places are for electronic payments. I haven't needed cash in my wallet in Canada in years, you simply never find a situation where it's needed.
You should travel south. Australia, NZ and most of the developed parts of Asia have also had this for years. Reading Slashdot I wonder what they do in the US, outside of Silicon Valley and NASA, everything seems to be stuck in the mid-20th century...
OK, but why should Windows, an OS designed for desktop and server user, also be the product they offer in the mobile space?
Because MS recognise they fell asleep in the mobile space, and now woken up obviously feel a converged OS would work best. I can't see why one OS can't work, as long as the switchability can be controlled by the user. This is where they screwed up in Win 8.
Well, my 2010 thinking still seems to be 2015 thinking according to most of the business world, judging by how little success Surface seems to have enjoyed so far.
I agree there is slow take up, but I believe that is the direction the world is heading. It might not be MS hardware, but some sort of convertible tablet satisfies most general requirements for most people, most of the time.
And again, you still haven't given a single reason that the Surface is better than just buying a laptop and running Office on that, which has been the norm for probably a decade and change.
Laptops have become only really wide spread in the last 6 or 7 years as prices came down. Prior to that was desktops with laptops only for the Execs and road warriors, and before that typewriters. After laptops will be convertibles or hybrids, then probably something else.
Touch and stylus input is only an advantage if they actually help you to do something useful. What is objectively better about your day because you all use a Surface? Do you do some things faster, or more accurately, or with better quality results? If so, how, and why is the hybrid device an advantage for you?
Why do people use iPads? you can do all that on a laptop too if you try hard enough?
Having the ability to use a full powered machine at your desk, then walk off with it to a meeting where you can use it as a tablet for hand written notes (with a stylus rather than your finger) and diagrams is very convenient. I've used mine as a whiteboard which can be shared via Webex and it's a shitload easier with a stylus than a mouse.
When I'm on the bus to and from work, the tablet form factor is a lot easier to use than try to wedge a laptop with attached keyboard into the cramped space. Same goes for air travel. I accept this is not for everyone, but for a lot of people these are real benefits.
Just going by your previous post, I'm not sure how far Microsoft would get with a sales pitch that their new and trendy gear for 2015 is not worse than what we've had since the early 2000s and costs (at current UK prices I just checked) only 2-3x as much as numerous perfectly serviceable business laptops that will all run Office just fine.
Not sure what you classify as a business laptop. These sell in the region of $2k (Australian dollars) for HP, Dell or Lenovo with decent processor, memory and hi-res screen. A Surface Pro 3 costs a little less than that.
The benefits are power, weight, resolution, battery life, and flexibility. I'd like to see which business grade laptops you are buying for a third the price of a Surface Pro.
You must not do much shopping in the US because you definitely have to here.
So is this problem with the technology or your stupid country? Seriously, so many discussions in this group seem to based around how the US uses some third world way of doing things, while the rest of the developed world has already solved those same problems. Contactless payments which require a simple wave of the hand with either card or NFC phone (even through a wallet) have been working everywhere else for years. The problem is not the technology.
A friend of mine manages a bar. He loves it because transactions are quicker meaning more drinks served meaning more profit. Patrons love it because it means lower queue times, meaning they come back more often, meaning more profit. The merchant fees are a part of doing business like paying rent or electricity. If a service provider can increase you business while charging a negligible fee in the process then it's a win for everyone.
You know there's is more to a car's pollution output than just mpg right?
If there's one thing I've learnt in my travels, it is that the car is evil. Any country without car infrastructure should skip it altogether and opt for pedestrian/bicycle/moped/public transport. it is the only viable model that can scale and minimises pollution.
As Mike Skinner from The Streets says, I'm 45th generation Roman. Go back far enough and we're all 2000th generation African. And since the age of cheap jet travel, we'll all be a mix of everything again within the next 45 generations. Makes racism seem kind of pointless.
How is the way of life and/or world view of the Native Americans worth saving?
Same question for impoverished rural Africans?
We are having this conversation only because an objectively superior culture with an objectively superior propensity for technical development has built this amazing medium for our use.
I'm with you buddy. It's the noble savage myth that hippies love to perpetuate. Easter Island is a great example for exposing that drivel.
Old cultures got taken over by new cultures because that's how evolution works. Ultimately we all have the same ancestors which first stood upright in Africa, and we'll all end up some munge of coffee coloured monkeys in the next few hundred years, so any talk of race seems pointless in the grand scheme of things. Adapt or die, regardless of your race.
One example, an corrupt state MP here bought a farm in the middle of nowhere for $200k. Not long after, the State govt issues a mining license for the property which increase the value of the property to $100million. He of course is now being prosecuted for corruption
Land has a lot of uses, not just what the current occupant is using it for.
I think the marketing problem for Microsoft is that, for desktop/laptop users, most of it was not broken in Windows 7 anyway. Windows 10 can't just be about fixing the things they got wrong with Windows 8. It needs to have some significant benefits as well, or everyone who's on Windows 7 today will just stay there and not upgrade.
It ain't broke don't fix only works in a static or slow moving environment. In fast paced IT, it's keep up or die. Win 7 was great fro desktops but missed the whole mobile revolution that occured after it's release. Win8 attempted to fix this (poorly). The converged OS is still a good idea IMO, it just needs to be tweaked to better suit the needs of it's customers. Win10 may do that, it may not, only time will tell.
But for those uses, a laptop does the job just fine anyway, and people who go to a lot of meetings probably take their laptop with them already. What extra benefit do they get for having a more complicated and expensive device like a Surface?
That's 2010 thinking. I work in a Surface only workplace. They aren't perfect, but slowly even the die-hards are losing the Laptop mentality. The cost of a Surface is similar to a Macbook Air (which is the de facto standard around here), but you get touch and stylus input, and native support for all the Office apps out of the box.
I accept that they aren't for everyone, but if you want a generic machine that does most things it ticks the box. For corporates, this is a no-brainer, and MS are aware of that. All they need to do is to get Win10 to be "good enough".
IOS: clicking the home button hides the app, double clicking and swiping closes it
Android: clicking the home or back button hides the app, double clicking home and swiping closes it.
Win8.1: clicking Windows hides the app, swiping from top to bottom of screen, or clicking x in the top right closes it.
They're all the same concept.
Please don't judge other's logic when you are so demonstrably poor at it yourself.
Judgment and penalty are two different concepts, hiding behind one to avoid the other is also a type Strawman. Maybe you've heard of that when you went to logic school?
You should take a look at Norway's crime statistics compared to those in the US.
Oh I'm quite familiar, as are most people who laugh at how ridiculously third world the US is when compared to every other OECD nation. But that is less about euthanasia and more about everything else that is wrong the the US (the list is long)
Given that Windows 8 has been a Vista-scale catatrophe for Microsoft, I think by now it's safe to say overall the corporate world doesn't buy into that vision either.
Yes, but if you try and understand what sucks about Win 8, most of it will be (hopefully) be fixed with Win 10. So just as Win7 was a relative success, I can;t see why Win 10 won't be the same.
Again, the things these devices are useful for in meetings are not necessarily the same things they are useful for when someone is working alone at a desk.
No not necessarily, but in most instances, Office people use Office apps (Outlook, Word, Excel, Web etc), and for that a Surface does the job of a tablet, laptop and desktop quite sufficiently.
There's your false assumption, the guy is not perfectly healthy, in fact the is more sick than most people realise.
Rehabilitate and release if possible, if not, terminate. Being better means actually being smart enough to accept that an active psychopath is not compatible with a modern society. And unless you have unlimited resources (ie live in fantasy land) you can choose to allocate your resources to housing, feeding and protecting these animals, or you can euthanise them and allocate your energy improving the lives of everyone else.
A real world example, Ivan Milat brutally raped and murder 7 people in my area. He got life which will cost the taxpayer approx $10Million over the course of his life. Given the option of execution (after a few years of appeals), the tax payer could re-allocate at least $7million of that to more teachers, nurses or ambulances. Or regular people can suck it up, while this psychopath eats and drinks and watches cable TV for the rest of his days. I know which of those options is *better* in my universe.
I take it you've never used a Surface? The Surface Pro 3 is a valid laptop replacement, we use them across the board at my current job and they work well.
Tablet in the meeting room, docked at desk to dual 24" monitors, keyboard and mouse giving 3 full HD desktops. This is the MS vision, if your use case doesn't suit, that doesn't mean most of the corporate world doesn't. And this is the target market for MS.
Win8 wasn't as bad as the press. I hated it too when I used it and have only just got around to using full time since forced on me at my new job I started last year.
In my experience there's a couple of small tweaks that will make the bad go away:
1. Give us the choice to Fuck Metro Off - this seems to be fixed here
2. Give us the start button back - fixed in 8.1
3. When you click on start give us a partial screen menu instead of the full screen one. Apparently fixed in Win10
So if the Metro fuckup is able to be controlled by the user, Win10 should be alright.
This is exactly how IOS and Android work so it's no big paradigm shift to simply hide apps rather than close them. The only catch with Windows is that it behaves the same on a desktop as a tablet, which is shit. Hopefully this fixes that issue.
I agree, the future of visual entertainment is streaming, not selling people an obscenely expensive and bloated package of crappy TV cannels just so they can watch a handful of them to catch their favorate shows.
I worked on an "IPTV" project 10 years ago when it was all new and whizz bang, but unfortunately it requires a half decent Internet service, which sadly even 10 years later most people don't have access to.
Slashdot Mirror
I've owned a lot of bikes and was keen to trade in stinkpower for clean, however, the biggest issue still remains, an Electric version costs twice as much as ICE power. My fuel costs are around $20/month so I'm not getting the difference back in any hurry. I'm happy to pay a premium for the novelty, but not double bubble.
Why do all electric cars look ridiculous (except Tesla)? Seriously it's like they give the design job to some goofball from the 70's who is imaging what a car will look like in the space-age 90's. Why can't we get an Electric car that just looks like a normal car?
A school friend of mine became an apprentice locksmith decades ago. Those big old fashioned locks from pre-1980's only had about 14 keys total, all numbered. When someone came to get a copy he didn't have to cut one, just pull a spare out of the box.
Any time I travel outside of Canada, whether to the USA or Europe, I'm always amazed at how far behind places are for electronic payments. I haven't needed cash in my wallet in Canada in years, you simply never find a situation where it's needed.
You should travel south. Australia, NZ and most of the developed parts of Asia have also had this for years. Reading Slashdot I wonder what they do in the US, outside of Silicon Valley and NASA, everything seems to be stuck in the mid-20th century...
OK, but why should Windows, an OS designed for desktop and server user, also be the product they offer in the mobile space?
Because MS recognise they fell asleep in the mobile space, and now woken up obviously feel a converged OS would work best. I can't see why one OS can't work, as long as the switchability can be controlled by the user. This is where they screwed up in Win 8.
Well, my 2010 thinking still seems to be 2015 thinking according to most of the business world, judging by how little success Surface seems to have enjoyed so far.
I agree there is slow take up, but I believe that is the direction the world is heading. It might not be MS hardware, but some sort of convertible tablet satisfies most general requirements for most people, most of the time.
And again, you still haven't given a single reason that the Surface is better than just buying a laptop and running Office on that, which has been the norm for probably a decade and change.
Laptops have become only really wide spread in the last 6 or 7 years as prices came down. Prior to that was desktops with laptops only for the Execs and road warriors, and before that typewriters. After laptops will be convertibles or hybrids, then probably something else.
Touch and stylus input is only an advantage if they actually help you to do something useful. What is objectively better about your day because you all use a Surface? Do you do some things faster, or more accurately, or with better quality results? If so, how, and why is the hybrid device an advantage for you?
Why do people use iPads? you can do all that on a laptop too if you try hard enough? Having the ability to use a full powered machine at your desk, then walk off with it to a meeting where you can use it as a tablet for hand written notes (with a stylus rather than your finger) and diagrams is very convenient. I've used mine as a whiteboard which can be shared via Webex and it's a shitload easier with a stylus than a mouse.
When I'm on the bus to and from work, the tablet form factor is a lot easier to use than try to wedge a laptop with attached keyboard into the cramped space. Same goes for air travel. I accept this is not for everyone, but for a lot of people these are real benefits.
Just going by your previous post, I'm not sure how far Microsoft would get with a sales pitch that their new and trendy gear for 2015 is not worse than what we've had since the early 2000s and costs (at current UK prices I just checked) only 2-3x as much as numerous perfectly serviceable business laptops that will all run Office just fine.
Not sure what you classify as a business laptop. These sell in the region of $2k (Australian dollars) for HP, Dell or Lenovo with decent processor, memory and hi-res screen. A Surface Pro 3 costs a little less than that. The benefits are power, weight, resolution, battery life, and flexibility. I'd like to see which business grade laptops you are buying for a third the price of a Surface Pro.
You must not do much shopping in the US because you definitely have to here.
So is this problem with the technology or your stupid country? Seriously, so many discussions in this group seem to based around how the US uses some third world way of doing things, while the rest of the developed world has already solved those same problems. Contactless payments which require a simple wave of the hand with either card or NFC phone (even through a wallet) have been working everywhere else for years. The problem is not the technology.
A friend of mine manages a bar. He loves it because transactions are quicker meaning more drinks served meaning more profit. Patrons love it because it means lower queue times, meaning they come back more often, meaning more profit. The merchant fees are a part of doing business like paying rent or electricity. If a service provider can increase you business while charging a negligible fee in the process then it's a win for everyone.
You know there's is more to a car's pollution output than just mpg right?
If there's one thing I've learnt in my travels, it is that the car is evil. Any country without car infrastructure should skip it altogether and opt for pedestrian/bicycle/moped/public transport. it is the only viable model that can scale and minimises pollution.
Those people would be dead by now anyway. As a descendant of one of those decimated, I can authoritatively state that I'm better off because of it.
As Mike Skinner from The Streets says, I'm 45th generation Roman. Go back far enough and we're all 2000th generation African. And since the age of cheap jet travel, we'll all be a mix of everything again within the next 45 generations. Makes racism seem kind of pointless.
How is the way of life and/or world view of the Native Americans worth saving?
Same question for impoverished rural Africans?
We are having this conversation only because an objectively superior culture with an objectively superior propensity for technical development has built this amazing medium for our use.
I'm with you buddy. It's the noble savage myth that hippies love to perpetuate. Easter Island is a great example for exposing that drivel.
Old cultures got taken over by new cultures because that's how evolution works. Ultimately we all have the same ancestors which first stood upright in Africa, and we'll all end up some munge of coffee coloured monkeys in the next few hundred years, so any talk of race seems pointless in the grand scheme of things. Adapt or die, regardless of your race.
One example, an corrupt state MP here bought a farm in the middle of nowhere for $200k. Not long after, the State govt issues a mining license for the property which increase the value of the property to $100million. He of course is now being prosecuted for corruption
Land has a lot of uses, not just what the current occupant is using it for.
The things you mentioned aren't supply and demand, they are competition. Supply and Demand still exist, whether artificially controlled or not.
Can this technology be used on farts and BO? If so it could actually contribute more to world peace than neutralising Sarin Gas ever would.
I think the marketing problem for Microsoft is that, for desktop/laptop users, most of it was not broken in Windows 7 anyway. Windows 10 can't just be about fixing the things they got wrong with Windows 8. It needs to have some significant benefits as well, or everyone who's on Windows 7 today will just stay there and not upgrade.
It ain't broke don't fix only works in a static or slow moving environment. In fast paced IT, it's keep up or die. Win 7 was great fro desktops but missed the whole mobile revolution that occured after it's release. Win8 attempted to fix this (poorly). The converged OS is still a good idea IMO, it just needs to be tweaked to better suit the needs of it's customers. Win10 may do that, it may not, only time will tell.
But for those uses, a laptop does the job just fine anyway, and people who go to a lot of meetings probably take their laptop with them already. What extra benefit do they get for having a more complicated and expensive device like a Surface?
That's 2010 thinking. I work in a Surface only workplace. They aren't perfect, but slowly even the die-hards are losing the Laptop mentality. The cost of a Surface is similar to a Macbook Air (which is the de facto standard around here), but you get touch and stylus input, and native support for all the Office apps out of the box.
I accept that they aren't for everyone, but if you want a generic machine that does most things it ticks the box. For corporates, this is a no-brainer, and MS are aware of that. All they need to do is to get Win10 to be "good enough".
IOS: clicking the home button hides the app, double clicking and swiping closes it
Android: clicking the home or back button hides the app, double clicking home and swiping closes it.
Win8.1: clicking Windows hides the app, swiping from top to bottom of screen, or clicking x in the top right closes it.
They're all the same concept.
Please don't judge other's logic when you are so demonstrably poor at it yourself.
Judgment and penalty are two different concepts, hiding behind one to avoid the other is also a type Strawman. Maybe you've heard of that when you went to logic school?
You should take a look at Norway's crime statistics compared to those in the US.
Oh I'm quite familiar, as are most people who laugh at how ridiculously third world the US is when compared to every other OECD nation. But that is less about euthanasia and more about everything else that is wrong the the US (the list is long)
Given that Windows 8 has been a Vista-scale catatrophe for Microsoft, I think by now it's safe to say overall the corporate world doesn't buy into that vision either.
Yes, but if you try and understand what sucks about Win 8, most of it will be (hopefully) be fixed with Win 10. So just as Win7 was a relative success, I can;t see why Win 10 won't be the same.
Again, the things these devices are useful for in meetings are not necessarily the same things they are useful for when someone is working alone at a desk.
No not necessarily, but in most instances, Office people use Office apps (Outlook, Word, Excel, Web etc), and for that a Surface does the job of a tablet, laptop and desktop quite sufficiently.
Where did you get the $10 million number?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cost+to+k...
Third one down...
There's your false assumption, the guy is not perfectly healthy, in fact the is more sick than most people realise. Rehabilitate and release if possible, if not, terminate. Being better means actually being smart enough to accept that an active psychopath is not compatible with a modern society. And unless you have unlimited resources (ie live in fantasy land) you can choose to allocate your resources to housing, feeding and protecting these animals, or you can euthanise them and allocate your energy improving the lives of everyone else.
A real world example, Ivan Milat brutally raped and murder 7 people in my area. He got life which will cost the taxpayer approx $10Million over the course of his life. Given the option of execution (after a few years of appeals), the tax payer could re-allocate at least $7million of that to more teachers, nurses or ambulances. Or regular people can suck it up, while this psychopath eats and drinks and watches cable TV for the rest of his days. I know which of those options is *better* in my universe.
I take it you've never used a Surface? The Surface Pro 3 is a valid laptop replacement, we use them across the board at my current job and they work well. Tablet in the meeting room, docked at desk to dual 24" monitors, keyboard and mouse giving 3 full HD desktops. This is the MS vision, if your use case doesn't suit, that doesn't mean most of the corporate world doesn't. And this is the target market for MS.
Win8 wasn't as bad as the press. I hated it too when I used it and have only just got around to using full time since forced on me at my new job I started last year. In my experience there's a couple of small tweaks that will make the bad go away:
1. Give us the choice to Fuck Metro Off - this seems to be fixed here 2. Give us the start button back - fixed in 8.1 3. When you click on start give us a partial screen menu instead of the full screen one. Apparently fixed in Win10 So if the Metro fuckup is able to be controlled by the user, Win10 should be alright.
This is exactly how IOS and Android work so it's no big paradigm shift to simply hide apps rather than close them. The only catch with Windows is that it behaves the same on a desktop as a tablet, which is shit. Hopefully this fixes that issue.
I agree, the future of visual entertainment is streaming, not selling people an obscenely expensive and bloated package of crappy TV cannels just so they can watch a handful of them to catch their favorate shows.
I worked on an "IPTV" project 10 years ago when it was all new and whizz bang, but unfortunately it requires a half decent Internet service, which sadly even 10 years later most people don't have access to.