The ribbon is a horrible UI design. At least with menu (bars) you can SEE ALL your choices. WIth the ribbon if your window width is too small you don't.
When you collapse the window horizontally, the Ribbon collapses also. Big boxes full of icons shrink and eventually become pull-down menus. All you really need to remember is whether the option you want is under "Font," "Paragraph," etc. I really don't see it as a problem. I can shrink a Word 2010 window down to about 2.5 inches wide on my screen and I'm still able to access every function on the Ribbon. Better still, though, I try to do most things with Hotkeys.
Myself, when I need to find something on the Start Screen (or the old Start Menu), I just hit the Windows key and type in the name of the app I'm trying to launch. If I use the program often enough, I'll pin its icon somewhere to save me the trouble.
Nope. He means the way I try to move my mouse to the right to moderate something on Slashdot in Firefox, and Windows 8 thinks I am using the right swipe gesture and changes to next application (Weather if always open, and is very often the next app). That is what he means.
And I'm not sure what you mean. My Windows 8 machines never interpret mouse movements as touch gestures. The only thing that can be annoying from time to time is if I move the mouse cursor all the way to the right of the screen and it pulls up the Charms bar. Are you using a Metro version of Firefox or something? And if so, why?
To be fair, it's becoming more common for the "4-year" Bachelor's degree to take five or more years anyway, at least with engineering.
It's happening with lots of fields. One thing that I've seen happen to students in all types of degree programs is that they'll need one more class to complete their requirements but the school isn't offering the class they need this semester, due to budget cuts.
Also, anyone who has strict scheduling requirements -- say, they have a job to pay for all this school, so they can only take night classes on certain days -- is especially susceptible to this.
Don't know about that. I dropped out of an associate's degree program, so don't have any degree, and my career is doing just fine. There are plenty of people with the same amount of experience and a bachelor's who are well below me on the career ladder.
There are always exceptions to the rule... and I'm not even sure I agree that it's a "rule" that you need a degree.
But, not having a degree myself, I can say that it does make things harder for you in some ways. You're going to have to struggle a bit. Your career might progress more slowly than if you had a degree. But then, on the other hand, college takes at least four years of your life to complete and it can be pretty hard, so isn't it sort of a toss-up?
Maybe the only real rule is that if you want to get anywhere in life, you're going to have to work hard, one way or the other. Some people make the wrong choices and end up doing their hard work on a factory floor.
"You didn't really get an education unless you completed a full degree program."
In the U.S., associate degrees are generally two-year college degrees. They are NOT the equivalent of a university degree. They are the kind of degrees you get if you want to go into specialized professions, like being a lab assistant, or some types of nursing (though many hospitals now require four-year degrees), and various other things.
Don't get me wrong, it can't hurt you to get an associate degree. But an associate degree is not generally what most employers want to see when they're looking at your CV.
That's not true. Windows 8 was released on October 26. Office 2013 technically hasn't been released yet.
You can get Office 2013 if you are an MSDN or TechNet subscriber, a volume licensing customer, or if you're willing to use a time-limited trial version. But Office 2013 is not available in the retail channel; in fact, Microsoft has not even said exactly when it plans to make it available.
I'm somewhat familiar with the terms and conditions involved w/Windows Store apps, and my first reaction was, "Is this even possible?"
Assuming you think having VLC run in TIFKAM (The Interface Formerly Known As Metro) is an important/necessary thing (I guess some people want that), they're talking about having people pledge thousands of dollars for what is essentially a shot in the dark. The Kickstarter page lists many of my own concerns:
A goal of this port is the inclusion in the Windows Store. While we think it is feasible, there is a significant number of forbidden API calls, so in theory, VLC for Windows 8 might not be applicable for the store. We will do our best to achieve a successful publication on the store, so side loading isn't needed. VLC for Windows 8 will be licensed under both the GPLv2+ and the LGPL2.1+ depending on the respective code functionality. It is still subject to thorough checks whether these licenses are compatible with the Windows Store's terms of service. Publication on the store depends on the results of this investigation.
Note that the new "official" name for TIFKAM apps is "Windows Store Apps." You're meant to load them from the Windows Store. That's supposed to be part of what makes TIFKAM apps "so great." All of the apps in the Windows Store have been vetted by Microsoft, thus they're guaranteed to have met a lot of conditions. An app that doesn't meet these conditions doesn't get to be in the Store.
These conditions include UI and performance standards. From what I've seen of the VLC UI, there is no way that it will be accepted by Microsoft if it wants to include all of its current features and settings. Even apps that do comply seem to have a hard time getting approved. The VLC guys say they're using "forbidden API calls" -- forget about it. They will not get that app running on Windows RT, and I doubt there's a snowball's chance in hell of getting it approved for the Windows Store.
No approval, no Windows Store. No Windows Store, no Windows Store app. There are ways to sideload TIFKAM apps, but they're designed for enterprise customers. As I understand it, to make it possible to sideload apps on a Windows 8 machine, you need to install a special product key on each client machine to allow that. Regular customers can't sideload apps -- or, if there's a way to do it, it involves some elaborate hack.
So in a nutshell, if the VLC group can't get its TIFKAM app into the Windows Store, it's basically dead in the water. They can develop it, but the only people who will be able to deploy it will be the 5% of users who are willing to do whatever ugly, dangerous hacks are necessary to sideload apps onto their Windows 8 machines. Microsoft has cautioned that it might get even harder to sideload apps in future versions of Windows, too.
So remind me again what we're paying for, here? For a total blind gamble?
If he returns to the US, he has to stand trial for all US crimes he's violated. Sex with an underaged (under 18) person (even if local law says younger is age-of-consent), use of illegal substances, anything that violates US federal statutes.
Don't be ridiculous. Have you never left the country, ever? Immigration and customs does not ask you whether you have ever used drugs or how old the people you've slept with are. If McAfee has been convicted of serious crimes in foreign countries there may be problems, and if he's wanted by law enforcement in other countries he may be arrested in the US, but only to be turned over to those authorities to stand trial. There is no retroactive "things you may have done in some country, at some time in your life, which violate US law, for which you now must stand trial under US law" clause.
But I see no sign that he's trying to go back to the US. Did he surrender his US citizenship?
It's been reported in news stories and by McAfee himself that he spoke with the American embassy in Guatemala about returning to the US. They said they wouldn't help him. Presumably something about respecting the sovereignty of both Guatemala and Belize, and the right of each to enforce its own laws on people within its own borders.
They're not going to let you out of custody, they're going to have a guard on you at the hospital. When the hospital releases you, back to jail you go.
In McAfee's case, he was actually taken to a police-run hospital. He was never out of custody.
The points you make are true, and he has also admitted in interviews that he, himself, holds patents -- technology patents which could potentially be licensed by Apple, among others (we just don't know) -- and that he used his past experiences with patents to instruct the other jurors about patent law.
He has explained exactly what points he convinced the other jurors of (I don't have a direct link here) and attorneys who have been asked about his arguments have said that he was totally off-base and that he does not have a good understanding of patent law.
Moreover, the court never recognized Hogan as any kind of "expert" (legally speaking) on patent law, so while he is certainly entitled to argue whatever he wants during jury deliberations, he should not have presented himself as an expert and the other jurors should have received any explanations of patent law they needed from the judge, not from Hogan.
I for one cannot imagine using a touch-the-screen solution on the desktop or laptop.
But TFA is correct. I've spent a day messing around with a tablet running Windows 8, touching away, and then when I go back to a regular PC with a monitor -- also running Windows 8, FWIW -- I automatically start reaching for the monitor for the first couple of moments. And this is for the Desktop UI, too. Once you get used to certain habits on one device, you want to do the same thing on other devices, especially when they are running the exact same OS and everything looks virtually identical to you. You know the touch points are supposed to be there, so you reach for them.
Whether this is a "good" thing or not is open to debate.
I don't think there's any intelligent code running the elevators in my building.
I live in a 14 floor apartment building. I frequently come home in the evenings to see both elevators just chilling idle on the 14th floor....
Does your building have any security? Maybe the policy is for the elevators to idle at the top floor after dark so that people coming in will have to hang around the lobby a certain amount of time before getting into the elevator?
Or maybe it's been determined that in a residential building, more people tend to be at home at nighttime than in during the day, which means that at night, residents are more likely to enter the elevator on a floor higher than the first floor, which means it's more efficient to have the elevator idle on a higher floor? And maybe they decided to make the idle floor the top floor because the people on the top floor are paying more rent?
I don't know how "intelligent" the elevators necessarily are, but it seems impossible that there's no kind of logic behind how they operate.
Around here, bars and restaurants make faked-up vodka cocktails (Bloody Marys, screwdrivers, etc.) using soju. Why? Because soju doesn't taste like anything (kind of like vodka) but it is so low in alcohol that you can serve it even if you only have a beer and wine license.
So as far as I can tell, soju is an alcohol designed for people with no tolerance and no taste.
Obviously older hardware won't get OS updates forever. It's because the hardware can't accommodate them, not because of some conspiracy theory.
With Android 4.2, the Nexus S and the Motorola Xoom got dropped from the list that get the upgrade. That seems logical. For example, the Nexus S only has a single-core processor, while its successor the Galaxy Nexus has a dual-core running at a higher clock speed. The Nexus S also has half the memory of the Galaxy Nexus, and its screen resolution is 37 percent lower. It simply is not a modern handset, and the effort required to shoehorn Jelly Bean 4.2 onto it wouldn't be worth the time, effort, or money.
Sure, the Nexus S was only released two years ago, but in case you haven't noticed, this market moves fast. I can understand why some people would be disappointed that the product's "shelf life" is only two years -- but that's really not the case. The Nexus S can still run Jelly Bean 4.1.2, which is a more recent OS release than all but 2.7 percent of all Android phones are running.
If we wanna quibble, the BASIC example given isn't really all that "random," either. The RND(x) function in 8-bit BASIC was (naturally) only pseudo-random, and not terribly chaotic, either. The way I recall it, on the Apple ][ at least, it really didn't take all that long at all to see the pattern start to repeat itself.
"although it won’t be able to run apps developed for Windows RT, unless the developers in question also built a version of their app for Windows 8—you really can’t get here from there"
Nobody knows what that quote from the article means.
Let me explain it to you in plain terms: There is not one single developer, anywhere, who will develop an app for Windows RT and not simultaneously release a version that will run on Windows 8. Nobody is developing for Windows RT. They are developing for Windows 8, and the fact that it's easy to get the same app to run on Windows RT is cake.
Also, note how news on Tuesday that Microsoft has sold 40M Windows 8 licenses so far completely missed Slashdot's front page
Sold to whom? To customers? To people who are sitting at desks, right now, running Windows 8? I highly doubt it. Most of those licenses that have been "sold" are to OEMs who have product sitting in the channel (or that hasn't even been produced yet) or to volume-licensing customers who are only really hypothetically buying it; the're not installing it. I say this as someone who's been running Windows 8 almost since it launched -- yes, I'm using it, but nobody else is.
Slashdot Mirror
The ribbon is a horrible UI design. At least with menu (bars) you can SEE ALL your choices. WIth the ribbon if your window width is too small you don't.
When you collapse the window horizontally, the Ribbon collapses also. Big boxes full of icons shrink and eventually become pull-down menus. All you really need to remember is whether the option you want is under "Font," "Paragraph," etc. I really don't see it as a problem. I can shrink a Word 2010 window down to about 2.5 inches wide on my screen and I'm still able to access every function on the Ribbon. Better still, though, I try to do most things with Hotkeys.
Myself, when I need to find something on the Start Screen (or the old Start Menu), I just hit the Windows key and type in the name of the app I'm trying to launch. If I use the program often enough, I'll pin its icon somewhere to save me the trouble.
Nope. He means the way I try to move my mouse to the right to moderate something on Slashdot in Firefox, and Windows 8 thinks I am using the right swipe gesture and changes to next application (Weather if always open, and is very often the next app). That is what he means.
And I'm not sure what you mean. My Windows 8 machines never interpret mouse movements as touch gestures. The only thing that can be annoying from time to time is if I move the mouse cursor all the way to the right of the screen and it pulls up the Charms bar. Are you using a Metro version of Firefox or something? And if so, why?
Unless you think that an AR-15 is an assult rifle in which case you need to check your definitions
This is debatable. At the time we had an "assault weapons ban" in effect in the United States, the AR-15 was one of the weapons listed in the ban.
Of all the things to complain about, this is fairly lame. It's a movie. Things need to be cut.
Apparently that isn't true for The Hobbit, which sounds like it's going to be even longer than the entire Lord of the Rings in movie form.
To be fair, it's becoming more common for the "4-year" Bachelor's degree to take five or more years anyway, at least with engineering.
It's happening with lots of fields. One thing that I've seen happen to students in all types of degree programs is that they'll need one more class to complete their requirements but the school isn't offering the class they need this semester, due to budget cuts.
Also, anyone who has strict scheduling requirements -- say, they have a job to pay for all this school, so they can only take night classes on certain days -- is especially susceptible to this.
I never really got an education, seeing as I was born an orphan and went to art college...
BORN an orphan? Now there's a disgusting image...
Don't know about that. I dropped out of an associate's degree program, so don't have any degree, and my career is doing just fine. There are plenty of people with the same amount of experience and a bachelor's who are well below me on the career ladder.
There are always exceptions to the rule ... and I'm not even sure I agree that it's a "rule" that you need a degree.
But, not having a degree myself, I can say that it does make things harder for you in some ways. You're going to have to struggle a bit. Your career might progress more slowly than if you had a degree. But then, on the other hand, college takes at least four years of your life to complete and it can be pretty hard, so isn't it sort of a toss-up?
Maybe the only real rule is that if you want to get anywhere in life, you're going to have to work hard, one way or the other. Some people make the wrong choices and end up doing their hard work on a factory floor.
Or
"You didn't really get an education unless you completed a full degree program."
In the U.S., associate degrees are generally two-year college degrees. They are NOT the equivalent of a university degree. They are the kind of degrees you get if you want to go into specialized professions, like being a lab assistant, or some types of nursing (though many hospitals now require four-year degrees), and various other things.
Don't get me wrong, it can't hurt you to get an associate degree. But an associate degree is not generally what most employers want to see when they're looking at your CV.
Office 2013 was released 21 days before Win8
That's not true. Windows 8 was released on October 26. Office 2013 technically hasn't been released yet.
You can get Office 2013 if you are an MSDN or TechNet subscriber, a volume licensing customer, or if you're willing to use a time-limited trial version. But Office 2013 is not available in the retail channel; in fact, Microsoft has not even said exactly when it plans to make it available.
I'm somewhat familiar with the terms and conditions involved w/Windows Store apps, and my first reaction was, "Is this even possible?"
Assuming you think having VLC run in TIFKAM (The Interface Formerly Known As Metro) is an important/necessary thing (I guess some people want that), they're talking about having people pledge thousands of dollars for what is essentially a shot in the dark. The Kickstarter page lists many of my own concerns:
A goal of this port is the inclusion in the Windows Store. While we think it is feasible, there is a significant number of forbidden API calls, so in theory, VLC for Windows 8 might not be applicable for the store. We will do our best to achieve a successful publication on the store, so side loading isn't needed.
VLC for Windows 8 will be licensed under both the GPLv2+ and the LGPL2.1+ depending on the respective code functionality. It is still subject to thorough checks whether these licenses are compatible with the Windows Store's terms of service. Publication on the store depends on the results of this investigation.
Note that the new "official" name for TIFKAM apps is "Windows Store Apps." You're meant to load them from the Windows Store. That's supposed to be part of what makes TIFKAM apps "so great." All of the apps in the Windows Store have been vetted by Microsoft, thus they're guaranteed to have met a lot of conditions. An app that doesn't meet these conditions doesn't get to be in the Store.
These conditions include UI and performance standards. From what I've seen of the VLC UI, there is no way that it will be accepted by Microsoft if it wants to include all of its current features and settings. Even apps that do comply seem to have a hard time getting approved. The VLC guys say they're using "forbidden API calls" -- forget about it. They will not get that app running on Windows RT, and I doubt there's a snowball's chance in hell of getting it approved for the Windows Store.
No approval, no Windows Store. No Windows Store, no Windows Store app. There are ways to sideload TIFKAM apps, but they're designed for enterprise customers. As I understand it, to make it possible to sideload apps on a Windows 8 machine, you need to install a special product key on each client machine to allow that. Regular customers can't sideload apps -- or, if there's a way to do it, it involves some elaborate hack.
So in a nutshell, if the VLC group can't get its TIFKAM app into the Windows Store, it's basically dead in the water. They can develop it, but the only people who will be able to deploy it will be the 5% of users who are willing to do whatever ugly, dangerous hacks are necessary to sideload apps onto their Windows 8 machines. Microsoft has cautioned that it might get even harder to sideload apps in future versions of Windows, too.
So remind me again what we're paying for, here? For a total blind gamble?
If he returns to the US, he has to stand trial for all US crimes he's violated. Sex with an underaged (under 18) person (even if local law says younger is age-of-consent), use of illegal substances, anything that violates US federal statutes.
Don't be ridiculous. Have you never left the country, ever? Immigration and customs does not ask you whether you have ever used drugs or how old the people you've slept with are. If McAfee has been convicted of serious crimes in foreign countries there may be problems, and if he's wanted by law enforcement in other countries he may be arrested in the US, but only to be turned over to those authorities to stand trial. There is no retroactive "things you may have done in some country, at some time in your life, which violate US law, for which you now must stand trial under US law" clause.
But I see no sign that he's trying to go back to the US. Did he surrender his US citizenship?
It's been reported in news stories and by McAfee himself that he spoke with the American embassy in Guatemala about returning to the US. They said they wouldn't help him. Presumably something about respecting the sovereignty of both Guatemala and Belize, and the right of each to enforce its own laws on people within its own borders.
Do you see $100 million of development every year? Where does the money go? Where is the 2011 report?
The 2011 report is right here.
They're not going to let you out of custody, they're going to have a guard on you at the hospital. When the hospital releases you, back to jail you go.
In McAfee's case, he was actually taken to a police-run hospital. He was never out of custody.
Keep your cds in a box somewhere as a catastrophic recovery, and have one duplicate of your ripped files offline somewhere.
So glad you told him this. Too bad that he had already thrown half of his CDs into the furnace before he heard your advice.
The points you make are true, and he has also admitted in interviews that he, himself, holds patents -- technology patents which could potentially be licensed by Apple, among others (we just don't know) -- and that he used his past experiences with patents to instruct the other jurors about patent law.
He has explained exactly what points he convinced the other jurors of (I don't have a direct link here) and attorneys who have been asked about his arguments have said that he was totally off-base and that he does not have a good understanding of patent law.
Moreover, the court never recognized Hogan as any kind of "expert" (legally speaking) on patent law, so while he is certainly entitled to argue whatever he wants during jury deliberations, he should not have presented himself as an expert and the other jurors should have received any explanations of patent law they needed from the judge, not from Hogan.
I for one cannot imagine using a touch-the-screen solution on the desktop or laptop.
But TFA is correct. I've spent a day messing around with a tablet running Windows 8, touching away, and then when I go back to a regular PC with a monitor -- also running Windows 8, FWIW -- I automatically start reaching for the monitor for the first couple of moments. And this is for the Desktop UI, too. Once you get used to certain habits on one device, you want to do the same thing on other devices, especially when they are running the exact same OS and everything looks virtually identical to you. You know the touch points are supposed to be there, so you reach for them.
Whether this is a "good" thing or not is open to debate.
I don't think there's any intelligent code running the elevators in my building.
I live in a 14 floor apartment building. I frequently come home in the evenings to see both elevators just chilling idle on the 14th floor....
Does your building have any security? Maybe the policy is for the elevators to idle at the top floor after dark so that people coming in will have to hang around the lobby a certain amount of time before getting into the elevator?
Or maybe it's been determined that in a residential building, more people tend to be at home at nighttime than in during the day, which means that at night, residents are more likely to enter the elevator on a floor higher than the first floor, which means it's more efficient to have the elevator idle on a higher floor? And maybe they decided to make the idle floor the top floor because the people on the top floor are paying more rent?
I don't know how "intelligent" the elevators necessarily are, but it seems impossible that there's no kind of logic behind how they operate.
Around here, bars and restaurants make faked-up vodka cocktails (Bloody Marys, screwdrivers, etc.) using soju. Why? Because soju doesn't taste like anything (kind of like vodka) but it is so low in alcohol that you can serve it even if you only have a beer and wine license.
So as far as I can tell, soju is an alcohol designed for people with no tolerance and no taste.
Obviously older hardware won't get OS updates forever. It's because the hardware can't accommodate them, not because of some conspiracy theory.
With Android 4.2, the Nexus S and the Motorola Xoom got dropped from the list that get the upgrade. That seems logical. For example, the Nexus S only has a single-core processor, while its successor the Galaxy Nexus has a dual-core running at a higher clock speed. The Nexus S also has half the memory of the Galaxy Nexus, and its screen resolution is 37 percent lower. It simply is not a modern handset, and the effort required to shoehorn Jelly Bean 4.2 onto it wouldn't be worth the time, effort, or money.
Sure, the Nexus S was only released two years ago, but in case you haven't noticed, this market moves fast. I can understand why some people would be disappointed that the product's "shelf life" is only two years -- but that's really not the case. The Nexus S can still run Jelly Bean 4.1.2, which is a more recent OS release than all but 2.7 percent of all Android phones are running.
If we wanna quibble, the BASIC example given isn't really all that "random," either. The RND(x) function in 8-bit BASIC was (naturally) only pseudo-random, and not terribly chaotic, either. The way I recall it, on the Apple ][ at least, it really didn't take all that long at all to see the pattern start to repeat itself.
"although it won’t be able to run apps developed for Windows RT, unless the developers in question also built a version of their app for Windows 8—you really can’t get here from there"
Nobody knows what that quote from the article means.
Let me explain it to you in plain terms: There is not one single developer, anywhere, who will develop an app for Windows RT and not simultaneously release a version that will run on Windows 8. Nobody is developing for Windows RT. They are developing for Windows 8, and the fact that it's easy to get the same app to run on Windows RT is cake.
With Windows 8 and surface there is a definite vibe that it is ready to be a full system builder.
Yeah. "Put me in the game, coach! I'm ready!"
Also, note how news on Tuesday that Microsoft has sold 40M Windows 8 licenses so far completely missed Slashdot's front page
Sold to whom? To customers? To people who are sitting at desks, right now, running Windows 8? I highly doubt it. Most of those licenses that have been "sold" are to OEMs who have product sitting in the channel (or that hasn't even been produced yet) or to volume-licensing customers who are only really hypothetically buying it; the're not installing it. I say this as someone who's been running Windows 8 almost since it launched -- yes, I'm using it, but nobody else is.