Don't forget the pressure sensitive digitizer with pen included and palm rest detection. That ain't cheap.
It's going to be very useful for meeting and class notes, especially when combined with One Note.
Seriously? You'd rather take notes with a pen than a keyboard? I mean, I guess I understand that being able to jot down sketches of some diagram your instructor put on the board is useful... but even more useful would be just snapping a picture with your camera. And I don't care how "pressure sensitive" a digital pen might be, I've never met one that is as useful as the genuine article, coupled with a pad of paper. To me, a tablet that includes a pen is a lot like a car that comes with "bicycle mode," where you can accelerate by alternating pressure on two pedals -- you know, because that's what you're used to.
To combat this, make it clear at the before the download how it all works.
It's likely that the people placing the support calls didn't even download the software themselves, let alone install it. To which I ask: Where are the IT support staff at these customers' companies? Aren't they usually first-line support for the software they install and maintain, and shouldn't they be the ones who escalate issues to the vendor?
As the one who originally submitted this question, we have considered the "account number" approach, but we can't justify anything that makes it more difficult for paying customers to get support when they need it.
So how do you establish who is a paying customer and who isn't? If it's your policy for the support staff to just ask for a credit card number every time they take a call, I might get pretty irate, too.
That AIO is going to be an oversized paperweight the moment one of it's components breaks or becomes painfully obsolete. Depending on your hardware vendor, your machine may be painfully obsolete as soon as you take it home.
So like a laptop, then? I think vendors have sold a few of those by now.
I wonder what the hungry masses in other regions will do when they still have their cars and their weapons and enough fuel to reach the food-producing regions... Hmm, I think they will just curl up and die in their apartments in cities. Going 100 miles to a ranch, killing the rancher and slaughtering all his cows would never occur to a bunch of city thugs, especially when the law enforcement ceased to exist.
Right. As if a "city thug" would know the first thing about how to slaughter and butcher a cow (without killing himself with e. coli), let alone how to plant and harvest a crop.
Out of curiosity: are they buying physical gold, storing it in a safe under their own control?
I'm not completely sure where they're keeping it. I doubt they trust banks enough to rent a safe deposit box, but keeping gold in your rented apartment in an urban area doesn't seem that smart, either. They're probably letting someone hang onto it, so it's only semi- under their control.
I was more thinking, though, of the problem that ANY kind of currency, be it gold or whatever, is worthless in a completely unregulated economy. If The Shit Goes Down and society collapses and I have ten loaves of bread and you have $1,000 worth of gold -- never mind how we both managed to agree how much gold is worth $1,000 -- guess what the price of one loaf of bread is going to be today?
but the legacy desktop side is still an unlocked experience, and vendors can install junk on there if they want to.
Depends on your definition of "junk." Most of the stuff in the Windows App Store looks like junk to me, just like most of the stuff in most app stores.
Also, your definition of "legacy" must be different than mine. I've been using Windows 8 on a daily basis since shortly after it launched, and I spend all day using desktop apps. I don't really see a way that my workloads can be transferred to TIFKAM apps, either, so I pretty much just ignore the Start Screen most of the time. (FWIW, this is actually very easy to do in Windows 8, despite all the online articles screaming bloody murder about having to put up with it.)
Interestingly, I see reports of users with Windows 8 OEM computers that are having a bitch of a time getting Windows 8 to reinstall off plain Windows 8 discs.
I don't know about the specific reports you mention, but they may be due to the fact that most (retail) Windows 8 discs are intended for upgrades only. If you want to wipe the drive and install fresh, you either need to install Windows 7 first and upgrade using a retail Windows 8 disc, buy the "System Builder Edition" of Windows 8, or get an ISO and a valid serial number from MSDN or TechNet. Also, Windows 8 will not activate without a valid Product Key -- and unlike Windows 7, you get no grace period and must activate it in order to use it -- and it seems likely that the Keys that are supplied with OEM preinstalled copies aren't valid for retail versions (though I have not verified this).
Or buy a Nexus device direct from Google. Stock Android UI, no crapware, and you also get the advantage of being among the first to get the latest OS updates (when other devices might never get them).
If you're talking about QuickTime for Windows, there's a big difference between that and the QuickTime that comes with Mac OS X in terms of the things you describe.
The question is - why are people buying these computers? Newegg, TigerDirect, and others sell components, online, and cheap. In an afternoon, a guy can build an equivalent computer from components, install his favorite OS, and be ready to start installing all his required software in the morning.
Show me someone who can build a 1.37-inch-thick 27" touchscreen all-in-one PC "in an afternoon" and I'll show you someone who works for Acer.
With all the new system form factors coming out, I highly doubt you're going to see many classic, slapped-together tower PCs in people's homes in the near future.
As the actual proposal notes, while Project Nashorn has been in the works within Oracle for some time, what they're doing now is proposing to make it part of OpenJDK, to get more people working on it so that the code can be tightened up for production use.
In addition, I have a cross-cut shredder at my home. I've looked at the bits of paper that come out of it, and it's nigh impossible to get any meaningful information off of them -- certainly not "Pete Jones is an undercover police officer, yes that Pete Jones, the one who buys his cocaine at the Acme Bar, the guy with the weird mustache." And mine is pretty old, too. They have ones that slice and dice the paper much finer than mine.
So, while I'm not saying it's impossible that somebody picked up some confetti at a parade and realized to their horror that it contained sensitive, confidential information; but if that did in fact happen, it was clearly an intentional act by someone.
Cue the dramatic organ music... and now let's start talking Occam's Razor. Do we believe this story, really?
If I were in place of your friends, I would [also] suspect an attempt at fraud. What people say is totally irrelevant; con artists specialize in being very convincing.
And yet I have more than a few friends who actively replace their surplus currency with gold, whenever they can. Their main reason for doing this is not really because they think gold is a great investment, but because they think the gold will still have value "when the shit goes down," meaning mass revolution and collapse of the American economy and society as we know it. I have had no more success trying to convince them that conducting an economy based on precious metals after the collapse of American society will be difficult than I have had convincing them that the collapse of society -- for which they have also been stockpiling assault rifles, BTW -- is unlikely to occur in their lifetimes. Some people are funny like that.
True story: I have some friends who operate a retail store that sells pricey imported bicycles. The bikes there go from around $1,300 to upwards of $4,000. One day, a guy walked in off the street, expressed some interest in buying a bike, but explained (long story short) that he was one of these "fiat currency" nuts and he didn't like to do business in U.S. dollars. Instead, he proposed to buy a bike using a certain amount of pure gold, and he took a little gold bar out of his pocket for proof.
My friends declined. It seems that, to them at least, the so-called fiat currency actually has more value than gold.
I'm not sure what the guy with the gold might have been up to, exactly. Maybe he really did think he could go around using gold as currency. Maybe he was a swindler. It would be a lot more interesting if it was all part of some long experiment he was conducting and he planned to publish his results, though.
I think it will tell us that even in the most optimistic scenerio where Bitcoin achieves 100% market penetration, some people will go to their graves insisting that it won't work, isn't really money, and is all just a ponzi scheme.
Conversely, if Bitcoin is around for 100 years and nobody but a handful of extreme-right libertarians thinks it's worth so much as a wooden nickel, we will have learned empirically that some people will always go to their graves still wishing for a pony.
People find your page because you provide information they need, not because they see your ads.
You're missing the point that the "information" his site provides is, in fact, advertising. All the site has to say is a list of the names of some movies and the times that you can come and pay to see them. People apparently want to know when they can do that, but that doesn't change the fact that he's advertising a business.
Webkit is huge in mobile but not on the desktop so there is no way we are only developing for it.
According to some stats, Chrome is neck-and-neck with Internet Explorer for browser market share, so I'd say WebKit is pretty huge on the desktop, too.
For software test scenarios, I find VMware Workstation has just about everything you'd ever want. Its snapshotting feature is especially impressive, if you're diligent about it. Example: You install Windows, clean from the disc, that's a snapshot. Then you run Windows Update a zillion times to get everything up to date, that's a snapshot. Then say it asks you if you want to upgrade from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 8. You do; that's a snapshot. Now you can flip back and forth between the two states of the VM; now you have IE7, now you have IE8. Now let's say you want to install something else in addition to the base Windows install. You can install it on both snapshots -- once on the IE7 state, and once on the IE8 state. Now the two VM states have diverged, and VMware forks them for you. You can then keep going, making new snapshots along each fork. And so on... and you can actually navigate around your little branching tree of snapshots with a GUI, resetting the machine to the state you want, whenever you want. It's very useful. That said, it looks like the current list price is $250, so that might be out of range for someone who just wants it "for personal use."
So all this talk of restricting number porting is ridiculous. Good on the Communications Alliance (who are mostly made up of smaller Telcos that like number porting) for not bowing to the pressure and bullshit spouted by here by iTnews.com.au. It really isn't an issue, in fact i think other countries should adopt similar consumer protection laws where switching providers whilst retaining the old mobile number is a breeze.
I don't know if switching mobile providers and keeping the same number is "a breeze" in the US, but I've done it a few times. You can even switch from a landline to a mobile phone and keep your same number, in many cases. There are no fees involved, unless you break a contract.
That said, there definitely is something fishy about this story. Do a Google search for "mobile phone porting fraud" and most of the results you get back are from.au domains. I don't know if that points to a misguided media (or marketing) campaign, like you suggest, or maybe there's a weakness in the number porting procedure in Australia that doesn't exist in other countries?
If he had no other assets, Lucas is now the 91st richest man in America.
I'd sell out for that too.
Hmmm. And here I thought Lucas was going to give Star Wars a rest so he could go back to making sensitive, independent art films that represent his true vision, the way he's always wanted to do. You know... films like Red Tails.
Similar economics apply to desktop software. Say an upgrade to the new version of Office costs $300. Ramping up a department of 100 workers, each with a copy of Office, would cost you $30,000. For a small business, that might actually force you to make a decision: Do we upgrade our software this quarter or do we install that new lighting we've been talking about? A subscription model might actually look attractive to you in that case, too -- which may be one reason why Microsoft is now offering Office in a subscription model (and Adobe is doing the same with Photoshop, etc.)
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Don't forget the pressure sensitive digitizer with pen included and palm rest detection. That ain't cheap.
It's going to be very useful for meeting and class notes, especially when combined with One Note.
Seriously? You'd rather take notes with a pen than a keyboard? I mean, I guess I understand that being able to jot down sketches of some diagram your instructor put on the board is useful... but even more useful would be just snapping a picture with your camera. And I don't care how "pressure sensitive" a digital pen might be, I've never met one that is as useful as the genuine article, coupled with a pad of paper. To me, a tablet that includes a pen is a lot like a car that comes with "bicycle mode," where you can accelerate by alternating pressure on two pedals -- you know, because that's what you're used to.
To combat this, make it clear at the before the download how it all works.
It's likely that the people placing the support calls didn't even download the software themselves, let alone install it. To which I ask: Where are the IT support staff at these customers' companies? Aren't they usually first-line support for the software they install and maintain, and shouldn't they be the ones who escalate issues to the vendor?
As the one who originally submitted this question, we have considered the "account number" approach, but we can't justify anything that makes it more difficult for paying customers to get support when they need it.
So how do you establish who is a paying customer and who isn't? If it's your policy for the support staff to just ask for a credit card number every time they take a call, I might get pretty irate, too.
So, if you like a machine that 'looks good' but runs like a dog, you'll probably favor the Acer
All due respect, but by most accounts Windows 8 requires fewer resources and runs better than Windows 7, the new Start Screen notwithstanding.
That AIO is going to be an oversized paperweight the moment one of it's components breaks or becomes painfully obsolete. Depending on your hardware vendor, your machine may be painfully obsolete as soon as you take it home.
So like a laptop, then? I think vendors have sold a few of those by now.
I wonder what the hungry masses in other regions will do when they still have their cars and their weapons and enough fuel to reach the food-producing regions... Hmm, I think they will just curl up and die in their apartments in cities. Going 100 miles to a ranch, killing the rancher and slaughtering all his cows would never occur to a bunch of city thugs, especially when the law enforcement ceased to exist.
Right. As if a "city thug" would know the first thing about how to slaughter and butcher a cow (without killing himself with e. coli), let alone how to plant and harvest a crop.
Out of curiosity: are they buying physical gold, storing it in a safe under their own control?
I'm not completely sure where they're keeping it. I doubt they trust banks enough to rent a safe deposit box, but keeping gold in your rented apartment in an urban area doesn't seem that smart, either. They're probably letting someone hang onto it, so it's only semi- under their control.
I was more thinking, though, of the problem that ANY kind of currency, be it gold or whatever, is worthless in a completely unregulated economy. If The Shit Goes Down and society collapses and I have ten loaves of bread and you have $1,000 worth of gold -- never mind how we both managed to agree how much gold is worth $1,000 -- guess what the price of one loaf of bread is going to be today?
WHERE do you live? Remind me not to visit. :-)
Believe it or not, San Francisco, California. It takes all kinds, I guess.
but the legacy desktop side is still an unlocked experience, and vendors can install junk on there if they want to.
Depends on your definition of "junk." Most of the stuff in the Windows App Store looks like junk to me, just like most of the stuff in most app stores.
Also, your definition of "legacy" must be different than mine. I've been using Windows 8 on a daily basis since shortly after it launched, and I spend all day using desktop apps. I don't really see a way that my workloads can be transferred to TIFKAM apps, either, so I pretty much just ignore the Start Screen most of the time. (FWIW, this is actually very easy to do in Windows 8, despite all the online articles screaming bloody murder about having to put up with it.)
Interestingly, I see reports of users with Windows 8 OEM computers that are having a bitch of a time getting Windows 8 to reinstall off plain Windows 8 discs.
I don't know about the specific reports you mention, but they may be due to the fact that most (retail) Windows 8 discs are intended for upgrades only. If you want to wipe the drive and install fresh, you either need to install Windows 7 first and upgrade using a retail Windows 8 disc, buy the "System Builder Edition" of Windows 8, or get an ISO and a valid serial number from MSDN or TechNet. Also, Windows 8 will not activate without a valid Product Key -- and unlike Windows 7, you get no grace period and must activate it in order to use it -- and it seems likely that the Keys that are supplied with OEM preinstalled copies aren't valid for retail versions (though I have not verified this).
Or buy a Nexus device direct from Google. Stock Android UI, no crapware, and you also get the advantage of being among the first to get the latest OS updates (when other devices might never get them).
If you're talking about QuickTime for Windows, there's a big difference between that and the QuickTime that comes with Mac OS X in terms of the things you describe.
The question is - why are people buying these computers? Newegg, TigerDirect, and others sell components, online, and cheap. In an afternoon, a guy can build an equivalent computer from components, install his favorite OS, and be ready to start installing all his required software in the morning.
Show me someone who can build a 1.37-inch-thick 27" touchscreen all-in-one PC "in an afternoon" and I'll show you someone who works for Acer.
With all the new system form factors coming out, I highly doubt you're going to see many classic, slapped-together tower PCs in people's homes in the near future.
As the actual proposal notes, while Project Nashorn has been in the works within Oracle for some time, what they're doing now is proposing to make it part of OpenJDK, to get more people working on it so that the code can be tightened up for production use.
In addition, I have a cross-cut shredder at my home. I've looked at the bits of paper that come out of it, and it's nigh impossible to get any meaningful information off of them -- certainly not "Pete Jones is an undercover police officer, yes that Pete Jones, the one who buys his cocaine at the Acme Bar, the guy with the weird mustache." And mine is pretty old, too. They have ones that slice and dice the paper much finer than mine.
So, while I'm not saying it's impossible that somebody picked up some confetti at a parade and realized to their horror that it contained sensitive, confidential information; but if that did in fact happen, it was clearly an intentional act by someone.
Cue the dramatic organ music... and now let's start talking Occam's Razor. Do we believe this story, really?
If I were in place of your friends, I would [also] suspect an attempt at fraud. What people say is totally irrelevant; con artists specialize in being very convincing.
And yet I have more than a few friends who actively replace their surplus currency with gold, whenever they can. Their main reason for doing this is not really because they think gold is a great investment, but because they think the gold will still have value "when the shit goes down," meaning mass revolution and collapse of the American economy and society as we know it. I have had no more success trying to convince them that conducting an economy based on precious metals after the collapse of American society will be difficult than I have had convincing them that the collapse of society -- for which they have also been stockpiling assault rifles, BTW -- is unlikely to occur in their lifetimes. Some people are funny like that.
True story: I have some friends who operate a retail store that sells pricey imported bicycles. The bikes there go from around $1,300 to upwards of $4,000. One day, a guy walked in off the street, expressed some interest in buying a bike, but explained (long story short) that he was one of these "fiat currency" nuts and he didn't like to do business in U.S. dollars. Instead, he proposed to buy a bike using a certain amount of pure gold, and he took a little gold bar out of his pocket for proof.
My friends declined. It seems that, to them at least, the so-called fiat currency actually has more value than gold.
I'm not sure what the guy with the gold might have been up to, exactly. Maybe he really did think he could go around using gold as currency. Maybe he was a swindler. It would be a lot more interesting if it was all part of some long experiment he was conducting and he planned to publish his results, though.
I think it will tell us that even in the most optimistic scenerio where Bitcoin achieves 100% market penetration, some people will go to their graves insisting that it won't work, isn't really money, and is all just a ponzi scheme.
Conversely, if Bitcoin is around for 100 years and nobody but a handful of extreme-right libertarians thinks it's worth so much as a wooden nickel, we will have learned empirically that some people will always go to their graves still wishing for a pony.
People find your page because you provide information they need, not because they see your ads.
You're missing the point that the "information" his site provides is, in fact, advertising. All the site has to say is a list of the names of some movies and the times that you can come and pay to see them. People apparently want to know when they can do that, but that doesn't change the fact that he's advertising a business.
Webkit is huge in mobile but not on the desktop so there is no way we are only developing for it.
According to some stats, Chrome is neck-and-neck with Internet Explorer for browser market share, so I'd say WebKit is pretty huge on the desktop, too.
For software test scenarios, I find VMware Workstation has just about everything you'd ever want. Its snapshotting feature is especially impressive, if you're diligent about it. Example: You install Windows, clean from the disc, that's a snapshot. Then you run Windows Update a zillion times to get everything up to date, that's a snapshot. Then say it asks you if you want to upgrade from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 8. You do; that's a snapshot. Now you can flip back and forth between the two states of the VM; now you have IE7, now you have IE8. Now let's say you want to install something else in addition to the base Windows install. You can install it on both snapshots -- once on the IE7 state, and once on the IE8 state. Now the two VM states have diverged, and VMware forks them for you. You can then keep going, making new snapshots along each fork. And so on ... and you can actually navigate around your little branching tree of snapshots with a GUI, resetting the machine to the state you want, whenever you want. It's very useful. That said, it looks like the current list price is $250, so that might be out of range for someone who just wants it "for personal use."
So all this talk of restricting number porting is ridiculous. Good on the Communications Alliance (who are mostly made up of smaller Telcos that like number porting) for not bowing to the pressure and bullshit spouted by here by iTnews.com.au. It really isn't an issue, in fact i think other countries should adopt similar consumer protection laws where switching providers whilst retaining the old mobile number is a breeze.
I don't know if switching mobile providers and keeping the same number is "a breeze" in the US, but I've done it a few times. You can even switch from a landline to a mobile phone and keep your same number, in many cases. There are no fees involved, unless you break a contract.
That said, there definitely is something fishy about this story. Do a Google search for "mobile phone porting fraud" and most of the results you get back are from .au domains. I don't know if that points to a misguided media (or marketing) campaign, like you suggest, or maybe there's a weakness in the number porting procedure in Australia that doesn't exist in other countries?
If he had no other assets, Lucas is now the 91st richest man in America.
I'd sell out for that too.
Hmmm. And here I thought Lucas was going to give Star Wars a rest so he could go back to making sensitive, independent art films that represent his true vision, the way he's always wanted to do. You know... films like Red Tails.
but the bulk of the phone market (Not just US...remind yourself of this...) is with Qualcomm's parts.
Did I say phone market? ARM chips are used for much more than phones.
Similar economics apply to desktop software. Say an upgrade to the new version of Office costs $300. Ramping up a department of 100 workers, each with a copy of Office, would cost you $30,000. For a small business, that might actually force you to make a decision: Do we upgrade our software this quarter or do we install that new lighting we've been talking about? A subscription model might actually look attractive to you in that case, too -- which may be one reason why Microsoft is now offering Office in a subscription model (and Adobe is doing the same with Photoshop, etc.)