You hit the nail on the head when you said that the biggest problem the Tablet PC has is software. But this brings up an interesting problem. Because there isn't a great deal of software available, sales of the platform have been lackluster... which means it's incredibly difficult to get any investment to create software for the platform. Rinse, lather, repeat.
As our final project in our undergrad computer engineering program, my group developed a mathematical handwriting recognition app for the tablet pc. Basic idea: write a math equation in the window, our app turns it into an expression tree and sends it off to a computer algebra system. We got it developed to over 90% accuracy, and working far better than the only commercial product on the market, but we have had little to no interest in investment, purely because the market is so small. It's frustrating, since it's exactly the kind of app the platform needs to be successful.
As for development, it was a breeze. Free student copies of VS.NET and we were on off to the races. If only Microsoft were more generous with their investment $$$:)
It is possible that they notified the users, since they had the cooperation of the ISPs. Even normal users can understand a letter telling them that criminals have been using their computers to perform illegal activities, and here are some guidelines for preventing it from happening in the future. Sure, it doesn't get everyone, but it can be enough to weaken the network for sure.
Sounds like they have a legitimate claim here... They did launch a web-based email service called GMail well before Google. The fact that they've been negotiating with Google for the past 15 months would indicate that they also brought their claim to Google early on. I wonder why Google hasn't just paid them to license the name? Wouldn't they rather use some of their excess money reserves than risk a tarnished name?
Maybe, just maybe, 90% of the market isn't completely wrong. Maybe the most successful company in history makes products that are slightly better than what amateurs put together in their spare time. Maybe packages that come from one organization (or are bought from their creators and Borg-ed) beat those cobbled together from the efforts thousands of volunteers, occassionally undrwritten by consulting firms out to make system so hard to configure you need to pay for consultants to do everything. Just a suggestion from someone who talks to real users guys.
This is exactly what so many IT professionals miss when they evaluate Microsoft's products. They just work for the users, plain and simple. It's even the same for Internet Explorer. Sure, Firefox has better features, but are they features that Mr. Average User needs? Certainly not in my office. And it requires almost no work on our part to configure and maintain for our entire user base, since it comes installed with the OS.
However, I do feel that Microsoft is going to have a problem selling Windows Vista and future versions of Office simply because what we have today works so well. Moving from Windows NT to Windows 2000 was a no-brainer. Moving from Windows 2000 to XP was less important, but it's quicker and has some benefits. And now, even though the OS is nearly 4 years old, we have no reason to be excited about getting a new one soon. I'm sure that there are improvements to be made in operating systems, but they are coming fewer and farther between.
...two four-year terms or 10 years, whichever is more
Shouldn't this obviously optimizable expression have been optimized at constitutional compile-time?
Seriously though, as an ignorant non-American, is this really what the document says? If so, perhaps the founding fathers should have brushed up on their mathematics first:P
Hopefully we start seeing some dual-core chips with a pairing of a fast core and a slow core. Most home users don't run two heavy apps at once (there are exceptions, of course, but most don't), but have lots of little apps running in the background. If there were a slower, but sufficient, core to handle all of these background tasks, the fast core could take care of the rest.
Unfortunately, the market for this type of chip might disappear, as apps become more and more multithreaded. However, I can't help but think that this would significantly help power consumption and heat dissapation.
What makes you think that a dual-processor system will perform similarly to a dual-core processor?
Why would you want a server/workstation part compared to a desktop part?
Sure, some of the sites are probable biased toward Intel. But that certainly does not apply to all of them. As we will no doubt see when they get their hands on AMD's first desktop dual-core offerings, which will likely lead in the same areas as their single-core brethren led, and trail likewise in the rest.
The point of these benchmarks is NOT Intel vs. AMD... It is single-core vs. dual-core. Results in comparing Intel's single-core processors to Intel's dual-core processors will closely match the kind of improvement we should see on the AMD side.
Keep in mind that these are just two cores beside one another... That means double the surface area, so the chip won't be any hotter at any specific point. Then add in the fact that you'll have more idle cycles on a given processor than you did on the single processor before, and you'll end up with cooler operation than the single-core processor.
How exactly is this a forced incompatibility? Were they somehow forced to upgrade to Windows XP? It's ridiculous to argue that the new machines were forced to run XP, if they obviously already have licenses for whatever operating system runs the app now.
The company had to make a calculated decision on whether to upgrade their app or their operating system. If they chose the app, that's their responsibility, not Microsoft's.
Well, even if it is the same chip, all designs benefit from a matured manufacturing process. Normally after a few steppings, a core will be capable of lower power operation, since manufacturing defects would be lessened.
I should clarify my position a bit... I didn't mean to say that all unions are bad. In some situations, the workers need representation against an employer that doesn't treat them as well as it should.
However, some unions really have run rampant here. I'm on a four-month co-op job right now, where all co-op students are required to be in a union. I also happen to be overpaid by about $5/hour, and I barely do any work, because the corporate mentality is so lazy. And this is a company that is flirting with bankruptcy! And I know for a fact that if the owners were to try to take away anything from the employees, they'd be threatening to strike immediately.
My co-op terms in Europe were quite refreshing... The focus there is on fair treatment of both sides, and that results in great productivity. Of course the productivity isn't as good as when you drive your employees like slaves, but the management won't have any trouble sleeping at night.
This whole EA thing is really indicative of a larger problem... unions in North America.
I grew up in Canada, with a father in management at a public utility. I heard endless complaints about the union workers at said utility... how they were overpaid and underworked, but there wasn't anything management could do about it, or there would be a strike.
Then I went to work in Europe, and lo and behold, almost everyone is in a union. Furthermore, the union workers are not abusing their powers. Instead, the unions help their members get jobs and training, with contract negotiation basically a secondary function. It simply isn't needed, because companies tend to be fair in the first place. The unions publish wage statistics that companies are expected to follow, and they do.
It seems that in North America, unionized workers are the ones that need it the least, while companies like Wal*Mart and EA do whatever they want to their employees. There's this attitude of management to care only about the bottom line and not about the workers, while at the same time, unions are all about grabbing more and more for their members (see the current labour situation in the NHL).
I hope that at some point the system can change, but it's a long way off.
The phenomenon can also be experienced in a hot tub... Regular hot tub use can severely limit the fertility of a male. But a good couple of months without use should get things back up to normal.
I believe the fall distance has more to do with the design of the laptop than the design of the hard drive. I couldn't find information on the shock absorbers, but wouldn't it make more sense if they were around the hard drive, rather than inside it?
Also, the motion sensor designed to stop the hard drive after sudden movement is definitely a separate component.
although other European languages have it to some degree
Not just to some degree... most if not all of the other Germanic languages have the same range of semantics, just with a different syntax.
Besides, there is another way that the sentence could be parsed... It could just be short for "Red Hat's Linux Distribution". The last word can effectively be dropped when dealing with an audience familiar with the fact that linux comes in many distros. As others have pointed out, the Linux kernel itself doesn't belong to Red Hat, but their distribution does.
Yes, the article says that sabatoge is believed to be the cause... by Union Carbide! We're supposed to accept that from the party that otherwise would have been highly responsible?
The Indian government is responsible for the failure in getting the compensation money to the people and cleaning up the facility. But that doesn't change the fact that the accident was likely caused by poor safety standards, and was definitely worsened by offline disaster mitigation equipment. There is plenty of hard evidence of those facts.
It's actually properly referred to as a levy, because the revenue goes to the private sector. The term "tax" is reserved for money that goes to government.
Ever looked at a typical Windows start menu, after the box has been installed for a couple of years? Most that I see have at least 20 folders under Programs, with most requiring two columns to show everything.
For users that don't know how to or don't bother cleaning their start menus, the most recently used option actually helps. Most of the users I know who aren't particularly savvy would certainly miss the feature.
That's also why it's enabled by default: the feature is meant for the users that wouldn't be able to find it to enable it. Advanced users can turn it off once after the initial install, and forget about it.
they've ALWAYS been quite generous with their licenses
This is actually a really good point...
I'm a student at a Canadian university who has an alliance deal. For a project, my group was able to get a copy of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise, 4 copies of VS.NET, Sharepoint Portal server, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, and other goodies with nothing owing to Microsoft. And if our project turns into something marketable, we don't have to pay anything to MS either.
MS has always been smart in knowing when to give stuff away for future profit. This article is another good example of that.
Slashdot Mirror
You hit the nail on the head when you said that the biggest problem the Tablet PC has is software. But this brings up an interesting problem. Because there isn't a great deal of software available, sales of the platform have been lackluster... which means it's incredibly difficult to get any investment to create software for the platform. Rinse, lather, repeat.
:)
As our final project in our undergrad computer engineering program, my group developed a mathematical handwriting recognition app for the tablet pc. Basic idea: write a math equation in the window, our app turns it into an expression tree and sends it off to a computer algebra system. We got it developed to over 90% accuracy, and working far better than the only commercial product on the market, but we have had little to no interest in investment, purely because the market is so small. It's frustrating, since it's exactly the kind of app the platform needs to be successful.
As for development, it was a breeze. Free student copies of VS.NET and we were on off to the races. If only Microsoft were more generous with their investment $$$
And now, a blatant plug in the off chance some investor is reading: http://www.freestylesolve.com/
It is possible that they notified the users, since they had the cooperation of the ISPs. Even normal users can understand a letter telling them that criminals have been using their computers to perform illegal activities, and here are some guidelines for preventing it from happening in the future. Sure, it doesn't get everyone, but it can be enough to weaken the network for sure.
So, in the next edition of the game, will you just have to bribe an OnStar employee to perform the titular crime?
Sounds like they have a legitimate claim here... They did launch a web-based email service called GMail well before Google. The fact that they've been negotiating with Google for the past 15 months would indicate that they also brought their claim to Google early on. I wonder why Google hasn't just paid them to license the name? Wouldn't they rather use some of their excess money reserves than risk a tarnished name?
Same goes for my Nokia 9300, and it runs Symbian :P I believe their memory cards come in sizes up to 1 GB to boot.
6.8 GHz, 1 TB RAM, 2TBHDD? Right. And Slashdot's only going to post this article once.
Maybe, just maybe, 90% of the market isn't completely wrong. Maybe the most successful company in history makes products that are slightly better than what amateurs put together in their spare time. Maybe packages that come from one organization (or are bought from their creators and Borg-ed) beat those cobbled together from the efforts thousands of volunteers, occassionally undrwritten by consulting firms out to make system so hard to configure you need to pay for consultants to do everything. Just a suggestion from someone who talks to real users guys.
This is exactly what so many IT professionals miss when they evaluate Microsoft's products. They just work for the users, plain and simple. It's even the same for Internet Explorer. Sure, Firefox has better features, but are they features that Mr. Average User needs? Certainly not in my office. And it requires almost no work on our part to configure and maintain for our entire user base, since it comes installed with the OS.
However, I do feel that Microsoft is going to have a problem selling Windows Vista and future versions of Office simply because what we have today works so well. Moving from Windows NT to Windows 2000 was a no-brainer. Moving from Windows 2000 to XP was less important, but it's quicker and has some benefits. And now, even though the OS is nearly 4 years old, we have no reason to be excited about getting a new one soon. I'm sure that there are improvements to be made in operating systems, but they are coming fewer and farther between.
...two four-year terms or 10 years, whichever is more
:P
Shouldn't this obviously optimizable expression have been optimized at constitutional compile-time?
Seriously though, as an ignorant non-American, is this really what the document says? If so, perhaps the founding fathers should have brushed up on their mathematics first
Hopefully we start seeing some dual-core chips with a pairing of a fast core and a slow core. Most home users don't run two heavy apps at once (there are exceptions, of course, but most don't), but have lots of little apps running in the background. If there were a slower, but sufficient, core to handle all of these background tasks, the fast core could take care of the rest.
Unfortunately, the market for this type of chip might disappear, as apps become more and more multithreaded. However, I can't help but think that this would significantly help power consumption and heat dissapation.
What makes you think that a dual-processor system will perform similarly to a dual-core processor?
Why would you want a server/workstation part compared to a desktop part?
Sure, some of the sites are probable biased toward Intel. But that certainly does not apply to all of them. As we will no doubt see when they get their hands on AMD's first desktop dual-core offerings, which will likely lead in the same areas as their single-core brethren led, and trail likewise in the rest.
The point of these benchmarks is NOT Intel vs. AMD... It is single-core vs. dual-core. Results in comparing Intel's single-core processors to Intel's dual-core processors will closely match the kind of improvement we should see on the AMD side.
Keep in mind that these are just two cores beside one another... That means double the surface area, so the chip won't be any hotter at any specific point. Then add in the fact that you'll have more idle cycles on a given processor than you did on the single processor before, and you'll end up with cooler operation than the single-core processor.
How exactly is this a forced incompatibility? Were they somehow forced to upgrade to Windows XP? It's ridiculous to argue that the new machines were forced to run XP, if they obviously already have licenses for whatever operating system runs the app now.
The company had to make a calculated decision on whether to upgrade their app or their operating system. If they chose the app, that's their responsibility, not Microsoft's.
Well, even if it is the same chip, all designs benefit from a matured manufacturing process. Normally after a few steppings, a core will be capable of lower power operation, since manufacturing defects would be lessened.
I wonder how much money is spent in hardware upgrades by gamers wanting to play the latest and greatest?
Sure, it's probably not enough to offset the difference. The point is that the gaming industry also has tie-ins to other areas.
I should clarify my position a bit... I didn't mean to say that all unions are bad. In some situations, the workers need representation against an employer that doesn't treat them as well as it should.
However, some unions really have run rampant here. I'm on a four-month co-op job right now, where all co-op students are required to be in a union. I also happen to be overpaid by about $5/hour, and I barely do any work, because the corporate mentality is so lazy. And this is a company that is flirting with bankruptcy! And I know for a fact that if the owners were to try to take away anything from the employees, they'd be threatening to strike immediately.
My co-op terms in Europe were quite refreshing... The focus there is on fair treatment of both sides, and that results in great productivity. Of course the productivity isn't as good as when you drive your employees like slaves, but the management won't have any trouble sleeping at night.
This whole EA thing is really indicative of a larger problem... unions in North America.
I grew up in Canada, with a father in management at a public utility. I heard endless complaints about the union workers at said utility... how they were overpaid and underworked, but there wasn't anything management could do about it, or there would be a strike.
Then I went to work in Europe, and lo and behold, almost everyone is in a union. Furthermore, the union workers are not abusing their powers. Instead, the unions help their members get jobs and training, with contract negotiation basically a secondary function. It simply isn't needed, because companies tend to be fair in the first place. The unions publish wage statistics that companies are expected to follow, and they do.
It seems that in North America, unionized workers are the ones that need it the least, while companies like Wal*Mart and EA do whatever they want to their employees. There's this attitude of management to care only about the bottom line and not about the workers, while at the same time, unions are all about grabbing more and more for their members (see the current labour situation in the NHL).
I hope that at some point the system can change, but it's a long way off.
This technology is by no means new... It's in both Intels and AMD's 90 nm offerings, and it has been discussed for years.
This is a good article (from 2002!).
The phenomenon can also be experienced in a hot tub... Regular hot tub use can severely limit the fertility of a male. But a good couple of months without use should get things back up to normal.
I believe the fall distance has more to do with the design of the laptop than the design of the hard drive. I couldn't find information on the shock absorbers, but wouldn't it make more sense if they were around the hard drive, rather than inside it?
Also, the motion sensor designed to stop the hard drive after sudden movement is definitely a separate component.
I've run XP perfectly well on a Pentium 200. I wasn't running anything particularly demanding on it, but the OS itself ran fine and was responsive.
although other European languages have it to some degree
Not just to some degree... most if not all of the other Germanic languages have the same range of semantics, just with a different syntax.
Besides, there is another way that the sentence could be parsed... It could just be short for "Red Hat's Linux Distribution". The last word can effectively be dropped when dealing with an audience familiar with the fact that linux comes in many distros. As others have pointed out, the Linux kernel itself doesn't belong to Red Hat, but their distribution does.
Yes, the article says that sabatoge is believed to be the cause... by Union Carbide! We're supposed to accept that from the party that otherwise would have been highly responsible?
The Indian government is responsible for the failure in getting the compensation money to the people and cleaning up the facility. But that doesn't change the fact that the accident was likely caused by poor safety standards, and was definitely worsened by offline disaster mitigation equipment. There is plenty of hard evidence of those facts.
...in exchange for a small tax on CDRs...
It's actually properly referred to as a levy, because the revenue goes to the private sector. The term "tax" is reserved for money that goes to government.
Ever looked at a typical Windows start menu, after the box has been installed for a couple of years? Most that I see have at least 20 folders under Programs, with most requiring two columns to show everything.
For users that don't know how to or don't bother cleaning their start menus, the most recently used option actually helps. Most of the users I know who aren't particularly savvy would certainly miss the feature.
That's also why it's enabled by default: the feature is meant for the users that wouldn't be able to find it to enable it. Advanced users can turn it off once after the initial install, and forget about it.
they've ALWAYS been quite generous with their licenses
This is actually a really good point...
I'm a student at a Canadian university who has an alliance deal. For a project, my group was able to get a copy of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise, 4 copies of VS.NET, Sharepoint Portal server, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, and other goodies with nothing owing to Microsoft. And if our project turns into something marketable, we don't have to pay anything to MS either.
MS has always been smart in knowing when to give stuff away for future profit. This article is another good example of that.