> This idea that Windows 8 is going to be Vista is sort of silly. Enterprises will likely have a Software Assurance or whatever MS is calling it these days and so the upgrade is just a matter of when not if.
We're a fairly big company. Why are we still on XP? Unless the rules for enterprises have changed recently? This of course is separate from the question of whether 8 is going to be Vista, unless you meant to say that a lot of people would skip 8 like they skipped Vista. We're planning to skip 8. Hell, we still have some work to do to fully qualify 7, which has had a very limited deployment here so far.
If what you're saying is that the upgrade to 8 is included in our yearly license fees, that could be true. But licensing is a very small part of the process of deploying a new OS in an enterprise environment.
In addition; After being very frustrated with the device, I gave it to my daughter to play with. She was at first excited, because she likes to draw and it had a stylus. But she soon became frustrated with the device, and now it's shelfware....which is why I typically say "I don't own a tablet and won't until certain things work on it". That lump of plastic in the bookshelf between Shaeffer's Data Center Operations and Java In A Nutshell isn't technically mine (it belongs to my daughter) and I'm waiting for things to settle out before trying again.
In fairness, part of the problem was that she could not find a drawing program on Windows that could easily be operated on a touch interface, and that is arguably an application problem. But this was compounded by Windows 7 Pro not having reasonable touch analogs for the mouse events the software required.
And finally, I wouldn't be intellectually honest if I did not include: At the price point for Windows 8 Pro, it's worth it to upgrade the device and see if it becomes more useful. If it goes back to being shelfware, at least we aren't out a lot of money.
> Given that there quite literally is no such thing as "Windows 7 Tablet Edition" and the last time anything similarly named existed, it was XP, I find your credibility rather questionable.
Verbal shorthand on my part. The thing came shipped with Home Basic, requiring an immediate upgrade to Pro in order to wake up the tablet features, such as they were.
As to why someone would ship a tablet with an OS that does not have tablet features, you'd have to ask the manufacturer.
Enh. If you have to attach a keyboard and mouse to a tablet in order to do real work, you've already lost. I would submit that this would *not* be the demise of the desktop. Rather, it's an admission that OS and app creators don't understand the touch paradigm.
> That's an awfully big "provided" clause you've got there.
Yes, it is.
I've argued until I got sick of it over in the Adobe forums that a "lite" version of their apps for tablets is worse than useless. They seem to expect me to carry a laptop *and* a tablet. Not going to happen. I don't currently own a tablet, and won't until I can work in the field *without* my laptop. Until I can do that, tablets are dead to me. I don't buy into the alpha-geek thang where you lug along one of every kind of portable device just to have them.
On the other hand, tablets really do have a lot of potential. But without serious apps, they're just portable web browsers. Toys.
And don't even *talk* to me about using Photoshop on a Winders tablet. Tried it -- I own a tablet running "Windows 7 tablet edition", and the experience sucketh mightily. And it will suck just as much on Windows 8, because it's the app itself that needs to change.
And yes, I can add a keyboard and mouse to the tablet, but then it's just a rather underpowered netbook with a bunch of separate pieces.
Ok, I admit it. I'm old and stubborn. My problem with the ribbon is that it takes up vertical space. The drop-down menus may be old and clunky, but they work better on smaller displays where real estate is precious.
Um, I'm fifty six. That you don't recognize facetiousness is... interesting. The GPS system went online in 1994, the year my daughter was born. One of the first consumer applications were handheld units for backpackers. Feel free to look that up. We owned two. They didn't have the cool graphic interface of any smartphone today, but they could transmit coordinates to another unit, which would then have range and bearing. I was a military contractor in the seventies and eighties, specializing in signal interception, analysis and for awhile, countermeasures. It made sense to leverage emerging technology to provide security for my child. Feel free to disagree; it wasn't your child.
I'm interested -- what part of my story got your panties in a bind? I would have thought it was all rather innocuous, but you never know what will set people off.
But but but, one goes to school to learn principles and ways of thinking. The specific solutions, if any, only serve as examples to teach the underlying principles. I wouldn't expect one to regurgitate the architectures verbatim, any more than one would expect to get a job programming in Pascal.
Back in the early eighties, I worked for a military contractor. At that time there was a chip on the market that would detect an EMP. Theoretically it would allow a circuit to do some remedial action before the electronics were destroyed by the pulse. Didn't seem very practical to me, but it led to a lot of theorizing about how it could be used. Launch all rockets? Turn on a light indicating that the computer probably didn't work anymore? Do the computer equivalent of bend over and kiss your behind goodbye? Someone at the time opined that every chip in our systems was a potential EMP detector. In some ways I miss those times.
> The point of all the extra non-computer science classes is to teach you how to learn and process new material.
Having gone to a technical institute, I have to agree. Some have humanities (mine did) but only the minimum necessary for the degree. I had to do a lot of backfilling later.
I agree with that. I went to a technical college but ended up backfilling at the local community college. Had I to do it over with, I would probably have done that in reverse order.
The issue with me is that I was desperate to get out of my home town, and it would have been hard to explain to my family why I moved out of state to go to a community college when there was one practically next door to the family home.
Shrug. I suppose, for certain values of zero... I have a degree from a technical college, and peaked at six figures during the dot com boom. Like most in IT, I took a hit after dot com bust, but still making just a tad under six figures.
Having a degree from a technical college means you will probably start below your skill set, (With a BSET I started as an engineering assistant, in a company where you couldn't be hired as a "member of the technical staff" without having graduated with honors from a very specific, very short list of colleges) but if you're worth anything, you will make up for it over time.
The main issue as I see it is that you can't even get an interview in some places without a degree of some kind. Without letters after your name, at some companies HR won't even forward your resume, so the hiring manager never sees it. This doesn't mean you're completely shut out, but it makes the process more difficult, and may require some social engineering to get the manager's attention.
There are people who make a comfortable living without any college at all. My nephew dropped out of CS because programming was "too hard". Later he managed to pass the MCSE and now manages to keep himself in raman noodles and xbox controllers by pushing brightly colored buttons. Shrug.
There are almost certainly places of learning you could attend with zero benefit. You should be able to spot those and stay away. But putting all technical institutes in that category is demonstrably not accurate.
All that said, out of high school I was accepted at two colleges, one conventional and one technical, and I wonder how things would have been different had I gone to a conventional college. For one thing, I believe there would have been more girls.
p....if you're going to run an OS on a device with a completely different input method that won't run your desktop applications, why does it need to look like your desktop?
Oh, c'mon. Lumping the Surface together with the iPad is at very least premature, and more than a little presumptive. Whatever Microsoft is calling "surface" these days is only a few clever commercials so far, and the iPad and it's main competitor (Android tablets) have been out for years. The competitor to the Surface is every single tablet out there, including the few and slightly wonky Windows 7 tablets. The iPad, with its known track record (however one feels about that) isn't something you pair with a product that hasn't reached consumer's hands yet.
Slashdot Mirror
...and why do all the articles about Windows 8 boil down to, "Small children can use it!!!"
Um, because there area lot of them?
> This idea that Windows 8 is going to be Vista is sort of silly. Enterprises will likely have a Software Assurance or whatever MS is calling it these days and so the upgrade is just a matter of when not if.
We're a fairly big company. Why are we still on XP? Unless the rules for enterprises have changed recently? This of course is separate from the question of whether 8 is going to be Vista, unless you meant to say that a lot of people would skip 8 like they skipped Vista. We're planning to skip 8. Hell, we still have some work to do to fully qualify 7, which has had a very limited deployment here so far.
If what you're saying is that the upgrade to 8 is included in our yearly license fees, that could be true. But licensing is a very small part of the process of deploying a new OS in an enterprise environment.
In addition; After being very frustrated with the device, I gave it to my daughter to play with. She was at first excited, because she likes to draw and it had a stylus. But she soon became frustrated with the device, and now it's shelfware. ...which is why I typically say "I don't own a tablet and won't until certain things work on it". That lump of plastic in the bookshelf between Shaeffer's Data Center Operations and Java In A Nutshell isn't technically mine (it belongs to my daughter) and I'm waiting for things to settle out before trying again.
In fairness, part of the problem was that she could not find a drawing program on Windows that could easily be operated on a touch interface, and that is arguably an application problem. But this was compounded by Windows 7 Pro not having reasonable touch analogs for the mouse events the software required.
And finally, I wouldn't be intellectually honest if I did not include: At the price point for Windows 8 Pro, it's worth it to upgrade the device and see if it becomes more useful. If it goes back to being shelfware, at least we aren't out a lot of money.
> Given that there quite literally is no such thing as "Windows 7 Tablet Edition" and the last time anything similarly named existed, it was XP, I find your credibility rather questionable.
Verbal shorthand on my part. The thing came shipped with Home Basic, requiring an immediate upgrade to Pro in order to wake up the tablet features, such as they were.
As to why someone would ship a tablet with an OS that does not have tablet features, you'd have to ask the manufacturer.
Enh. If you have to attach a keyboard and mouse to a tablet in order to do real work, you've already lost. I would submit that this would *not* be the demise of the desktop. Rather, it's an admission that OS and app creators don't understand the touch paradigm.
> That's an awfully big "provided" clause you've got there.
Yes, it is.
I've argued until I got sick of it over in the Adobe forums that a "lite" version of their apps for tablets is worse than useless. They seem to expect me to carry a laptop *and* a tablet. Not going to happen. I don't currently own a tablet, and won't until I can work in the field *without* my laptop. Until I can do that, tablets are dead to me. I don't buy into the alpha-geek thang where you lug along one of every kind of portable device just to have them.
On the other hand, tablets really do have a lot of potential. But without serious apps, they're just portable web browsers. Toys.
And don't even *talk* to me about using Photoshop on a Winders tablet. Tried it -- I own a tablet running "Windows 7 tablet edition", and the experience sucketh mightily. And it will suck just as much on Windows 8, because it's the app itself that needs to change.
And yes, I can add a keyboard and mouse to the tablet, but then it's just a rather underpowered netbook with a bunch of separate pieces.
Ok, I admit it. I'm old and stubborn. My problem with the ribbon is that it takes up vertical space. The drop-down menus may be old and clunky, but they work better on smaller displays where real estate is precious.
Of course that means further demise of the desktop.
I'll stand on the sidewalk and wave as the desktop heads outta town, providing the apps I need work reasonably on tablets.
Um, I'm fifty six. That you don't recognize facetiousness is... interesting. The GPS system went online in 1994, the year my daughter was born. One of the first consumer applications were handheld units for backpackers. Feel free to look that up. We owned two. They didn't have the cool graphic interface of any smartphone today, but they could transmit coordinates to another unit, which would then have range and bearing. I was a military contractor in the seventies and eighties, specializing in signal interception, analysis and for awhile, countermeasures. It made sense to leverage emerging technology to provide security for my child. Feel free to disagree; it wasn't your child.
I'm interested -- what part of my story got your panties in a bind? I would have thought it was all rather innocuous, but you never know what will set people off.
That's a great question.
But but but, one goes to school to learn principles and ways of thinking. The specific solutions, if any, only serve as examples to teach the underlying principles. I wouldn't expect one to regurgitate the architectures verbatim, any more than one would expect to get a job programming in Pascal.
Wake me when you have a Snooki-seeking missile.
You miss the point. We can make scads of money selling them to our enemies.
Back in the early eighties, I worked for a military contractor. At that time there was a chip on the market that would detect an EMP. Theoretically it would allow a circuit to do some remedial action before the electronics were destroyed by the pulse. Didn't seem very practical to me, but it led to a lot of theorizing about how it could be used. Launch all rockets? Turn on a light indicating that the computer probably didn't work anymore? Do the computer equivalent of bend over and kiss your behind goodbye? Someone at the time opined that every chip in our systems was a potential EMP detector. In some ways I miss those times.
Well, at least the CCNA. MCSAs (at least the lower levels) are becoming a dime a dozen.
> The point of all the extra non-computer science classes is to teach you how to learn and process new material.
Having gone to a technical institute, I have to agree. Some have humanities (mine did) but only the minimum necessary for the degree. I had to do a lot of backfilling later.
I agree with that. I went to a technical college but ended up backfilling at the local community college. Had I to do it over with, I would probably have done that in reverse order.
The issue with me is that I was desperate to get out of my home town, and it would have been hard to explain to my family why I moved out of state to go to a community college when there was one practically next door to the family home.
Shrug. I suppose, for certain values of zero... I have a degree from a technical college, and peaked at six figures during the dot com boom. Like most in IT, I took a hit after dot com bust, but still making just a tad under six figures.
Having a degree from a technical college means you will probably start below your skill set, (With a BSET I started as an engineering assistant, in a company where you couldn't be hired as a "member of the technical staff" without having graduated with honors from a very specific, very short list of colleges) but if you're worth anything, you will make up for it over time.
The main issue as I see it is that you can't even get an interview in some places without a degree of some kind. Without letters after your name, at some companies HR won't even forward your resume, so the hiring manager never sees it. This doesn't mean you're completely shut out, but it makes the process more difficult, and may require some social engineering to get the manager's attention.
There are people who make a comfortable living without any college at all. My nephew dropped out of CS because programming was "too hard". Later he managed to pass the MCSE and now manages to keep himself in raman noodles and xbox controllers by pushing brightly colored buttons. Shrug.
There are almost certainly places of learning you could attend with zero benefit. You should be able to spot those and stay away. But putting all technical institutes in that category is demonstrably not accurate.
All that said, out of high school I was accepted at two colleges, one conventional and one technical, and I wonder how things would have been different had I gone to a conventional college. For one thing, I believe there would have been more girls.
p. ...if you're going to run an OS on a device with a completely different input method that won't run your desktop applications, why does it need to look like your desktop?
Bingo.
> A Look At Competitors to the Surface and iPad
Oh, c'mon. Lumping the Surface together with the iPad is at very least premature, and more than a little presumptive. Whatever Microsoft is calling "surface" these days is only a few clever commercials so far, and the iPad and it's main competitor (Android tablets) have been out for years. The competitor to the Surface is every single tablet out there, including the few and slightly wonky Windows 7 tablets. The iPad, with its known track record (however one feels about that) isn't something you pair with a product that hasn't reached consumer's hands yet.