Reasons to have the RT: 1. As a reminder to Intel that MS controls the ecosystem
Clearly, they don't, because this product proved to be a turd nobody wants; whereas the one Surface product that people might actually pay attention to has an Intel CPU at it's heart.
2. To remind hardware manufacturers who is boss.
See: #1. To remind someone who's boss, you have to actually succeed. Asus, Lenovo, and friends are laughing their ass off right now.
3. As a way to blunt the rise of tablets from Apple and Android by introducing confusion.
Yeah, how'd that work out? iPad sales continue to rise, Android tablets are starting to sell in decent quantity, and exactly nobody is confused about what a Windows 8 tablet is and if they want one or not.
4. As a potential future growth path - an option.
I'll buy this one. If by some miracle what Microsoft wanted came to pass - this thing selling faster than crack vials on a Baltimore street corner - then Microsoft would have opened up another revenue stream from their app store. However, something else happened, and now they are writing off $1B on their 10-Q paperwork for the SEC.
The difference is that the only ads that Apple runs that simply showed people dancing around, were ads for a music player with the iconic white earbuds and music playing in the background. Everyone already knew what an iPod was by the time this campaign hit TV and print advertising, and everyone could mentally draw the connection between the earbuds and the product without one single word having to say it. That's brilliant advertising.
When it came to iPhone and iPad, their ads showed very little except the device, and what it could do, and how easily it did it. And, more importantly, showed how different the experience was from the shitbox computer that the target audience bought from Best Buy a few years back that everyone in the family universally hates. Also brilliant (and effective) advertising.
Microsoft showed a bunch of assholes dancing around clicking magnets together. It didn't tell you anything about what the product was, what it could do, and why you needed one. Then, they followed it up by showing the word "Surface" and the Microsoft logo - as if anyone would actually say "Oh, it's Microsoft, so it must be a good quality, feature filled, easy to use, and stable product that I need to know more about!"
Microsoft doesn't know what their own brand represents, and this ad campaign illustrates that. Microsoft is not "hip" or "cool." Microsoft absolutely does not "rock." Even with the Xbox brand, Microsoft is only tolerated because the only other player worth mentioning is Sony, who is just as bad if not worse. People get excited about Microsoft the same way that people get excited about their vacuum cleaners - it's a product that serves a purpose, and is mildly annoying when it doesn't work right, which is often. It hasn't been 1995 for a long time.
If they want to right this ship, they need to embrace who they really are - the engine of business. They are the new IBM that they mocked and ridiculed in the 90s. They need to stop fucking around with trying to make consumer electronics where they have little experience, and instead extend their successes to the new platforms that people are using. Get Office onto iOS and Android. Go whole hog on integrating iOS and Android MDM into Active Directory and cut that new market for management tools off at it's ass. Get a true Exchange client onto iOS and Android, and stop relying on a generic ActiveSync API that is poorly implemented on all sides of the equation.
These are core competencies that Microsoft could do properly, but refuses to because of "Not Made Here" syndrome. And it has to stop if they want to live.
It wasn't always that way - Apple used to be left with thousands of stale Macs that nobody wanted to buy when they would release a new model. They would end up writing them off. And, in those days, they were suffering from model schizophrenia where you would have 14 different models of the same computer where the only difference between the model numbers was the store they were bought from, or a slightly different load of crapware preloaded.
Then Tim Cook came in and streamlined the logistics chain into the machine that Apple is today. This is the primary reason he was tapped to be CEO.
Nobody remembers this because the people that used them are still working through the psychological trauma caused by using these fucking garbage devices. Microsoft was trying to shoehorn the full weight of Windows into places it didn't belong, and it showed. While everyone likes to think that consumer electronic customers are sheep, even the sheep know to stay away from a field full of hemlock.
Fast forward to today, and we have Windows RT being written off. It's an answer to a question nobody asked: I wonder what it's like to have a crippled version of Windows 8 that runs on ARM and has no application compatibility whatsoever?
At least WinCE / PocketPC / WinMo has a use in embedded systems and retail scan guns.
If your new OS upgrade has you going out of your way to avoid using the upgraded components, or actively installing hacks to give you back features of the old OS that were removed without cause; then I would postulate that it isn't an upgrade at all, and that as a software developer they have completely failed in their task of delivering a better product.
If there's a touchscreen attached (which even Windows 7 can tell you in the Computer Properties), you put the Metro / Modern UI up. If not, make it go the fuck away and give us the Win7 Aero UI.
Tablets get tiles, mice get menus. That was hard to fix.
Where Microsoft completely failed with Windows RT: no Active Directory binding. A whole lot of businesses are looking for a way to say "no" to iPad, and having a device that talks to their existing management infrastructure might have been able to do it. But, Microsoft decided to go all XP Home Edition with it, and completely screwed themselves.
If I have to put in a MDM solution to manage these devices just like iPad / Android, why wouldn't I go with the platforms with a healthier software ecosystem, and have more mature MDM capabilities?
I wish I could produce something that isn't going to go anywhere like the iPad.
Billions in sales, which are still increasing 4 years later, say you're wrong. If it was a "fad" device, it would have turned into a pumpkin by now. You know, like that decade of Windows convertible laptop tablet things that never got traction anywhere but the medical industry.
Checking in from Ohio. My company has a building that they've shoved all the IT folk into, and pretty much everyone has a smartphone of some kind. There was a severe thunderstorm / flash flood alert that got sent out via this system a week or so back, and the whole damn building was filled with the annoying sounds of these alerts going off simultaneously, and everyone was universally angry about it.
There are some pretty cool things you can do with vPro / AMT 7.x. A demo I did at an annual gathering of divisional IT folk last year was the following, using a Win7 VM running on a MacBook Pro as my "admin machine" and then a Lenovo X220 as the client:
1. Manually provision vPro on the X220 by pressing ctrl+p at the EFI boot screen (this is the easy way, see below for better ways) 2. Rig the X220 to blue screen on boot by setting the SATA to "compatibility" mode after Windows was installed in AHCI mode 3. Power it off 4. Use the AMT power management engine's HTTP server to remote power up the X220 5. Watch it blue screen 6. Use RealVNC Plus to connect using vPro authentication to that PC 7. Confirm the connection by putting in the numeric code that pops up *over* the blue screen 8. Observe the blue screen in a VNC viewer window on the Win7 VM / Mac 9. Reboot the X220 remotely, and press F1 through the VNC session to enter EFI / BIOS 10. Fix the SATA setting, save changes, reboot 11. Observe the fixed Windows PC rebooting. 12. Remote mount a Solaris 11 Live ISO using RealVNC Plus 13. Remote reboot the X220 onto the ISO over the network, with the same VNC session still connected the whole way.
And yes, this works over Wireless* too, since having the vPro feature set means you also have a Centrino wireless adapter that the chipset can operate in a low power listen-only mode. It's very cool stuff, and largely OS independent. For larger installs (like an entire company, for example) you can set up a "Setup and Configuration Services" box (SCS) which allows you to create vPro configuration profiles which can be loaded en masse on compliant hardware via whatever software delivery agent you are using (Altiris / Tivoli / SCCM / ITMS / LANDesk / etc.) that allow for AD-authenticated access and different privileges.
Oh, and Intel also published PowerShell scripting additions so that you can make some front end utilities to simplify stuff for the monkeys at the help desk =)
*given a sane 802.11 network and no access restrictions disallowing peer-to-peer connectivity between hosts on the WLAN. Wireless config may only be available using SCS, and not the BIOS extension. I can't remember.
A door-to-door dragnet still requires the police to gain your permission to search your home, or a proper warrant granted on sufficient probable cause.
They can knock, but you are under no obligation to allow them in or answer any questions.
The 9th and 10th amendments were specifically inserted to limit the Government's ability to constrain rights, and the Government's enumeration of powers. Madison actually had a list of 40+ rights he wanted in there, and this was his way to see that those and many others were protected for all time.
Unfortunately, everyone seems to forget these amendments exist.
Our corporate Macs which I maintain have an antivirus installed due to policy, but the only thing it ever finds is Windows viruses that arrive via email attachments that manage to get through the email gateway scanner.
The #1 thing that protects our Macs: The user does not have administrative credentials. The #2 thing that protects our Macs: Applications are all deployed via a centrally managed repository, which allows for #1.
You can turn off that behavior in the app Preferences, which is not locked out by this "malware." Also, hold shift while launching Safari after the force quit, and it won't re-open to last visited.
Even as you read this, you are wishing that you could jam a gun in my face and make me back down.
You seem to be incredibly confident in your ability to raise an emotional reaction out of your copying and pasting.
Oh, and because one or two people are deranged idiots, doesn't mean that all gun owners are. The biggest problem that gun rights advocates have with the gun control advocates is that most of the gun control advocates don't just hate guns, but hate people that don't hate guns.
They maintain that the 2nd Amendment does indeed enshrine not only a right for a militia to bear arms, but an individual right as well, passed from the federal government down to the individual states via the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but what do we do when the Water Chip fails?
The problem with the way things worked out:
Reasons to have the RT:
1. As a reminder to Intel that MS controls the ecosystem
Clearly, they don't, because this product proved to be a turd nobody wants; whereas the one Surface product that people might actually pay attention to has an Intel CPU at it's heart.
2. To remind hardware manufacturers who is boss.
See: #1. To remind someone who's boss, you have to actually succeed. Asus, Lenovo, and friends are laughing their ass off right now.
3. As a way to blunt the rise of tablets from Apple and Android by introducing confusion.
Yeah, how'd that work out? iPad sales continue to rise, Android tablets are starting to sell in decent quantity, and exactly nobody is confused about what a Windows 8 tablet is and if they want one or not.
4. As a potential future growth path - an option.
I'll buy this one. If by some miracle what Microsoft wanted came to pass - this thing selling faster than crack vials on a Baltimore street corner - then Microsoft would have opened up another revenue stream from their app store. However, something else happened, and now they are writing off $1B on their 10-Q paperwork for the SEC.
The difference is that the only ads that Apple runs that simply showed people dancing around, were ads for a music player with the iconic white earbuds and music playing in the background. Everyone already knew what an iPod was by the time this campaign hit TV and print advertising, and everyone could mentally draw the connection between the earbuds and the product without one single word having to say it. That's brilliant advertising.
When it came to iPhone and iPad, their ads showed very little except the device, and what it could do, and how easily it did it. And, more importantly, showed how different the experience was from the shitbox computer that the target audience bought from Best Buy a few years back that everyone in the family universally hates. Also brilliant (and effective) advertising.
Microsoft showed a bunch of assholes dancing around clicking magnets together. It didn't tell you anything about what the product was, what it could do, and why you needed one. Then, they followed it up by showing the word "Surface" and the Microsoft logo - as if anyone would actually say "Oh, it's Microsoft, so it must be a good quality, feature filled, easy to use, and stable product that I need to know more about!"
Microsoft doesn't know what their own brand represents, and this ad campaign illustrates that. Microsoft is not "hip" or "cool." Microsoft absolutely does not "rock." Even with the Xbox brand, Microsoft is only tolerated because the only other player worth mentioning is Sony, who is just as bad if not worse. People get excited about Microsoft the same way that people get excited about their vacuum cleaners - it's a product that serves a purpose, and is mildly annoying when it doesn't work right, which is often. It hasn't been 1995 for a long time.
If they want to right this ship, they need to embrace who they really are - the engine of business. They are the new IBM that they mocked and ridiculed in the 90s. They need to stop fucking around with trying to make consumer electronics where they have little experience, and instead extend their successes to the new platforms that people are using. Get Office onto iOS and Android. Go whole hog on integrating iOS and Android MDM into Active Directory and cut that new market for management tools off at it's ass. Get a true Exchange client onto iOS and Android, and stop relying on a generic ActiveSync API that is poorly implemented on all sides of the equation.
These are core competencies that Microsoft could do properly, but refuses to because of "Not Made Here" syndrome. And it has to stop if they want to live.
Yeah, because Slashdot is a bastion of Apple / Steve Jobs love, right?
And Apple took it down because he was right.
So Apple's the bad guy for actually respecting the original developer's rights?
And yet, Microsoft still hasn't learned this after 15 years of trying...
It wasn't always that way - Apple used to be left with thousands of stale Macs that nobody wanted to buy when they would release a new model. They would end up writing them off. And, in those days, they were suffering from model schizophrenia where you would have 14 different models of the same computer where the only difference between the model numbers was the store they were bought from, or a slightly different load of crapware preloaded.
Then Tim Cook came in and streamlined the logistics chain into the machine that Apple is today. This is the primary reason he was tapped to be CEO.
Microsoft was in tablets and phones before Apple.
Nobody remembers this because the people that used them are still working through the psychological trauma caused by using these fucking garbage devices. Microsoft was trying to shoehorn the full weight of Windows into places it didn't belong, and it showed. While everyone likes to think that consumer electronic customers are sheep, even the sheep know to stay away from a field full of hemlock.
Fast forward to today, and we have Windows RT being written off. It's an answer to a question nobody asked: I wonder what it's like to have a crippled version of Windows 8 that runs on ARM and has no application compatibility whatsoever?
At least WinCE / PocketPC / WinMo has a use in embedded systems and retail scan guns.
If your new OS upgrade has you going out of your way to avoid using the upgraded components, or actively installing hacks to give you back features of the old OS that were removed without cause; then I would postulate that it isn't an upgrade at all, and that as a software developer they have completely failed in their task of delivering a better product.
Or, they could have done this:
If there's a touchscreen attached (which even Windows 7 can tell you in the Computer Properties), you put the Metro / Modern UI up. If not, make it go the fuck away and give us the Win7 Aero UI.
Tablets get tiles, mice get menus. That was hard to fix.
Where Microsoft completely failed with Windows RT: no Active Directory binding. A whole lot of businesses are looking for a way to say "no" to iPad, and having a device that talks to their existing management infrastructure might have been able to do it. But, Microsoft decided to go all XP Home Edition with it, and completely screwed themselves.
If I have to put in a MDM solution to manage these devices just like iPad / Android, why wouldn't I go with the platforms with a healthier software ecosystem, and have more mature MDM capabilities?
I wish I could produce something that isn't going to go anywhere like the iPad.
Billions in sales, which are still increasing 4 years later, say you're wrong. If it was a "fad" device, it would have turned into a pumpkin by now. You know, like that decade of Windows convertible laptop tablet things that never got traction anywhere but the medical industry.
That is basically what iOS does. If you don't grant it permission, it still returns the expected types of data, but the data is essentially empty.
Yeah, because blasting a message to a couple million sleeping people about a car's license plate is a fantastic way to find the car.
Checking in from Ohio. My company has a building that they've shoved all the IT folk into, and pretty much everyone has a smartphone of some kind. There was a severe thunderstorm / flash flood alert that got sent out via this system a week or so back, and the whole damn building was filled with the annoying sounds of these alerts going off simultaneously, and everyone was universally angry about it.
You do know that there's at least one electrical engineer on Apple's payroll, right?
There are some pretty cool things you can do with vPro / AMT 7.x. A demo I did at an annual gathering of divisional IT folk last year was the following, using a Win7 VM running on a MacBook Pro as my "admin machine" and then a Lenovo X220 as the client:
1. Manually provision vPro on the X220 by pressing ctrl+p at the EFI boot screen (this is the easy way, see below for better ways)
2. Rig the X220 to blue screen on boot by setting the SATA to "compatibility" mode after Windows was installed in AHCI mode
3. Power it off
4. Use the AMT power management engine's HTTP server to remote power up the X220
5. Watch it blue screen
6. Use RealVNC Plus to connect using vPro authentication to that PC
7. Confirm the connection by putting in the numeric code that pops up *over* the blue screen
8. Observe the blue screen in a VNC viewer window on the Win7 VM / Mac
9. Reboot the X220 remotely, and press F1 through the VNC session to enter EFI / BIOS
10. Fix the SATA setting, save changes, reboot
11. Observe the fixed Windows PC rebooting.
12. Remote mount a Solaris 11 Live ISO using RealVNC Plus
13. Remote reboot the X220 onto the ISO over the network, with the same VNC session still connected the whole way.
And yes, this works over Wireless* too, since having the vPro feature set means you also have a Centrino wireless adapter that the chipset can operate in a low power listen-only mode. It's very cool stuff, and largely OS independent. For larger installs (like an entire company, for example) you can set up a "Setup and Configuration Services" box (SCS) which allows you to create vPro configuration profiles which can be loaded en masse on compliant hardware via whatever software delivery agent you are using (Altiris / Tivoli / SCCM / ITMS / LANDesk / etc.) that allow for AD-authenticated access and different privileges.
Oh, and Intel also published PowerShell scripting additions so that you can make some front end utilities to simplify stuff for the monkeys at the help desk =)
*given a sane 802.11 network and no access restrictions disallowing peer-to-peer connectivity between hosts on the WLAN. Wireless config may only be available using SCS, and not the BIOS extension. I can't remember.
A door-to-door dragnet still requires the police to gain your permission to search your home, or a proper warrant granted on sufficient probable cause.
They can knock, but you are under no obligation to allow them in or answer any questions.
The 9th and 10th amendments were specifically inserted to limit the Government's ability to constrain rights, and the Government's enumeration of powers. Madison actually had a list of 40+ rights he wanted in there, and this was his way to see that those and many others were protected for all time.
Unfortunately, everyone seems to forget these amendments exist.
Our corporate Macs which I maintain have an antivirus installed due to policy, but the only thing it ever finds is Windows viruses that arrive via email attachments that manage to get through the email gateway scanner.
The #1 thing that protects our Macs: The user does not have administrative credentials.
The #2 thing that protects our Macs: Applications are all deployed via a centrally managed repository, which allows for #1.
You can turn off that behavior in the app Preferences, which is not locked out by this "malware." Also, hold shift while launching Safari after the force quit, and it won't re-open to last visited.
This isn't malware. It's a javascript on a web page.
Calling this malware is like calling a firecracker a weapon of mass destruction.
Even as you read this, you are wishing that you could jam a gun in my face and make me back down.
You seem to be incredibly confident in your ability to raise an emotional reaction out of your copying and pasting.
Oh, and because one or two people are deranged idiots, doesn't mean that all gun owners are. The biggest problem that gun rights advocates have with the gun control advocates is that most of the gun control advocates don't just hate guns, but hate people that don't hate guns.
Your post reads like that.
Which would then mean that guns themselves are not the issue, but rather a lack of training and identification of mental disorders.
But let's pass laws to do away with the guns, disregarding that shooting people is already against the law (for the most part).
The Supreme Court of the United States of America disagrees with you, specifically in the District of Columbia v Heller and McDonald v Chicago decisions.
They maintain that the 2nd Amendment does indeed enshrine not only a right for a militia to bear arms, but an individual right as well, passed from the federal government down to the individual states via the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment.