The world needs dicks like Jobs and Edison. They get things done. Woz is definitely the more brilliant mind among the two, yet what grand mark did he leave us with after the Apple II? With Jobs you can point to the Mac (the first one and the reborn NeXT one), the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone (not to mention some really nice animated movies). You have to give him some credit towards legal, affordable, mainstream music downloads - eventually DRM free, no less. Sure, he was a colossal dick, and by all accounts a weird, picky, self-centered dude. But the man knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get it. Things got done, and he changed several markets that he decided to enter into.
Edison is the same way. Yeah, he gambled and lost on DC power. Yeah, Tesla was by far the more brilliant man. But the world needs managers, too - and Edison was a master at managing large teams toward a goal... or at least he was far better at it than most other people at the time. The result? Tesla did a bunch of cool things, but his biggest contributions came when he was working for someone else. Edison, on the other hand, get's credited for a staggering number of inventions that his team cranked out - and which shaped the world of the time. Phonograph, carbon microphone, practical lightbulb, alkaline battery, and numerous electricity-related innovations...
I LIKE Woz better, and I think he's a better role model. Tesla is way cooler. But I'm glad Edison existed and I'm glad Jobs knew better than Xerox what the world would buy.
I'm the opposite... almost every time I have to open "ES Explorer", I die a little inside. I'm too cheap to buy an iPhone, though. I bought two on eBay just to use for a while, but currently I have a cheap Android. Both OSes have their strengths - I'd say that iOS is a bit more pain-free and Android is more fun to geek out with. My kids use my old iPhones as iPods, and we have a Kindle tablet - the iPad Mini was not out at the time and the full-sized iPad is way to rich for my blood.
2) I'll believe that targeted advertising delivers a 'relevant and diverse experience' the day the ads show me stuff I want to buy but haven't yet, instead of stuff I just fucking bought; as it stands, most "targeted ads" are essentially a redux of the contents of your last Amazon shopping cart.
This is so true. "You just purchased a washing machine. You might like... a washing machine." It probably works for books, movies, and toilet paper - but it's really funny when you buy something big-ticket.
Well, it's cheaper to use in a car than electricity is.
The projection is that renewables will make up at least 1/3rd of all electrical power generation in CA by 2020, and the majority of that will be from solar.
That would be great, but again that is the future. Solar will need to progress, and biofuels would need to NOT progress for solar to overtake them.
Plug-in hybrids seem to make profound economic sense right now.
Absolutely not. Run the numbers, any way you would like to. I've done the math. If hybrid pay back period were measured in less than 100,000+ miles or a dozen years, there'd be one sitting in my driveway. The Volt is NOT a luxury car, even though it is in BMW price range. Not only is it not even remotely up to BMW specs aesthetically (fit and finish, engine and road noise, etc), the thing drives like a tank in comparison. Tesla is a much better example of a luxury competitor, and it's price is not even that crazy for what it is. But then, the expensive battery makes up a much smaller percentage of cost in a $70,000 automobile than it does in what should be a $25,000 automobile. Tesla also makes almost no profit, so it is not really "competing" with Mercedes, BMW, or Lexus - but give 'em time... at the very least they will change the game.
The technology is just about there, and prices are falling quickly. We just need to wait a little bit longer.
I agree. It's not there yet, but the future is bright. Just remember that solar is chasing a moving target.
Just plot the line from the EV1 to the Leaf
Aren't they almost the same price with almost the same range? There's no question that the Leaf is a bigger and better car and that there are 15 years of inflation between them, but battery technology is startlingly slow to improve. I had the pleasure of trying an EV1, and it was a punchy little thing that would hold it's own today, even if it had the misfortune to appear on the market when gas was less than a dollar per gallon. Drawing your line would have electric cars improving at about the same rate as inflation. Slow and steady wins the race.
Now that batteries are capable enough and starting to take over, biofuels have been nearly forgotten by everyone with two neurons to rub together, and for good reason.
I think that's more an effect of fossil fuels becoming so inexpensive again. I certainly don't see an explosion of solar any more than I see an explosion of biofuels. Biomass alone makes up only 1.4% of US electricity. That seems small until you compare it to solar, which accounts for 10x less than that, and that number includes non-photovoltaic. For cars, neither biofuels nor electricity make any economic sense right now, but E85 is only about $1 more than gas on a per-energy basis currently. Since the capital costs of E85 are far lower than electric cars, it would still be cheaper to buy a Versa and run it on E85 than a Leaf running on electricity for the vast majority of drivers. I realize E85 is not necessarily pure biofuel, but I'm using it for illustrative purposes since the cost is easy to find. Biodiesel is not easy to find, which is probably not a good sign for it's cost-effectiveness!
The instant electric makes sense, I'll have a charging station in the garage:)
Enormous line losses?!? Last I checked, grid losses average 7%.
All of these percentages add up! 7% line loss plus 15% storage loss means that solar panels need to be 22% more efficient than they would otherwise to compete with bio-fuels. It also means higher capital costs, since bio-fuels would not need storage at all. Having a giant storage reservoir also increases the ecological footprint of solar, reducing one of the main benefits. Anyway, you are cherry picking the low-end of the ranges. A long-distance line from a sunny, dry area that is great for solar to a wet, hilly area that is great for hydro would mostly be pretty long distance and would have higher-than-average line losses. Alternately, finding a reservoir closer to the solar location would mean more evaporation from the reservoir, putting you closer to the 30% efficiency loss in storage. And of course you could put solar in the wet, hilly area, but that is likely to have less favorable sun and so solar generation would suffer.
There's no comparison, and I don't see how you can twist the logic around to even claim biofuel isn't vastly worse.
My logic is thus: Biofuel is cheaper to store. Biofuel requires almost zero infrastructure change. For electrical generation, you have similar capital costs per kilowatt hour. For electrical generation, you need additional capital costs for solar in order to provide power at night.
Both technologies are improving, and I'm not pooh-poohing the future of solar power - I'm just making the point that the equation isn't as simple as efficiency of the solar panels themselves... storage and transportation are just as important.
Weight is a non-issue for large ships, and they have a lot of space available.
Cost is the issue.
long-distance transport is more efficient via freight trains
Those are not solar powered, unless...
and they can be powered by overhead electric lines quite well.
Again the issue is one of cost.
For grid-level purposes, you'd use pumped hydro storage.
You might, if you had ready access to water and a nice elevation change. The problem is, that also makes your location ideal for building a dam and using hydro power - which is of course where most hydro storage takes place. You could transmit the power from the solar plant during the day to the hydro plant, but then you deal with enormous line losses on top of the 15-30% losses from pumping all of that water. I don't think this compares favorably with bio-fuel electrical generation costs, which do not have any capital or operating expense associated with electrical storage.
Then I did not make myself clear. I'm not talking about batteries' suitability for most commuters. Currently, transportation depends on vast amounts of stored fuel. A ship crossing the ocean cannot rely on batteries. Tractor trailers doing an overnight haul cannot rely on batteries. And batteries are certainly not capable of storing enough energy to supply the electrical grid overnight when the sun isn't shining.
There are some other solar technologies (not solar panels) that might work to store energy for the electrical grid. Solar furnaces that melt salts for later steam generation is one such tech, though I'm not sure how it competes on price with bio-fuels. I know that trash-to-energy and biomass electric plants currently are feasible and operating, but solar/molten salt plants are more rare - the last time I read up on it there were three small ones planned and none in operation.
I don't think sugar cane can be grown in sugar beet country and vice versa, so the two are complimentary. In addition, harvest times are totally different between sugar beets and sugar cane.
It's not just energy conversion that needs to compete, it's storage and transport.
For a solar panel to compete, you would need some efficient way to turn electricity into liquid hydrocarbons - or you would need tremendously improved battery/capacitor technology. You would also need to replace the existing infrastructure for moving around liquid fuels.
I have this naive theory that if enough people buy their books, they might write some more. But maybe I'm just dreaming...
It's a naive idea about the actual process, but you are not being naive about the result. There are a few authors that win the lottery, get very popular, and they can negotiate contracts with publishing companies that are favorable. This encourages thousands of other authors to play the lottery, too. Sure, they will almost all fail to make any money, but we get our commercial literature so the system technically works.
OK well then, Windows RT does not need its apps compiled (in the compiled into assembly sense) either. It uses platform neutral bytecode just like Windows 7.NET.
Yes, I understand that. But I can't take a.NET application that works on my Windows 7 box and just run it on RT - that's the frustrating thing. There's no technical reason for that - it's just marketing.
But simultaneously Microsoft is nudging the x86 market towards creating these types of programs.
I'm not a marketer, but this seems doomed to fail. Metro is a horrid interface on a desktop, so it is awfully hard to convince people to target that with their desktop apps. It's not even a straightforward "port", in general the interface would need to be completely redesigned.
They want Win32 dead because it can't handle ubiquitous anymore than iOS or OSX applications can.
To my above point, I agree that Win32 sucks on tablets. Win32 has been available on tablets since the 90s, and it never took off. With that said, Metro is currently just as horrid on the desktop as iOS would be. Perhaps they can stick with it until it isn't, but I would think the mouse/touch disconnect would be a showstopper.
By the way, you are one of the more civil, functional people that I've conversed with here on Slashdot.
It would have been far better if touchscreen was mandatory and Windows 7 was still the OS you got on non-touch laptops.
Agreed. I was so happy with Windows 7 that I jumped immediately on Windows 8 and was in shock for a while. Not enough to delete it, but my jaw still hangs at the decisions made by such a traditionally conservative company. It's almost like someone told them to be bold, but they don't really know how to do that yet.
It's not Courier unless you have your browser set up to display Courier. It is a <tt> tag, which has a css style of "font-family:monospace;". Courier is monospaced, but so are typewriters. He is at least as correct as you are.
There is nothing in Visual Studio every that doesn't need to be compiled.
I meant old-fashioned compiled into assembly, as opposed to the platform neutral bytecode magic that.NET and JAVA use.
But I don't really see the point.
Market differentiation, that's all. They sorely need it, because right now RT offers nothing compelling over and above their competitors. If they could run regular Windows programs - even slowly - it would give them a bullet point that their competition could not match.
I have the speed to run desktop applications and they still kinda suck.
Agreed, but at least you have the option if you needed it.
Part of it is one of branding and expectations... the RT in all of the ads has a keyboard either attached or prominently featured. At that point it looks just like a Windows laptop, and it comes from MS, but it can't run Windows! But the $600 version (which is of course not ARM) does run Windows. To the naive consumer, it looks like a ploy to get me to buy the expensive version, since ARM vs ATOM seems like the old Intel vs AMD.
I feel like I read text in chunks, even starting to read to the next line before my brain is done processing the last chunk. I think that is why I shrink down my web browser to less than full-screen... it is less comfortable to read long lines of text.
I mean a project done in, say, Visual Studio that has no compiled portions - all the code is.NET. Unless you specifically package your project for RT, Metro, or whatever it is called now, it will not run. So if I buy an RT, I'm starting from the ground up on my software collection. At that point, why exactly would I purchase an RT when there are Android and Apple tablets with a huge software library and support community?
ARM couldn't run an x86 emulator, because of speed. That's the technical reason.
It would run, just at 15-year-old computer speeds. DOS Box works on my Kindle and has just enough oomph to play Masters of Orion, which is a game from the mid 90s IIRC. There are many, many applications that don't need any more speed than that. If they were clever about it - like they were with that Alpha x86 emulator on NT that I linked to a few posts back, they wouldn't even need to emulate everything. And even if the speed were poor on the current generation of ARM chips, the 64 bit line is right around the corner.
I don't personally have much in the way of legacy apps that I need to run, and maybe I'm normal and that's why MS marketing made the decision that they did. But I've definitely heard people grumble about how corporate un-friendly it is.
LOL, true - but so far I'm enjoying catching up on some classics. The head of our English department in high school had a very unhealthy obsession with Shakespeare, accounting for about 50% of the curriculum. As a result, I missed out on a lot of staples. I'm currently making my way through the complete works of Mark Twain.:)
(Innocents Abroad is a hoot... the man had a gift for a good insult.)
You are right, I should have just quoted them directly. Forgive me for my cynicism.. the recent news of how Apple and the publishers recently won a consumers' award for fair competition must have slipped my mind.
That's not what I mean. Is there a technical reason that a pure-.NET app that works fine on Windows 7 cannot run on ARM? No, the distinction is one of marketing. Their position seems to be that Windows for ARM is separate and distinct, and at the moment limited to consumer toys.
Slashdot Mirror
The world needs dicks like Jobs and Edison. They get things done. Woz is definitely the more brilliant mind among the two, yet what grand mark did he leave us with after the Apple II? With Jobs you can point to the Mac (the first one and the reborn NeXT one), the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone (not to mention some really nice animated movies). You have to give him some credit towards legal, affordable, mainstream music downloads - eventually DRM free, no less. Sure, he was a colossal dick, and by all accounts a weird, picky, self-centered dude. But the man knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get it. Things got done, and he changed several markets that he decided to enter into.
Edison is the same way. Yeah, he gambled and lost on DC power. Yeah, Tesla was by far the more brilliant man. But the world needs managers, too - and Edison was a master at managing large teams toward a goal... or at least he was far better at it than most other people at the time. The result? Tesla did a bunch of cool things, but his biggest contributions came when he was working for someone else. Edison, on the other hand, get's credited for a staggering number of inventions that his team cranked out - and which shaped the world of the time. Phonograph, carbon microphone, practical lightbulb, alkaline battery, and numerous electricity-related innovations...
I LIKE Woz better, and I think he's a better role model. Tesla is way cooler. But I'm glad Edison existed and I'm glad Jobs knew better than Xerox what the world would buy.
I'm the opposite... almost every time I have to open "ES Explorer", I die a little inside. I'm too cheap to buy an iPhone, though. I bought two on eBay just to use for a while, but currently I have a cheap Android. Both OSes have their strengths - I'd say that iOS is a bit more pain-free and Android is more fun to geek out with. My kids use my old iPhones as iPods, and we have a Kindle tablet - the iPad Mini was not out at the time and the full-sized iPad is way to rich for my blood.
It's hard to imagine how a 65ft billboard of their Deal Reader every half-mile is not "advertisement".
2) I'll believe that targeted advertising delivers a 'relevant and diverse experience' the day the ads show me stuff I want to buy but haven't yet, instead of stuff I just fucking bought; as it stands, most "targeted ads" are essentially a redux of the contents of your last Amazon shopping cart.
This is so true. "You just purchased a washing machine. You might like... a washing machine." It probably works for books, movies, and toilet paper - but it's really funny when you buy something big-ticket.
Oooo! Or a version with all security fixes backed out!
And oil certainly isn't inexpensive.
Well, it's cheaper to use in a car than electricity is.
The projection is that renewables will make up at least 1/3rd of all electrical power generation in CA by 2020, and the majority of that will be from solar.
That would be great, but again that is the future. Solar will need to progress, and biofuels would need to NOT progress for solar to overtake them.
Plug-in hybrids seem to make profound economic sense right now.
Absolutely not. Run the numbers, any way you would like to. I've done the math. If hybrid pay back period were measured in less than 100,000+ miles or a dozen years, there'd be one sitting in my driveway. The Volt is NOT a luxury car, even though it is in BMW price range. Not only is it not even remotely up to BMW specs aesthetically (fit and finish, engine and road noise, etc), the thing drives like a tank in comparison. Tesla is a much better example of a luxury competitor, and it's price is not even that crazy for what it is. But then, the expensive battery makes up a much smaller percentage of cost in a $70,000 automobile than it does in what should be a $25,000 automobile. Tesla also makes almost no profit, so it is not really "competing" with Mercedes, BMW, or Lexus - but give 'em time... at the very least they will change the game.
The technology is just about there, and prices are falling quickly. We just need to wait a little bit longer.
I agree. It's not there yet, but the future is bright. Just remember that solar is chasing a moving target.
Just plot the line from the EV1 to the Leaf
Aren't they almost the same price with almost the same range? There's no question that the Leaf is a bigger and better car and that there are 15 years of inflation between them, but battery technology is startlingly slow to improve. I had the pleasure of trying an EV1, and it was a punchy little thing that would hold it's own today, even if it had the misfortune to appear on the market when gas was less than a dollar per gallon. Drawing your line would have electric cars improving at about the same rate as inflation. Slow and steady wins the race.
Now that batteries are capable enough and starting to take over, biofuels have been nearly forgotten by everyone with two neurons to rub together, and for good reason.
I think that's more an effect of fossil fuels becoming so inexpensive again. I certainly don't see an explosion of solar any more than I see an explosion of biofuels. Biomass alone makes up only 1.4% of US electricity. That seems small until you compare it to solar, which accounts for 10x less than that, and that number includes non-photovoltaic. For cars, neither biofuels nor electricity make any economic sense right now, but E85 is only about $1 more than gas on a per-energy basis currently. Since the capital costs of E85 are far lower than electric cars, it would still be cheaper to buy a Versa and run it on E85 than a Leaf running on electricity for the vast majority of drivers. I realize E85 is not necessarily pure biofuel, but I'm using it for illustrative purposes since the cost is easy to find. Biodiesel is not easy to find, which is probably not a good sign for it's cost-effectiveness!
The instant electric makes sense, I'll have a charging station in the garage :)
My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
Enormous line losses?!? Last I checked, grid losses average 7%.
All of these percentages add up! 7% line loss plus 15% storage loss means that solar panels need to be 22% more efficient than they would otherwise to compete with bio-fuels. It also means higher capital costs, since bio-fuels would not need storage at all. Having a giant storage reservoir also increases the ecological footprint of solar, reducing one of the main benefits. Anyway, you are cherry picking the low-end of the ranges. A long-distance line from a sunny, dry area that is great for solar to a wet, hilly area that is great for hydro would mostly be pretty long distance and would have higher-than-average line losses. Alternately, finding a reservoir closer to the solar location would mean more evaporation from the reservoir, putting you closer to the 30% efficiency loss in storage. And of course you could put solar in the wet, hilly area, but that is likely to have less favorable sun and so solar generation would suffer.
There's no comparison, and I don't see how you can twist the logic around to even claim biofuel isn't vastly worse.
My logic is thus:
Biofuel is cheaper to store.
Biofuel requires almost zero infrastructure change.
For electrical generation, you have similar capital costs per kilowatt hour.
For electrical generation, you need additional capital costs for solar in order to provide power at night.
Both technologies are improving, and I'm not pooh-poohing the future of solar power - I'm just making the point that the equation isn't as simple as efficiency of the solar panels themselves... storage and transportation are just as important.
Weight is a non-issue for large ships, and they have a lot of space available.
Cost is the issue.
long-distance transport is more efficient via freight trains
Those are not solar powered, unless...
and they can be powered by overhead electric lines quite well.
Again the issue is one of cost.
For grid-level purposes, you'd use pumped hydro storage.
You might, if you had ready access to water and a nice elevation change. The problem is, that also makes your location ideal for building a dam and using hydro power - which is of course where most hydro storage takes place. You could transmit the power from the solar plant during the day to the hydro plant, but then you deal with enormous line losses on top of the 15-30% losses from pumping all of that water. I don't think this compares favorably with bio-fuel electrical generation costs, which do not have any capital or operating expense associated with electrical storage.
purple
Current batteries are more than good enough.
Then I did not make myself clear. I'm not talking about batteries' suitability for most commuters. Currently, transportation depends on vast amounts of stored fuel. A ship crossing the ocean cannot rely on batteries. Tractor trailers doing an overnight haul cannot rely on batteries. And batteries are certainly not capable of storing enough energy to supply the electrical grid overnight when the sun isn't shining.
There are some other solar technologies (not solar panels) that might work to store energy for the electrical grid. Solar furnaces that melt salts for later steam generation is one such tech, though I'm not sure how it competes on price with bio-fuels. I know that trash-to-energy and biomass electric plants currently are feasible and operating, but solar/molten salt plants are more rare - the last time I read up on it there were three small ones planned and none in operation.
I don't think sugar cane can be grown in sugar beet country and vice versa, so the two are complimentary. In addition, harvest times are totally different between sugar beets and sugar cane.
It's not just energy conversion that needs to compete, it's storage and transport.
For a solar panel to compete, you would need some efficient way to turn electricity into liquid hydrocarbons - or you would need tremendously improved battery/capacitor technology. You would also need to replace the existing infrastructure for moving around liquid fuels.
I agree, but I feel that the reduced ownership and lower costs of production and distribution should be reflected in the price.
I have this naive theory that if enough people buy their books, they might write some more. But maybe I'm just dreaming ...
It's a naive idea about the actual process, but you are not being naive about the result. There are a few authors that win the lottery, get very popular, and they can negotiate contracts with publishing companies that are favorable. This encourages thousands of other authors to play the lottery, too. Sure, they will almost all fail to make any money, but we get our commercial literature so the system technically works.
OK well then, Windows RT does not need its apps compiled (in the compiled into assembly sense) either. It uses platform neutral bytecode just like Windows 7 .NET.
Yes, I understand that. But I can't take a .NET application that works on my Windows 7 box and just run it on RT - that's the frustrating thing. There's no technical reason for that - it's just marketing.
But simultaneously Microsoft is nudging the x86 market towards creating these types of programs.
I'm not a marketer, but this seems doomed to fail. Metro is a horrid interface on a desktop, so it is awfully hard to convince people to target that with their desktop apps. It's not even a straightforward "port", in general the interface would need to be completely redesigned.
They want Win32 dead because it can't handle ubiquitous anymore than iOS or OSX applications can.
To my above point, I agree that Win32 sucks on tablets. Win32 has been available on tablets since the 90s, and it never took off. With that said, Metro is currently just as horrid on the desktop as iOS would be. Perhaps they can stick with it until it isn't, but I would think the mouse/touch disconnect would be a showstopper.
By the way, you are one of the more civil, functional people that I've conversed with here on Slashdot.
It would have been far better if touchscreen was mandatory and Windows 7 was still the OS you got on non-touch laptops.
Agreed. I was so happy with Windows 7 that I jumped immediately on Windows 8 and was in shock for a while. Not enough to delete it, but my jaw still hangs at the decisions made by such a traditionally conservative company. It's almost like someone told them to be bold, but they don't really know how to do that yet.
It's not Courier unless you have your browser set up to display Courier. It is a <tt> tag, which has a css style of "font-family:monospace;". Courier is monospaced, but so are typewriters. He is at least as correct as you are.
There is nothing in Visual Studio every that doesn't need to be compiled.
I meant old-fashioned compiled into assembly, as opposed to the platform neutral bytecode magic that .NET and JAVA use.
But I don't really see the point.
Market differentiation, that's all. They sorely need it, because right now RT offers nothing compelling over and above their competitors. If they could run regular Windows programs - even slowly - it would give them a bullet point that their competition could not match.
I have the speed to run desktop applications and they still kinda suck.
Agreed, but at least you have the option if you needed it.
Part of it is one of branding and expectations... the RT in all of the ads has a keyboard either attached or prominently featured. At that point it looks just like a Windows laptop, and it comes from MS, but it can't run Windows! But the $600 version (which is of course not ARM) does run Windows. To the naive consumer, it looks like a ploy to get me to buy the expensive version, since ARM vs ATOM seems like the old Intel vs AMD.
I... don't... think... I... read... words... one... at... a... time...
I feel like I read text in chunks, even starting to read to the next line before my brain is done processing the last chunk. I think that is why I shrink down my web browser to less than full-screen... it is less comfortable to read long lines of text.
What do you mean by "pure" .NET?
I mean a project done in, say, Visual Studio that has no compiled portions - all the code is .NET. Unless you specifically package your project for RT, Metro, or whatever it is called now, it will not run. So if I buy an RT, I'm starting from the ground up on my software collection. At that point, why exactly would I purchase an RT when there are Android and Apple tablets with a huge software library and support community?
ARM couldn't run an x86 emulator, because of speed. That's the technical reason.
It would run, just at 15-year-old computer speeds. DOS Box works on my Kindle and has just enough oomph to play Masters of Orion, which is a game from the mid 90s IIRC. There are many, many applications that don't need any more speed than that. If they were clever about it - like they were with that Alpha x86 emulator on NT that I linked to a few posts back, they wouldn't even need to emulate everything. And even if the speed were poor on the current generation of ARM chips, the 64 bit line is right around the corner.
I don't personally have much in the way of legacy apps that I need to run, and maybe I'm normal and that's why MS marketing made the decision that they did. But I've definitely heard people grumble about how corporate un-friendly it is.
LOL, true - but so far I'm enjoying catching up on some classics. The head of our English department in high school had a very unhealthy obsession with Shakespeare, accounting for about 50% of the curriculum. As a result, I missed out on a lot of staples. I'm currently making my way through the complete works of Mark Twain. :)
(Innocents Abroad is a hoot... the man had a gift for a good insult.)
You are right, I should have just quoted them directly. Forgive me for my cynicism.. the recent news of how Apple and the publishers recently won a consumers' award for fair competition must have slipped my mind.
That's not what I mean. Is there a technical reason that a pure-.NET app that works fine on Windows 7 cannot run on ARM? No, the distinction is one of marketing. Their position seems to be that Windows for ARM is separate and distinct, and at the moment limited to consumer toys.
Those distracting kittens would be a problem if Bush had let Cheney finish the job.