Tell that to Tomshardware and others who use x87 benchmarks and games like skyrim showing an AMD 8 core being handed a smackdown by an i3?
True, it's horrible that review sites benchmark CPUs using the kind of programs people actually run on them.
I remember back when I bought my P4, the only thing a similarly priced Athlon XP really beat it on were x87-intensive games. Professional 3D apps using SSE were significantly faster on the P4, which is why I ended up buying it instead.
But Surface (and more so the second versions announced) isn't just marketed nor targeted at being a tablet. It makes a great laptop when you have the keyboard/cover.
Except a laptop makes a much better laptop. And costs less.
No-one's been clamouring for tablets that can also be used as crappy laptops. Asus has been making them for a while, but they're a poor alternative to a netbook.
The worst thing is that so many of the new Windows laptops are now trying to be crappy tablets, even though hardly any laptop user actually wants that.
Screen size, resolution, storage capactiy, storage speed, processor speed, active digitizer, RAM, x86 architecture are all advantages the Surface Pro has over the tablets you mentioned.
And if you get an ultrabook, it really isn't any bigger than carrying around the Surface Pro, and in many cases you'll get much better specs for the same price.
But an Ultrabook won't come with a two-position kickstand!
If those were meaningless points, Microsoft wouldn't just have had to dump a billion dollars worth of Surface tablets because no-one wanted to buy them.
'Surface Pro' is just a continuation of the long line of x86 tablets that hardly anyone wanted to buy for the last decade or more.
Or, since you're carrying a keyboard around with you and you have to use a kickstand because the tablet is horribly unbalanced, you could, you know, just buy a laptop for half the price.
It continues to amaze me how successive versions of windows don't feel like they get any faster - my windows 8 box feels mostly about the same to use as my windows 2000 box did on good hardware..
No version of Windows I've used has ever felt as fast as Windows 3.1 did on a 486 with an SSD.
When you buy the ticket and board the plane, you agree to play by their rules. They have the property rights and have sold you limited rights to your seats with stipulations.
It's not their rules. It's the FAA rules. The FAA is part of the US government. Hence the F.
WHY? I never click on such links for the elementary fact that I have no idea where they lead
That's not hard to work around. Bit.ly, for example, seems to use amzn.to for all shortened links that go to Amazon... if you click one of those links, you know it goes to Amazon and not Goatse. The US government could presumably afford to set up a link-shortening service of their own which you can trust to go to a government site.
"How the fsck do I start notepad on this crappy excuse for a GUI?" "Easy. You just press Windows + R to get to the command line and type 'notepad'. It's such a great advance over using a menu."
If I wanted a closed platform and vendor lock-in I'd just install Steam for Windows and dual boot, isn't that what everyone else does?
No, many of us run Steam for Windows in Wine. Oddly enough, it's the Valve games that cause me the most problems there, because they'll be working fine and then an update comes along and they stop working until two more updates later.
We used to use MySQL unless a customer demanded Oracle. Now we've switched to Postgres, because MySQL's future is so hazy and we typically have to support these systems for ten years or more.
Ubuntu may be upgradable in theory, but it's not really upgradable in practise. When I was using it, I'd have to reinstall every couple of years to fix all the crud that accumulated from multiple version upgrades.
In fact, replacing Ubuntu with Mint on my laptop was faster than a typical Ubuntu version upgrade that I have to leave running all night and hope nothing crashes part-way through and leaves me trying to fix it from the command line. Wipe the old system partitions, install the OS, leave/home as it was and update a few system configuration options.
Anyone know a polished linux distribution that could hold the candle after Ubuntu croaks in a weird accident involving barbed sex toys (fingers crossed)?
Mint seems the best option at the moment, but since it's basically Ubuntu with the suck removed, it will probably go away if Ubuntu does.
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Tell that to Tomshardware and others who use x87 benchmarks and games like skyrim showing an AMD 8 core being handed a smackdown by an i3?
True, it's horrible that review sites benchmark CPUs using the kind of programs people actually run on them.
I remember back when I bought my P4, the only thing a similarly priced Athlon XP really beat it on were x87-intensive games. Professional 3D apps using SSE were significantly faster on the P4, which is why I ended up buying it instead.
That's easy to prove. Just show us one fake SSL certificate issued by the NSA.
So far, not a single one has ever surfaced. If it's happening at all, it's certainly very rare.
But Surface (and more so the second versions announced) isn't just marketed nor targeted at being a tablet. It makes a great laptop when you have the keyboard/cover.
Except a laptop makes a much better laptop. And costs less.
No-one's been clamouring for tablets that can also be used as crappy laptops. Asus has been making them for a while, but they're a poor alternative to a netbook.
The worst thing is that so many of the new Windows laptops are now trying to be crappy tablets, even though hardly any laptop user actually wants that.
Now that I have 2GB and an SSD, it's a pretty nice machine.
Ditto. Particularly after wiping the disk and installing Linux.
Screen size, resolution, storage capactiy, storage speed, processor speed, active digitizer, RAM, x86 architecture are all advantages the Surface Pro has over the tablets you mentioned.
So, nothing most people care about, then.
I actually met someone with a Windows phone recently.
True story.
Of course they said they were planning to dump it and get an iPhone when their contract ran out.
And if you get an ultrabook, it really isn't any bigger than carrying around the Surface Pro, and in many cases you'll get much better specs for the same price.
But an Ultrabook won't come with a two-position kickstand!
Because it doesn't need one.
If those were meaningless points, Microsoft wouldn't just have had to dump a billion dollars worth of Surface tablets because no-one wanted to buy them.
'Surface Pro' is just a continuation of the long line of x86 tablets that hardly anyone wanted to buy for the last decade or more.
Or, since you're carrying a keyboard around with you and you have to use a kickstand because the tablet is horribly unbalanced, you could, you know, just buy a laptop for half the price.
It continues to amaze me how successive versions of windows don't feel like they get any faster - my windows 8 box feels mostly about the same to use as my windows 2000 box did on good hardware..
No version of Windows I've used has ever felt as fast as Windows 3.1 did on a 486 with an SSD.
If that was the case, businesses wouldn't run Windows or Office. yet they do, so that means it isn't all that bad.
Businesses run Office because they have to work with businesses who run Office. They run Windows because that's what Office runs on.
Speak for yourself. The Surface Pro is the most capable tablet on the market.
Capable of everything except actually selling.
BYOD is the future of IT IYKWIM.
Only until the first enormous security breach after some idiot lets some other idiot connect their malware-infested device to the corporate LAN.
When you buy the ticket and board the plane, you agree to play by their rules. They have the property rights and have sold you limited rights to your seats with stipulations.
It's not their rules. It's the FAA rules. The FAA is part of the US government. Hence the F.
For $100 more, you can get a real laptop, with a large disk and a keyboard.
Don't you mean 'for $100 LESS'?
WHY? I never click on such links for the elementary fact that I have no idea where they lead
That's not hard to work around. Bit.ly, for example, seems to use amzn.to for all shortened links that go to Amazon... if you click one of those links, you know it goes to Amazon and not Goatse. The US government could presumably afford to set up a link-shortening service of their own which you can trust to go to a government site.
But Windows 8 has brought the CLI back.
"How the fsck do I start notepad on this crappy excuse for a GUI?"
"Easy. You just press Windows + R to get to the command line and type 'notepad'. It's such a great advance over using a menu."
You can't enforce DRM effectively until you lock down the device completely. So, of course Steam wants to control the OS.
Except Steam DRM has always been pretty weak, and more there to keep honest people honest than stop pirates. Many Steam games don't even have DRM.
If I wanted a closed platform and vendor lock-in I'd just install Steam for Windows and dual boot, isn't that what everyone else does?
No, many of us run Steam for Windows in Wine. Oddly enough, it's the Valve games that cause me the most problems there, because they'll be working fine and then an update comes along and they stop working until two more updates later.
Funny, but not actually true.
We used to use MySQL unless a customer demanded Oracle. Now we've switched to Postgres, because MySQL's future is so hazy and we typically have to support these systems for ten years or more.
You mean all the people who use a desktop other than Unity.
Which, from what I've seen, is 99% of the population.
Problem is, they dropped Gnome 2, and XFCE is a pretty clunky replacement.
By "the suck" you mean upgradability?
Ubuntu may be upgradable in theory, but it's not really upgradable in practise. When I was using it, I'd have to reinstall every couple of years to fix all the crud that accumulated from multiple version upgrades.
In fact, replacing Ubuntu with Mint on my laptop was faster than a typical Ubuntu version upgrade that I have to leave running all night and hope nothing crashes part-way through and leaves me trying to fix it from the command line. Wipe the old system partitions, install the OS, leave /home as it was and update a few system configuration options.
I'd completely forgotten about that, but it's good to know they can survive Ubuntu going away.
However, according to the web site it has no GPT or EFI support, so it looks like a non-starter on modern machines.
Debian is Ubuntu before the suck is added in. Mint should base itself on the original instead.
Yeah, that's probably a good option if they have the manpower to switch Mint over.
Anyone know a polished linux distribution that could hold the candle after Ubuntu croaks in a weird accident involving barbed sex toys (fingers crossed)?
Mint seems the best option at the moment, but since it's basically Ubuntu with the suck removed, it will probably go away if Ubuntu does.