Unfortunately - their users (primarily NASA and other US government entities ATM, but soon other old guard customers) don't agree with that philosophy.
Satellite customers consider 1-2% failure rates perfectly acceptable. NASA considers losing the vehicle and killing the crew one time in 70 to be 'man rated'.
They can only do that if they can get a CA to sign fake keys.
Which is not impossible, as demonstrated by the fake keys seen in the wild over the last few years after CAs were hacked. But no CA wants to hand out fake keys because they know it's financial suicide.
It's not 1% of sales, it's 1% of traffic. Considering how massive the installed base is, 1% in a short period of time isn't bad at all.
But the fanboys keep telling us what a success Windows 8 is because it sold 40 MIlLLION COPIES IN A MONTH! Either there are four billion Windows PCs in the world (possible, but seems unlikely), or few of those copies are actually installed on a real computer that people use.
With multitouch, this could be done in a single fluid gesture: move your fingers to translate, pinch your fingers to scale, spin your fingers to rotate, and it's a completely natural intuitive gesture.
Yeah, because getting pixel-accurate scaling and rotation is just so easy when using big fat fingers instead of a mouse.
And the problem is not that touch could be useful in some situations, but that the interface has to be designed to be usable with a touchscreen, which means it becomes incredibly tedious with a mouse; for example, the big, huge buttons all over the place so you can press them with your fingers, and the wonderful 'gestures' you have to create with your mouse instead of just clicking on the damn thing you want to do.
It's also very possible that the Asus Transformer range showed that a good touchscreen tablet/laptop combo is a useful bit of gear well before "Microsoft might have validated the idea".
It's because I own a Transformer that I know touchscreen laptops suck.
The most difficult part of Frontier was fighting through the copy protection, which required entering a specific word from a specific place in the manual, except it was never really clear which lines counted and which it ignored (headings, etc?). I seem to remember we eventually found a list of all the answers on Usenet, which rather defeated the point.
I firmly believe that the intersection of people who appreciate the tablet form factor but also would like to use legacy apps is large enough to sustain x86 Windows 8 tablets, especially in business and education.
How often do you plan to be writing Word documents on a ladder?
To elaborate, if she is browsing the internet she might tap a link, which is faster than moving the mouse to the link on a trackpad and clicking..
Must be a pretty lousy trackpad if you can press a link faster than clicking it. Particularly when you take account of the number of times you accidentally press the wrong link because the text is a fraction the size of your finger and have to go back and do it again.
Why the reluctance to offer bigger batteries? Let the users who need longer runtimes buy longer runtimes, let the users who need lighter weight buy lighter weight. Is it fear that reviewers comparing competitive products would insist on citing the weight for comparable runtime instead of weight of the lightest unit?
Because it's already a heavy tablet and a bigger battery would make it even worse? My Asus Transformer weighs about two thirds as much and that's too heavy for my taste.
My MythTV box gets shut down a few times a year when we lose power at our house and so far there haven't been any problems. I'm not sure I'd trust it for valuable data, though.
And there seems to have been an insane marketing push on Windows 8 PCs during the recent sales. The flyer I received yesterday had pages and pages of the things, all cut in price.
If you're paying $200,000 for a flight into space, the cost of a flight to the nearest suitable airport is noise in comparison. I'm far from convinced there's enough of a market for $200,000 London to Sydney flights to justify it as a high-speed airliner.
Fuel is cheap: rocket designers dream of a future where fuel will be the primary cost of launching things into space. Developing a space plane is not, and you have to invest all that money before you even know if it will work.
SpaceX estimates for launches on a reusable Falcon are similar to the estimates for Skylon, and they can build up to it, starting with expendable versions that are proving the technology and making money. Skylon has the tricky 'give us ten billion and it will probably work' hurdle to jump over.
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They're teaching kids from an early age that keeping your stuff in 'The Cloud' is a retarded idea.
Sounds rather like he wants a netbook with GPS and HDMI.
Even if you go to the pet shop and buy a gold fish and it's yours it still won't fly. I'm telling you, it won't be possible.
What a stupid argument. A goldfish has no wings, so it can't fly. A Surface is a flying goldfish whose wings have been tied down to prevent it flying.
Wow, have you used Linux since 1996?
Unfortunately - their users (primarily NASA and other US government entities ATM, but soon other old guard customers) don't agree with that philosophy.
Satellite customers consider 1-2% failure rates perfectly acceptable. NASA considers losing the vehicle and killing the crew one time in 70 to be 'man rated'.
So SpaceX have a pretty low bar to reach.
They can only do that if they can get a CA to sign fake keys.
Which is not impossible, as demonstrated by the fake keys seen in the wild over the last few years after CAs were hacked. But no CA wants to hand out fake keys because they know it's financial suicide.
Tablets and netbooks are all the rage, and Apple has changed course to supporting it.
So why, in real life, do I see hundreds of times as many desktop systems and full-size laptops as tablets and netbooks?
It's not 1% of sales, it's 1% of traffic. Considering how massive the installed base is, 1% in a short period of time isn't bad at all.
But the fanboys keep telling us what a success Windows 8 is because it sold 40 MIlLLION COPIES IN A MONTH! Either there are four billion Windows PCs in the world (possible, but seems unlikely), or few of those copies are actually installed on a real computer that people use.
With multitouch, this could be done in a single fluid gesture: move your fingers to translate, pinch your fingers to scale, spin your fingers to rotate, and it's a completely natural intuitive gesture.
Yeah, because getting pixel-accurate scaling and rotation is just so easy when using big fat fingers instead of a mouse.
And the problem is not that touch could be useful in some situations, but that the interface has to be designed to be usable with a touchscreen, which means it becomes incredibly tedious with a mouse; for example, the big, huge buttons all over the place so you can press them with your fingers, and the wonderful 'gestures' you have to create with your mouse instead of just clicking on the damn thing you want to do.
It's also very possible that the Asus Transformer range showed that a good touchscreen tablet/laptop combo is a useful bit of gear well before "Microsoft might have validated the idea".
It's because I own a Transformer that I know touchscreen laptops suck.
The most difficult part of Frontier was fighting through the copy protection, which required entering a specific word from a specific place in the manual, except it was never really clear which lines counted and which it ignored (headings, etc?). I seem to remember we eventually found a list of all the answers on Usenet, which rather defeated the point.
Yes it does. you tax them, if they leave, you tax their products more than if they were here.
So you're going to make everyone better off by increasing the cost of the things they buy?
I firmly believe that the intersection of people who appreciate the tablet form factor but also would like to use legacy apps is large enough to sustain x86 Windows 8 tablets, especially in business and education.
How often do you plan to be writing Word documents on a ladder?
If I wanted to type in application names to run programs, I'd still be using DOS.
If your GUI requires you to type application names to start them, you've just shown that it's a lousy GUI.
To elaborate, if she is browsing the internet she might tap a link, which is faster than moving the mouse to the link on a trackpad and clicking..
Must be a pretty lousy trackpad if you can press a link faster than clicking it. Particularly when you take account of the number of times you accidentally press the wrong link because the text is a fraction the size of your finger and have to go back and do it again.
Then why call them both "Surface"?
Why call the OS Windows when it's designed to run full-screen apps?
Why the reluctance to offer bigger batteries? Let the users who need longer runtimes buy longer runtimes, let the users who need lighter weight buy lighter weight. Is it fear that reviewers comparing competitive products would insist on citing the weight for comparable runtime instead of weight of the lightest unit?
Because it's already a heavy tablet and a bigger battery would make it even worse? My Asus Transformer weighs about two thirds as much and that's too heavy for my taste.
My MythTV box gets shut down a few times a year when we lose power at our house and so far there haven't been any problems. I'm not sure I'd trust it for valuable data, though.
It works for Ubuntu.
Most Ubuntu users stick with the LTS release. Most of the rest only upgrade because it's free.
And there seems to have been an insane marketing push on Windows 8 PCs during the recent sales. The flyer I received yesterday had pages and pages of the things, all cut in price.
So what world do you live in where 250 million means 10 billion?
The world where space planes don't magically appear for free once you have engines for them?
If you're paying $200,000 for a flight into space, the cost of a flight to the nearest suitable airport is noise in comparison. I'm far from convinced there's enough of a market for $200,000 London to Sydney flights to justify it as a high-speed airliner.
That will only happen, if you're not throwing away a vehicle every time you launch.
Sure. But if Skylon meets the launch cost estimates I've seen, fuel will still be only a few percent of that cost.
As I understand it, they want to use air during launch to allow them to carry a bigger payload in an SSTO, not to save money.
Personally, I upgraded to windows 8 specifically because it was so cheap.
You'd have to pay me a lot more than $40 to downgrade my Windows PC to 8.
I'd be happy to pay $25 a year and always have the newest version of Windows.
Most Windows user don't pay for Windows; it's hidden in the cost of the PC they buy. Few of them are going to throw Microsoft $25 every year.
Fuel is cheap: rocket designers dream of a future where fuel will be the primary cost of launching things into space. Developing a space plane is not, and you have to invest all that money before you even know if it will work.
SpaceX estimates for launches on a reusable Falcon are similar to the estimates for Skylon, and they can build up to it, starting with expendable versions that are proving the technology and making money. Skylon has the tricky 'give us ten billion and it will probably work' hurdle to jump over.