Don't be discouraged. Every post on slashdot has to have a number of folks who disagree. I think the idea is wonderful and will probably buy a few when they're available at retail.
People don't choose Windows. They take it because it's the only thing offered. Microsoft has worked very hard the last two decades to ensure that desktops aren't offered without Windows, and Windows is the only thing offered. In the most recent case, netbooks, they achieved this goal by killing the market for netbooks. Linux netbooks launched the category, and Windows 7 killed it. Microsoft has worked hard to prevent choice, and that's working against them now because people like to choose. It makes them enjoy the fantasy that they have some control over their course.
Now we're going mobile and Microsoft isn't coming with us because they forgot to let us pretend we get to choose.
Oh my, that's a lovely frist psot, and no doubt you spent a lot of time preparing it, savoring the moment you could paste it.
Let me just short circuit all of your arguments: we really don't give a damn who did what to whom. We just want to video chat with grandma, and the first one to put that ability in our pocket wins. We want progress and we really don't care who brings it. Give with the progress and we honestly don't give a [darn] who you stole it from as long as we get it.
The free market has a decidedly pro-Android bias. Android is now on more than half of smartphones - not because it's the only option but because people chose it, voting with their own money.
I asked who would want Windows Phone on a desktop. You gave me the exact opposite thing: You like Windows 7 on a tablet.
Now look that that thing: Samsung Series 7 Slate. $1099 asking price. Good selection of I/O slots. Better than average video. Pen. 3.5 hours battery life.
If you really want Windows 7 in a tablet, then this thing with 3x the battery life would be a dream machine. I wonder what it weighs.
So you could have 2 iPads, 6 Kindle Fires, 12 Novo7's, or this. And you like this. Good for you.
You're a corner case. Fringe. Out of the mainstream. Most of us don't like Windows so much that we're going to let it get in the way of all this new good stuff. And especially not enough to tether to a wall every 4 hours. For what this costs I could get an Android tablet for all the kids that are currently stealing my Asus Transformer, and have $400 left to buy apps. And I have Citrix, Onlive gaming and various other things, so it doesn't do anything I can't do better from my Android tablet that cost less than half as much. I can wifi tether to my phone, access my citrix, open Outlook Excel Word and Powerpoint just like I was at my desk - and put it on the conference room bigscreen over HDMI in 1080 res.
When Microsoft could prevent people from having cool new stuff by managing their partners you might have had a point. But you can only hold back the tide for so long. Eventually, the tide wins.
Believe it or not WordPerfect's problems with printing persisted at least until the last time I had to deal with it, which was WordPerfect Office X4 in XP about two years ago. I did get it to work, but frankly it was high IT voodoo - not the sort of thing in the range of your average geek. It takes a pretty committed customer to even ask for such a thing. Funny story: it had worked fine for over a year, but then a Windows Update came along that broke printing.
Either the WordPerfect programming team can make an awesome word processor capable of some really brilliant things - but are yet unable to figure out how printing works, or that Windows team really holds a grudge and continues to reverse engineer WP to break printing and other things. Up to the time I was dealing with the problem I would have gone with the latter. Now, not so much.
WordPerfect was bought by Corel, and in 2010 Corel was bought by "Vector Capital" - an investment group well shielded from discovery of who is actually behind it. If I were to venture an opinion about this, many here would be fitting me for a tinfoil hat. Let's just say my estimation of the chances of a commitment to renovation of WordPerfect to serve the obvious demand for the product and create a resurgence of it is effectively nil. WordPerfect is in my opinion really and truly dead.
I honestly believe that if WordPerfect were fixed and released it would generate a lot of sales and give a good return on investment. The people who like it really do like it. But I also believe that ain't gonna happen.
We saw this happen with OpenOffice too. It couldn't fall into worse hands than Oracle. But OpenOffice was open source, so forking was possible and there's hope LibreOffice will be one of the office software contenders in the future. WordPerfect doesn't have that open source feature. It can be killed, and I believe it has been.
I was checking this out on Wikipedia. Apparently Thailand has an aircraft carrier of the ski-jump sort. And yes, it was only used for Harriers - and only for the two years that their Harriers would still fly.
As long as making a hit app is harder than porting from one to the other, developers will port every hit from their favorite to the other before searching for another hit. Because nobody in his right mind is going to turn down hundreds of millions more customers. So the hit apps will be present on both.
Oh yeah. Crashing and burning the Kinde fire is. I hear it is barely moving a million units a week since launch. The pace is starting to pick up now though, so there is hope yet Amazon may get this dog to hunt.
Microsoft takes features out of their software the second Tuesday of every month. It's called "Patch Tuesday". That most people didn't want those features is irrelevant: some people did. That the features can be quite important is told by the fact that major enterprises employ teams to "vet the patches" against their golden images and designated sacrificial customers so they can avoid the ones that break critical infrastructure until the software that relies on the features can be upgraded, modified or replaced. Microsoft has no choice but to remove these features since they're also vulnerabilities that lead to compromise of the computer. In the best case these vulnerabilities can be considered poor design choices. In the worst cases like AutoRun they're just stupid.
Retail Windows users are on their own, and are typically divided into types: auto-update and no-update. The auto-update crowd have become used to some portion of their environment going dead now and then and waiting for their software vendor to issue an update - even if it's in the software library that interacts with the driver that drives the solenoid that opens their cash register drawer. The no-update crowd have become used to being very careful opening emails and clicking links and resigned to rebuilding their PC once a year when it's become too crap-infested to work at all. Neither set sees Windows as a reliable platform for home or small business use but what are they going to do? They don't have an IT team to keep them safe and can't afford one. Most of them would prefer their PC work more like their iPhone or Android phone, their iPad or Android tablet. But they don't sell something like that at BestBuy, Walmart or Staples yet.
I never held much hope the courts would find against Sony in this. It's probably legal. Wrong or right is a complete other thing. By keeping it in play for so long the suit has put it in the public eye that Sony will defend to the death their right to sell you a major software feature and then take it back. And that's the lesson we should all take away from this. It's a cultural thing. In Japan noone would question this at all. Sony is Japanese. The Japanese have great respect for authority, even corporate authority. They're not going to understand why we think this is not OK. Sony thinks this decision benefits their corporate brand, not diminishes it because it "proves they were right" - and there's nothing we can say to them that will counter this estimation because the concept is so alien they can't understand it.
I feel sorry for those affected of course, but that's not me. I don't own any Sony stuff. For fifteen years what the Sony brand means to me is "a thing that doesn't work with your other stuff." I was never in any danger of being impacted by this issue. See, I'm a "progressive" guy, and when I'm considering buying a new thing I look at both whether it is designed with open standards so it works with the things I have - but more importantly, will completely work with the amazing things I'm going to have after they've been invented and produced in the future. Sony doesn't pretend to offer that, so they don't get my money. I do like Samsung though - for now.
Wait. This has been going on for years, and is instantiated in the very article we're commenting on, as well as the ones I referenced earlier, and all the other suits in this thread. You're a regular on Groklaw aren't you, where this sort of thing is covered every day? What do you mean we don't see a lot of it?
So I'm guessing you didn't read the ggp, where I described what they get. And the grandparent post where I said it again. They get the prevention of progress of their competitors. That is the only goal, and it's the only thing this patent tool is good for.
If it takes 4 and the factory quotes 3, and you have 9,000 to do, I'm sure you could find some efficiencies to get that done without my help. But if you need me, I could organize that activity so everybody were happy and the work got done. and we made more money..
I happen to be typing this from a rebuild machine I'm working on at the moment, building from XP Pro x86 SP1a (long story, not my choice. License issues. Naturally not for me, since I run Linux and BSD exclusively). Microsoft is rate-limiting the download speed of the XP SP3 to near dialup speeds. Maybe this is to encourage folks to migrate to W7. It downloaded much quicker through Citrix from a share in our CoLo three states away, through the same pipe at the same time, so I got our copy rather than the public one to update this box. I was getting 8,000kbps through the VPN over wireless, and 28.8kbps through technet wired Ethernet at the same time. I have 50Mbps cable internet. If you want SP3 as an executable and don't have it yet, downloading it now while you still can seems advisable before they drop that rate to 300bps. Be prepared for a long wait because it's nearly 300MB and at 56kbps it will take quite a while if it completes at all. The first 12 times I tried it I got "server reset" try again.
I've six hours work before me, and six behind me, to make this box work safely in Windows. At the start I had a pendrive to boot Linux and get to work in 15 seconds with a comfy work environment no matter what hardware you have.
How long it's legal is a political thing. Given political and regulatory capture processes currently extant I'm going to have to say "until the revolution comes."
Slashdot Mirror
And most of those specialized applications require IE 6 - which is being cleansed with fire anyway. So as long as you've got to change them...
I reject this blatant lie. Google runs on Linux because it's cost effective, but also because it's more secure, flexible and performant.
Same with the others - especially the supercomputers. Cost effectiveness is only part of the answer.
Cool stuff.
Or maybe, not.
Don't be discouraged. Every post on slashdot has to have a number of folks who disagree. I think the idea is wonderful and will probably buy a few when they're available at retail.
People don't choose Windows. They take it because it's the only thing offered. Microsoft has worked very hard the last two decades to ensure that desktops aren't offered without Windows, and Windows is the only thing offered. In the most recent case, netbooks, they achieved this goal by killing the market for netbooks. Linux netbooks launched the category, and Windows 7 killed it. Microsoft has worked hard to prevent choice, and that's working against them now because people like to choose. It makes them enjoy the fantasy that they have some control over their course.
Now we're going mobile and Microsoft isn't coming with us because they forgot to let us pretend we get to choose.
Our money is made of fantasy, it's true. Regrettably that fantasy seems more tangible than "people who make stuff". We're well down the rabbit-hole.
Oh my, that's a lovely frist psot, and no doubt you spent a lot of time preparing it, savoring the moment you could paste it.
Let me just short circuit all of your arguments: we really don't give a damn who did what to whom. We just want to video chat with grandma, and the first one to put that ability in our pocket wins. We want progress and we really don't care who brings it. Give with the progress and we honestly don't give a [darn] who you stole it from as long as we get it.
The free market has a decidedly pro-Android bias. Android is now on more than half of smartphones - not because it's the only option but because people chose it, voting with their own money.
Maybe that's because it's better.
I asked who would want Windows Phone on a desktop. You gave me the exact opposite thing: You like Windows 7 on a tablet.
Now look that that thing: Samsung Series 7 Slate. $1099 asking price. Good selection of I/O slots. Better than average video. Pen. 3.5 hours battery life.
If you really want Windows 7 in a tablet, then this thing with 3x the battery life would be a dream machine. I wonder what it weighs.
So you could have 2 iPads, 6 Kindle Fires, 12 Novo7's, or this. And you like this. Good for you.
You're a corner case. Fringe. Out of the mainstream. Most of us don't like Windows so much that we're going to let it get in the way of all this new good stuff. And especially not enough to tether to a wall every 4 hours. For what this costs I could get an Android tablet for all the kids that are currently stealing my Asus Transformer, and have $400 left to buy apps. And I have Citrix, Onlive gaming and various other things, so it doesn't do anything I can't do better from my Android tablet that cost less than half as much. I can wifi tether to my phone, access my citrix, open Outlook Excel Word and Powerpoint just like I was at my desk - and put it on the conference room bigscreen over HDMI in 1080 res.
When Microsoft could prevent people from having cool new stuff by managing their partners you might have had a point. But you can only hold back the tide for so long. Eventually, the tide wins.
Believe it or not WordPerfect's problems with printing persisted at least until the last time I had to deal with it, which was WordPerfect Office X4 in XP about two years ago. I did get it to work, but frankly it was high IT voodoo - not the sort of thing in the range of your average geek. It takes a pretty committed customer to even ask for such a thing. Funny story: it had worked fine for over a year, but then a Windows Update came along that broke printing.
Either the WordPerfect programming team can make an awesome word processor capable of some really brilliant things - but are yet unable to figure out how printing works, or that Windows team really holds a grudge and continues to reverse engineer WP to break printing and other things. Up to the time I was dealing with the problem I would have gone with the latter. Now, not so much.
WordPerfect was bought by Corel, and in 2010 Corel was bought by "Vector Capital" - an investment group well shielded from discovery of who is actually behind it. If I were to venture an opinion about this, many here would be fitting me for a tinfoil hat. Let's just say my estimation of the chances of a commitment to renovation of WordPerfect to serve the obvious demand for the product and create a resurgence of it is effectively nil. WordPerfect is in my opinion really and truly dead.
I honestly believe that if WordPerfect were fixed and released it would generate a lot of sales and give a good return on investment. The people who like it really do like it. But I also believe that ain't gonna happen.
We saw this happen with OpenOffice too. It couldn't fall into worse hands than Oracle. But OpenOffice was open source, so forking was possible and there's hope LibreOffice will be one of the office software contenders in the future. WordPerfect doesn't have that open source feature. It can be killed, and I believe it has been.
I was checking this out on Wikipedia. Apparently Thailand has an aircraft carrier of the ski-jump sort. And yes, it was only used for Harriers - and only for the two years that their Harriers would still fly.
What did you think American money was made of?
As long as making a hit app is harder than porting from one to the other, developers will port every hit from their favorite to the other before searching for another hit. Because nobody in his right mind is going to turn down hundreds of millions more customers. So the hit apps will be present on both.
Oh yeah. Crashing and burning the Kinde fire is. I hear it is barely moving a million units a week since launch. The pace is starting to pick up now though, so there is hope yet Amazon may get this dog to hunt.
There are suns orbiting this black hole. There's a diagram of them in the second link. Here's a direct link to the image: link
Congratulations. I was wondering who would be the first to bash Google in this thread. You win the prize!
No. they were made for Sharp.
It is a distraction. "Do not look at Andy Lees".
Microsoft takes features out of their software the second Tuesday of every month. It's called "Patch Tuesday". That most people didn't want those features is irrelevant: some people did. That the features can be quite important is told by the fact that major enterprises employ teams to "vet the patches" against their golden images and designated sacrificial customers so they can avoid the ones that break critical infrastructure until the software that relies on the features can be upgraded, modified or replaced. Microsoft has no choice but to remove these features since they're also vulnerabilities that lead to compromise of the computer. In the best case these vulnerabilities can be considered poor design choices. In the worst cases like AutoRun they're just stupid.
Retail Windows users are on their own, and are typically divided into types: auto-update and no-update. The auto-update crowd have become used to some portion of their environment going dead now and then and waiting for their software vendor to issue an update - even if it's in the software library that interacts with the driver that drives the solenoid that opens their cash register drawer. The no-update crowd have become used to being very careful opening emails and clicking links and resigned to rebuilding their PC once a year when it's become too crap-infested to work at all. Neither set sees Windows as a reliable platform for home or small business use but what are they going to do? They don't have an IT team to keep them safe and can't afford one. Most of them would prefer their PC work more like their iPhone or Android phone, their iPad or Android tablet. But they don't sell something like that at BestBuy, Walmart or Staples yet.
I never held much hope the courts would find against Sony in this. It's probably legal. Wrong or right is a complete other thing. By keeping it in play for so long the suit has put it in the public eye that Sony will defend to the death their right to sell you a major software feature and then take it back. And that's the lesson we should all take away from this. It's a cultural thing. In Japan noone would question this at all. Sony is Japanese. The Japanese have great respect for authority, even corporate authority. They're not going to understand why we think this is not OK. Sony thinks this decision benefits their corporate brand, not diminishes it because it "proves they were right" - and there's nothing we can say to them that will counter this estimation because the concept is so alien they can't understand it.
I feel sorry for those affected of course, but that's not me. I don't own any Sony stuff. For fifteen years what the Sony brand means to me is "a thing that doesn't work with your other stuff." I was never in any danger of being impacted by this issue. See, I'm a "progressive" guy, and when I'm considering buying a new thing I look at both whether it is designed with open standards so it works with the things I have - but more importantly, will completely work with the amazing things I'm going to have after they've been invented and produced in the future. Sony doesn't pretend to offer that, so they don't get my money. I do like Samsung though - for now.
Wait. This has been going on for years, and is instantiated in the very article we're commenting on, as well as the ones I referenced earlier, and all the other suits in this thread. You're a regular on Groklaw aren't you, where this sort of thing is covered every day? What do you mean we don't see a lot of it?
So I'm guessing you didn't read the ggp, where I described what they get. And the grandparent post where I said it again. They get the prevention of progress of their competitors. That is the only goal, and it's the only thing this patent tool is good for.
No, I'm a big hater of Hollywood accounting. This is not that. Look at it and judge again.
If it takes 4 and the factory quotes 3, and you have 9,000 to do, I'm sure you could find some efficiencies to get that done without my help. But if you need me, I could organize that activity so everybody were happy and the work got done. and we made more money..
I happen to be typing this from a rebuild machine I'm working on at the moment, building from XP Pro x86 SP1a (long story, not my choice. License issues. Naturally not for me, since I run Linux and BSD exclusively). Microsoft is rate-limiting the download speed of the XP SP3 to near dialup speeds. Maybe this is to encourage folks to migrate to W7. It downloaded much quicker through Citrix from a share in our CoLo three states away, through the same pipe at the same time, so I got our copy rather than the public one to update this box. I was getting 8,000kbps through the VPN over wireless, and 28.8kbps through technet wired Ethernet at the same time. I have 50Mbps cable internet. If you want SP3 as an executable and don't have it yet, downloading it now while you still can seems advisable before they drop that rate to 300bps. Be prepared for a long wait because it's nearly 300MB and at 56kbps it will take quite a while if it completes at all. The first 12 times I tried it I got "server reset" try again.
I've six hours work before me, and six behind me, to make this box work safely in Windows. At the start I had a pendrive to boot Linux and get to work in 15 seconds with a comfy work environment no matter what hardware you have.
How long it's legal is a political thing. Given political and regulatory capture processes currently extant I'm going to have to say "until the revolution comes."