But I really think that in this case ***Futureshop*** is confusing customers, not Microsoft.
Those stock photos showing the Windows 8 logo were not likely provided by ASUS for the RT product. >
Really this is a Microsoft Problem because they named them too closely. They should have called WinRT something totally different, to avoid this mess, really anyone thinking about it should have been able to predict this.
If all the product specialists are the biggest electronic retailers in North America are confused and making mistakes, what chance does the average consumer have.
This is the biggest Electronics retailer in Canada (does link work outside Canada?).
The First two tablets listed, both $599, Both look physically the same. Both have the exact same blue screen "Windows 8" logos on their screen.
There is absolutely no way that you can know by looking at any of the information at this level, that one of these tablets in x86 and will run legacy applications, and the other is ARM and won't.
If you go to each product page you can find in the fine print of specifications that one runs Intel, the other Tegra and one is Windows 8 RT. Which is incomprehensible nerd speak to most people.
It is that fact that they look the same, are marketed the same with the same graphical "Windows 8" is going to confuse almost everyone that isn't a hard core nerd.
The IBM Thinkpad keyboard has a 2.5mm stroke length and is perfectly usable (superior to most other non buckling-spring designs). In fact the X1 has a 2mm stroke and is still usable, if a bit less familiar feeling.
The Touch cover, has no travel. It has no stroke length. It has No Keys/Keyswitches.
Take your mouse pad, get a ruler and a sharpie and draw a keyboard on your mousepad.
Now type on that. You now know what touch cover typing feels is like.
Have you even touched one of those keyboards to know what you are talking about? Or are you just assuming it is like other portable keyboards that have come before?
Read the specs. The Touch cover has no travel, it has no keyswitches that move to activate.
It is a flat piece of plastic with touchscreen like capacitive sensors, similar to a smartphone/tablet screen.
Microsoft, when it was looking for a place to locate, chose this rural Washington town because the town offered them electricity at about 1/3 the regular going rate, as long as they purchased a certain amount of electricity from this municipal utility.
Yes, Microsoft should have just paid the fine.
With the stunt they pulled the municipality should declare the cheap energy contract void and charge them full price for power from now on.
Load forecasting is a huge deal. In my province we can end up having to Pay other jurisdictions millions of dollars to take away our excess power when the forecast is off.
Microsoft screwed the municipality twice, first by significantly missing their estimates, creating a low load situation, then again with the heater stunt, by creating a high load situation.
This should be a lesson for the next jurisdiction looking to sign one of these generous deals to lure a company that will stab them in the back at the first sign things aren't going their way.
If you can write off the subscription cost in your business, then you can have some justification.
But for a home users? The vast majority would likely be happy with the office version they bought with their computer, and using on their next computer if they could. They need to upgrade just about never.
Getting roped into annual fees makes absolutely no sense in this case.
"ARM ends up being several times more efficient than Intel"
Wow. Someone suffered a flashback to the ancient CISC vs RISC wars.
This is really totally out to lunch. Seek out some analysis from actual CPU designers on the topic. What I read generally pegs the x86 CISC overhead at maybe 10%, not several times.
While I do feel it is annoying that Intel is pushing an Anti-Linux platform, it doesn't make sense to trot out ancient CISC/RISC myths to attack it.
Intel Chips have lagged because they were targeting much different performance envelopes. But now the performance envelopes are converging and so are the power envelopes.
Medfield has already been demonstrated at competetive power envelope in smartphones.
Again we see reasonable numbers for the X900 but nothing stellar. The good news is that the whole x86 can't be power efficient argument appears to be completely debunked with the release of a single device.
Unfortunately, we were soon to uncover a much more severe colour error which made our previous fears of oversaturated Yellows look truly trivial.
The first sign that the Sharp LC46LE821E had colour problems that went beyond it’s expanded colour gamut became apparent with test patterns, and later with real-world content. The edges of saturated colours — especially reds — would appear thresholded, having a strange “tizzing” effect. In fact, this anomaly almost looked like a modern-day cousin of the dot crawl we all hated in old-fashioned Composite video systems.
Near the beginning of Chapter 6 on the UK Blu-ray Disc release of “The Hurt Locker”, there is a shot of a off-cyan sky which is covered in a pleasing amount of film grain (this material originates on 16mm film). On the Sharp LC46LE821E, even without using its Colour Management controls (that is, using the company’s recommended “Movie” mode settings), the sky showed visible darker blocks dancing around in it. And in the next shot, what once appeared as one smooth sky was divided into two distinct bands. This is very surprising indeed, because Sharp has publically stated that one of the benefits of their Quattron technology is to provide smoother gradations.
Remembering that there were strange artefacts in areas of highly saturated colour, we pulled out the Blu-ray Disc of “Serenity” and skipped to Chapter 6, which features a vividly coloured, impressively lit neon city scene. Here, the Sharp LC46LE821E made a complete mess of the coloured transitions, and created obvious borders around tones which, on any other TV, would appear smooth and natural. The Sharp LC46LE821E created harsh borders around the actors, and in fact, the effect is akin to a poorly-done “green screen” effect with a fuzzy edge. The effect is best illustrated with pictures:
When I was checking out TVs, I quickly marked Sharp off my list. IMO their panels have the worse viewing angle washout of any of the panel types and no real compensating high point (Yellow pixels are more gimmick than benefit).
I see lots of talk from Sharp, but I have never seen a Sharp screen I want to buy, so no great loss IMO.
I don't get the problem, it helps immediately understand similar concepts from the real world in the computer space. The whole desktop UI metaphore used in Windows/OSX and many UNIX versions is full of skeuomorphisms.
I am on Win7 right now:
Little trashcan icon, for deleting/undeleting files. Top Level icon is of a "computer", under it I find my hard drives, which look like pictures of physical HD. My files are organized into folders (that look like little file folders) The icons for text files are little pieces of paper.
etc... etc...
IMO, this is very good way to create a visual UI for a computer to relate concepts to what we already know from the physical world.
Of course anything can be overdone. When it starts to impair functionality then it has, but I have seen little evidence of that happening anywhere.
The Lance rats that we know of were all caught by failing drug tests.
They then claimed they saw Lance cheat (which benefits them by selling their stories, getting lighter sentences) or even that he told them how to do it and encouraged them.
Now the confusing part is if they were so intimate with details of Lances cheating, how come he was so much better at it, that despite being tested more than any of them, he was never caught by a drug test like they were.
Either way this is sad story. Either Lance cheated, or a bunch of known cheaters were pulled together by a power tripping bureaucrat on a witch hunt. Sucks either way.
What next, are they having a similar witch hunt for Indurain and his 5 wins. Similar allegations swirled around him.
"I think that the new consoles will give a huge boost to the industry, just like they do every time that they come. "
This is just my gut talking, but I really feel like people are actually caring much less about the next generation consoles this time. Smartphones and tablets are increasingly becoming a way to spend leisure gaming time with a much lower cost.
I just can't seen "Xbox 720" and "Halo 7" and PS4 making that big of an impression this time.
They have no real tablet share, so they aren't risking losing that. They have no real smartphone share, so they aren't risking losing that. They own desktop users body and soul, and there are scant real alternatives where users can go even if they hate it. So I don't see much risk here either.
Worse case, it's another Vista, which they tweak, and continue business as usual.
This is the latest report and yet again, the "Others" category contracted. It is now at 4.0% total containing who knows what because new WindowsPhone7, but likely old Windows Phone6.x that is shrinking faster than WindowPhone7 is growing.
iOS/Android = ~90% Blackberry = ~6% Others = 4%
IMO it is questionable if you should bother supporting Blackberry, let alone delving for real scraps in the "Others" category.
If we can assume 33%*90% (drivetrain) we get 29.7% - with a 38% Stirling engine, if we get 90% from the rest of the system (generator, battery, controller, wiring) -
Something seems amiss with your math: 33%(prius at 10KW) * 90% (Mechanical) = 29.7%
Even operating well away from peak efficiency, the Prius wins.
As I have already rebutted, your links are laboratory single cell ideal conditions battery, and small scale motor numbers. Real world numbers for full EV sized motors/generators/packs are more consistent with a 90% (at best) each number, not 90% total. Total system Gen-Battery-Battery-Motor is.9*.9.*9 = 72.9% efficient. Too low and the reason everyone is going for series-parallel configurations with mechanical couplings.
Now this is a 95% peak efficiency so you have that minor point.
But look at the efficiency map and tell me what a reasonable number for overall efficiency when used in a car would be?
If you think about it, you will realize it is under 90%. As you can't cruise at any legal speed and be using enough HP to push even to the 90% region. Brief spurts of acceleration may go a bit above 90%, but you don't spend enough time accelerating for that to matter. And if you are in stop and go traffic your RPMs will be too low to get anywhere near 90%.
I really think you are dragging out minutia here. 90% for a real full EV Motor(as a pure series hybrid would have to be) is an extremely reasonable, if not optimistic number.
Real world, street legal, full EVs are not getting better than 90% efficiency from their motors.
Slashdot Mirror
But I really think that in this case ***Futureshop*** is confusing customers, not Microsoft.
Those stock photos showing the Windows 8 logo were not likely provided by ASUS for the RT product. >
Really this is a Microsoft Problem because they named them too closely. They should have called WinRT something totally different, to avoid this mess, really anyone thinking about it should have been able to predict this.
If all the product specialists are the biggest electronic retailers in North America are confused and making mistakes, what chance does the average consumer have.
Essentially the same thing happening at Newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Tablets-Accessories/Category/ID-164?Tpk=tablet
Check the top of the page.
Win 8 Tablets!
Then they have a mix of ARM/x86 tablets all with the same graphics (this time Metro).
But it is still both kinds of tablets called Windows 8 and undifferentiated.
Macs Run OS X.
iPad Runs iOS.
x86 and ARM machines both run "Windows 8".
Here is a perfect example of this SNAFU:
http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/category/windows-tablets/31088.aspx?path=6d56ed26a8e2432d145864a8ee45cd37en01
This is the biggest Electronics retailer in Canada (does link work outside Canada?).
The First two tablets listed, both $599, Both look physically the same. Both have the exact same blue screen "Windows 8" logos on their screen.
There is absolutely no way that you can know by looking at any of the information at this level, that one of these tablets in x86 and will run legacy applications, and the other is ARM and won't.
If you go to each product page you can find in the fine print of specifications that one runs Intel, the other Tegra and one is Windows 8 RT. Which is incomprehensible nerd speak to most people.
It is that fact that they look the same, are marketed the same with the same graphical "Windows 8" is going to confuse almost everyone that isn't a hard core nerd.
I really don't see the problem this solves.
Not a high enough portion of my computer usage goes through Google for monitoring/monetizing?
There are not enough limited use gadgets in peoples homes?
My portable machines have too much independent capability when offline?
I am surprised Google is still pushing chromebooks. This is the first I heard of them in ages.
The IBM Thinkpad keyboard has a 2.5mm stroke length and is perfectly usable (superior to most other non buckling-spring designs). In fact the X1 has a 2mm stroke and is still usable, if a bit less familiar feeling.
The Touch cover, has no travel. It has no stroke length. It has No Keys/Keyswitches.
Take your mouse pad, get a ruler and a sharpie and draw a keyboard on your mousepad.
Now type on that. You now know what touch cover typing feels is like.
Note that it does have an microSD card slot. With that in mind, the point of the 64 Gb version eludes me completely.
Since this is a walled garden system, you might not be able to install software on the microSD storage.
targeting the existing 1.3 billion Windows users.
I wonder how many Windows users will mistakenly buy a Surface tablet expecting it to run their "Windows" application/gaming software.
Have you even touched one of those keyboards to know what you are talking about? Or are you just assuming it is like other portable keyboards that have come before?
Read the specs. The Touch cover has no travel, it has no keyswitches that move to activate.
It is a flat piece of plastic with touchscreen like capacitive sensors, similar to a smartphone/tablet screen.
There is no demand increase or shortage of crude oil.
The tightness in supply of gasoline is due to limited refinery capacity.
Why is there limited refinery capacity? Because the oil companies have been closing refineries.
Why are they doing that? So there can artificially limit supply and drive up price.
http://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/Article/3021014/Valero-CEO-believes-refining-capacity-still-too-much-in-US-western-Europe.html
Look a little closer...
Microsoft, when it was looking for a place to locate, chose this rural Washington town because the town offered them electricity at about 1/3 the regular going rate, as long as they purchased a certain amount of electricity from this municipal utility.
Yes, Microsoft should have just paid the fine.
With the stunt they pulled the municipality should declare the cheap energy contract void and charge them full price for power from now on.
Load forecasting is a huge deal. In my province we can end up having to Pay other jurisdictions millions of dollars to take away our excess power when the forecast is off.
Microsoft screwed the municipality twice, first by significantly missing their estimates, creating a low load situation, then again with the heater stunt, by creating a high load situation.
This should be a lesson for the next jurisdiction looking to sign one of these generous deals to lure a company that will stab them in the back at the first sign things aren't going their way.
If you can write off the subscription cost in your business, then you can have some justification.
But for a home users? The vast majority would likely be happy with the office version they bought with their computer, and using on their next computer if they could. They need to upgrade just about never.
Getting roped into annual fees makes absolutely no sense in this case.
"ARM ends up being several times more efficient than Intel"
Wow. Someone suffered a flashback to the ancient CISC vs RISC wars.
This is really totally out to lunch. Seek out some analysis from actual CPU designers on the topic. What I read generally pegs the x86 CISC overhead at maybe 10%, not several times.
While I do feel it is annoying that Intel is pushing an Anti-Linux platform, it doesn't make sense to trot out ancient CISC/RISC myths to attack it.
Intel Chips have lagged because they were targeting much different performance envelopes. But now the performance envelopes are converging and so are the power envelopes.
Medfield has already been demonstrated at competetive power envelope in smartphones.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the-first-intel-medfield-phone/6
Again we see reasonable numbers for the X900 but nothing stellar. The good news is that the whole x86 can't be power efficient argument appears to be completely debunked with the release of a single device.
Isn't it just a rumor that Sharp will be making iPhone screens. AFAIK, there are no sharp screens in any shipping Apple product.
Desktops use LG IPS screens. iPhone 4s uses LG IPS screens. iPad 1/2 use LG IPS screens. iPad 3 uses Samsung PLS(their version of IPS) screens.
Sharp??
Which was probably just a re-badged sharp panel..
Well at least you hide behind an anonymous login when making clueless posts, about topics where you are entirely ignorant.
Saying an AU Optronics panel is just a re-badged sharp panel, makes about as much sense as saying an Intel CPU is probably just re-badged AMD CPU.
That's not a feature, it is a glitch is Sharps Color processing.
http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/sharp-lc46le821e-lc40le821e-20100628755.htm
Unfortunately, we were soon to uncover a much more severe colour error which made our previous fears of oversaturated Yellows look truly trivial.
The first sign that the Sharp LC46LE821E had colour problems that went beyond it’s expanded colour gamut became apparent with test patterns, and later with real-world content. The edges of saturated colours — especially reds — would appear thresholded, having a strange “tizzing” effect. In fact, this anomaly almost looked like a modern-day cousin of the dot crawl we all hated in old-fashioned Composite video systems.
Near the beginning of Chapter 6 on the UK Blu-ray Disc release of “The Hurt Locker”, there is a shot of a off-cyan sky which is covered in a pleasing amount of film grain (this material originates on 16mm film). On the Sharp LC46LE821E, even without using its Colour Management controls (that is, using the company’s recommended “Movie” mode settings), the sky showed visible darker blocks dancing around in it. And in the next shot, what once appeared as one smooth sky was divided into two distinct bands. This is very surprising indeed, because Sharp has publically stated that one of the benefits of their Quattron technology is to provide smoother gradations.
Remembering that there were strange artefacts in areas of highly saturated colour, we pulled out the Blu-ray Disc of “Serenity” and skipped to Chapter 6, which features a vividly coloured, impressively lit neon city scene. Here, the Sharp LC46LE821E made a complete mess of the coloured transitions, and created obvious borders around tones which, on any other TV, would appear smooth and natural. The Sharp LC46LE821E created harsh borders around the actors, and in fact, the effect is akin to a poorly-done “green screen” effect with a fuzzy edge. The effect is best illustrated with pictures:
No. Sharp actually makes the screens in relatively few TVs. My TV has a AU Optronics panel.
When I was checking out TVs, I quickly marked Sharp off my list. IMO their panels have the worse viewing angle washout of any of the panel types and no real compensating high point (Yellow pixels are more gimmick than benefit).
I see lots of talk from Sharp, but I have never seen a Sharp screen I want to buy, so no great loss IMO.
I don't get the problem, it helps immediately understand similar concepts from the real world in the computer space. The whole desktop UI metaphore used in Windows/OSX and many UNIX versions is full of skeuomorphisms.
I am on Win7 right now:
Little trashcan icon, for deleting/undeleting files.
Top Level icon is of a "computer", under it I find my hard drives, which look like pictures of physical HD.
My files are organized into folders (that look like little file folders)
The icons for text files are little pieces of paper.
etc... etc...
IMO, this is very good way to create a visual UI for a computer to relate concepts to what we already know from the physical world.
Of course anything can be overdone. When it starts to impair functionality then it has, but I have seen little evidence of that happening anywhere.
The Lance rats that we know of were all caught by failing drug tests.
They then claimed they saw Lance cheat (which benefits them by selling their stories, getting lighter sentences) or even that he told them how to do it and encouraged them.
Now the confusing part is if they were so intimate with details of Lances cheating, how come he was so much better at it, that despite being tested more than any of them, he was never caught by a drug test like they were.
Either way this is sad story. Either Lance cheated, or a bunch of known cheaters were pulled together by a power tripping bureaucrat on a witch hunt.
Sucks either way.
What next, are they having a similar witch hunt for Indurain and his 5 wins. Similar allegations swirled around him.
"I think that the new consoles will give a huge boost to the industry, just like they do every time that they come. "
This is just my gut talking, but I really feel like people are actually caring much less about the next generation consoles this time. Smartphones and tablets are increasingly becoming a way to spend leisure gaming time with a much lower cost.
I just can't seen "Xbox 720" and "Halo 7" and PS4 making that big of an impression this time.
They have no real tablet share, so they aren't risking losing that.
They have no real smartphone share, so they aren't risking losing that.
They own desktop users body and soul, and there are scant real alternatives where users can go even if they hate it. So I don't see much risk here either.
Worse case, it's another Vista, which they tweak, and continue business as usual.
Already there is Classic Shell to restore the start menu and solve the main Win8 complaint:
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/
Obvious if Win8 was received even worse than Vista, MS could simply issue a patch that does the same and have a soft fallback.
Bottom line, the fixes are easy, and the desktop users are going anywhere else anyway, so minimal risk.
They aren't moving enough Windows Phones to get out of the "Others" ghetto in market share analysis:
http://allthingsd.com/files/2012/07/Strat_ana.jpg
This is the latest report and yet again, the "Others" category contracted. It is now at 4.0% total containing who knows what because new WindowsPhone7, but likely old Windows Phone6.x that is shrinking faster than WindowPhone7 is growing.
iOS/Android = ~90%
Blackberry = ~6%
Others = 4%
IMO it is questionable if you should bother supporting Blackberry, let alone delving for real scraps in the "Others" category.
Ok, sure you win, we will all be driving pure series hybrids in the near future as the industry catches up with your genius.
If we can assume 33%*90% (drivetrain) we get 29.7% - with a 38% Stirling engine, if we get 90% from the rest of the system (generator, battery, controller, wiring) -
Something seems amiss with your math:
33%(prius at 10KW) * 90% (Mechanical) = 29.7%
But 38%(Stirling) * 90% (Generator) * 90% (Motor) * 90% (Battery Charge discharge) = 27.7%
Even operating well away from peak efficiency, the Prius wins.
As I have already rebutted, your links are laboratory single cell ideal conditions battery, and small scale motor numbers. Real world numbers for full EV sized motors/generators/packs are more consistent with a 90% (at best) each number, not 90% total. Total system Gen-Battery-Battery-Motor is .9*.9.*9 = 72.9% efficient. Too low and the reason everyone is going for series-parallel configurations with mechanical couplings.
Also, here is efficiency Map of an actual BLDC motor suitable for a full blown EV:
http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2418/evmotor.png
Now this is a 95% peak efficiency so you have that minor point.
But look at the efficiency map and tell me what a reasonable number for overall efficiency when used in a car would be?
If you think about it, you will realize it is under 90%. As you can't cruise at any legal speed and be using enough HP to push even to the 90% region. Brief spurts of acceleration may go a bit above 90%, but you don't spend enough time accelerating for that to matter. And if you are in stop and go traffic your RPMs will be too low to get anywhere near 90%.
I really think you are dragging out minutia here. 90% for a real full EV Motor(as a pure series hybrid would have to be) is an extremely reasonable, if not optimistic number.
Real world, street legal, full EVs are not getting better than 90% efficiency from their motors.
Which backs what I said. Hybrids have smaller less powerful motors.
Full EVs like Tesla, EV-1, with bigger more powerful motors use AC induction motors.