When you talk about digital audio "compression" you have to be careful because compression means a different thing at different stages of audio production. I have yet to see an article on the Internet about digital audio and compression where the author didn't mix this up at least once.
DYNAMICS COMPRESSION (compress the audible dynamic range) During mixing and mastering, the dynamic range of the audio content is compressed. The softest sounds are made louder and the loudest sounds are made softer. This is what music and audio people think of first if you talk about compression.
Dynamics compression has nothing at all to do with bits, this can be done acoustically, electrically, or digitally, it is about audio. The human ear does outrageous dynamics compression. Analog tape machines have a built-in dynamics compression that is considered to be musically useful and that is imitated today by digital. If you don't do that, you don't have "rock" music. Take away a rock band's dynamics compression and you have a really lame jazz combo, it is all the same instruments, the difference between the sound of jazz and rock drums is 98% dynamics compression. For rock vocals the compressor/limiter is more important then the microphone. Whether the singer whispers or screams it should all be the same volume. If it is not, you can't believe the complaining you will hear about it from everybody because that is not what rock singing sounds like. It is all the same volume. Go and listen to your records, the singer is right there in the front of your skull the whole time.
If you want music with a broad dynamic range there is plenty of it around, it just doesn't sell very well. With a broad dynamic range you have to turn up the volume high to catch the low sounds, and you have to shut the fuck up so you can actually listen to the musical presentation like you would a concert performer. This covers at most 10% of music listeners who are going to do that. Most people listen to music as an accompaniment to their lives like a movie soundtrack. They are running or partying or dancing or reading or whatever while they listen. For that purpose you want the dynamic range to be tight or you will miss a lot of music.
DATA COMPRESSION (compress the amount of disk storage used) After mixing and mastering, you can make a mix that takes up about half the file size by compressing the data in the file, same as making a Zip archive. This is what computer people think of when you say compression. The bit stream that the player sees is the same as raw audio, but on disk it is compressed data.
LOSSY COMPRESSION (compress the amount of playback bandwidth required) Finally, you can encode a mix into a lossy format, and the encoder will throw data away in order to compress the bandwidth the file requires to play in real-time. This is how MP3 and MP4 do it. This is what video people think of when you talk about compression, because this is also how DV and many other video-related formats keep their file sizes low enough to be practical.
Apple wouldn't have switched to Intel if they weren't specifically going to beat the rest of the industry on comparable machines. They could have maintained PowerPC workstations at a premium over consumer Intel systems, they could have shopped at AMD, they could have introduced a Cell workstation for specific applications, they could have done all kinds of kooky shit to distract from the fact that they couldn't compete with other hardware vendors.
The whole point is to make the common hardware go away, not just by using the same hardware but by charging the end user the same price for it. It takes it out of the picture for both Apple and computer purchasers. It leaves them staring at Mac OS X and Windows Vista and asking questions and that is a game Apple welcomes. (It's called "competition".)
People have been encouraging Apple to go head-to-head with Microsoft by releasing Mac OS X for Intel in a retail software box for generic PC systems. But that isn't going head-to-head with Microsoft because they have a hardware cartel that does pre-installs, that is where 90% of computers got the operating system that they're running right now. The retail box in a store is an entirely different market that only sells upgrades to itself.
Competing with Microsoft means taking the Intel Core x64 -based PC with USB2, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi "n", Bluetooth, memory, storage, graphics that the user WAS GOING TO BUY ANYWAY from 2006 forward and fit it with Mac enhancements for the same price as it costs to have it fitted with Microsoft enhancements, and then offer the consumer the choice of "Mac" or "Vista" PC. That represents a real choice, not the same as a few years ago the same user would be asked if they want a P4 2.0GHz or 2.6GHz with their Windows XP? All of the common PC parts just go away in today's comparison and leave you staring at the software.
When Photoshop 10 shipped recently, the first "Photoshop shootout" that I saw was someone running Photoshop 10 for Mac OS X in Tiger on a Mac, and then running Photoshop 10 for Windows in Vista on the same Mac and the Mac won. Only the software stack was compared. Used to be you used two computers for this and blamed the outcome on the Mac's bus speed or the PC's lack of registers. Now we're talking about flaws in Windows that Adobe can't work around, or features of Mac OS X that specifically enable something that the user wants. That is where the choice is now, Mac or Vista, you don't get to compete on 8% more CPU cycles anymore, the game is much more sophisticated.
The obligatory Linux reference would be that Linux and BSD enable you to be your own Microsoft or Apple when that makes sense. An example is Google building their own hardware for their software, or anyone building row after row of Apache Web servers, or TiVo. If you know you're going to basically run one app all the time you don't need Mac or Vista, you just want a way for your software to talk to the hardware without you having to write a kernel. It's as specialized as an iPod, you break a piece off a general purpose system.
You are killing me. A fucking word processor. It is like inviting people to use a back-breaking chair.
Now that we have more than one output medium, it is important to separate content from style. We also have a "universal" text format which is UTF-8 but we do not have a universal style format. If you munge in your styles with your text you are just setting up a situation where a publishing professional is going to have to rip that text back out of there and if you stored it with a funky old encoding good luck on your smart quotes and em dashes.
What would be the point of enabling a computer user in 2007 type type text and apply styles and you don't save their work as HTML+CSS? What is the point? It makes no sense to me.
What is required when you write is to store the actual typing. If you save UTF-8 you can type any character from any language and then later another human can use that UTF-8 text file to instantly "re-type" your work into any publishing system, smart quotes and all. No conversion necessary, no errors introduced. Doesn't matter if they are working in InDesign or Dreamweaver or other, there is simply no defensible argument for not having a single UTF-8 master copy of any kind of writing. You can drop it on a browser to read even 25 years from now, it will be compatible long after you are dead. In the entire history of computing there has not been a word processing format that lasted even 10 years. If you open a Word document from Word 97, that is only 10 years ago, it has to be "converted" (destroyed) when you open it. Good luck with that system here in the 21st century.
If Microsoft tries to sell ice in the Arctic, will open source follow with open source ice for the Arctic?
Movable Type is about 10,000 times more exciting than OpenOffice. I mean, c'mon.
TextWrangler for Mac OS X is free and it has UTF-8, RegEx find/replace that works across any number of files or a whole disk, real-time speller, S/FTP, lots of writing tools, a great find differences, beautiful text rendering, and completely scriptable with AppleScript (macros). Those are the tools that people need to do good writing and create documents that can be used in modern ways, not mail merge and bad fonts.
Another document format is not needed. This was already obvious before blogs took off, but to be promoting now is unforgivably stupid and irresponsible. Try and explain to an average person why all the typing they just did cannot even be viewed in a Web browser, they will not get it. Saving the user's typing as DOC or ODF is a con. The storage of text, styled text, graphics, photos, even movies (MPEG-4 H.264-AAC) has been solved. Your document format is ready it is HTML 4.01 Strict, CSS 2.1, and JS 1.5, there is nothing in the 1980's technology of MS Word that cannot be stored this way.
Coders should move on to the word processing interface WHICH FUCKING SUCKS. Make users the word processor that is wanted by both Firefox/Safari and Firefox/Safari users. Please the humans with a great writing interface and easy document-construction tools, and please the browsers by storing all of the work as really plain HTML+CSS+JS. The future will thank you. And I am speaking as someone who has converted his share of "word processing" work into useable information.
Designers can also generate templates for such a word processor out of their own HTML+CSS+JS authoring tools. Programmers can integrate their work with everyday work processing documents if they are stored as HTML+CSS+JS. You put the office typewriter into the Web's tool chain and it will be good for everyone.
> The main viewing for video should still be on the flat screen etc., but the UI for the system could be on the top of the 'coffee table'
You are talking about replacing the TV remote with a coffee table instead of a better TV remote.
Even so, wouldn't an iPhone make more sense that Surface in this context? It is hand-sized, it can emulate any key layout (could even have a picture of a TV remote on there) and it can stream videos and photos to an AppleTV. This is not strange futuristic tech I'm talking about, this stuff is happening now.
> You are very correct! The concept has been toyed with, in idea and a few tests,
And in a highly-publicized phone that ships in a couple of weeks.
> but Microsoft is getting this out of concept phase and bringing what looks to be a usable product to market.
No, they are not getting it out of the concept phase, they are not bringing it to market. Did you read the fucking article?
It is a demo only. It is the same as the electric cars that GM shows off every year but never makes.
You're playing Microsoft's game. They only have two products: Office and Windows. Everything else is a marketing initiative. (In fact, some would say Office and Windows are also marketing initiatives, but at least they are actual products with users and SKU's and price points and everything.)
Wow, Microsoft invented "detecting things with cameras."
Finally, there is hope in the 21st century.
This fucking thing is only slightly more impressive than the Kodak machine at my Walgreen's. If you told me this was NEXT year's Kodak machine for Walgreen's I would be like, "yeah, OK." Read the article, turns out it is.
> The point is, who can polish the idea, make it usable and find a market willing to pay the price for it first.
If that is the point, then Microsoft has FAILED MISERABLY. This is not a product, it is not coming to market, it doesn't have a price ($5000-$10,000?), and nobody is even willing to pay for it. T-Mobile is not there saying we can't wait to pay $10,000 for this.
Now, if this is just another demo, and it is years later than all the other product demos of this kind, THEN WE ARE VERY RIGHT TO BUST MICROSOFT'S BALLS ABOUT IT. If another startup out of somebody's garage showed this demo we would piss our pants laughing at the absurdity of it and tell them to call us when they have a fucking SKU to share. If Surface was a PRODUCT, we could move out of the "my demo is bigger than yours" arena and into actual use cases.
However, we cannot.
This is just another fucking demo, and it is more impressive to me that the iPhone is going to put multi-touch into millions of pockets starting like next week than it is that Microsoft had enough money to build yet another PC-based art project that nobody fucking wants.
> "What is interesting is the application (implementation, and that anyone could write apps for it (as opposed to iPhone, for example)."
You may not have noticed, but iPhone has a full Web apps capable Web browser in it with Wi-Fi "n". It can run Flickr and eBay and Google everything as well as every other major site on the Internet.
In addition to that, you will be able to install software through iTunes same as iPod video. Get with the fucking program if you are going to spout propaganda. Fucking keep up. Read a bit.
> Apple is using multitouch as a gimmick to create buzz. It doesn't actually do anything useful.
On the iPhone, the multi-touch screen replaces the keypad. Instead of touching any of 12 places with any finger, you can touch hundreds of places. In a sense it is a keypad that can morph into any button arrangement. This is not only appropriate for a phone, it also bears mentioning that iPhone is a real product, you can buy 20 of them for the price of one Microsoft Surface which is not even for sale. That's the real gimmick.
> [Surface] use[s] a screen larger than a postage stamp (as opposed to the iPhone, for example).
In the first place, the small screen in the iPhone is considered a feature because it helps it to fit into your pocket, unlike Surface.
In the second place, the Surface screen is only 1024x768... that is only 4x the pixels of iPhone.
You can use Bluetooth to get stuff off of devices that are still in your pocket or purse. You don't have to so much as take them out of there to place them on a table. This feature is as timely as Microsoft's recent Flash competitor.
Also, innovating a way to un-flatten displays again only a few years after they went flat... that is really something. It is like making a really, really big iPod, and refusing to use flash memory or play RSS feeds with enclosures (Podcasts). Oh, wait, Microsoft did that also.
> I'm really happy that something like this is coming out
Who said it was coming out? They are going to give a few away to corporate partners.
> Sure there have been examples of this inthe past. The difference is a company like Microsoft takes the idea and makes a commercial > product with it.
YOU STUPID FUCKING ASS.
1) this is not a commercial product 2) Microsoft leads the world demo:product ratio (very few products, millions of demos) 3) they have two (2) profitable products (Office, Windows/DOS) in their ENTIRE FUCKING HISTORY 4) neither Office or Windows/DOS are even remotely original, in fact they were proud to bring you a WordPerfect clone, a Lotus clone, a Mac clone
> Taking an idea out of the academic world and actually making something useful is the whole idea research like this. If Apple did this there > would be a line a couple kms long on this site to fellate Jobs.
ONCE AGAIN, YOU STUPID FUCKING ASS.
The iPhone ships in a couple of weeks, and yes, there is a line a couple of kms long to fellate Jobs.
> What are these people doing demoing this product with stupid family pictures BS?? > This has the potential to be THE breakthrough for CAD, CAM, 3D and 2D design applications.
If you can do CAD on a 1024x768 screen with finger-painting accuracy then you can just as easily do it in your head and do not need Microsoft Surface. It is not even a product, let alone professional design tool. You're wondering why people are using crayons with coloring books instead of drawing blueprints... it's a crayon.
These breakthroughs are going on but Microsoft has nothing to do with it.
If you drool thinking about this you want an Apple 30 Cinema Display and a big Wacom Tablet. In fact you can get a bunch of them for the price of one Microsoft Surface.
How did they solve this in the iPhone, then? You can get 20 of them for $10,000.
There is a company that you send them your iMac they send it back with a touch screen on it. These guys are like in a garage somewhere. At no time will you find a rear-projection system installed in your iMac due to this.
Microsoft is doing such outrageous low-tech and poor design you have to make an ass out of yourself just to try and defend it.
Ir cameras and rear-projection? Surely this is the multi-touch screen of the 1970's. If you put a picture of Microsoft Surface on Wikipedia I would think it was 30 years old, even before I saw the iPhone.
Surface is like a stunt some geeks pull at a convention... "this year we built a finger-painting table out of an old projection TV and pieces of an HP CAT scanner."
They should have built it into a table TOP, not a table. Just the flat part, flat like a screen.
You ought to be able to take Microsoft Surface out of a big flat box and screw on whatever legs you want, or build it into a counter top or bar. The display should be flat and the touch should be an invisible layer on top.
However that would be if it was a real product. Then you would have a reason to do all that design work, make it better, more useful, sell more, make a profit.
When you compare this to the iPhone it is like the same product from two different centuries.
The resolution on Microsoft Surface is said to be only 1024x768, you can't buy a computer with that low resolution for a few years now. The iPhone screen has 1/4 as many pixels, and you can buy 10-20 iPhones for the price of one Microsoft Surface, or 10 iPhones and 5 iMacs and an iPod shuffle.
The stand on the iMac is already removable. If you add a third-party touch screen to today's iMac you can lay it down on any table and go to work for about $1500, and it is twice the resolution of Microsoft Surface also.
The story on the iPhone is that it was originally a tablet Mac, but making it ridiculously small made the fingers part even more useful because you don't have a keyboard or mouse to replace, you're essentially replacing a number pad.
With how much people like the "touch your music" thing, and the fact that touch screens are HUGE among electronic DJ's, and Final Cut and Logic have thousands of knobs and controls and sliders, the platform would do really well if it went all touch screen.
Also you can imagine a very small notebook with a keyboard and a wide touch screen and no track pad, a cross between iPhone and MacBook. The touch screen enables SMALLER and they have been doing smaller at Apple since 2000 like it is a religion.
> This is so "Star Trek" to the geek in me. Finally, a way to use the computing processing power available in a method about anyone can > use. Now to get it into a package that is thinner and doesn't require the supporting table.
Possibly something that could be held in the hand and carried in the pocket, maybe a touch screen phone of some kind, maybe with an Apple logo on it, could be as soon as two weeks from now, but I don't know, it is so hard to peer into the mysterious future of technology.
Doesn't it seem strange to put a computer display into a table like this, rather than into just a table-top? Since displays are flat?
I'm thinking that the Apple version of this would have just been a table top and you would attach whatever legs you want, but there would be room for your legs under there.
The Microsoft version looks like it has some 1940's radar in there also. Why does it have to be such a big box?
There is a rumor that the next generation of Macs will have multi-touch screens like the iPhone. In that case a $1200 iMac can lay flat on your kitchen table and you have the same thing.
> They just couldn't compete under all the iPod hype.
Bullshit. They failed for technical reasons or for DRM reasons or for a combination of technical and DRM reasons and may get an assist from bad or no design. You are defending the 8-track tape. It is pitiful from a technical perspective. The "PC" technology market did not take over the consumer entertainment technology market as planned. Let it go.
iPod hype hit in like 2004-2005 when the iPod was already years old and had already bested all rivals on technical, DRM, and design merits. Something like 90% of iPods ever sold have color screens, that excludes the first 3 generations entirely, they are just a blip on the radar, but those were sales to a much, much geekier crowd.
It may be a treasure trove for Slashdot readers but maybe that's only because we will have the right combination of diminished expectations and technical know-how to not be disappointed in one of these devices.
Slashdot Mirror
When you talk about digital audio "compression" you have to be careful because compression means a different thing at different stages of audio production. I have yet to see an article on the Internet about digital audio and compression where the author didn't mix this up at least once.
DYNAMICS COMPRESSION (compress the audible dynamic range)
During mixing and mastering, the dynamic range of the audio content is compressed. The softest sounds are made louder and the loudest sounds are made softer. This is what music and audio people think of first if you talk about compression.
Dynamics compression has nothing at all to do with bits, this can be done acoustically, electrically, or digitally, it is about audio. The human ear does outrageous dynamics compression. Analog tape machines have a built-in dynamics compression that is considered to be musically useful and that is imitated today by digital. If you don't do that, you don't have "rock" music. Take away a rock band's dynamics compression and you have a really lame jazz combo, it is all the same instruments, the difference between the sound of jazz and rock drums is 98% dynamics compression. For rock vocals the compressor/limiter is more important then the microphone. Whether the singer whispers or screams it should all be the same volume. If it is not, you can't believe the complaining you will hear about it from everybody because that is not what rock singing sounds like. It is all the same volume. Go and listen to your records, the singer is right there in the front of your skull the whole time.
If you want music with a broad dynamic range there is plenty of it around, it just doesn't sell very well. With a broad dynamic range you have to turn up the volume high to catch the low sounds, and you have to shut the fuck up so you can actually listen to the musical presentation like you would a concert performer. This covers at most 10% of music listeners who are going to do that. Most people listen to music as an accompaniment to their lives like a movie soundtrack. They are running or partying or dancing or reading or whatever while they listen. For that purpose you want the dynamic range to be tight or you will miss a lot of music.
DATA COMPRESSION (compress the amount of disk storage used)
After mixing and mastering, you can make a mix that takes up about half the file size by compressing the data in the file, same as making a Zip archive. This is what computer people think of when you say compression. The bit stream that the player sees is the same as raw audio, but on disk it is compressed data.
LOSSY COMPRESSION (compress the amount of playback bandwidth required)
Finally, you can encode a mix into a lossy format, and the encoder will throw data away in order to compress the bandwidth the file requires to play in real-time. This is how MP3 and MP4 do it. This is what video people think of when you talk about compression, because this is also how DV and many other video-related formats keep their file sizes low enough to be practical.
Apple wouldn't have switched to Intel if they weren't specifically going to beat the rest of the industry on comparable machines. They could have maintained PowerPC workstations at a premium over consumer Intel systems, they could have shopped at AMD, they could have introduced a Cell workstation for specific applications, they could have done all kinds of kooky shit to distract from the fact that they couldn't compete with other hardware vendors.
The whole point is to make the common hardware go away, not just by using the same hardware but by charging the end user the same price for it. It takes it out of the picture for both Apple and computer purchasers. It leaves them staring at Mac OS X and Windows Vista and asking questions and that is a game Apple welcomes. (It's called "competition".)
People have been encouraging Apple to go head-to-head with Microsoft by releasing Mac OS X for Intel in a retail software box for generic PC systems. But that isn't going head-to-head with Microsoft because they have a hardware cartel that does pre-installs, that is where 90% of computers got the operating system that they're running right now. The retail box in a store is an entirely different market that only sells upgrades to itself.
Competing with Microsoft means taking the Intel Core x64 -based PC with USB2, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi "n", Bluetooth, memory, storage, graphics that the user WAS GOING TO BUY ANYWAY from 2006 forward and fit it with Mac enhancements for the same price as it costs to have it fitted with Microsoft enhancements, and then offer the consumer the choice of "Mac" or "Vista" PC. That represents a real choice, not the same as a few years ago the same user would be asked if they want a P4 2.0GHz or 2.6GHz with their Windows XP? All of the common PC parts just go away in today's comparison and leave you staring at the software.
When Photoshop 10 shipped recently, the first "Photoshop shootout" that I saw was someone running Photoshop 10 for Mac OS X in Tiger on a Mac, and then running Photoshop 10 for Windows in Vista on the same Mac and the Mac won. Only the software stack was compared. Used to be you used two computers for this and blamed the outcome on the Mac's bus speed or the PC's lack of registers. Now we're talking about flaws in Windows that Adobe can't work around, or features of Mac OS X that specifically enable something that the user wants. That is where the choice is now, Mac or Vista, you don't get to compete on 8% more CPU cycles anymore, the game is much more sophisticated.
The obligatory Linux reference would be that Linux and BSD enable you to be your own Microsoft or Apple when that makes sense. An example is Google building their own hardware for their software, or anyone building row after row of Apache Web servers, or TiVo. If you know you're going to basically run one app all the time you don't need Mac or Vista, you just want a way for your software to talk to the hardware without you having to write a kernel. It's as specialized as an iPod, you break a piece off a general purpose system.
Ugly, ugly technology.
This is a complete fucking waste of time.
A word processor?
You are killing me. A fucking word processor. It is like inviting people to use a back-breaking chair.
Now that we have more than one output medium, it is important to separate content from style. We also have a "universal" text format which is UTF-8 but we do not have a universal style format. If you munge in your styles with your text you are just setting up a situation where a publishing professional is going to have to rip that text back out of there and if you stored it with a funky old encoding good luck on your smart quotes and em dashes.
What would be the point of enabling a computer user in 2007 type type text and apply styles and you don't save their work as HTML+CSS? What is the point? It makes no sense to me.
What is required when you write is to store the actual typing. If you save UTF-8 you can type any character from any language and then later another human can use that UTF-8 text file to instantly "re-type" your work into any publishing system, smart quotes and all. No conversion necessary, no errors introduced. Doesn't matter if they are working in InDesign or Dreamweaver or other, there is simply no defensible argument for not having a single UTF-8 master copy of any kind of writing. You can drop it on a browser to read even 25 years from now, it will be compatible long after you are dead. In the entire history of computing there has not been a word processing format that lasted even 10 years. If you open a Word document from Word 97, that is only 10 years ago, it has to be "converted" (destroyed) when you open it. Good luck with that system here in the 21st century.
If Microsoft tries to sell ice in the Arctic, will open source follow with open source ice for the Arctic?
Movable Type is about 10,000 times more exciting than OpenOffice. I mean, c'mon.
TextWrangler for Mac OS X is free and it has UTF-8, RegEx find/replace that works across any number of files or a whole disk, real-time speller, S/FTP, lots of writing tools, a great find differences, beautiful text rendering, and completely scriptable with AppleScript (macros). Those are the tools that people need to do good writing and create documents that can be used in modern ways, not mail merge and bad fonts.
Another document format is not needed. This was already obvious before blogs took off, but to be promoting now is unforgivably stupid and irresponsible. Try and explain to an average person why all the typing they just did cannot even be viewed in a Web browser, they will not get it. Saving the user's typing as DOC or ODF is a con. The storage of text, styled text, graphics, photos, even movies (MPEG-4 H.264-AAC) has been solved. Your document format is ready it is HTML 4.01 Strict, CSS 2.1, and JS 1.5, there is nothing in the 1980's technology of MS Word that cannot be stored this way.
Coders should move on to the word processing interface WHICH FUCKING SUCKS. Make users the word processor that is wanted by both Firefox/Safari and Firefox/Safari users. Please the humans with a great writing interface and easy document-construction tools, and please the browsers by storing all of the work as really plain HTML+CSS+JS. The future will thank you. And I am speaking as someone who has converted his share of "word processing" work into useable information.
Designers can also generate templates for such a word processor out of their own HTML+CSS+JS authoring tools. Programmers can integrate their work with everyday work processing documents if they are stored as HTML+CSS+JS. You put the office typewriter into the Web's tool chain and it will be good for everyone.
> Consider the iPod, which was absolutely nothing new
... what was new was that it worked.
As far as parts go, pieces go, no not really anything new
I would love to see something from Microsoft that works. It doesn't have to be new.
> The main viewing for video should still be on the flat screen etc., but the UI for the system could be on the top of the 'coffee table'
You are talking about replacing the TV remote with a coffee table instead of a better TV remote.
Even so, wouldn't an iPhone make more sense that Surface in this context? It is hand-sized, it can emulate any key layout (could even have a picture of a TV remote on there) and it can stream videos and photos to an AppleTV. This is not strange futuristic tech I'm talking about, this stuff is happening now.
> You are very correct! The concept has been toyed with, in idea and a few tests,
And in a highly-publicized phone that ships in a couple of weeks.
> but Microsoft is getting this out of concept phase and bringing what looks to be a usable product to market.
No, they are not getting it out of the concept phase, they are not bringing it to market. Did you read the fucking article?
It is a demo only. It is the same as the electric cars that GM shows off every year but never makes.
You're playing Microsoft's game. They only have two products: Office and Windows. Everything else is a marketing initiative. (In fact, some would say Office and Windows are also marketing initiatives, but at least they are actual products with users and SKU's and price points and everything.)
Wow, Microsoft invented "detecting things with cameras."
Finally, there is hope in the 21st century.
This fucking thing is only slightly more impressive than the Kodak machine at my Walgreen's. If you told me this was NEXT year's Kodak machine for Walgreen's I would be like, "yeah, OK." Read the article, turns out it is.
> The point is, who can polish the idea, make it usable and find a market willing to pay the price for it first.
If that is the point, then Microsoft has FAILED MISERABLY. This is not a product, it is not coming to market, it doesn't have a price ($5000-$10,000?), and nobody is even willing to pay for it. T-Mobile is not there saying we can't wait to pay $10,000 for this.
Now, if this is just another demo, and it is years later than all the other product demos of this kind, THEN WE ARE VERY RIGHT TO BUST MICROSOFT'S BALLS ABOUT IT. If another startup out of somebody's garage showed this demo we would piss our pants laughing at the absurdity of it and tell them to call us when they have a fucking SKU to share. If Surface was a PRODUCT, we could move out of the "my demo is bigger than yours" arena and into actual use cases.
However, we cannot.
This is just another fucking demo, and it is more impressive to me that the iPhone is going to put multi-touch into millions of pockets starting like next week than it is that Microsoft had enough money to build yet another PC-based art project that nobody fucking wants.
> "What is interesting is the application (implementation, and that anyone could write apps for it (as opposed to iPhone, for example)."
... that is only 4x the pixels of iPhone.
You may not have noticed, but iPhone has a full Web apps capable Web browser in it with Wi-Fi "n". It can run Flickr and eBay and Google everything as well as every other major site on the Internet.
In addition to that, you will be able to install software through iTunes same as iPod video. Get with the fucking program if you are going to spout propaganda. Fucking keep up. Read a bit.
> Apple is using multitouch as a gimmick to create buzz. It doesn't actually do anything useful.
On the iPhone, the multi-touch screen replaces the keypad. Instead of touching any of 12 places with any finger, you can touch hundreds of places. In a sense it is a keypad that can morph into any button arrangement. This is not only appropriate for a phone, it also bears mentioning that iPhone is a real product, you can buy 20 of them for the price of one Microsoft Surface which is not even for sale. That's the real gimmick.
> [Surface] use[s] a screen larger than a postage stamp (as opposed to the iPhone, for example).
In the first place, the small screen in the iPhone is considered a feature because it helps it to fit into your pocket, unlike Surface.
In the second place, the Surface screen is only 1024x768
You can use Bluetooth to get stuff off of devices that are still in your pocket or purse. You don't have to so much as take them out of there to place them on a table. This feature is as timely as Microsoft's recent Flash competitor.
... that is really something. It is like making a really, really big iPod, and refusing to use flash memory or play RSS feeds with enclosures (Podcasts). Oh, wait, Microsoft did that also.
Also, innovating a way to un-flatten displays again only a few years after they went flat
> I'm really happy that something like this is coming out
Who said it was coming out? They are going to give a few away to corporate partners.
> Sure there have been examples of this inthe past. The difference is a company like Microsoft takes the idea and makes a commercial
> product with it.
YOU STUPID FUCKING ASS.
1) this is not a commercial product
2) Microsoft leads the world demo:product ratio (very few products, millions of demos)
3) they have two (2) profitable products (Office, Windows/DOS) in their ENTIRE FUCKING HISTORY
4) neither Office or Windows/DOS are even remotely original, in fact they were proud to bring you a WordPerfect clone, a Lotus clone, a Mac clone
> Taking an idea out of the academic world and actually making something useful is the whole idea research like this. If Apple did this there
> would be a line a couple kms long on this site to fellate Jobs.
ONCE AGAIN, YOU STUPID FUCKING ASS.
The iPhone ships in a couple of weeks, and yes, there is a line a couple of kms long to fellate Jobs.
> What are these people doing demoing this product with stupid family pictures BS??
... it's a crayon.
> This has the potential to be THE breakthrough for CAD, CAM, 3D and 2D design applications.
If you can do CAD on a 1024x768 screen with finger-painting accuracy then you can just as easily do it in your head and do not need Microsoft Surface. It is not even a product, let alone professional design tool. You're wondering why people are using crayons with coloring books instead of drawing blueprints
These breakthroughs are going on but Microsoft has nothing to do with it.
If you drool thinking about this you want an Apple 30 Cinema Display and a big Wacom Tablet. In fact you can get a bunch of them for the price of one Microsoft Surface.
Apple's response to this is the iPhone, and possibly more iPhone-like Macs when Leopard ships.
If there is a new paradigm here, it is the very first multi-touch screen that is not sexy.
How did they solve this in the iPhone, then? You can get 20 of them for $10,000.
... "this year we built a finger-painting table out of an old projection TV and pieces of an HP CAT scanner."
There is a company that you send them your iMac they send it back with a touch screen on it. These guys are like in a garage somewhere. At no time will you find a rear-projection system installed in your iMac due to this.
Microsoft is doing such outrageous low-tech and poor design you have to make an ass out of yourself just to try and defend it.
Ir cameras and rear-projection? Surely this is the multi-touch screen of the 1970's. If you put a picture of Microsoft Surface on Wikipedia I would think it was 30 years old, even before I saw the iPhone.
Surface is like a stunt some geeks pull at a convention
They should have built it into a table TOP, not a table. Just the flat part, flat like a screen.
You ought to be able to take Microsoft Surface out of a big flat box and screw on whatever legs you want, or build it into a counter top or bar. The display should be flat and the touch should be an invisible layer on top.
However that would be if it was a real product. Then you would have a reason to do all that design work, make it better, more useful, sell more, make a profit.
When you compare this to the iPhone it is like the same product from two different centuries.
The resolution on Microsoft Surface is said to be only 1024x768, you can't buy a computer with that low resolution for a few years now. The iPhone screen has 1/4 as many pixels, and you can buy 10-20 iPhones for the price of one Microsoft Surface, or 10 iPhones and 5 iMacs and an iPod shuffle.
The stand on the iMac is already removable. If you add a third-party touch screen to today's iMac you can lay it down on any table and go to work for about $1500, and it is twice the resolution of Microsoft Surface also.
The story on the iPhone is that it was originally a tablet Mac, but making it ridiculously small made the fingers part even more useful because you don't have a keyboard or mouse to replace, you're essentially replacing a number pad.
With how much people like the "touch your music" thing, and the fact that touch screens are HUGE among electronic DJ's, and Final Cut and Logic have thousands of knobs and controls and sliders, the platform would do really well if it went all touch screen.
Also you can imagine a very small notebook with a keyboard and a wide touch screen and no track pad, a cross between iPhone and MacBook. The touch screen enables SMALLER and they have been doing smaller at Apple since 2000 like it is a religion.
> People have been dreaming about large screen very high resolution interactive work surfaces for years.
The article says that Microsoft Surface is 1024x768, that is not very high resolution. It's only 4x more pixels than iPhone.
> Yes but the idea of having the camera/PDA/whatever interact like that is completely new in my mind. I haven't seen anything like that.
There are many games doing this kind of thing. For example, there are games you can play with Web cams.
> This is so "Star Trek" to the geek in me. Finally, a way to use the computing processing power available in a method about anyone can
> use. Now to get it into a package that is thinner and doesn't require the supporting table.
Possibly something that could be held in the hand and carried in the pocket, maybe a touch screen phone of some kind, maybe with an Apple logo on it, could be as soon as two weeks from now, but I don't know, it is so hard to peer into the mysterious future of technology.
Doesn't it seem strange to put a computer display into a table like this, rather than into just a table-top? Since displays are flat?
I'm thinking that the Apple version of this would have just been a table top and you would attach whatever legs you want, but there would be room for your legs under there.
The Microsoft version looks like it has some 1940's radar in there also. Why does it have to be such a big box?
There is a rumor that the next generation of Macs will have multi-touch screens like the iPhone. In that case a $1200 iMac can lay flat on your kitchen table and you have the same thing.
Apple already announced the iPhone would ship in Europe in January 2008. Seems like these would be the European iPhones.
> They just couldn't compete under all the iPod hype.
Bullshit. They failed for technical reasons or for DRM reasons or for a combination of technical and DRM reasons and may get an assist from bad or no design. You are defending the 8-track tape. It is pitiful from a technical perspective. The "PC" technology market did not take over the consumer entertainment technology market as planned. Let it go.
iPod hype hit in like 2004-2005 when the iPod was already years old and had already bested all rivals on technical, DRM, and design merits. Something like 90% of iPods ever sold have color screens, that excludes the first 3 generations entirely, they are just a blip on the radar, but those were sales to a much, much geekier crowd.
It may be a treasure trove for Slashdot readers but maybe that's only because we will have the right combination of diminished expectations and technical know-how to not be disappointed in one of these devices.