Surface RT offers nothing that mid and upper end iDevices and Androids do not.
Except for out-of-the-box integration with Remote Workplace is your office has Windows server. That was one of the big ones for me. I could just remote desktop in while on the road from my tablet instead of having to use a laptop.
It also supports multi-tasking which isn't a gimmick. Keeping skype open for chatting while browsing the web is way better than flipping back and forth. A few Samsung phones have that now which is a good step. It really really really is needed in android. I don't expect apple to ever add it just like two button mice.:P
Also the windows environment is super awkward with touch but it's way better than the alternative of not being able to use a real file browser. I was at a conference and was able to download a PDF, make a couple changes in word and copy it to a USB stick to be taken to a fedex shop for printing. I bought a USB adapter for my Galaxy Tab which was my previous tablet and I always forgot the adapter at home and even when I had it... apps didn't really support it very well and just moving files to it was a PITA.
But by and far the best feature of WindowsRT that no iDevice or Android tablet offers is an honest to god desktop browser. There are still tons of sites which just don't quite work with touch or touch centric browsers. Menus that you have to hover over. Websites whose forms don't work. That's true of MetroIE as well but you can always load up windows and real IE. That has saved my ass numerous times on airport check-ins etc which just never quite worked on my Galaxy Tab.
I expected to not like my SurfaceRT but I had just accidentally run my Galaxy Tab through the washing machine (It was in my bedding) so I needed something for long haul transpacific flights and I figured I would just buy one and ebay it when the Surface Pro came out. I actually ended up keeping it because I do really like. It's way more useful than you would expect. Microsoft just didn't actually sell it as a product with features, they tried to market it as a fashion/style statement--which isn't a bad idea but you also need to demonstrate as you mention what it offers over the competition. The real killer was that there were absolutely 0 apps at launch.
Microsoft needs Metro Apps though. If they don't offer desireable metro apps people won't migrate to the metro UI. The SurfaceRT was a calculated move to force its users to only use Metro. If they had sold 6 million like they apparently hoped then Metro apps would have taken off a lot faster. I know I kickstarted VLC for metro. There certainly is more demand for metro than had surface not shipped or shipped with an Atom (an atom would have been better for its customers). But I don't think they hit critical mass to force developers to pay attention to it like MS hoped.
I don't think it made sense to push ARM so early. They should have gone Atom, same battery life and performance and full backwards compatibility. Still done the grunt work on ARM so that they could integrate Windows 9/ Windows Phone 9 into one OS and then just persuade devs to release ARM ports of metro apps--which would have been far more trivial than convincing them to write apps at all.
It does appear that there is a gas powered APU. And they definitely could be running the APU while on the tarmac. In which case it would be a traditional petroleum caused fire. If it was an APU fire then it wouldn't be a risk to passengers since it only runs while on the ground.
2. Does American Airlines belong to the Unites States of America?
From Wikipedia:
Ethiopian Airlines formerly Ethiopian Air Lines and often referred to as simply Ethiopian, is Ethiopia's flag carrier and is wholly owned by the country's government.
If Balmer is responsible for the ZuneHD, Windows Phone, Windows 7/8 and Xbox 360 then he's doing something right.
None of those have sold terribly well but for all of its faults ZuneHD was Spotify 5 years before spotify. And suddenly people realized how amazing a service like that would be.
Microsoft's biggest problem as of late has been its complete disconnect on sales. It doesn't know how to sell what it's got.
Governments have been tapping phone lines since the 1800s. Why should I suddenly be shocked and dismayed that they are tapping the modern equivalent.
It's like the stupidity over drones. Police agencies have been flying helicopters since the helicopters were invented but suddenly if it's unmanned OMGZ POLICE STATE!
Oh please. Working with a company to lay out how you would tap their technology isn't in of itself anything new. This report might as well say:
Shocking Report: Verizon Works With Law Enforcement on How to Tap Phones!"
The government has been tapping phones since the 1800s. Should we be *shocked* that they would also want to tap Skype phone calls?
Slashdot always whines that lawmakers feel the need to make special laws for old things e.g. "Stealing using a computer!? Isn't that just stealing, why create a new law?" or when people patent "___ with a computer." The double sided twist of that a phone call __using a computer__. Is just as tapable as a phone call using normal copper. Of course companies have to comply with legal wire-tap requests.
If you close a million dollar account you should buy everyone in the theater popcorn to celebrate! Everyone wins!:D I would have them pause a movie briefly if they started throwing Benjamins into the crowd in celebration.
You [...] conclude that humans have a terrible anatomy that would never work. And yet, here we are, masters of the entire earth.
I didn't say we would "never work" I said we were a fundamentally terrible design. Luckily our competition is also fundamentally bad. For being highly evolved pond scum we're pretty damn impressive but if I were designing something from scratch without any 'legacy' considerations I wouldn't have a heart, lungs, stomach, pancreas etc. And every part would be easily serviceable and replaceable. Humans would get like a -100 on the iFixit scale.
Terrible pump design? Show me a human designed pump that can operate for ~100 years at 60-100 beats a minute without stopping once and that under normal operation requires no maintenance.
Which is why an intelligent designer wouldn't have a pump in the first place. Especially one which was required to operate indefinitely without periodic maintenance. If I were designing something and I designed it in such a way that it could never be turned off for more than about 30 seconds and that no parts were replaceable or serviceable I would be called an idiot.
We're fundamentally a terrible design. If I told you that your laptop's battery dying would result in you losing all of your data forever and that you couldn't back it up anywhere you would tell me to take my laptop and design and shove it.
Actually writing code on my Surface Pro is better than writing code on the desktop at a lot of stages since I can test touch-enabled apps without compiling, copying to an Tab, iPad or surfaceRT.
Well I would ask if you have ever actually had someone text in a movie because it sounded like you hadn't but you addressed that in your post. You better believe it's that annoying. A phone screen is often brighter than the theater screen. It's like a flashing blue flash light in your eyes. There is a reason you can use your cell phone screen as a flash light to find your way around a dark room. They have to be bright enough to compete with daylight!
It might not be an open standard but Nvidia, AMD, Imagination Technologies and Qualcomm aren't reverse engineering the API to deliver DirectX GPUs so clearly there is a spec doc somewhere available.
But Game companies would have been just as likely to code to 11.1 as 11.2 and 11.1 requires Windows 8. So you would have been getting some variant of Windows 8 anyway. Why would gamers be concerned they couldn't use an outdated build of 8?
Lastly this is the same sort of FUD that we heard over Vista and DX10. "OMG gamers will have to use Vista!" Meanwhile almost a decade later if you don't want all the fancy features in Vista and DX10/11 you're still perfectly capable of playing almost every single game on the market on Windows XP.
I can memorize the attack patterns etc of early video games. But to say "I memorized the algorithms" is a really douchey way to say "I memorized the patterns."
The whole point of the program is that after one country receives in excess of a certain number of visas it is ineligible for the bonus allotment lottery. For numerous reasons many countries have an easier path to citizenship in the US. It's not a zero sum game to also try and expand the pool of applicants to countries which for a variety of reasons have fewer immigrants. It's not "racist" to say that we have plenty of Canadians and therefore they are ineligible. Canadian isn't even a race.
Which makes the entire effort sound like $10 million to avoid writing better software in the first place.
How much time/money did they spend optimizing the software?
I always have to remind people of this in my line of work. They'll spend 10 minutes optimizing an equation that only gets run once. Sure it saved an hour of processing time with that 10 minutes of work but that 10 minutes of human resources was worth more than 100 hours of CPU time.
Haha, that's what I was thinking too while reading the summary "Who the hell wants to live in Oakland? If I wanted to get stabbed every day I would just cover my walls in knives and swords."
I can't imagine why it would actually make anybody angry but I guess you're probably right.
The only people who would be affected by this are people who already have Windows 8 but don't want to install a free point release to their OS. It's like someone being angry that they can't install it without SP1 installed. I think it's safe to say that even if it wasn't necessary because of WDDM it still shouldn't make anyone mad.
It's not 'racist' to try and diversify your immigration policy. If 90% of your immigrants are from one or two countries it's not racist to put a cap on any one country's applications in order to give others a chance as well.
"Racist" would be negatively discriminating against a race. Mexico and China aren't being discriminated against in the slightest, if anything they are getting preferential treatment. In exchange for the status quo which is preferential, they save a few spots for everyone else.
, space may be the only habitable home we have left after this one gets wrecked
The least hospitable places on earth are still far more hospitable than pretty much the safest places within traveling distance.
It's a lot easier to clean up earth than to terraform or colonize a planet. Even if we nuked the living snot out of this planet it would still be lower radiation than the trip to Mars or the Moon. It's easier to filter out viruses than it is to create oxygen. It's easier to dive deep under the ocean to escape a catastrophic tsunami or asteroid impact than to fly to another planet.
Until the sun dies there is no real challenge humanity faces that would be easier to face on another planet. If we legitimately were worried about contingencies we shouldn't spend our resources on space exploration we should just burrow deep into the earth and build a deep underground base that can sustain itself for hundreds of years.
Slashdot Mirror
Surface RT offers nothing that mid and upper end iDevices and Androids do not.
Except for out-of-the-box integration with Remote Workplace is your office has Windows server. That was one of the big ones for me. I could just remote desktop in while on the road from my tablet instead of having to use a laptop.
It also supports multi-tasking which isn't a gimmick. Keeping skype open for chatting while browsing the web is way better than flipping back and forth. A few Samsung phones have that now which is a good step. It really really really is needed in android. I don't expect apple to ever add it just like two button mice. :P
Also the windows environment is super awkward with touch but it's way better than the alternative of not being able to use a real file browser. I was at a conference and was able to download a PDF, make a couple changes in word and copy it to a USB stick to be taken to a fedex shop for printing. I bought a USB adapter for my Galaxy Tab which was my previous tablet and I always forgot the adapter at home and even when I had it... apps didn't really support it very well and just moving files to it was a PITA.
But by and far the best feature of WindowsRT that no iDevice or Android tablet offers is an honest to god desktop browser. There are still tons of sites which just don't quite work with touch or touch centric browsers. Menus that you have to hover over. Websites whose forms don't work. That's true of MetroIE as well but you can always load up windows and real IE. That has saved my ass numerous times on airport check-ins etc which just never quite worked on my Galaxy Tab.
I expected to not like my SurfaceRT but I had just accidentally run my Galaxy Tab through the washing machine (It was in my bedding) so I needed something for long haul transpacific flights and I figured I would just buy one and ebay it when the Surface Pro came out. I actually ended up keeping it because I do really like. It's way more useful than you would expect. Microsoft just didn't actually sell it as a product with features, they tried to market it as a fashion/style statement--which isn't a bad idea but you also need to demonstrate as you mention what it offers over the competition. The real killer was that there were absolutely 0 apps at launch.
Microsoft needs Metro Apps though. If they don't offer desireable metro apps people won't migrate to the metro UI. The SurfaceRT was a calculated move to force its users to only use Metro. If they had sold 6 million like they apparently hoped then Metro apps would have taken off a lot faster. I know I kickstarted VLC for metro. There certainly is more demand for metro than had surface not shipped or shipped with an Atom (an atom would have been better for its customers). But I don't think they hit critical mass to force developers to pay attention to it like MS hoped.
I don't think it made sense to push ARM so early. They should have gone Atom, same battery life and performance and full backwards compatibility. Still done the grunt work on ARM so that they could integrate Windows 9/ Windows Phone 9 into one OS and then just persuade devs to release ARM ports of metro apps--which would have been far more trivial than convincing them to write apps at all.
Interesting to see the difference in reaction between this incident and Aaron Swartz...
They still need a warrant.
To listen to US citizens' conversations they still need a warrant.
There were only about 1,000-2,000 given to the FBI for prism data last year.
So I should be against it because it's more affordable and effective?
That's like saying we should keep the police on horses because cars are cheaper and more efficient!
That graphic is incorrect.
http://graphics.chicagotribune.com/dreamliner-problems/
It does appear that there is a gas powered APU. And they definitely could be running the APU while on the tarmac. In which case it would be a traditional petroleum caused fire. If it was an APU fire then it wouldn't be a risk to passengers since it only runs while on the ground.
2. Does American Airlines belong to the Unites States of America?
From Wikipedia:
Ethiopian Airlines formerly Ethiopian Air Lines and often referred to as simply Ethiopian, is Ethiopia's flag carrier and is wholly owned by the country's government.
If Balmer is responsible for the ZuneHD, Windows Phone, Windows 7/8 and Xbox 360 then he's doing something right.
None of those have sold terribly well but for all of its faults ZuneHD was Spotify 5 years before spotify. And suddenly people realized how amazing a service like that would be.
Microsoft's biggest problem as of late has been its complete disconnect on sales. It doesn't know how to sell what it's got.
Governments have been tapping phone lines since the 1800s. Why should I suddenly be shocked and dismayed that they are tapping the modern equivalent.
It's like the stupidity over drones. Police agencies have been flying helicopters since the helicopters were invented but suddenly if it's unmanned OMGZ POLICE STATE!
Oh please. Working with a company to lay out how you would tap their technology isn't in of itself anything new. This report might as well say:
Shocking Report: Verizon Works With Law Enforcement on How to Tap Phones!"
The government has been tapping phones since the 1800s. Should we be *shocked* that they would also want to tap Skype phone calls?
Slashdot always whines that lawmakers feel the need to make special laws for old things e.g. "Stealing using a computer!? Isn't that just stealing, why create a new law?" or when people patent "___ with a computer." The double sided twist of that a phone call __using a computer__. Is just as tapable as a phone call using normal copper. Of course companies have to comply with legal wire-tap requests.
If you close a million dollar account you should buy everyone in the theater popcorn to celebrate! Everyone wins! :D I would have them pause a movie briefly if they started throwing Benjamins into the crowd in celebration.
You [...] conclude that humans have a terrible anatomy that would never work. And yet, here we are, masters of the entire earth.
I didn't say we would "never work" I said we were a fundamentally terrible design. Luckily our competition is also fundamentally bad. For being highly evolved pond scum we're pretty damn impressive but if I were designing something from scratch without any 'legacy' considerations I wouldn't have a heart, lungs, stomach, pancreas etc. And every part would be easily serviceable and replaceable. Humans would get like a -100 on the iFixit scale.
if the average battery life was over sixty years you'd be able to afford a lot of places to shove it.
Battery life is between 30 seconds (oxygen/blood) and 40 days (fat/food) depending on which fuel source is most in short supply.
Terrible pump design? Show me a human designed pump that can operate for ~100 years at 60-100 beats a minute without stopping once and that under normal operation requires no maintenance.
Which is why an intelligent designer wouldn't have a pump in the first place. Especially one which was required to operate indefinitely without periodic maintenance. If I were designing something and I designed it in such a way that it could never be turned off for more than about 30 seconds and that no parts were replaceable or serviceable I would be called an idiot.
We're fundamentally a terrible design. If I told you that your laptop's battery dying would result in you losing all of your data forever and that you couldn't back it up anywhere you would tell me to take my laptop and design and shove it.
Actually writing code on my Surface Pro is better than writing code on the desktop at a lot of stages since I can test touch-enabled apps without compiling, copying to an Tab, iPad or surfaceRT.
Well I would ask if you have ever actually had someone text in a movie because it sounded like you hadn't but you addressed that in your post. You better believe it's that annoying. A phone screen is often brighter than the theater screen. It's like a flashing blue flash light in your eyes. There is a reason you can use your cell phone screen as a flash light to find your way around a dark room. They have to be bright enough to compete with daylight!
It doesnt even have a spec doc like OpenGL does.
It might not be an open standard but Nvidia, AMD, Imagination Technologies and Qualcomm aren't reverse engineering the API to deliver DirectX GPUs so clearly there is a spec doc somewhere available.
But Game companies would have been just as likely to code to 11.1 as 11.2 and 11.1 requires Windows 8. So you would have been getting some variant of Windows 8 anyway. Why would gamers be concerned they couldn't use an outdated build of 8?
Lastly this is the same sort of FUD that we heard over Vista and DX10. "OMG gamers will have to use Vista!" Meanwhile almost a decade later if you don't want all the fancy features in Vista and DX10/11 you're still perfectly capable of playing almost every single game on the market on Windows XP.
I can memorize the attack patterns etc of early video games. But to say "I memorized the algorithms" is a really douchey way to say "I memorized the patterns."
The whole point of the program is that after one country receives in excess of a certain number of visas it is ineligible for the bonus allotment lottery. For numerous reasons many countries have an easier path to citizenship in the US. It's not a zero sum game to also try and expand the pool of applicants to countries which for a variety of reasons have fewer immigrants. It's not "racist" to say that we have plenty of Canadians and therefore they are ineligible. Canadian isn't even a race.
Which makes the entire effort sound like $10 million to avoid writing better software in the first place.
How much time/money did they spend optimizing the software?
I always have to remind people of this in my line of work. They'll spend 10 minutes optimizing an equation that only gets run once. Sure it saved an hour of processing time with that 10 minutes of work but that 10 minutes of human resources was worth more than 100 hours of CPU time.
Haha, that's what I was thinking too while reading the summary "Who the hell wants to live in Oakland? If I wanted to get stabbed every day I would just cover my walls in knives and swords."
I can't imagine why it would actually make anybody angry but I guess you're probably right.
The only people who would be affected by this are people who already have Windows 8 but don't want to install a free point release to their OS. It's like someone being angry that they can't install it without SP1 installed. I think it's safe to say that even if it wasn't necessary because of WDDM it still shouldn't make anyone mad.
It's not 'racist' to try and diversify your immigration policy. If 90% of your immigrants are from one or two countries it's not racist to put a cap on any one country's applications in order to give others a chance as well.
"Racist" would be negatively discriminating against a race. Mexico and China aren't being discriminated against in the slightest, if anything they are getting preferential treatment. In exchange for the status quo which is preferential, they save a few spots for everyone else.
, space may be the only habitable home we have left after this one gets wrecked
The least hospitable places on earth are still far more hospitable than pretty much the safest places within traveling distance.
It's a lot easier to clean up earth than to terraform or colonize a planet. Even if we nuked the living snot out of this planet it would still be lower radiation than the trip to Mars or the Moon. It's easier to filter out viruses than it is to create oxygen. It's easier to dive deep under the ocean to escape a catastrophic tsunami or asteroid impact than to fly to another planet.
Until the sun dies there is no real challenge humanity faces that would be easier to face on another planet. If we legitimately were worried about contingencies we shouldn't spend our resources on space exploration we should just burrow deep into the earth and build a deep underground base that can sustain itself for hundreds of years.