Facebook is popular because (this might shock you) people like it.
As to high "friend scores" most of the people who use facebook aren't gamers. Nor does it have anything to do with social hierarchy. It's simple: one more friend is one more person whose gossip you have access to. The cost? One more person as an audience to your thoughts. You gain access to gossip in exchange for attention. You only benefit without any cost except for the time to press "OK". There are of course subtle and less obvious privacy questions but most people are completely oblivious to them so they aren't taken into account as a potential hazard.
You could hide the friend # on facebook and behavior wouldn't change in the slightest.
International security is often tied more to resource control than actual ideological differences. Who controls Water, Agriculture and Energy is HUGE.
If one country redirects a river and causes a famine in another country then you can expect conflict. Changing weather and environment can make a once prosperous region barren or destroy agricultural capability. And once a population is facing resource restrictions while a neighbor appears to be unharmed then it's easy to rouse up your population to "go get what you deserve from the greedy neighbor".
Every DVD player or BluRay player I've ever bought comes with "PowerDVD" or equivalent. Once PowerDVD is installed you can watch DVDs through WindowsMediaPlayer. So what I imagine the OEMs are saying is "Look we already get a DVD playback license from LG for the DVD players we buy. But now we're getting charged by you too for the codec. Cut it out of the OS and we'll just get it through the DVD player.
Or Microsoft isn't forcing Skype to do things their way and is letting the Skype team do what they've been doing well up to this point. I imagine this change has been years in the making. No reason to force them to change paths due to politics.
That's a reasonable position. However we can't have a reasonable debate about to what extent we should be offsetting the effects of climate change and how best to address climate change until the deniers admit there's a problem in the first place.
It's like having a raging forest fire and not just trying to debate whether it's better to let it burn out and pay out the insurance for lost homes or to throw people at the problem while one party is arguing that there isn't even a fire to put out.
I'm confused where blowing up men is more moral than blowing up women. The guy was perfectly eager to kill men.
I heartily support women's rights. But I also support everybody's rights to not be murdered. The fact that his psychopathic ambitions only aspired to kill *half* of the population doesn't seem like coercion.
If a terrorist is worried their bomb will Kill a muslim so they promise it'll only kill Jews I don't view that as coercion--the intent to kill *somebody* is all that matters.
Our government is fine. It's the voters who are incompetent. We'll vote for something 10 times and then decide 2 years later right before construction that we don't want it... then spend another 10 years trying to decide what to do only to scratch that at the last second.
Also incompetence I've found is far more prevalent when you're broke. When you're working the razor's edge of a budget and you screw up at all--it all goes to shit. When you have a surplus budget you can usually literally buy yourself out of the problem.
I don't think it's a bad thing but whenever you dramatically change the 'rules' you're bound to encounter unintended consequences up the wazoo. We've spent the last couple thousand years vetting out the most perfect solution that works with human psychology.
Regardless of your opinion on it, everyone has to agree that it's the most dangerous form of science since it's the only avenue of science which regardless if it benefits or destroys society will by definition completely transform it in a fashion never before seen in human history.
Sapient artificial species which don't die of natural causes and can live virtually will more radically threaten our culture, society and civilization than any other change in technology.
For all of human history we've been adapting to the same species using different technology. We've never in history dealt with the fundamental nature of man changing before.
Steal a baby from 2,000 BCE and it'll probably grow up like any other human. Steal a baby from 2,500 AD and it will most likely be a new species.
Well, here's the question though, would these screeners have 'ignored' an explosive for $2,400?
I mean I wouldn't lift a finger to report someone selling pot. But if I somehow knew someone was selling plastic explosives I would definitely report them. I think a TSA agent is probably more likely to turn a blink eye to cocaine than an actual threat to people's lives.
I know I could sleep easy knowing there is a kilo of coke in the world. I wouldn't be able to sleep easy if I let a terrorist kill 200 people.
Well it's maybe a little bit of a story. The idea that you want answers not webpages isn't a new one. But Google is also investing a ton of money on solving that as well.
Windows will have Metro finger friendly apps. But instead of be SOL when you can't get one to work you can always resort to awkwardly using your tablet.
They are making the same mistake but in reverse, making desktop adhere to a UI designed for mobile devices.
Except that they aren't. They left the desktop intact. If you want to run Micro-Pixel-Buttons the Power-App you'll continue running it exactly as you do today.
If you want a lightweight finger friendly app then you use Metro. Nobody is being forced to adhere to Metro on the desktop. The desktop is continuing on exactly as it was and has been.
You seem to believe that the desktop is dead. It's not. It's exactly where it's always been. Nothing is getting shoehorned into something else. You have a desktop (and god help you if you want to use your fingers but it's there anyway.) and you have apps which are finger friendly. Why can't the two co-exist?
So you're saying that Starcraft will run on Windows RT?
No. I'm saying that Windows RT is irrelevant for the same reason that iPad and Android are similarly irellevant: it can't run Starcraft*. (*Starcraft obviously being a token application. Insert your favorite application here.)
Microsoft is smart enough to know that "Another good tablet OS" isn't enough to take over the market. What is good enough is an OS which offers something that Android and iPad don't have which is a massive back catalogue and capability to fall back on real applications when there is no lightweight app equivalent.
Think about all the hacking people do to run Hulu without an App. Windows 8 x86 is a PC therefore you won't be able to discriminate against a touchscreen PC vs a desktop PC. No more hacking to get Hulu to work.
You said:
MS felt that they needed to spend development to shove the tablet model into Windows and label it as Windows 8. If MS focused on creating a new OS just for the tablet, they might have worked out all the enterprise features instead.
This is precisely my point. Windows 8 x86 on a tablet is unique in that it offers legacy applications. If Microsoft had just released Windows RT they wouldn't have this feature. And if you just want a cheap ARM tablet and have no need for legacy apps they've got you covered there *as well* and when you realize that you do want a real PC you can buy an x86 tablet and still use all of your old Metro Apps from your ARM tablet.
That's why I'm saying that it's a good idea to "shove a tablet into windows" since the x86 PCs will offer both a PC and a Tablet in one. Why buy a Macbook Air and an iPad when you can buy a Windows 8 slate and pop on a keyboard/trackpad case when you need to use the full windows experience?
I'm so fed up with all the limitations of my Android Tablet that I can't wait to run a full windows OS which also has a nice front end for consumption and lightweight apps.
These obvious advantages haven't amounted to a successful Windows tablet for the last 17 years, when they've been available and not sold well the whole time. What makes this new one different?
Speaking as a Niche Windows Tablet owner I can actually say with a high degree of confidence why I own a Windows Tablet and an Android Tablet.
1) Battery life. Until now Windows tablets get about 3 hours of battery life. If you are on a long flight and spend an hour or two in an airport your battery is dead mid-flight.
2) Weight. Until now Windows tablets weight a metric ton and are treated like laptops not tablets.
3) Performance. With a processor small enough to avoid #1 and #2 windows is too slow to run even basic apps. (I even had a Samsung Q1 ultra for a while but it was just too slow even for web browsing and I returned it.)
4) No touch apps. Windows is actually already pretty touch friendly. But none of its apps are. Microsoft has been pushing a Mouse and Keyboard OS and hoping people would just happen to make their applications touch/pen friendly. But it doesn't matter how usable Windows is if an application has a 10px wide button in its UI. Windows can't force interfaces to be touch friendly nor should it be. With Windows 8 though Metro is making a concerted effort to offer a venue and market for touch friendly applications for Windows. Microsoft has to show developers that they're super double dog serious about people using their windows PCs as tablets.
I think Windows 8 is coinciding with the important convergence of Affordable large capacitive touch displays, long lasting small batteries and extremely power efficient x86 processors.
I've always said that the iPhone succeeded not because of the OS but because of affordable capacitive not resistive touch displays, a drop in mobile bandwidth prices and improved batteries more than anything else. Everybody mocked Windows Phone 6 for not being finger friendly but if you tried actually using a Resistive touch screen with your finger (which was all that was available to OEMs) then you would understand immediately why fingers were not at the forefront of UI design.
Same thing is happening with Windows 8. x86 has gotten to the point now where we can already have a smoking fast Windows machine with 7.5 hours of battery life, great performance and weigh less than 3 lbs while remaining affordable. http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/09/15-inch-samsung-series-9-review-2012/
Intel has posted the specs for their slate tablets and they're 9+ hours of battery life 9mm thick and 1.5lbs in weight. That's a Asus Transformer Prime or Samsung Galaxy Tab 2.
So the answer is that for the last 17 years Windows hasn't had the hardware it needs to succeed. But people are expect less out of their apps (My old Windows XP box is 'good enough'!) and hardware is getting smaller and cheaper.
ARM will probably have the price advantage in the near term still but Intel is closing the gap fast. Windows 8 is just in the right place at the right time.
You're taking my statement out of context and making it in response to something other than the OP.
The OP said that it was a mistake for Microsoft to force its TabletOS to be "Windows" and should have simply pursued a "Windows-Tablet".
My point was that the ARM Tablet market running on a "tablet-OS" is already over-saturated and deficient in many areas that are important to customers.
I went on to say that my prediction is that the ARM branch of Windows 8 will not be very successful and will be killed in the not too distant future. The only reason Microsoft released an ARM version of Windows 8 was to offer the argument that if you like ARM and think ARM is faster you can get as good of an experience as you're getting with an iPad today (but with cross platform application support in Metro Apps) so you have no excuse. I also suspect it's an effort to bring its existing WP7 ecosystem into the Windows8 Kernel fold.
Windows 8 RT as a tablet OS is kind of the bastard step child designed for those who don't care about backwards compatibility. Windows 8 x86 is going to be just as fast and battery efficient but most likely cost a small premium in the short term.
And going forward it will run all of the same applications so if you were to buy a Windows RT Tablet you could later switch to Windows 8 without any penalty or loss of data/applications.
Corporations are going to want backwards compatibility in applications and other x86 capabilities. If corporations need the full group policies and enterprise features they can just buy a full copy of Windows 8 Enterprise.
If I was a corporate IT department I would prefer to support a single Windows version instead of trying to stay on top of both x86 and ARM updates and glitches.
The largest advantage of a Windows Tablet is that everything just works. You can run Starcraft if you feel like it. You can run not some butchered Google Docs or HTML5 version of office but the real application. You can run the real version of flash, silverlight and everything else if you really really need to. You can fail-back to a normal desktop experience if needed.
I have an Android Tablet and it is incredibly frustrating to constantly run into limitations and gaps in the software and OS. For instance the other day I just really wanted to send a link to a friend on facebook messenger. I didn't have the Facebook App installed so I figured I would just fire up Opera. Much profanity later I finally got the message out but even with awkward finger interfaces in Windows I would have been able to send it much more quickly. There is a popular web forum I read that doesn't have an app. I was trying to write a comment but their javascript WYSIWYG comment window wasn't registering my typing correctly. It's that kind of incompatibility that just-works on a PC that no tablets offer yet.
What will differentiate Windows 8 from Android and the iPad is that it's a full blown honest to God OS for when you really really need the real honest to god versions of applications. If you want to see what your idea of Windows 8 would have looked like in the market look at WP7. Microsoft knocked it out of the park according to the consensus of reviewers but it just isn't different enough to convince people to use it. If Microsoft tried to offer an OS specifically written for tablets then it would probably make 3% of the market and offer nothing of interest. Microsoft did the right thing. They are offering something very unique, the full windows experience and app compatibility but also with a mode which is friendly to touch. But they took it a step further and ensured "if you buy Photoshop for your tablet you also get photoshop for your PC and if you buy angry birds for your tablet you also get it for your PC." I assume the next step will be 'if you buy angry birds for your PC you also buy it for your tablet and phone.'
I used to use an Android phone and it's obnoxious that I have to repurchase all of my apps for my new phone OS and that I can't play them on my Xbox or PC. Microsoft and Apple are both in the near future fighting to offer the "Buy once, run anywhere" model of applications. If you had to buy separate applications for your laptop and your desktop there would be a revolt.
I don't think Microsoft ran out of time. I think Microsoft just doesn't care about WindowsRT. x86 and ARM are going to performance and battery life parity by the time Windows8 Launches. Microsoft is going to go "Look you can buy a WinRT computer with no backwards compatibility that only runs new apps or you can buy Windows 8 and get all of your old applications and the new ones. Which do you want? The hardware is the same in performance and battery life." People are going to choose x86 because once again ARM just can't stand up to the unstoppable juggernaut that is Intel's foundry and development arms. And in 12 months when Microsoft quietly kills their ARM fork they're going to say "See you asked for ARM and we ensured it ran on ARM but the market has spoken and Intel won out again."
Exception to the rule. If it works on one Xbox it almost certainly works on another Xbox. Everybody has the almost the same hardware and exactly the same drivers etc. Almost never have incompatibility or glitches. My PC Games crash far more often.
You missed the really important part where you didn't go to law school. Neither did I, but in this case I still actually understand the law. You completely misread your own quote (and the law). The important bit "fixed in any tangible medium of expression" and you highlighted it. But what that means is that it is a form of art that is * recordable*. It also means you have to record it in some fashion to be copyrighted.
If I write a song I own the copyright on that *TUNE* I don't only own a copyright on the performance. But once it's performed or recorded then I own the copyright to that tune. This is important so that you can't say "oh the Beatles stole my song idea." without a recording of it somewhere. And now a recording doesn't have to be a literal audio recording it can also be a metaphoric recording such as sheet music or some form of notation.
So if there was "magical notation" then you could say that the choreography of the trick was copyrighted without even performing it. But in the case of Penn and Teller the fact that he's performed it is also an example of your creative work being recorded.
I don't know if he'll win his lawsuit but if a dance is copyright-able then a magic trick I would think should be as well. Just not the idea behind a magic trick.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah.... but no.
Facebook is popular because (this might shock you) people like it.
As to high "friend scores" most of the people who use facebook aren't gamers. Nor does it have anything to do with social hierarchy. It's simple: one more friend is one more person whose gossip you have access to. The cost? One more person as an audience to your thoughts. You gain access to gossip in exchange for attention. You only benefit without any cost except for the time to press "OK". There are of course subtle and less obvious privacy questions but most people are completely oblivious to them so they aren't taken into account as a potential hazard.
You could hide the friend # on facebook and behavior wouldn't change in the slightest.
International security is often tied more to resource control than actual ideological differences. Who controls Water, Agriculture and Energy is HUGE.
If one country redirects a river and causes a famine in another country then you can expect conflict. Changing weather and environment can make a once prosperous region barren or destroy agricultural capability. And once a population is facing resource restrictions while a neighbor appears to be unharmed then it's easy to rouse up your population to "go get what you deserve from the greedy neighbor".
The OEMs actually have a leg to stand on here.
Every DVD player or BluRay player I've ever bought comes with "PowerDVD" or equivalent. Once PowerDVD is installed you can watch DVDs through WindowsMediaPlayer. So what I imagine the OEMs are saying is "Look we already get a DVD playback license from LG for the DVD players we buy. But now we're getting charged by you too for the codec. Cut it out of the OS and we'll just get it through the DVD player.
Or Microsoft isn't forcing Skype to do things their way and is letting the Skype team do what they've been doing well up to this point. I imagine this change has been years in the making. No reason to force them to change paths due to politics.
Good on Microsoft.
That's a reasonable position. However we can't have a reasonable debate about to what extent we should be offsetting the effects of climate change and how best to address climate change until the deniers admit there's a problem in the first place.
It's like having a raging forest fire and not just trying to debate whether it's better to let it burn out and pay out the insurance for lost homes or to throw people at the problem while one party is arguing that there isn't even a fire to put out.
I'm confused where blowing up men is more moral than blowing up women. The guy was perfectly eager to kill men.
I heartily support women's rights. But I also support everybody's rights to not be murdered. The fact that his psychopathic ambitions only aspired to kill *half* of the population doesn't seem like coercion.
If a terrorist is worried their bomb will Kill a muslim so they promise it'll only kill Jews I don't view that as coercion--the intent to kill *somebody* is all that matters.
Our local government seems amazingly incompetent.
Our government is fine. It's the voters who are incompetent. We'll vote for something 10 times and then decide 2 years later right before construction that we don't want it... then spend another 10 years trying to decide what to do only to scratch that at the last second.
Also incompetence I've found is far more prevalent when you're broke. When you're working the razor's edge of a budget and you screw up at all--it all goes to shit. When you have a surplus budget you can usually literally buy yourself out of the problem.
Ummmmm yeah... no.
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-5000/hd-5970/Pages/ati-radeon-hd-5970-overview.aspx
Do you also boycott US intellectual property such as x86 chips, Nvidia and ATI GPUs etc?
No, of course not.
I don't think it's a bad thing but whenever you dramatically change the 'rules' you're bound to encounter unintended consequences up the wazoo. We've spent the last couple thousand years vetting out the most perfect solution that works with human psychology.
Regardless of your opinion on it, everyone has to agree that it's the most dangerous form of science since it's the only avenue of science which regardless if it benefits or destroys society will by definition completely transform it in a fashion never before seen in human history.
Sapient artificial species which don't die of natural causes and can live virtually will more radically threaten our culture, society and civilization than any other change in technology.
For all of human history we've been adapting to the same species using different technology. We've never in history dealt with the fundamental nature of man changing before.
Steal a baby from 2,000 BCE and it'll probably grow up like any other human. Steal a baby from 2,500 AD and it will most likely be a new species.
The bribed security agent looks at the bag on the X-Ray. If it was a plastic explosive I imagine it would look very different from cocaine.
Well, here's the question though, would these screeners have 'ignored' an explosive for $2,400?
I mean I wouldn't lift a finger to report someone selling pot. But if I somehow knew someone was selling plastic explosives I would definitely report them. I think a TSA agent is probably more likely to turn a blink eye to cocaine than an actual threat to people's lives.
I know I could sleep easy knowing there is a kilo of coke in the world. I wouldn't be able to sleep easy if I let a terrorist kill 200 people.
Well it's maybe a little bit of a story. The idea that you want answers not webpages isn't a new one. But Google is also investing a ton of money on solving that as well.
http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/google-knowledge-graph-change-search/
If you search for something like: "The Eiffel tower height" it'll give you an exact answer now.
This is exactly how Android works. It's a good system.
Amazon doesn't require a unique username and password for movie purchases vs book purchases vs etc...
Solar. Makes sense as a source of off-grid energy but will never compete on a cost basis.
Nobody will ever need more than 64KB of memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Even the most expensive energy sources cost 2x coal. My energy bill per month is $20. If it became $40... my civilization wouldn't implode.
Hard is better than impossible.
Windows will have Metro finger friendly apps. But instead of be SOL when you can't get one to work you can always resort to awkwardly using your tablet.
They are making the same mistake but in reverse, making desktop adhere to a UI designed for mobile devices.
Except that they aren't. They left the desktop intact. If you want to run Micro-Pixel-Buttons the Power-App you'll continue running it exactly as you do today.
If you want a lightweight finger friendly app then you use Metro. Nobody is being forced to adhere to Metro on the desktop. The desktop is continuing on exactly as it was and has been.
You seem to believe that the desktop is dead. It's not. It's exactly where it's always been. Nothing is getting shoehorned into something else. You have a desktop (and god help you if you want to use your fingers but it's there anyway.) and you have apps which are finger friendly. Why can't the two co-exist?
So you're saying that Starcraft will run on Windows RT?
No. I'm saying that Windows RT is irrelevant for the same reason that iPad and Android are similarly irellevant: it can't run Starcraft*. (*Starcraft obviously being a token application. Insert your favorite application here.)
Microsoft is smart enough to know that "Another good tablet OS" isn't enough to take over the market. What is good enough is an OS which offers something that Android and iPad don't have which is a massive back catalogue and capability to fall back on real applications when there is no lightweight app equivalent.
Think about all the hacking people do to run Hulu without an App. Windows 8 x86 is a PC therefore you won't be able to discriminate against a touchscreen PC vs a desktop PC. No more hacking to get Hulu to work.
You said:
MS felt that they needed to spend development to shove the tablet model into Windows and label it as Windows 8. If MS focused on creating a new OS just for the tablet, they might have worked out all the enterprise features instead.
This is precisely my point. Windows 8 x86 on a tablet is unique in that it offers legacy applications. If Microsoft had just released Windows RT they wouldn't have this feature. And if you just want a cheap ARM tablet and have no need for legacy apps they've got you covered there *as well* and when you realize that you do want a real PC you can buy an x86 tablet and still use all of your old Metro Apps from your ARM tablet.
That's why I'm saying that it's a good idea to "shove a tablet into windows" since the x86 PCs will offer both a PC and a Tablet in one. Why buy a Macbook Air and an iPad when you can buy a Windows 8 slate and pop on a keyboard/trackpad case when you need to use the full windows experience?
I'm so fed up with all the limitations of my Android Tablet that I can't wait to run a full windows OS which also has a nice front end for consumption and lightweight apps.
These obvious advantages haven't amounted to a successful Windows tablet for the last 17 years, when they've been available and not sold well the whole time. What makes this new one different?
Speaking as a Niche Windows Tablet owner I can actually say with a high degree of confidence why I own a Windows Tablet and an Android Tablet.
1) Battery life. Until now Windows tablets get about 3 hours of battery life. If you are on a long flight and spend an hour or two in an airport your battery is dead mid-flight.
2) Weight. Until now Windows tablets weight a metric ton and are treated like laptops not tablets.
3) Performance. With a processor small enough to avoid #1 and #2 windows is too slow to run even basic apps. (I even had a Samsung Q1 ultra for a while but it was just too slow even for web browsing and I returned it.)
4) No touch apps. Windows is actually already pretty touch friendly. But none of its apps are. Microsoft has been pushing a Mouse and Keyboard OS and hoping people would just happen to make their applications touch/pen friendly. But it doesn't matter how usable Windows is if an application has a 10px wide button in its UI. Windows can't force interfaces to be touch friendly nor should it be. With Windows 8 though Metro is making a concerted effort to offer a venue and market for touch friendly applications for Windows. Microsoft has to show developers that they're super double dog serious about people using their windows PCs as tablets.
I think Windows 8 is coinciding with the important convergence of Affordable large capacitive touch displays, long lasting small batteries and extremely power efficient x86 processors.
I've always said that the iPhone succeeded not because of the OS but because of affordable capacitive not resistive touch displays, a drop in mobile bandwidth prices and improved batteries more than anything else. Everybody mocked Windows Phone 6 for not being finger friendly but if you tried actually using a Resistive touch screen with your finger (which was all that was available to OEMs) then you would understand immediately why fingers were not at the forefront of UI design.
Same thing is happening with Windows 8. x86 has gotten to the point now where we can already have a smoking fast Windows machine with 7.5 hours of battery life, great performance and weigh less than 3 lbs while remaining affordable. http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/09/15-inch-samsung-series-9-review-2012/
Intel has posted the specs for their slate tablets and they're 9+ hours of battery life 9mm thick and 1.5lbs in weight. That's a Asus Transformer Prime or Samsung Galaxy Tab 2.
So the answer is that for the last 17 years Windows hasn't had the hardware it needs to succeed. But people are expect less out of their apps (My old Windows XP box is 'good enough'!) and hardware is getting smaller and cheaper.
ARM will probably have the price advantage in the near term still but Intel is closing the gap fast. Windows 8 is just in the right place at the right time.
You're taking my statement out of context and making it in response to something other than the OP.
The OP said that it was a mistake for Microsoft to force its TabletOS to be "Windows" and should have simply pursued a "Windows-Tablet".
My point was that the ARM Tablet market running on a "tablet-OS" is already over-saturated and deficient in many areas that are important to customers.
I went on to say that my prediction is that the ARM branch of Windows 8 will not be very successful and will be killed in the not too distant future. The only reason Microsoft released an ARM version of Windows 8 was to offer the argument that if you like ARM and think ARM is faster you can get as good of an experience as you're getting with an iPad today (but with cross platform application support in Metro Apps) so you have no excuse. I also suspect it's an effort to bring its existing WP7 ecosystem into the Windows8 Kernel fold.
Windows 8 RT as a tablet OS is kind of the bastard step child designed for those who don't care about backwards compatibility. Windows 8 x86 is going to be just as fast and battery efficient but most likely cost a small premium in the short term.
And going forward it will run all of the same applications so if you were to buy a Windows RT Tablet you could later switch to Windows 8 without any penalty or loss of data/applications.
The real question is: why would you want an ARM powered Windows Tablet anyway? With Medfield http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones/1 we're already seeing x86 not only competitive but actually besting some ARM devices for performance and battery life.
Corporations are going to want backwards compatibility in applications and other x86 capabilities. If corporations need the full group policies and enterprise features they can just buy a full copy of Windows 8 Enterprise.
If I was a corporate IT department I would prefer to support a single Windows version instead of trying to stay on top of both x86 and ARM updates and glitches.
The largest advantage of a Windows Tablet is that everything just works. You can run Starcraft if you feel like it. You can run not some butchered Google Docs or HTML5 version of office but the real application. You can run the real version of flash, silverlight and everything else if you really really need to. You can fail-back to a normal desktop experience if needed.
I have an Android Tablet and it is incredibly frustrating to constantly run into limitations and gaps in the software and OS. For instance the other day I just really wanted to send a link to a friend on facebook messenger. I didn't have the Facebook App installed so I figured I would just fire up Opera. Much profanity later I finally got the message out but even with awkward finger interfaces in Windows I would have been able to send it much more quickly. There is a popular web forum I read that doesn't have an app. I was trying to write a comment but their javascript WYSIWYG comment window wasn't registering my typing correctly. It's that kind of incompatibility that just-works on a PC that no tablets offer yet.
What will differentiate Windows 8 from Android and the iPad is that it's a full blown honest to God OS for when you really really need the real honest to god versions of applications. If you want to see what your idea of Windows 8 would have looked like in the market look at WP7. Microsoft knocked it out of the park according to the consensus of reviewers but it just isn't different enough to convince people to use it. If Microsoft tried to offer an OS specifically written for tablets then it would probably make 3% of the market and offer nothing of interest. Microsoft did the right thing. They are offering something very unique, the full windows experience and app compatibility but also with a mode which is friendly to touch. But they took it a step further and ensured "if you buy Photoshop for your tablet you also get photoshop for your PC and if you buy angry birds for your tablet you also get it for your PC." I assume the next step will be 'if you buy angry birds for your PC you also buy it for your tablet and phone.'
I used to use an Android phone and it's obnoxious that I have to repurchase all of my apps for my new phone OS and that I can't play them on my Xbox or PC. Microsoft and Apple are both in the near future fighting to offer the "Buy once, run anywhere" model of applications. If you had to buy separate applications for your laptop and your desktop there would be a revolt.
I don't think Microsoft ran out of time. I think Microsoft just doesn't care about WindowsRT. x86 and ARM are going to performance and battery life parity by the time Windows8 Launches. Microsoft is going to go "Look you can buy a WinRT computer with no backwards compatibility that only runs new apps or you can buy Windows 8 and get all of your old applications and the new ones. Which do you want? The hardware is the same in performance and battery life." People are going to choose x86 because once again ARM just can't stand up to the unstoppable juggernaut that is Intel's foundry and development arms. And in 12 months when Microsoft quietly kills their ARM fork they're going to say "See you asked for ARM and we ensured it ran on ARM but the market has spoken and Intel won out again."
Exception to the rule. If it works on one Xbox it almost certainly works on another Xbox. Everybody has the almost the same hardware and exactly the same drivers etc. Almost never have incompatibility or glitches. My PC Games crash far more often.
You missed the really important part where you didn't go to law school. Neither did I, but in this case I still actually understand the law. You completely misread your own quote (and the law). The important bit "fixed in any tangible medium of expression" and you highlighted it. But what that means is that it is a form of art that is * recordable*. It also means you have to record it in some fashion to be copyrighted.
If I write a song I own the copyright on that *TUNE* I don't only own a copyright on the performance. But once it's performed or recorded then I own the copyright to that tune. This is important so that you can't say "oh the Beatles stole my song idea." without a recording of it somewhere. And now a recording doesn't have to be a literal audio recording it can also be a metaphoric recording such as sheet music or some form of notation.
So if there was "magical notation" then you could say that the choreography of the trick was copyrighted without even performing it. But in the case of Penn and Teller the fact that he's performed it is also an example of your creative work being recorded.
I don't know if he'll win his lawsuit but if a dance is copyright-able then a magic trick I would think should be as well. Just not the idea behind a magic trick.