Uhh...you can make Windows anything you want, it just ain't free. here you go, it takes less than 30 seconds to install and its "clicky clicky next next next" simple and you even get a 30 day free trial. If MSFT is stupid enough to cancel Win 7 sales for Win 8 (which I personally doubt seeing as they recently upped the EOL date of all version of Win 7 to 2020) the users can easily get any desktop they want from Win98 to KDE if that floats your boat, but more likely MSFT will let the OEMs sell Win 7 on non touch screen devices while including a Win 8 "upgrade disc" so as to count as a sale while the user chunks them just like the XP buyers chunked those Vista discs.
They lock it on ARM for the same reason Google does it with ChromeOS, because if you can just bypass the boot security on a mobile device ALL security is as easy to bypass as "Hey want a free copy of "Plants VS Zombie" well just run this!" which then installs itself into the boot and ur pwned.
What I want to know is what kind of assurance is Canonical gonna provide to the OEMs. Are they gonna guarantee they won't screw the drivers in the main branch like they did with Dell or are these OEMs gonna have to do like Dell and run their own repos (which of course leaves them behind the curve and vulnerable) which will cause their support costs to go through the roof?
Lets face it there is a REASON why OEMs ain't been using Linux, and it ain't because writing all them checks for OEM copies of Windows gives them a big happy, its because the Linux driver model sucks when it comes to updates. Nobody is gonna continue to sell Linux boxes, I don't care if they are Ubuntu or PCLOS or any other flavor, if their support costs go up due to borked drivers. Now we ALL know that Linux has some serious problems with upgrades, especially wireless and Nvidia or ATI drivers so unless these OEMs are ONLY gonna sell the LTS and ONLY warranty it for the amount of time left on the LTS then this is gonna be a problem unless Canonical steps up and makes damned sure their upgrades don't go poop on the drivers. If Canonical is gonna step up? great wonderful, glad to hear it. if they are not? Well then this will probably end up a lot like an experiment in how quick to turn off the OEMs to ever using Linux.
Exactly. With 12 foot ceilings in my apt it is a royal PITA to change bulbs and i've gone through so many of the CFLs I'm now using two instead of one in the living room fixture (even though it makes it a little over bright) just so i can buy a little more time between changings while in the easy to reach fixtures like the kitchen and bathroom I've gone back to incandescent because in these old buildings little sags and brown outs are common and the CFLs blow like mad. All their claims of "last X number of years" have at least to me proven to be horseshit in my case.
So if they don't back up their claims by a solid EASY TO CLAIM warranty then they can keep the thing, I learned my lesson with the CFLs. After all any of us who have had to jump through flaming hoops because of a warranty claim know that if it isn't easy to claim it might as well not be offered.
There won't be any flamewars because as it says in my sig I ignore ACs and most of the FOSSies here only post as ACs since they have their regular accounts modded to hell because of batshit conspiracy posts. They also have no comeback to one simple fact, ALL OSes USED to be CLIs and now they are not, why? Because GUIs are explorable and discoverable, CLI is not. Do you use CLI with an iPhone? Android? No? Why? Because its a crappy human interface that's why. But as long as those that have drank the koolaid truly believe that CLI has gonad powers then things simply won't get any better.
So if they want to be like RMS and Discos Stu and hang out in 1978 that is fine by me, just like the rest of the planet i'll just ignore them.
Thank you. I watch our current tech obsession in the USAF and all I can think of is the Luftwaffe in the 30s and 40s that would put up small numbers of the technological marvels like the 109G and the 262 and get curb stomped by swarms of Thunderbolts and Mustangs on the western side and the early MiGs and Yaks on the east. Hell the Russians even took an aircraft we couldn't get to work (the airacobra) and turned it into a truly deadly monster by stripping off the wing guns and making it a nimble fighter and tank buster with its huge cannon.
Considering how long it takes us to get even a single F-22 or F-35 in the air, not to mention the insane maintenance required to keep them going that if we were to get into another Korea we would either run out of planes or end up having to over stress 40 year old airframes simply because we can't keep the techno wonders in the air, which was also the problem the Germans had with planes like the 262. in any case we are gonna have to keep the current teen series fighters in the sky long past their retirement dates simply because we have put all our eggs in one basket and the techno turkeys are simply too expensive to buy in sufficient numbers to replace even what we have now, much less build up our flying forces.
Hell at this point I'm seriously starting to wonder if we shouldn't just buy the MiGs and the SUs as they can at least be cranked out in large numbers and are good aircraft and I'm sure Russia would be happy to sell if we bring cash.
But those showed up after the great crash which killed many corps and left excess memory modules in the market. In 1981 the ONLY way one could add RAM into a personal computer was to break out the solder and then only on certain units such as the Apple ][ because the price of RAM was simply so damned high nobody bothered to place slots. IIRC user changeable RAM didn't show up until the mid 80s as side port expansion packs (by companies such as Commodore as you named) and didn't take their current form of motherboard slots until 1990 when the price of RAM had dropped enough it was actually feasible for the average user to upgrade a computer rather than replace it outright.
That doesn't change the overall sentiment though, that it isn't the developing the tech that becomes the hurdle, its the getting it at a low enough price point to be competitive that's the problem. After all both core and bubble memory had the same advantage as SSDs in that it didn't lose memory on power loss but they simply weren't able to ramp up the sizes at a competitive price point compared to early RAM such as EDO which exploded in size while lowering cost. A good example of this is how SSDs still can't get anywhere near HDD storage space without costing more than a new car because they simply can't crank out the chips at a low enough price point yet to beat spinning platters. Will they pull it off, or will it be a niche? Who knows, only time will tell. I know I've seen demos of holodiscs but since the reader costs nearly $1000 and the discs cost $60 for 200Gb they simply aren't competitive with current technology.
Did you go to Windows answers and submit a minidump? While I would assume that if you are running 2K8 you would have a support contract and thus be able to open a ticket even if you do not have a contract you can go here and tell them your problem and after submitting a minidump they will often escalate it within MSFT and get you a patch if its a Windows problem. I had this done myself when I found a weird little bug with WMP 12 where it would refuse to downconvert a WMA file from one bitrate to a lower bitrate. Once it was established that several other had replicated the problem it ended up getting a patch issued and was rolled into SP1 for Windows 7.
Anyway considering how many tens of thousands of third party drivers Windows has to interact with having all drivers work perfectly is pretty much impossible but these are a great bunch of guys that have the ear of the MSFT dev teams and can get things escalated pretty quickly if they can reproduce the error or don't already have a hotfix for the issue.
As for the restart I have found logs in customers PCs of restarts for video and audio (in those cases they were running badly out of date drivers) but I can't recall it happening with a network driver. Now that may be that I've never come across one with a buggy network drivers, as most of my customers often use the Windows default drivers, or it may mean that subsystem is simply too low a level for the silent restart to function. in any case register at the above site and you will often get a reply in a couple of hours max which for a free service is pretty damned good IMHO.
Actually the description is a lot larger and more complex than the actual action, which is
1.- Go to Ninite check box for revo and run it, while open go ahead and do same with ATI driver 2.-Pick.NET from list and uninstall it, 3.-Download latest.NET and run it. 4.-Download latest AMD driver and run it
And unlike Linux this is 100% GUI, no having to tweak CLI gobbledygook which is usually the case. Hell you can even send screen caps and your average grandma could do this one since revo is left at default settings. This is why I have said for years if Linux wishes to go anywhere CLI HAS TO BE BANNED because otherwise lazy devs use it as a crutch.
Whether Linux devs wish to accept it or not there is one little bit of reality that simply can't be argued with and that is this: GUIs are explorable and discoverable, CLIs are not. if you don't already know the proper syntax conventions for that CLI then it might as well be in Chinese for all the good it is gonna do you, whereas with help files and tooltips even someone who has never used a particular GUI can find their way around enough to perform the task needed.
Well then the question should be "Has economic sanctions ever brought about the change desired by the one doing the sanctioning" and as far as i know it has not. If someone has evidence I don't know about of sanctions ever bringing about the desired change without armed intervention please post it, otherwise it smells like a "We are doing SOMETHING...even if its completely pointless' kinda exercise.
Not to mention on some services (AT&T Y U Suck So Hard?) the amount of delay can border on comedy. I have sent a txt, got no response, actually drove to the person and 45 minutes into a conversation THEN have the txt show up asking if they were there...yeah kinda don't want to trust my life and the lives of my family on something slower to respond than carrier pigeon.
Not to mention if one wanted to give an example of MSFT being innovative it would NOT be DOS, but instead would be hiring Dave Cutler and giving him pretty much free rein on WinNT. The fact that the majority of desktops are still running a kernel first started so long ago just shows how well Dave Cutler was at design, and between that and DirectX (which before DirectX games were a MAJOR PITA to get running on PCs, often having to have serious tweaking done just to get sound and video working right) I would say those are the two major contributions MSFT made to the tech world.
Now before anyone screams or waves their Google or Apple fanboi flags i will now point out what Google and Apple have brought which I haven't seen pointed out in this thread...What Google gave us that was innovative was NOT search but to show that one could build a platform on neither software NOR hardware but on monetizing eyeballs. Before Google came around everything was based pretty much around the MSFT model of software or the Apple model of hardware and "free" was often looked upon as a scam, what Google did was show one could create a product AND give it away for free and still make money, which was pretty damned innovative in my book.
Finally what Apple did under Jobs was to actually look at things from a consumer perspective instead of an engineers. Look at what MP3 players were like before iPod, they were these big bulky blocks that were a PITA to navigate and had submenus up the ass. Even someone like me who has stuck with his Sandisk (because it does what i need it to and is built like a tank) can see the value in the ease of use of the iPod compared to the 5 menus and at least 1 submenu for each menu on my MP3 player. same thing with the iPhone, where most were using some God awful desktop metaphor that frankly was shit to control and a PITA whereas the iPhone was a model of simplistic yet functional design.
So as one can see all three companies have given us innovation which to me makes it all the more sad that it seems inevitable for a megacorp to turn into a douchebag at some point in their life, I don't know if its the threat of other companies that do it, the drive to continually get ever higher share or what, but it seems to me that all these megacorps start decent enough but then just get nastier as they go along. maybe its the size thing, hell if I know.
I shouldn't answer an AC but since I actually know the answer to that one WTF I'll go ahead. the reason a certain ATI driver shits itself on Windows is a royally fucked.NET update put out by MSFT. It doesn't seem to affect other software but the ATI driver expects.NET to behave a certain way and when that update is applied it don't so ur fucked.
The way to fix this is with Revo Uninstaller since MSFT thinks.NET is so damned wonderful they never bothered coming up with a way to cleanly uninstall the bitch. remove ALL patches related to.NET followed by.NET itself and then install the latest version ONLY, don't take some old version and patch up to current. Finally remove and re-install the ATI driver and it will behave itself. Even better once you have removed.NET install the latest AMD driver (unless you are stuck with some legacy cards, then follow the first suggestion) which thankfully they removed all the.NET dependencies and went with Visual C++ instead.
But this is a classic example of what happens when a company bases a core component of one of their major pieces of software on something they have ZERO control over. I only hope the moron that decided to base the drivers on.NET of all things got himself a pink slip when they were bought by AMD because that was a seriously dumbass move.
But as we saw everywhere from WWII to Gulf War it ain't the bird, its the man. There is a good reason that the only time the USA pilots score went down was during the political bullshit of Vietnam (give them missiles that work best at long range and then refuse to let them engage until visually IDed, yeah what could go wrong?) and that is because our pilots are insanely well trained and the other guys? Not so much. The only ones so far that could go head to head with us was the Russians who likewise gave an insane amount of training to their pilots.
The problem we are making is funnily enough the exact same one the Germans made in WWII, that is quality over quantity. As McCain said we have NEVER allowed the F22 in combat, why? Too damned expensive to risk it. doesn't make for a good selling point, it's like Nigel's guitar "Don't look at it! Well don't point either!" while the Russians are cranking out MiGs for less than $60 mil flyaway and the SU27 was even cheaper last i checked, something like 35 mil.
IMHO the MUCH better choice if you want stealth is the F15 Stealth Eagle which is a battle tested platform and you can buy 3 for the cost of 1 F22 or F35. We should cancel the lame duck F35 and buy improved F-18s, F16s, and F15s in both regular and stealth packages and concentrate on giving our boys plenty of time in the sims and in the air instead of trillion dollar turkeys. Remember what Stalin said "quantity is a quality all its own" and considering they built 60,000+ T34s to Germany building less than 2000 Tiger Is I'd say the man had a point. If you want even more stealth than the Eagle build a fricking drone, with the new engines that would be a better goal anyway since they can pull more Gs than a pilot can survive.
BTW that reminds me...WTF are we doing still making planes you sit down in? We have known since WWII that if you put the pilot flat on their belly they can take 3 to 5 times the G forces as someone in a sitting position, so why are we building superplanes where you sit down? all that means is we'll have to put limits on their performance much lower than the plane can actually take to keep from killing the pilot, so why do it?
Why? Because they have so many other candidates lining up for the job? as someone who uses yahoo Services frankly I don't care if he said his mama was a snowblower on his resume as long as he does his job and keeps Yahoo afloat. After the privacy change I don't trust Google for anything more than a spamdump (and for public forums such as this) and Hotmail I just can't stand, so as long as he keeps Yahoo strong enough I can keep my Yahoo mail frankly i don't give a shit if his resume says he can fart diamonds. Hell he can't be any worse than some of their previous CEOs.
And THAT friend was a decade after I was speaking of! In 1981 a Mb of RAM was on the order of $30,000 and that is IF you could afford to buy a machine that would actually hold it. This is why most computers at the time had RAM soldered to the board, because it simply would have cost too much to upgrade the RAM so the OEMs like Commodore and Apple never bothered with an upgrade path.
So the problem isn't developing the tech, its developing the tech at an affordable price.
First of all CentOS does NOT offer 10 year support cycles, nor do they backport squat. CentOS is run by a small company that USED to pay for RHEL licenses for their devices and then decided it was cheaper to "leech" so you are only gonna get what they are using. Even RHEL doesn't offer support beyond 5 years unless you have a full service contract which as I said compare $4000 to $89 and its no contest. Second I guess you missed it but MSFT announced that ALL VERSIONS WILL GET TEN YEARS which was the mandatory length for business version but they have extended that to ALL versions from Start to Ultimate. That means Vista gets until 2017 minimum, win 7 2020, Win 8 2022.
And as i told you feel free to try the experiment yourself, take the version from 3 years ago (I have done this with ubuntu/Mint, PCLOS, Fedora (because I had a nut swear that Fedora didn't do that) PCLOS, OpenSUSE, so pick your poison) and slap it on your average laptop or desktop and upgrade it to current. The last time I did this was when Ubuntu 11 came out as I can't afford to blow tons of bandwidth every 6 months but I honestly don't see you pulling it off with a new release as one still has to upgrade to current. Now realize that in those 3 years 1.-Both major DEs have been tossed aside for new DEs so that entire subsystem is gonna end up a mess, and 2.-Pulseaudio was introduced which frankly is STILL a buggy POS IMNSHO.
So I'm sorry friend it just doesn't work. Not a single one of the above distros when upgraded to current using the GUI (which is the ONLY way a consumer level user will have the skill upgrade) will have SOMETHING broken. and all the hardware was the same stuff you see on a good 90% of consumer hardware, AMD,Nvidia, and Intel chipsets, realtek and Sigma sound, Realtek and SiS networking, Aetheros, Broadcom, or Intel wireless, pretty bog standard stuff.
I've done the math and it just don't work any way you slice it. the ONLY way one can take a distro from 3 years ago and upgrade to current is to do clean installs and remember my time is $35 an hour and the customers will NOT have the skills nor the inclination to accomplish that feat so a single 6 month upgrade would again cost MORE than Win Home. Feel free to perform the test yourself, but I can't afford to blow another 7+Gb worth of data when I have caps just to show you what I already know, and that is the current upgrade mechanism takes a giant shit all over drivers. Again with Windows drivers work for the life of the OS which is 10 years. you can't even take a driver from 5 years ago and get it to work with the newest kernel without serious fiddling or a recompile which again out of the skills range of normal users.
But this is why Walmart gave up on selling low cost Linux machines, because they saw the same thing that I saw, the upgrades shat on drivers so they had to spend more in support than they saved on a copy of Starter or Home. God what I wouldn't give to find a legit source for Starter because when WinXP is EOLed I bet I'll have a lot of boxes go to the dump (If I don't break down and do what some of the other shops are doing and just sell them with Win 7 Pirate) because no matter how you work the math Linux just doesn't work in the home sector. Hell the user below you brings up Dell Ubuntu boxes without even knowing Dell has to run their own repo (which is horribly out of date and falling farther behind, so a Dell Ubuntu box is a security risk) just to keep the drivers working. ask Dell how much they make per unit, I did, they won't tell you. I would surmise that is because the cost of running their own repo has them LOSING money on each sale I'm sorry friend but I simply can't afford to run my own repo, I would be bankrupt within the year. No sale.
Finally if you want to know the scope then do as I said, download the version from 3 years ago (whatever was current then) and upgrade to current. You yourself ran into it with wireless and I can tell you that is the norm NOT the exception. i have tried regular to LTS, LTS to regular, and L
Did you miss the "Gamer customers" part? One bought top o' the line OCZ and the other Intel. Both drives were replaced but that didn't help the data none. Nice to see there are still plenty of loonies that treat tech like ballclubs and automatically assume "Ur doin it wrong" because God Forbid their God may be false. All Hail The One True God!
It can't, not anymore. Its damned near impossible to BSOD a Windows 7 system with a bad driver, it will just silently kill and restart the driver (as a system should) and make a little note in Action Center about it. And while your experience may vary I had a HELL of a lot bigger time with crashing X Server than I ever did with BSODs. it especially didn't seem to like having a video playing while surfing to pages that may have an embedded video or surfing pages with possible embedded video while playing tunes in the background. Hell Firefox won't allow hardware acceleration in Linux because X Drivers are buggy and they don't want to be blamed for X crashes.
As for TFA it has nothing to do with Android and everything to do with shitty governments wanting a pie in the sky. A $45 tablet and they want milspec? yeah and I want my Alyson Hannigan sexbot for $50 and a pack of Lucky Strikes and now we're both disappointed, while certain things ARE inflated one thing that isn't is how damned expensive it is to make electronics that can take milspec abuse. The reason a toughbook is so damned expensive is because of the amount of abuse it can take and you just can't get the materials to absorb that much punishment for $50, just not gonna happen. And they want double battery life and double CPU for the same price? Again the reason the price was so low was precisely BECAUSE it was using chips not in high demand such as its ARM 11 366MHz CPU. You want something that is going in more high dollar cell phones you have to pay a more high dollar price, that's reality. What it sounds like they are wanting is a milspec iPad for $50 and are using that as an excuse to give one of their buddies the contract who will of course probably come out with something worse than what this guy is offering so they can pocket more profit after bribing officials.
Answer? Make it in China and don't tell them about any deals! From the looks of it it was the Indian government with its head up its ass, it kept changing the specs with finally asking for specs similar to USA milspec (which as anybody knows costs thousands per unit because of how much abuse they can take. They ARE built for the battlefield after all) while still expecting them to keep the price low enough you could practically give them away...ohh AND they wanted double the battery AND a doubling of speed on the CPU! Hell why not ask for a pony to bring the stars of the last porn convention to blow you while you are at it?
The moral of this story is FUCK THE GOVERNMENTS and instead simply make as good a product as you can to fit a price point. if this guy can crank out sub $80 pads that are actually pleasant to use? Then he WILL find a market for them. Hell if it'll play SD video at whatever resolution the screen is I'll take 4 please. But by dealing with governments unless you are a "good old boy" that knows their games and whom to slip the envelope of money to you aren't gonna win friend, that is just the way it is.
Actually I'm personally not so sure about SSDs when you consider they seem to work on the hot/crazy scale. Now sure they may figure out and fix the problems or they could just as easily have a real nasty bug show up like the infamous Jaz Drive "Click Of Death" and scare off the public. I know that after I had a couple of my gamer customers buy really nice SSDs and both failed in less than a year and a half I personally will be staying away from SSDs for at least another year. Sure hard drives fail but they nearly always give a warning first, these SSDs? Zip, just one day they flipped the switch and nothing, not even the BIOS/EFI would recognize them.
So if they can give me the speed of SSDs or better and the long life of HDDs? All for it, bring it on. But I think I'll let some other sucker test them first, thanks.
Yeah I wouldn't be ready to hold my breath yet. anybody remember how many times we've been told 200Gb+ Holodiscs would be as cheap as DVDs and just as common? Still don't see any Holodiscs at the Walmart.
The big problem all these new tech seem to run into isn't actually getting these things to work, its getting it to work at a price that would be affordable. After all who would want this stuff if it ends up costing as much as a Mb of RAM cost in 1981?
The installs aren't the problem friend, in fact I'd be the first to say that many of the more modern distros have gotten nearly as simple as Windows (which Win 7 asks a grand total of 4 questions, the hardest of which is what password you would like) when it comes to ease of setup.
Nope the problem is the driver model is shit and this causes an insane number of breakages. Take Mint for example, when many were telling me "Mint does it right!" I downloaded the version from a couple of revs back and let it upgrade to current via GUI, as one would have to do if they were a normal user given a desktop, correct? Well what happened? It broke HORRIBLY, the Wifi was toast and no longer able to hook up to the network, the video was having weird artifacts and the audio would often be nothing but a clicking noise and static after a reboot.
So I would have to 1.-Know which things are broken , 2.-How to describe them to someone in the forums, 3.-Be given a bunch a CLI gobbledygook that WILL often have to be tweaked because I've found the driver model is picky as hell, no simply downloading a Mint driver but instead has to be for the EXACT make/model/firmware with ZERO variation allowed,4.-Have the skills to understand WHY the CLI mess doesn't work AND the skills to fix the problems with the correct syntax and finally, 5.-Be able to get the whole mess imported using nothing but a CLI, where even the slightest mistype or even miss copying a bracket can hose the system.
So I'm sorry friend but while the OOTB experience has gotten frankly first rate until a free distro offers a 10 year update cycle like Windows does or figures out how to fix the driver subsystem being a mess it really is NO comparison. Compare this to Windows, where thanks to the combination of a ton of drivers on the DVD plus WU having even more drivers if the PC is less than 4 years old (which is what most users would be messing with, most consumers don't refurb PCs) it will all "Just work" and continue to work until the OS is EOL which in the case of Win 7 is 2020, and if you plug in a new device Windows will autoinstall the driver if it has one or pop up a little "Would you like me to find drivers for this?" if it don't which will then call WU when you click yes and its all taken care of FOR the user. Now I have searched and the ONLY OS in Linux land with anywhere close to a 10 year length of support is RHEL under support contracts, which is $400 a year or $4000 if one were to keep the PC the entire 10 years.
believe me friend, as a retailer I HAVE run the numbers, tried ALL the flavors, because frankly the cost of Win 7 OEM cuts into my profits but sadly no matter which version you name I can drag a couple of boxes out at the shop and if I simulate just 3 years of ownership (by taking the version from 3 years ago and upgrading to current) it WILL break, leaving my customers pissed off and ruining my rep. I'm sorry but no matter how you slice it the numbers just don't work. Wish it weren't so, but at $35 an hour a single borked driver costs me more than an $89 copy of Windows Home and I can tell you there is NO way in hell the average user would have the skillset to accomplish this on their own. If you have a spare laptop or HDD for your desktop feel free to try the experiment yourself, you'll find its sadly all too true, the upgrade mechanism is just horribly borked in Linux no matter which distro you pick, even bog standard hardware will often get shat upon, sorry.
Funny that when I clicked the link it had already fallen to #9, damn that was fast!
The problem with a "Windows phone' is that the word "Windows" has a VERY specific meaning in the eyes of the vast majority and that is the ability to run Windows programs, aka x86 Windows software. Since neither is the phone capable of running X86 windows software nor does the public want to run X86 Windows programs on a teeny cell phone screen naturally its gonna bomb.
The smartest thing MSFT can do is when Win 8 bombs (which from the amount of sheer hatred its getting is probably a certainty on non touch screen devices which of course is MSFT's and the OEM's biggest sellers) is to spin off the mobile division so that MSFT and Windows names simply aren't attached to it as the name has too much history and baggage to deal with. if it were me I'd call it "Metro OS" and work to make it easy to sync up with the X360 and PC but other than that and porting some of the big names like MS Office I would let it sink or swim on its own and like in the old days of having the consumer and business desktops be two totally different things so too would mobile and X86 be two separate paths.
Lets face it the name Windows bring nothing to the table but baggage when it comes to smartphones and ARM based tablets. I saw this first hand last Xmas when a local retailer tried to sell "Windows tablets" based on WinCE and got to take a bath on the returns. When people see something that looks like windows dammit they are gonna expect it to run like Windows and the average user doesn't know ARM from a P4, all they go by is appearance and how big the numbers next to the device are. you see this in X86 with how much AMD is able to sell out Bulldozer chips despite really shitty reviews because people see 8 cores and automatically assume that is better than 4 Intel ones since 8 is better than 4.
In the end as long as it has the name Windows on it its just not gonna compete with Android or iPhone. Its like when I was helping my dad pick out a cell phone (he chose an HTC Android phone) and when we came to the Windows phones the first words out of his mouth were "Why would I want Quickbooks on my phone?" because that is what Windows is for my dad, MSN Messenger and QB. It frankly wouldn't matter if MSFT put out the best phone on the planet (although if the rumors are true and WinPhone 7 won't get Win 8 I'd say its doing pretty poorly in that regard) because there is just too much baggage with the brand.
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You are just learning what some of us have no for years friend...every OS sucks!
Uhh...you can make Windows anything you want, it just ain't free. here you go, it takes less than 30 seconds to install and its "clicky clicky next next next" simple and you even get a 30 day free trial. If MSFT is stupid enough to cancel Win 7 sales for Win 8 (which I personally doubt seeing as they recently upped the EOL date of all version of Win 7 to 2020) the users can easily get any desktop they want from Win98 to KDE if that floats your boat, but more likely MSFT will let the OEMs sell Win 7 on non touch screen devices while including a Win 8 "upgrade disc" so as to count as a sale while the user chunks them just like the XP buyers chunked those Vista discs.
You paid $700 for a laptop that was 1366x768? i realize these guys need to make some profit but...damn! That's highway robbery!
They lock it on ARM for the same reason Google does it with ChromeOS, because if you can just bypass the boot security on a mobile device ALL security is as easy to bypass as "Hey want a free copy of "Plants VS Zombie" well just run this!" which then installs itself into the boot and ur pwned.
What I want to know is what kind of assurance is Canonical gonna provide to the OEMs. Are they gonna guarantee they won't screw the drivers in the main branch like they did with Dell or are these OEMs gonna have to do like Dell and run their own repos (which of course leaves them behind the curve and vulnerable) which will cause their support costs to go through the roof?
Lets face it there is a REASON why OEMs ain't been using Linux, and it ain't because writing all them checks for OEM copies of Windows gives them a big happy, its because the Linux driver model sucks when it comes to updates. Nobody is gonna continue to sell Linux boxes, I don't care if they are Ubuntu or PCLOS or any other flavor, if their support costs go up due to borked drivers. Now we ALL know that Linux has some serious problems with upgrades, especially wireless and Nvidia or ATI drivers so unless these OEMs are ONLY gonna sell the LTS and ONLY warranty it for the amount of time left on the LTS then this is gonna be a problem unless Canonical steps up and makes damned sure their upgrades don't go poop on the drivers. If Canonical is gonna step up? great wonderful, glad to hear it. if they are not? Well then this will probably end up a lot like an experiment in how quick to turn off the OEMs to ever using Linux.
Exactly. With 12 foot ceilings in my apt it is a royal PITA to change bulbs and i've gone through so many of the CFLs I'm now using two instead of one in the living room fixture (even though it makes it a little over bright) just so i can buy a little more time between changings while in the easy to reach fixtures like the kitchen and bathroom I've gone back to incandescent because in these old buildings little sags and brown outs are common and the CFLs blow like mad. All their claims of "last X number of years" have at least to me proven to be horseshit in my case.
So if they don't back up their claims by a solid EASY TO CLAIM warranty then they can keep the thing, I learned my lesson with the CFLs. After all any of us who have had to jump through flaming hoops because of a warranty claim know that if it isn't easy to claim it might as well not be offered.
There won't be any flamewars because as it says in my sig I ignore ACs and most of the FOSSies here only post as ACs since they have their regular accounts modded to hell because of batshit conspiracy posts. They also have no comeback to one simple fact, ALL OSes USED to be CLIs and now they are not, why? Because GUIs are explorable and discoverable, CLI is not. Do you use CLI with an iPhone? Android? No? Why? Because its a crappy human interface that's why. But as long as those that have drank the koolaid truly believe that CLI has gonad powers then things simply won't get any better.
So if they want to be like RMS and Discos Stu and hang out in 1978 that is fine by me, just like the rest of the planet i'll just ignore them.
Thank you. I watch our current tech obsession in the USAF and all I can think of is the Luftwaffe in the 30s and 40s that would put up small numbers of the technological marvels like the 109G and the 262 and get curb stomped by swarms of Thunderbolts and Mustangs on the western side and the early MiGs and Yaks on the east. Hell the Russians even took an aircraft we couldn't get to work (the airacobra) and turned it into a truly deadly monster by stripping off the wing guns and making it a nimble fighter and tank buster with its huge cannon.
Considering how long it takes us to get even a single F-22 or F-35 in the air, not to mention the insane maintenance required to keep them going that if we were to get into another Korea we would either run out of planes or end up having to over stress 40 year old airframes simply because we can't keep the techno wonders in the air, which was also the problem the Germans had with planes like the 262. in any case we are gonna have to keep the current teen series fighters in the sky long past their retirement dates simply because we have put all our eggs in one basket and the techno turkeys are simply too expensive to buy in sufficient numbers to replace even what we have now, much less build up our flying forces.
Hell at this point I'm seriously starting to wonder if we shouldn't just buy the MiGs and the SUs as they can at least be cranked out in large numbers and are good aircraft and I'm sure Russia would be happy to sell if we bring cash.
But those showed up after the great crash which killed many corps and left excess memory modules in the market. In 1981 the ONLY way one could add RAM into a personal computer was to break out the solder and then only on certain units such as the Apple ][ because the price of RAM was simply so damned high nobody bothered to place slots. IIRC user changeable RAM didn't show up until the mid 80s as side port expansion packs (by companies such as Commodore as you named) and didn't take their current form of motherboard slots until 1990 when the price of RAM had dropped enough it was actually feasible for the average user to upgrade a computer rather than replace it outright.
That doesn't change the overall sentiment though, that it isn't the developing the tech that becomes the hurdle, its the getting it at a low enough price point to be competitive that's the problem. After all both core and bubble memory had the same advantage as SSDs in that it didn't lose memory on power loss but they simply weren't able to ramp up the sizes at a competitive price point compared to early RAM such as EDO which exploded in size while lowering cost. A good example of this is how SSDs still can't get anywhere near HDD storage space without costing more than a new car because they simply can't crank out the chips at a low enough price point yet to beat spinning platters. Will they pull it off, or will it be a niche? Who knows, only time will tell. I know I've seen demos of holodiscs but since the reader costs nearly $1000 and the discs cost $60 for 200Gb they simply aren't competitive with current technology.
Did you go to Windows answers and submit a minidump? While I would assume that if you are running 2K8 you would have a support contract and thus be able to open a ticket even if you do not have a contract you can go here and tell them your problem and after submitting a minidump they will often escalate it within MSFT and get you a patch if its a Windows problem. I had this done myself when I found a weird little bug with WMP 12 where it would refuse to downconvert a WMA file from one bitrate to a lower bitrate. Once it was established that several other had replicated the problem it ended up getting a patch issued and was rolled into SP1 for Windows 7.
Anyway considering how many tens of thousands of third party drivers Windows has to interact with having all drivers work perfectly is pretty much impossible but these are a great bunch of guys that have the ear of the MSFT dev teams and can get things escalated pretty quickly if they can reproduce the error or don't already have a hotfix for the issue.
As for the restart I have found logs in customers PCs of restarts for video and audio (in those cases they were running badly out of date drivers) but I can't recall it happening with a network driver. Now that may be that I've never come across one with a buggy network drivers, as most of my customers often use the Windows default drivers, or it may mean that subsystem is simply too low a level for the silent restart to function. in any case register at the above site and you will often get a reply in a couple of hours max which for a free service is pretty damned good IMHO.
Actually the description is a lot larger and more complex than the actual action, which is
1.- Go to Ninite check box for revo and run it, while open go ahead and do same with ATI driver 2.-Pick .NET from list and uninstall it, 3.-Download latest .NET and run it. 4.-Download latest AMD driver and run it
And unlike Linux this is 100% GUI, no having to tweak CLI gobbledygook which is usually the case. Hell you can even send screen caps and your average grandma could do this one since revo is left at default settings. This is why I have said for years if Linux wishes to go anywhere CLI HAS TO BE BANNED because otherwise lazy devs use it as a crutch.
Whether Linux devs wish to accept it or not there is one little bit of reality that simply can't be argued with and that is this: GUIs are explorable and discoverable, CLIs are not. if you don't already know the proper syntax conventions for that CLI then it might as well be in Chinese for all the good it is gonna do you, whereas with help files and tooltips even someone who has never used a particular GUI can find their way around enough to perform the task needed.
Well then the question should be "Has economic sanctions ever brought about the change desired by the one doing the sanctioning" and as far as i know it has not. If someone has evidence I don't know about of sanctions ever bringing about the desired change without armed intervention please post it, otherwise it smells like a "We are doing SOMETHING...even if its completely pointless' kinda exercise.
Not to mention on some services (AT&T Y U Suck So Hard?) the amount of delay can border on comedy. I have sent a txt, got no response, actually drove to the person and 45 minutes into a conversation THEN have the txt show up asking if they were there...yeah kinda don't want to trust my life and the lives of my family on something slower to respond than carrier pigeon.
Not to mention if one wanted to give an example of MSFT being innovative it would NOT be DOS, but instead would be hiring Dave Cutler and giving him pretty much free rein on WinNT. The fact that the majority of desktops are still running a kernel first started so long ago just shows how well Dave Cutler was at design, and between that and DirectX (which before DirectX games were a MAJOR PITA to get running on PCs, often having to have serious tweaking done just to get sound and video working right) I would say those are the two major contributions MSFT made to the tech world.
Now before anyone screams or waves their Google or Apple fanboi flags i will now point out what Google and Apple have brought which I haven't seen pointed out in this thread...What Google gave us that was innovative was NOT search but to show that one could build a platform on neither software NOR hardware but on monetizing eyeballs. Before Google came around everything was based pretty much around the MSFT model of software or the Apple model of hardware and "free" was often looked upon as a scam, what Google did was show one could create a product AND give it away for free and still make money, which was pretty damned innovative in my book.
Finally what Apple did under Jobs was to actually look at things from a consumer perspective instead of an engineers. Look at what MP3 players were like before iPod, they were these big bulky blocks that were a PITA to navigate and had submenus up the ass. Even someone like me who has stuck with his Sandisk (because it does what i need it to and is built like a tank) can see the value in the ease of use of the iPod compared to the 5 menus and at least 1 submenu for each menu on my MP3 player. same thing with the iPhone, where most were using some God awful desktop metaphor that frankly was shit to control and a PITA whereas the iPhone was a model of simplistic yet functional design.
So as one can see all three companies have given us innovation which to me makes it all the more sad that it seems inevitable for a megacorp to turn into a douchebag at some point in their life, I don't know if its the threat of other companies that do it, the drive to continually get ever higher share or what, but it seems to me that all these megacorps start decent enough but then just get nastier as they go along. maybe its the size thing, hell if I know.
I shouldn't answer an AC but since I actually know the answer to that one WTF I'll go ahead. the reason a certain ATI driver shits itself on Windows is a royally fucked .NET update put out by MSFT. It doesn't seem to affect other software but the ATI driver expects .NET to behave a certain way and when that update is applied it don't so ur fucked.
The way to fix this is with Revo Uninstaller since MSFT thinks .NET is so damned wonderful they never bothered coming up with a way to cleanly uninstall the bitch. remove ALL patches related to .NET followed by .NET itself and then install the latest version ONLY, don't take some old version and patch up to current. Finally remove and re-install the ATI driver and it will behave itself. Even better once you have removed .NET install the latest AMD driver (unless you are stuck with some legacy cards, then follow the first suggestion) which thankfully they removed all the .NET dependencies and went with Visual C++ instead.
But this is a classic example of what happens when a company bases a core component of one of their major pieces of software on something they have ZERO control over. I only hope the moron that decided to base the drivers on .NET of all things got himself a pink slip when they were bought by AMD because that was a seriously dumbass move.
But as we saw everywhere from WWII to Gulf War it ain't the bird, its the man. There is a good reason that the only time the USA pilots score went down was during the political bullshit of Vietnam (give them missiles that work best at long range and then refuse to let them engage until visually IDed, yeah what could go wrong?) and that is because our pilots are insanely well trained and the other guys? Not so much. The only ones so far that could go head to head with us was the Russians who likewise gave an insane amount of training to their pilots.
The problem we are making is funnily enough the exact same one the Germans made in WWII, that is quality over quantity. As McCain said we have NEVER allowed the F22 in combat, why? Too damned expensive to risk it. doesn't make for a good selling point, it's like Nigel's guitar "Don't look at it! Well don't point either!" while the Russians are cranking out MiGs for less than $60 mil flyaway and the SU27 was even cheaper last i checked, something like 35 mil.
IMHO the MUCH better choice if you want stealth is the F15 Stealth Eagle which is a battle tested platform and you can buy 3 for the cost of 1 F22 or F35. We should cancel the lame duck F35 and buy improved F-18s, F16s, and F15s in both regular and stealth packages and concentrate on giving our boys plenty of time in the sims and in the air instead of trillion dollar turkeys. Remember what Stalin said "quantity is a quality all its own" and considering they built 60,000+ T34s to Germany building less than 2000 Tiger Is I'd say the man had a point. If you want even more stealth than the Eagle build a fricking drone, with the new engines that would be a better goal anyway since they can pull more Gs than a pilot can survive.
BTW that reminds me...WTF are we doing still making planes you sit down in? We have known since WWII that if you put the pilot flat on their belly they can take 3 to 5 times the G forces as someone in a sitting position, so why are we building superplanes where you sit down? all that means is we'll have to put limits on their performance much lower than the plane can actually take to keep from killing the pilot, so why do it?
Why? Because they have so many other candidates lining up for the job? as someone who uses yahoo Services frankly I don't care if he said his mama was a snowblower on his resume as long as he does his job and keeps Yahoo afloat. After the privacy change I don't trust Google for anything more than a spamdump (and for public forums such as this) and Hotmail I just can't stand, so as long as he keeps Yahoo strong enough I can keep my Yahoo mail frankly i don't give a shit if his resume says he can fart diamonds. Hell he can't be any worse than some of their previous CEOs.
And THAT friend was a decade after I was speaking of! In 1981 a Mb of RAM was on the order of $30,000 and that is IF you could afford to buy a machine that would actually hold it. This is why most computers at the time had RAM soldered to the board, because it simply would have cost too much to upgrade the RAM so the OEMs like Commodore and Apple never bothered with an upgrade path.
So the problem isn't developing the tech, its developing the tech at an affordable price.
First of all CentOS does NOT offer 10 year support cycles, nor do they backport squat. CentOS is run by a small company that USED to pay for RHEL licenses for their devices and then decided it was cheaper to "leech" so you are only gonna get what they are using. Even RHEL doesn't offer support beyond 5 years unless you have a full service contract which as I said compare $4000 to $89 and its no contest. Second I guess you missed it but MSFT announced that ALL VERSIONS WILL GET TEN YEARS which was the mandatory length for business version but they have extended that to ALL versions from Start to Ultimate. That means Vista gets until 2017 minimum, win 7 2020, Win 8 2022.
And as i told you feel free to try the experiment yourself, take the version from 3 years ago (I have done this with ubuntu/Mint, PCLOS, Fedora (because I had a nut swear that Fedora didn't do that) PCLOS, OpenSUSE, so pick your poison) and slap it on your average laptop or desktop and upgrade it to current. The last time I did this was when Ubuntu 11 came out as I can't afford to blow tons of bandwidth every 6 months but I honestly don't see you pulling it off with a new release as one still has to upgrade to current. Now realize that in those 3 years 1.-Both major DEs have been tossed aside for new DEs so that entire subsystem is gonna end up a mess, and 2.-Pulseaudio was introduced which frankly is STILL a buggy POS IMNSHO.
So I'm sorry friend it just doesn't work. Not a single one of the above distros when upgraded to current using the GUI (which is the ONLY way a consumer level user will have the skill upgrade) will have SOMETHING broken. and all the hardware was the same stuff you see on a good 90% of consumer hardware, AMD,Nvidia, and Intel chipsets, realtek and Sigma sound, Realtek and SiS networking, Aetheros, Broadcom, or Intel wireless, pretty bog standard stuff.
I've done the math and it just don't work any way you slice it. the ONLY way one can take a distro from 3 years ago and upgrade to current is to do clean installs and remember my time is $35 an hour and the customers will NOT have the skills nor the inclination to accomplish that feat so a single 6 month upgrade would again cost MORE than Win Home. Feel free to perform the test yourself, but I can't afford to blow another 7+Gb worth of data when I have caps just to show you what I already know, and that is the current upgrade mechanism takes a giant shit all over drivers. Again with Windows drivers work for the life of the OS which is 10 years. you can't even take a driver from 5 years ago and get it to work with the newest kernel without serious fiddling or a recompile which again out of the skills range of normal users.
But this is why Walmart gave up on selling low cost Linux machines, because they saw the same thing that I saw, the upgrades shat on drivers so they had to spend more in support than they saved on a copy of Starter or Home. God what I wouldn't give to find a legit source for Starter because when WinXP is EOLed I bet I'll have a lot of boxes go to the dump (If I don't break down and do what some of the other shops are doing and just sell them with Win 7 Pirate) because no matter how you work the math Linux just doesn't work in the home sector. Hell the user below you brings up Dell Ubuntu boxes without even knowing Dell has to run their own repo (which is horribly out of date and falling farther behind, so a Dell Ubuntu box is a security risk) just to keep the drivers working. ask Dell how much they make per unit, I did, they won't tell you. I would surmise that is because the cost of running their own repo has them LOSING money on each sale I'm sorry friend but I simply can't afford to run my own repo, I would be bankrupt within the year. No sale.
Finally if you want to know the scope then do as I said, download the version from 3 years ago (whatever was current then) and upgrade to current. You yourself ran into it with wireless and I can tell you that is the norm NOT the exception. i have tried regular to LTS, LTS to regular, and L
Did you miss the "Gamer customers" part? One bought top o' the line OCZ and the other Intel. Both drives were replaced but that didn't help the data none. Nice to see there are still plenty of loonies that treat tech like ballclubs and automatically assume "Ur doin it wrong" because God Forbid their God may be false. All Hail The One True God!
It can't, not anymore. Its damned near impossible to BSOD a Windows 7 system with a bad driver, it will just silently kill and restart the driver (as a system should) and make a little note in Action Center about it. And while your experience may vary I had a HELL of a lot bigger time with crashing X Server than I ever did with BSODs. it especially didn't seem to like having a video playing while surfing to pages that may have an embedded video or surfing pages with possible embedded video while playing tunes in the background. Hell Firefox won't allow hardware acceleration in Linux because X Drivers are buggy and they don't want to be blamed for X crashes.
As for TFA it has nothing to do with Android and everything to do with shitty governments wanting a pie in the sky. A $45 tablet and they want milspec? yeah and I want my Alyson Hannigan sexbot for $50 and a pack of Lucky Strikes and now we're both disappointed, while certain things ARE inflated one thing that isn't is how damned expensive it is to make electronics that can take milspec abuse. The reason a toughbook is so damned expensive is because of the amount of abuse it can take and you just can't get the materials to absorb that much punishment for $50, just not gonna happen. And they want double battery life and double CPU for the same price? Again the reason the price was so low was precisely BECAUSE it was using chips not in high demand such as its ARM 11 366MHz CPU. You want something that is going in more high dollar cell phones you have to pay a more high dollar price, that's reality. What it sounds like they are wanting is a milspec iPad for $50 and are using that as an excuse to give one of their buddies the contract who will of course probably come out with something worse than what this guy is offering so they can pocket more profit after bribing officials.
Answer? Make it in China and don't tell them about any deals! From the looks of it it was the Indian government with its head up its ass, it kept changing the specs with finally asking for specs similar to USA milspec (which as anybody knows costs thousands per unit because of how much abuse they can take. They ARE built for the battlefield after all) while still expecting them to keep the price low enough you could practically give them away...ohh AND they wanted double the battery AND a doubling of speed on the CPU! Hell why not ask for a pony to bring the stars of the last porn convention to blow you while you are at it?
The moral of this story is FUCK THE GOVERNMENTS and instead simply make as good a product as you can to fit a price point. if this guy can crank out sub $80 pads that are actually pleasant to use? Then he WILL find a market for them. Hell if it'll play SD video at whatever resolution the screen is I'll take 4 please. But by dealing with governments unless you are a "good old boy" that knows their games and whom to slip the envelope of money to you aren't gonna win friend, that is just the way it is.
Actually I'm personally not so sure about SSDs when you consider they seem to work on the hot/crazy scale. Now sure they may figure out and fix the problems or they could just as easily have a real nasty bug show up like the infamous Jaz Drive "Click Of Death" and scare off the public. I know that after I had a couple of my gamer customers buy really nice SSDs and both failed in less than a year and a half I personally will be staying away from SSDs for at least another year. Sure hard drives fail but they nearly always give a warning first, these SSDs? Zip, just one day they flipped the switch and nothing, not even the BIOS/EFI would recognize them.
So if they can give me the speed of SSDs or better and the long life of HDDs? All for it, bring it on. But I think I'll let some other sucker test them first, thanks.
Yeah I wouldn't be ready to hold my breath yet. anybody remember how many times we've been told 200Gb+ Holodiscs would be as cheap as DVDs and just as common? Still don't see any Holodiscs at the Walmart.
The big problem all these new tech seem to run into isn't actually getting these things to work, its getting it to work at a price that would be affordable. After all who would want this stuff if it ends up costing as much as a Mb of RAM cost in 1981?
The installs aren't the problem friend, in fact I'd be the first to say that many of the more modern distros have gotten nearly as simple as Windows (which Win 7 asks a grand total of 4 questions, the hardest of which is what password you would like) when it comes to ease of setup.
Nope the problem is the driver model is shit and this causes an insane number of breakages. Take Mint for example, when many were telling me "Mint does it right!" I downloaded the version from a couple of revs back and let it upgrade to current via GUI, as one would have to do if they were a normal user given a desktop, correct? Well what happened? It broke HORRIBLY, the Wifi was toast and no longer able to hook up to the network, the video was having weird artifacts and the audio would often be nothing but a clicking noise and static after a reboot.
So I would have to 1.-Know which things are broken , 2.-How to describe them to someone in the forums, 3.-Be given a bunch a CLI gobbledygook that WILL often have to be tweaked because I've found the driver model is picky as hell, no simply downloading a Mint driver but instead has to be for the EXACT make/model/firmware with ZERO variation allowed,4.-Have the skills to understand WHY the CLI mess doesn't work AND the skills to fix the problems with the correct syntax and finally, 5.-Be able to get the whole mess imported using nothing but a CLI, where even the slightest mistype or even miss copying a bracket can hose the system.
So I'm sorry friend but while the OOTB experience has gotten frankly first rate until a free distro offers a 10 year update cycle like Windows does or figures out how to fix the driver subsystem being a mess it really is NO comparison. Compare this to Windows, where thanks to the combination of a ton of drivers on the DVD plus WU having even more drivers if the PC is less than 4 years old (which is what most users would be messing with, most consumers don't refurb PCs) it will all "Just work" and continue to work until the OS is EOL which in the case of Win 7 is 2020, and if you plug in a new device Windows will autoinstall the driver if it has one or pop up a little "Would you like me to find drivers for this?" if it don't which will then call WU when you click yes and its all taken care of FOR the user. Now I have searched and the ONLY OS in Linux land with anywhere close to a 10 year length of support is RHEL under support contracts, which is $400 a year or $4000 if one were to keep the PC the entire 10 years.
believe me friend, as a retailer I HAVE run the numbers, tried ALL the flavors, because frankly the cost of Win 7 OEM cuts into my profits but sadly no matter which version you name I can drag a couple of boxes out at the shop and if I simulate just 3 years of ownership (by taking the version from 3 years ago and upgrading to current) it WILL break, leaving my customers pissed off and ruining my rep. I'm sorry but no matter how you slice it the numbers just don't work. Wish it weren't so, but at $35 an hour a single borked driver costs me more than an $89 copy of Windows Home and I can tell you there is NO way in hell the average user would have the skillset to accomplish this on their own. If you have a spare laptop or HDD for your desktop feel free to try the experiment yourself, you'll find its sadly all too true, the upgrade mechanism is just horribly borked in Linux no matter which distro you pick, even bog standard hardware will often get shat upon, sorry.
Funny that when I clicked the link it had already fallen to #9, damn that was fast!
The problem with a "Windows phone' is that the word "Windows" has a VERY specific meaning in the eyes of the vast majority and that is the ability to run Windows programs, aka x86 Windows software. Since neither is the phone capable of running X86 windows software nor does the public want to run X86 Windows programs on a teeny cell phone screen naturally its gonna bomb.
The smartest thing MSFT can do is when Win 8 bombs (which from the amount of sheer hatred its getting is probably a certainty on non touch screen devices which of course is MSFT's and the OEM's biggest sellers) is to spin off the mobile division so that MSFT and Windows names simply aren't attached to it as the name has too much history and baggage to deal with. if it were me I'd call it "Metro OS" and work to make it easy to sync up with the X360 and PC but other than that and porting some of the big names like MS Office I would let it sink or swim on its own and like in the old days of having the consumer and business desktops be two totally different things so too would mobile and X86 be two separate paths.
Lets face it the name Windows bring nothing to the table but baggage when it comes to smartphones and ARM based tablets. I saw this first hand last Xmas when a local retailer tried to sell "Windows tablets" based on WinCE and got to take a bath on the returns. When people see something that looks like windows dammit they are gonna expect it to run like Windows and the average user doesn't know ARM from a P4, all they go by is appearance and how big the numbers next to the device are. you see this in X86 with how much AMD is able to sell out Bulldozer chips despite really shitty reviews because people see 8 cores and automatically assume that is better than 4 Intel ones since 8 is better than 4.
In the end as long as it has the name Windows on it its just not gonna compete with Android or iPhone. Its like when I was helping my dad pick out a cell phone (he chose an HTC Android phone) and when we came to the Windows phones the first words out of his mouth were "Why would I want Quickbooks on my phone?" because that is what Windows is for my dad, MSN Messenger and QB. It frankly wouldn't matter if MSFT put out the best phone on the planet (although if the rumors are true and WinPhone 7 won't get Win 8 I'd say its doing pretty poorly in that regard) because there is just too much baggage with the brand.