Here is the 125 reasons not to buy a Windows Phone
I stopped reading after the first ten since they were all wrong. How much are you being paid to post this nonsense? If your not getting paid, you are a moron, or just a "useful idiot".
You are lying. As usual you paid Google shills are just making up stuff as you go along. Sadly for you, Google doesn't pay you shills in anything but hit ranking, which is worthless when you are.
Just to set the record straight, the people who buy and use Windows phones are the ones also happiest with their purchase. They have a very, very high customer satisfaction rate. Also, the "not selling" is true in the US, but not in other markets. US Consumers are among the most conservative and least willing to change to newer and better technologies (I mean, american cars were actually sold in the US all through the 1980s). Not so in other places. At the moment Windows Phone apparently sells on par with iPhone for example i Russia.
Not saying they are a great market success yet, but that there are signs that WP might do quite well in the next five years.
Your faith in Photoshop (clearly a fantastic product) is not warranted. Photoshop can do cool stuff in many situations, but walk on water and wake the dead are not among them.
will necessarily yield muddy pictures, similar to most point-and-shoots
That's an utterly moronic statement. It's like saying my Canon 5D has crappy pictures because they are nowhere near the quality I get with my Hasselblad.
This phone will yield fantastic pictures (remember, we've seen the result before in the Symbian version of this phone) fora phone. That is all good. Phones are the most used cameras today, and they are all, without exception
crap compared to my 5D, and not even images compared to my Hasselblad. The fact that technology improves to yield better pictures is a Good Thing (TM) and only shills paid by Google will argue otherwise.
The lenses are very good. Extremely good in fact. For their size. The problem is, in optics, size matters. A lot.
Still, this is a silly discussion, the camera is going to produce excellent imagry for a phone. Better than any on the market today, we know this because we have seen this stuff in action before, at that time on a Symbian phone that wasn't going to go anywhere, but still. The images from this phone are going to be stunning, for a phone, but they are not going to be in the same league as my Canon 5D (a touch over 20MP) images in anything but perfect lighting conditions.
Sadly, the haters are going to hate no matter what. If it is Windows, these paid Linux and Google shills are going to keep hating. That is what they are paid to do in online fora.
Nah, what God specializes in is to create havoc on the world, Man desperately tries to remedy his mistakes. What Man excels at is inventing new infantile fairies in the sky that are cause of this, that or the other.
I don't like devices that are locked down... the secure boot portion that shows Microsoft is up to their old games
Strange comment considering Microsoft requires all OEM selling Windows ship with all three UEFI modes enabled, which means that the user can turn off secure boot with no ill effects. For phones and tablets the story is different, than for PCs, but not different from other manufacturers. Without some guarantee that you could not "mess up" the operating system on your phone, no carrier in the world would have allowed WP phones on their network.
No they didn't have to break compatibility
There were two reasons to drop WinMo support in WP7. Remember, only the WinCE core was shared between WinMo and WP7. WinMo is far more than WinCE, it is a whole infrastructure on top of WinCE, such as drivers, graphics libraries etc. Maintaining this would have made WP7 quite bloated, and WP7 and WP8 anything but. They are fast and efficient. Keeping the WinMo stack in would have made that much harder to do.
The other, and probably even more important reason is commercial. WinMo was dying, losing market share really, really fast. Probably not as fast as it should have, but fast. If WP7 had shipped with the ability to run WinMo apps, the number of WP7 specific (Metro) apps would have been very, very low. Developers would have stuck with the tools they knew and developed WinMo apps. Many (particularly in the Enterprise where WinMo had some users) developers are like that. If Microsoft wanted to have any chance at all of capturing market share, they would have had to dump WinMo compatibility to try to force developers to the WP7 platform. That worked in fact. There are some 150K+ WP (Metro) apps, that number would have been much lower with WinMo compatibiliy.
WP is not a success at this point, but its accelerating growth outside of the US means it may become a contender. That would probably not have been the case with WinMo compatibility and a continued "reign" of absolutely horrendous WinMo apps. Horrendous due to the terrible user interface of WinMo.
OK, so maybe the reason you think 'Microsoft is getting better' is because you don't know what they are doing.
Yes, I do, and the only reason you are keeping up this silly game of yours is because you simply have nothing of value to say about UEFI. Nothing apart from your own religious convictions that is.
How do you feel about Microsoft breaking compatibility with Windows Mobile when they release WP7
Windows Mobile was crap. They had to break compatibility. They didn't actually break compatibility when they moved to WP8. WP7 apps run fine on WP8. What they did was that they changed the HW requirements. I do not think that Microsoft is the first company in the world to require more competent hardware when releasing a new OS, but they handled this one very, very poorly.
But, as I said, you are only keeping this thing up because I have challenged your religious superstition and you have nothing to offer. I hope you get well soon.
I have the same number of opinions on this as you have reasons for UEFI being bad. For the same reasons. I don't know it, and have zero opinions on it.
OOXML is a terrible Microsoft specific document format more concerned with supporting MS Office applications than actually storing documents in a portable and (even more importantly) semantic manner. -- I'd also love to see Word/OO/WPerfect etc, be possible to install without options for setting text format at all except through using styles. Styles are (possibly) semantic. Setting a font to 14pt, bold and blue is not semantic and impossible for software to derive semantic meaning from.
Office apps and their file formats are to document exchange what the Unix philosophy of "everything is a stream of bytes" is to file management. To put it differently, Office apps are to portable file formats what Google is to the semantic web. A disaster. Microsoft isn't interested in document exchange, for very obvious reasons. "Everything is a stream of bytes" was just lazy and bad design from the get-go (almost as bad as null-terminted strings, probably the worst design decision of any programming language ever). Google of course is not at all interested in promoting a semantic web since that removes the only business advantage they have, a good search engine. Companies do evil stuff for selfish (or in case of Unix files and C strings, incompetent reasons).
The fact that null-terminated strings and "everything is a stream of bytes" were bad design decisions, doesn't mean that everything Kerningham and Ritchie did was bad design. The fact that Googles active sabotage of the semantic web is evil doesn't mean that everything Google does is evil, and the fact that Microsoft undermines any attempt at open document standards doesn't mean that everything Microsoft does is evil.
The non-religious amongst us use the tool that works for the situation. That's why I deploy my Ruby stuff on Linux (AWS), it is why I (used to) promote IBM big iron in data centers, and Apple and OSX to my computer-illiterate family. I shoot Canon my self, but will recommend Nikon to friends if those friends have family and friends who shoot Nikon.
Windows is by far the best desktop operating system in existence for a lot of users - particularly Enterprise users. Why? Windows has apps not available elsewhere, and if you need those, you have to run Windows. For most people, the same apps are available for OSX, but if you are a "power user" Apple has decided that you are irrelevant, so power users should stay away from Apple. Also, Microsoft has spent significant resources on making Windows more secure to the point where it today is moving past Linux and OSX. Also, for companies, Windows is more manageable than anything else by quite a bit. That brings us to UEFI. UEFI, which is not a Microsoft product nor were they active in promoting it. UEFI makes computers more manageable for IT staff. More so by huge margin in fact. This makes UEFI a Good Thing(TM). Given the fact that Microsoft explisitly forbids the installation of Windows on UEFI machines that do not support all UEFI modes (including Setup) it is also a good thing for the end-user who wants full control of the hardware he owns.
The Microsoft-Secure Boot hysteria is quite equivalent to the "They are giving full access to NSA hysteria". It is nonsense blown out of all proportions by people who have no clue what they are talking about (none of the companies are giving NSA access to your data). Which brings us to you, I still do not see anything at all from you describing what's wrong with UEFI.
the government caved to the moronic side of America.
Doesn't it always? I mean, GWB had to pretend he was a moron just to get elected president (no, he wasn't as much of a moron as he seemed to be), and given the popularity of FOX News, being a moron seems to be the only possible thing for a public person in the US these days. It's sad really.
The fact that the movie industry always makes the guy in a lab coat the villain doesn't help.
So that means you are not able to site a single reason UEFI is bad. I understand. You do realize that this is the only possible explanation for you not doing it right?
As to what I am... I was part of one of the first teams in the world that released large-scale commercial software based on the Java platform. It was so early that we had to go out of our way to hide the fact that it was written in Java, people would not have bought at the time since the perception was that Java was slow (even very early on that perception was wrong). I developed on Linux (and partly on Windows) but deployment was 95% Sun and 5% HP. I recognize good technology when I see it, but I am not tied to a particular product. For example I do realize today that if you do not need platform independece,.NET is a far better platform than Java, and C# is heads and shoulders above Java as a programming language (but neither can touch Ruby). Today I do about half of my work on Windows since I am engaged as a consultant for integrating a Windows-based CRM system with various other systems. The other half of my time I spend on Linux developing in Java (and part Scala) for a jBoss deployed solution. Fanbois are idiots, since they are unable to choose the best system independent of supplier. Some times that is Windows, other times it is not.
At home I use mostly Windows since photography and videography are important hobbies of mine. For those things there are only two possible OSs to use, and that is OSX and Windows. Since Apple is more closed than Microsoft, and Apple also have stopped producing professional products (the new Mac Pro is a f*cking joke, but as usual, a good looking joke) OSX is not an option. Linux is not, and probably will never be an option for enthusiast photographers and videographers, the software simply isn't there. Oh, and no, Gimp is not an alternative to Photoshop.
The only fanboi here is you. You have a religious notion that Microsoft is bad, and you are therefore unable to make rational decisions about your computing platforms. That is a pity, since from your other comments in other threads, you do appear to be reasonably intelligent.
But hey, you can list all that is bad, or even just one thing, with UEFI, and perhaps lift the rather sad "fanboi" image you are putting on your self as this stage. I am quite sure you are unable to though.
I've studied the EFI API. I know what UEFI is. Do you know what an apologist is? That's you.
You know what a liar is. Check a mirror. You have not been able, in several posts, to give a single reason for UEFI being bad. This means you are a liar. Grow up.
Complaints about Google are for another day, but if Microsoft open sources their mobile OS, I will very much appreciate it.
I see no reason that Microsoft should. Remember, Android is not open source in the way most people think of FOSS. If you want to learn about that, you could for example read this (sorry, only PDF). Making Windows Open Source makes no sense for Microsoft. It makes a lot of sense for Google to both make it seem like Android is FOSS, and also for Google to heavily sponsor Android to get the ad revenue they live off.
The following two articles will (attempt to) remove your religious notion about UEFI being "evil" or "Satan". Please read them, they contain far more valuable information that the insane FUD you read about UEFI and Secure Boot on/.
Please remember, disregarding exceptions like me, the signal to noise ratio on/. is extremely low, the religious nutcases are a huge majority and the number of people who post with knowledge about what they are posting about is very close to zero. Thankfully for you, a lemming who just follows what the religious nuts on/. is hysterical about from day to day, there are people like me to inform and educate.
Yes it is, and I did expect you to fall in this trap. You see, you have no idea what UEFI is, and you mix it up with Secure Boot. Secure Boot is only a tiny part of UEFI. UEFI is a replacement for the very, very, very ageing BIOS. The BIOS should have died decades ago, it simply isn't a good way to manage hardware. UEFI gives hardware support people and IT managers a huge array of features to manage their PCs. This includes, for example, remote connectivity. That is remote acces before booting the OS, that is hugely important and makes managing hardware a lot easier. UEFI also enables huge hard drives, not available using BIOS. A number of other things too.
What you (and much of the FOSS community) is fanatical about is a tiny part of UEFI called Secure Boot. This only allows for booting of signed OSs (essentially). UEFI can be used in three modes, locked down, setup and custom. Now, this is where things get interesting. Microsoft has required that for phones and tablets, UEFI Secure Boot must be locked down by the vendor. That means that GRUB (due mostly to GPL restrictions and nothing related to Microsoft) will not work properly. There are a number of work-arounds, one being not using GRUB as a boot loader due to the overly restrictive GPL restrictions, if GRUB is a requirement you can use shims to work around the limitations of GRUB GPL restrictions (which have nothing to do with Microsoft). This only applies to tablets and phones. In this regard, Microsoft, Apple and Google all do the same thing. I am unsure why this makes Microsoft evil at all.
Now, when it comes to OEM PCs, what is the story there? Well, in the same way that Microsoft requires tablets and phones be locked down, they also require that OEM PCs are shipped with UEFI that is open. This means you can easily turn off Secure Boot in UEFI for all OEM PCs. This is a Microsoft requirement.
So, how exactly is UEFI bad? To be more specific, how is UEFI Secure Boot bad or evil, when Microsoft mandates it can be disabled on all relevant devices? I know ingorant fools like to harp on the evils of UEFI, which is insane, and UEFI Secure Boot, which is not insane, just badly informed rubbish, but thing is, UEFI and UEFI Secure Boot is only relevant as a negative if you want to install Android on a Windows Phone or a Surface RT tablet. If you wanted to, why did you buy them in the first place, they are neither great hardware nor cheap.
I also notice that you are not commenting on the fact that Microsoft, faster than for example Google, is embracing and pooring money into FOSS, particularly in the web space.
For the past few years Microsoft has played very nice. Yes. Even UEFI is playing nice. They have also been very, very active in the FOSS environment, where more and more MS products are going FOSS. This includes products like ASP.NET MVC, one of the very best web app frameworks out there, Entity Framework etc. Also, Microsoft is incorporating and adding developers to frameworks such as jQuery, jQuery UI, Knockout.js is from Microsoft, Bootstrap is now the default MS web platform for ASP.NET etc. Dynamics CRM, a product MS didn't develop themselves but bought, was IE only, now it is HTML5 and entirely cross-platform. Other Dynamics products are moving in the same direction.
No, Microsoft is not perfect by any means, but they are quite a lot better than they were. Claiming it isn't so is ignorant superstition.
I understand that anyone challenging your religion hurts, but remember, religious fantasies are that, fantasies. They are not real. There is no evil devil. You are imagining stuff. Talk to a shrink if it becomes difficult.
Goodness. Are you making a joke? If you think, for only a second, that Google is less evil than Apple or Microsoft or IBM or any other company out there, you need to go talk to your doctor. Your diagnosis would be: utterly retarded
To me, Android's strength is that the individual handset really doesn't matter. I could lose or destroy my phone and just get another, resync to my Google account, and the bulk of what's important will be right back there again, like my contacts list.
I recently killed my phone with a hammer, entirely unintentional. I went out and got a new one. Once logged in, all my SMS threads were there, all my pictures from my old phone was there, all my contacts and emails also of course (Gmail). All my settings were also restored completely. The apps I had installed on my previous handset were not there automatically, but when I re-installed the apps I wanted, the app configurations came along for the ride. All my wi-fi preferences and networks were there automatically. And on and on...
Thank you Microsoft and Nokia, you make the very, very best phones with the very, very best phone OS out there. For the few days I had to use my Samsung Galaxy SIII instead of my Nokia Lumia 920 I struggled mightily with the horrendously inefficient UI that albeit slightly better than iOS, seems to have been designed by someone who only use their phone as a computer. A phone is a communication device, and honestly, WP8 beats all the competitors by a mile as a communication centered OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, we all work for Google. It's a conspiracy. Nice try.
Wooooosh
Here is the 125 reasons not to buy a Windows Phone
I stopped reading after the first ten since they were all wrong. How much are you being paid to post this nonsense? If your not getting paid, you are a moron, or just a "useful idiot".
You are lying. As usual you paid Google shills are just making up stuff as you go along. Sadly for you, Google doesn't pay you shills in anything but hit ranking, which is worthless when you are.
http://wmpoweruser.com/nokias-windows-phones-topping-customer-satisfaction-charts-in-us/
Just to set the record straight, the people who buy and use Windows phones are the ones also happiest with their purchase. They have a very, very high customer satisfaction rate. Also, the "not selling" is true in the US, but not in other markets. US Consumers are among the most conservative and least willing to change to newer and better technologies (I mean, american cars were actually sold in the US all through the 1980s). Not so in other places. At the moment Windows Phone apparently sells on par with iPhone for example i Russia.
Not saying they are a great market success yet, but that there are signs that WP might do quite well in the next five years.
Photoshop has filters that can do that now
Your faith in Photoshop (clearly a fantastic product) is not warranted. Photoshop can do cool stuff in many situations, but walk on water and wake the dead are not among them.
will necessarily yield muddy pictures, similar to most point-and-shoots
That's an utterly moronic statement. It's like saying my Canon 5D has crappy pictures because they are nowhere near the quality I get with my Hasselblad.
This phone will yield fantastic pictures (remember, we've seen the result before in the Symbian version of this phone) fora phone. That is all good. Phones are the most used cameras today, and they are all, without exception
crap compared to my 5D, and not even images compared to my Hasselblad. The fact that technology improves to yield better pictures is a Good Thing (TM) and only shills paid by Google will argue otherwise.
What makes you think the lenses are not good?
The lenses are very good. Extremely good in fact. For their size. The problem is, in optics, size matters. A lot.
Still, this is a silly discussion, the camera is going to produce excellent imagry for a phone. Better than any on the market today, we know this because we have seen this stuff in action before, at that time on a Symbian phone that wasn't going to go anywhere, but still. The images from this phone are going to be stunning, for a phone, but they are not going to be in the same league as my Canon 5D (a touch over 20MP) images in anything but perfect lighting conditions.
Sadly, the haters are going to hate no matter what. If it is Windows, these paid Linux and Google shills are going to keep hating. That is what they are paid to do in online fora.
Nah, only the retarded ones, like you. For the common good you know.
Or to put it differently, I challenge you to name one.
Nah, what God specializes in is to create havoc on the world, Man desperately tries to remedy his mistakes. What Man excels at is inventing new infantile fairies in the sky that are cause of this, that or the other.
I don't like devices that are locked down ... the secure boot portion that shows Microsoft is up to their old games
Strange comment considering Microsoft requires all OEM selling Windows ship with all three UEFI modes enabled, which means that the user can turn off secure boot with no ill effects. For phones and tablets the story is different, than for PCs, but not different from other manufacturers. Without some guarantee that you could not "mess up" the operating system on your phone, no carrier in the world would have allowed WP phones on their network.
No they didn't have to break compatibility
There were two reasons to drop WinMo support in WP7. Remember, only the WinCE core was shared between WinMo and WP7. WinMo is far more than WinCE, it is a whole infrastructure on top of WinCE, such as drivers, graphics libraries etc. Maintaining this would have made WP7 quite bloated, and WP7 and WP8 anything but. They are fast and efficient. Keeping the WinMo stack in would have made that much harder to do.
The other, and probably even more important reason is commercial. WinMo was dying, losing market share really, really fast. Probably not as fast as it should have, but fast. If WP7 had shipped with the ability to run WinMo apps, the number of WP7 specific (Metro) apps would have been very, very low. Developers would have stuck with the tools they knew and developed WinMo apps. Many (particularly in the Enterprise where WinMo had some users) developers are like that. If Microsoft wanted to have any chance at all of capturing market share, they would have had to dump WinMo compatibility to try to force developers to the WP7 platform. That worked in fact. There are some 150K+ WP (Metro) apps, that number would have been much lower with WinMo compatibiliy.
WP is not a success at this point, but its accelerating growth outside of the US means it may become a contender. That would probably not have been the case with WinMo compatibility and a continued "reign" of absolutely horrendous WinMo apps. Horrendous due to the terrible user interface of WinMo.
OK, so maybe the reason you think 'Microsoft is getting better' is because you don't know what they are doing.
Yes, I do, and the only reason you are keeping up this silly game of yours is because you simply have nothing of value to say about UEFI. Nothing apart from your own religious convictions that is.
How do you feel about Microsoft breaking compatibility with Windows Mobile when they release WP7
Windows Mobile was crap. They had to break compatibility. They didn't actually break compatibility when they moved to WP8. WP7 apps run fine on WP8. What they did was that they changed the HW requirements. I do not think that Microsoft is the first company in the world to require more competent hardware when releasing a new OS, but they handled this one very, very poorly.
But, as I said, you are only keeping this thing up because I have challenged your religious superstition and you have nothing to offer. I hope you get well soon.
I have the same number of opinions on this as you have reasons for UEFI being bad. For the same reasons. I don't know it, and have zero opinions on it.
OOXML is a terrible Microsoft specific document format more concerned with supporting MS Office applications than actually storing documents in a portable and (even more importantly) semantic manner. -- I'd also love to see Word/OO/WPerfect etc, be possible to install without options for setting text format at all except through using styles. Styles are (possibly) semantic. Setting a font to 14pt, bold and blue is not semantic and impossible for software to derive semantic meaning from.
Office apps and their file formats are to document exchange what the Unix philosophy of "everything is a stream of bytes" is to file management. To put it differently, Office apps are to portable file formats what Google is to the semantic web. A disaster. Microsoft isn't interested in document exchange, for very obvious reasons. "Everything is a stream of bytes" was just lazy and bad design from the get-go (almost as bad as null-terminted strings, probably the worst design decision of any programming language ever). Google of course is not at all interested in promoting a semantic web since that removes the only business advantage they have, a good search engine. Companies do evil stuff for selfish (or in case of Unix files and C strings, incompetent reasons).
The fact that null-terminated strings and "everything is a stream of bytes" were bad design decisions, doesn't mean that everything Kerningham and Ritchie did was bad design. The fact that Googles active sabotage of the semantic web is evil doesn't mean that everything Google does is evil, and the fact that Microsoft undermines any attempt at open document standards doesn't mean that everything Microsoft does is evil.
The non-religious amongst us use the tool that works for the situation. That's why I deploy my Ruby stuff on Linux (AWS), it is why I (used to) promote IBM big iron in data centers, and Apple and OSX to my computer-illiterate family. I shoot Canon my self, but will recommend Nikon to friends if those friends have family and friends who shoot Nikon.
Windows is by far the best desktop operating system in existence for a lot of users - particularly Enterprise users. Why? Windows has apps not available elsewhere, and if you need those, you have to run Windows. For most people, the same apps are available for OSX, but if you are a "power user" Apple has decided that you are irrelevant, so power users should stay away from Apple. Also, Microsoft has spent significant resources on making Windows more secure to the point where it today is moving past Linux and OSX. Also, for companies, Windows is more manageable than anything else by quite a bit. That brings us to UEFI. UEFI, which is not a Microsoft product nor were they active in promoting it. UEFI makes computers more manageable for IT staff. More so by huge margin in fact. This makes UEFI a Good Thing(TM). Given the fact that Microsoft explisitly forbids the installation of Windows on UEFI machines that do not support all UEFI modes (including Setup) it is also a good thing for the end-user who wants full control of the hardware he owns.
The Microsoft-Secure Boot hysteria is quite equivalent to the "They are giving full access to NSA hysteria". It is nonsense blown out of all proportions by people who have no clue what they are talking about (none of the companies are giving NSA access to your data). Which brings us to you, I still do not see anything at all from you describing what's wrong with UEFI.
the government caved to the moronic side of America.
Doesn't it always? I mean, GWB had to pretend he was a moron just to get elected president (no, he wasn't as much of a moron as he seemed to be), and given the popularity of FOX News, being a moron seems to be the only possible thing for a public person in the US these days. It's sad really.
The fact that the movie industry always makes the guy in a lab coat the villain doesn't help.
The problem with RWD is that 99% of drivers have never driven one
Really? Are you saying that BMW and Mercedes between them have less than a one percent market share?
So that means you are not able to site a single reason UEFI is bad. I understand. You do realize that this is the only possible explanation for you not doing it right?
As to what I am... I was part of one of the first teams in the world that released large-scale commercial software based on the Java platform. It was so early that we had to go out of our way to hide the fact that it was written in Java, people would not have bought at the time since the perception was that Java was slow (even very early on that perception was wrong). I developed on Linux (and partly on Windows) but deployment was 95% Sun and 5% HP. I recognize good technology when I see it, but I am not tied to a particular product. For example I do realize today that if you do not need platform independece, .NET is a far better platform than Java, and C# is heads and shoulders above Java as a programming language (but neither can touch Ruby). Today I do about half of my work on Windows since I am engaged as a consultant for integrating a Windows-based CRM system with various other systems. The other half of my time I spend on Linux developing in Java (and part Scala) for a jBoss deployed solution. Fanbois are idiots, since they are unable to choose the best system independent of supplier. Some times that is Windows, other times it is not.
At home I use mostly Windows since photography and videography are important hobbies of mine. For those things there are only two possible OSs to use, and that is OSX and Windows. Since Apple is more closed than Microsoft, and Apple also have stopped producing professional products (the new Mac Pro is a f*cking joke, but as usual, a good looking joke) OSX is not an option. Linux is not, and probably will never be an option for enthusiast photographers and videographers, the software simply isn't there. Oh, and no, Gimp is not an alternative to Photoshop.
The only fanboi here is you. You have a religious notion that Microsoft is bad, and you are therefore unable to make rational decisions about your computing platforms. That is a pity, since from your other comments in other threads, you do appear to be reasonably intelligent.
But hey, you can list all that is bad, or even just one thing, with UEFI, and perhaps lift the rather sad "fanboi" image you are putting on your self as this stage. I am quite sure you are unable to though.
I've studied the EFI API. I know what UEFI is. Do you know what an apologist is? That's you.
You know what a liar is. Check a mirror. You have not been able, in several posts, to give a single reason for UEFI being bad. This means you are a liar. Grow up.
Complaints about Google are for another day, but if Microsoft open sources their mobile OS, I will very much appreciate it.
I see no reason that Microsoft should. Remember, Android is not open source in the way most people think of FOSS. If you want to learn about that, you could for example read this (sorry, only PDF). Making Windows Open Source makes no sense for Microsoft. It makes a lot of sense for Google to both make it seem like Android is FOSS, and also for Google to heavily sponsor Android to get the ad revenue they live off.
The following two articles will (attempt to) remove your religious notion about UEFI being "evil" or "Satan". Please read them, they contain far more valuable information that the insane FUD you read about UEFI and Secure Boot on /.
The 30-year-long Reign of BIOS is Over: Why UEFI Will Rock Your IT and Enough with the UEFI drama already
Please remember, disregarding exceptions like me, the signal to noise ratio on /. is extremely low, the religious nutcases are a huge majority and the number of people who post with knowledge about what they are posting about is very close to zero. Thankfully for you, a lemming who just follows what the religious nuts on /. is hysterical about from day to day, there are people like me to inform and educate.
UEFI is playing nice, eh?
Yes it is, and I did expect you to fall in this trap. You see, you have no idea what UEFI is, and you mix it up with Secure Boot. Secure Boot is only a tiny part of UEFI. UEFI is a replacement for the very, very, very ageing BIOS. The BIOS should have died decades ago, it simply isn't a good way to manage hardware. UEFI gives hardware support people and IT managers a huge array of features to manage their PCs. This includes, for example, remote connectivity. That is remote acces before booting the OS, that is hugely important and makes managing hardware a lot easier. UEFI also enables huge hard drives, not available using BIOS. A number of other things too.
What you (and much of the FOSS community) is fanatical about is a tiny part of UEFI called Secure Boot. This only allows for booting of signed OSs (essentially). UEFI can be used in three modes, locked down, setup and custom. Now, this is where things get interesting. Microsoft has required that for phones and tablets, UEFI Secure Boot must be locked down by the vendor. That means that GRUB (due mostly to GPL restrictions and nothing related to Microsoft) will not work properly. There are a number of work-arounds, one being not using GRUB as a boot loader due to the overly restrictive GPL restrictions, if GRUB is a requirement you can use shims to work around the limitations of GRUB GPL restrictions (which have nothing to do with Microsoft). This only applies to tablets and phones. In this regard, Microsoft, Apple and Google all do the same thing. I am unsure why this makes Microsoft evil at all.
Now, when it comes to OEM PCs, what is the story there? Well, in the same way that Microsoft requires tablets and phones be locked down, they also require that OEM PCs are shipped with UEFI that is open. This means you can easily turn off Secure Boot in UEFI for all OEM PCs. This is a Microsoft requirement.
So, how exactly is UEFI bad? To be more specific, how is UEFI Secure Boot bad or evil, when Microsoft mandates it can be disabled on all relevant devices? I know ingorant fools like to harp on the evils of UEFI, which is insane, and UEFI Secure Boot, which is not insane, just badly informed rubbish, but thing is, UEFI and UEFI Secure Boot is only relevant as a negative if you want to install Android on a Windows Phone or a Surface RT tablet. If you wanted to, why did you buy them in the first place, they are neither great hardware nor cheap.
I also notice that you are not commenting on the fact that Microsoft, faster than for example Google, is embracing and pooring money into FOSS, particularly in the web space.
For the past few years Microsoft has played very nice. Yes. Even UEFI is playing nice. They have also been very, very active in the FOSS environment, where more and more MS products are going FOSS. This includes products like ASP.NET MVC, one of the very best web app frameworks out there, Entity Framework etc. Also, Microsoft is incorporating and adding developers to frameworks such as jQuery, jQuery UI, Knockout.js is from Microsoft, Bootstrap is now the default MS web platform for ASP.NET etc. Dynamics CRM, a product MS didn't develop themselves but bought, was IE only, now it is HTML5 and entirely cross-platform. Other Dynamics products are moving in the same direction.
No, Microsoft is not perfect by any means, but they are quite a lot better than they were. Claiming it isn't so is ignorant superstition.
I understand that anyone challenging your religion hurts, but remember, religious fantasies are that, fantasies. They are not real. There is no evil devil. You are imagining stuff. Talk to a shrink if it becomes difficult.
I wanted a computer, not a registration of an account in one more "social" scheme.
RTFA! It's for the BETA, and ONLY for the beta.
Goodness. Are you making a joke? If you think, for only a second, that Google is less evil than Apple or Microsoft or IBM or any other company out there, you need to go talk to your doctor. Your diagnosis would be: utterly retarded
Nah, MS is the very old IBM, Apple was the new IBM, but Google is the new IBM. Trusting one over the other only means you are retarded.
To me, Android's strength is that the individual handset really doesn't matter. I could lose or destroy my phone and just get another, resync to my Google account, and the bulk of what's important will be right back there again, like my contacts list.
I recently killed my phone with a hammer, entirely unintentional. I went out and got a new one. Once logged in, all my SMS threads were there, all my pictures from my old phone was there, all my contacts and emails also of course (Gmail). All my settings were also restored completely. The apps I had installed on my previous handset were not there automatically, but when I re-installed the apps I wanted, the app configurations came along for the ride. All my wi-fi preferences and networks were there automatically. And on and on...
Thank you Microsoft and Nokia, you make the very, very best phones with the very, very best phone OS out there. For the few days I had to use my Samsung Galaxy SIII instead of my Nokia Lumia 920 I struggled mightily with the horrendously inefficient UI that albeit slightly better than iOS, seems to have been designed by someone who only use their phone as a computer. A phone is a communication device, and honestly, WP8 beats all the competitors by a mile as a communication centered OS.