When you say that it is not properly sandboxed and using admin user permissions, does that apply to people using IE11 (Windows 8)? I thought the defaults on Windows 8 were not as careless as back in the day of XP pre-SP.
All those are relevant considerations that nobody seems to have when producing and selling more and better weapons. There's nothing you said that would be wrong in the context of rifles, cannons or fighter aircraft.
That's two different things, IMHO: 1) RT needs to be different from Windows Phone because MS needs Office to run on tablets. They cannot have underpowered hardware for tablets messing up that selling point. Even though Intel is releasing x86 mobile chips, it is expected that ARM and other mobile CPU specialists will carry on building really good products with a much lower power consumption than that of the high end phone and tablet market segments. Windows Mobile OS needs to exist so that Windows OS and devices can compete in a small device market (watches, hats, motorcyclist suits, whatever..).
2) Windows RT needs to be different from Windows x86 because of what that article says about giving the OS away with hardware. Unifying Windows around x86 compatibility would make it hard to sell Windows x86 bundled with hardware at a price MS likes; while unifying Windows around RT and bundling it with hardware would lead to lawsuits for anti-competitive behaviour.
Must be that fragmentation that they talk about in the news...
wired has an article that could clarify this for you: in a world where hardware companies are pushing their own brand of OS and app store, selling the OS is becoming very hard. rather than accepting this without a struggle, MS may give away RT with surface and sell x86 Windows as usual for as long as possible.
"Part of whatâ(TM)s going on here is that the low-cost mobile ecosystem has changed the way people think about operating system software. Smartphones and tablets have left traditional computers in the dust, and their operating systems and apps are overwhelmingly free. Upgrades to Appleâ(TM)s iOS platform â" which powers the companyâ(TM)s iPads tablets and iPhones â" have long been free, as have new versions of Googleâ(TM)s Android mobile OS. Like Microsoft, Google supplies operating systems to outside hardware makers, but unlike Microsoft, it doesnâ(TM)t charge them for the software. Phone and tablet makers can load Android on their devices for free."
I can't speak for "everyone" who is not using Windows 8, but I'll tell you about my experience this weekend after upgrading from 8 to 8.1: I am wishing more applications are re-written for Metro. That's how I see that "personality disorder" conversation going away. The UI needs to be experienced for people to accept or reject it on its own merits. First of all, the thing feels faster than before the upgrade. Applications launch faster and switching back and forth does not slow things down, no matter if there's desktop or Metro apps involved.
IE looks great and loads really fast. I'm so used to Firefox that it is a hard sale. If the guys at Mozilla move Firefox to Metro while retaining the extension foundation, I'll be happy. The first beta (or was it alpha?) of Firefox Metro didn't bring anything new to the table in exchange for losing all extensions, so things are not looking good. With IE you can pin sites to the Start screen, I am hoping to do the same with RSS feeds. So far, the "read it later" application that is included is much faster than what I'm getting with Pocket (the original readitlater.com).
The Music app is probably the most elegant I've seen working "out of the box". It is worth trying. The 10 hours of free access to the Zune music collection (per month) sounds like a really nice thing to have. I have yet to try if the stereo mix input is still working;)
The way I see it, when Microsoft puts out 95, XP, Vista or Windows 8, there is no shortage of people saying that the product feels unfinished and therefore the whole of Microsoft is DoOoOoOoMED. In this day and age, if we judged all companies and web-based services like that, nobody would be good enough.
To the OP who said that nobody wants Windows 8 - that sounds true: Nobody asked for a new version. However, since Microsoft needs to compete and sell more, at some point you'd be facing an upgrade. There are plenty alternatives out there but if you are using Windows this one is more worthwhile than the effort to keep XP running on 2014's PCS.
If it's not right, don't ship it. If it's not ready, don't ship it. A company I used to work for lived by these words, if only the rest of the world did. (and if only they did too, they kinda don't anymore)
Wow. That looks really complicated. So far I've bought 3 used cars after shopping around on eBay and at used car lots. If that's the kind of effort that is needed, I'll stick to used cars...
I think we share the same hope, though Bangladesh is a good case study of #1 being enacted as we speak.
Bangladesh? Don't need to go that far. We see the tools and techniques used by armed forces being transferred to police forces quite regularly. Why should flying drones (with cameras and guns) not be part of that trend? It sure is harder to to have a revolution than 100 years ago...
I wouldn't go as far as to say the rest of the world is laughing. I would however say that China and the other non-democratic countries are keeping score.
I'm not a software developer or anything of that sort. Maybe school children can have some sort of programming lessons as part of maths, just organised in a different way than it was back in my younger days. My school maths curriculum included logic operations when I was in 10th grade (16-17 years old) Converting numbers from base 10 to base 2, base 8, base whatever when I was in 5th grade (10-11 years old)
Is that the basis for "coding", or do people mean clicking on UI elements and assigning them existing functions?
Right now, Id say... Android. I've signed up for a broadband service which is bundled with a sports TV channel. I can access that TV channel via the web or using a native app for Android and iOS. When I try using Firefox (on Windows 8 Pro 64) it just will not work. I try IE. Not compatible with that browser, tells me to try a different one.
I tap the Android app and... It just works. Now let's think of what can I do to have that same channel on a larger TV screen. Since I don't have a smart TV box (only free to air channels), I can use that old media centre PC I've been trying to set up for 2 years. Pay £100 for Windows and then get that kind of experience? nah. Pay £100 for Apple TV? Looks great at the shop but will not touch my local media collection. Install Ubuntu? OK, but during a recent upgrade the wifi stopped working with no explanation. Maybe I can get Android x86 and hope for the best, or I can get a cheap £50 android box and just get it over with.
ah yes, but you forget that Market = quantity times price. I don't think that we'll see how the real numbers stack up but my gut feeling is that between hardware, cloud service rents and app sales, Apple is ahead of Google.
I read these things and I don't get the Surface (RT) hate, nor the Surface Pro love. For some reason, there are plenty of Slashdotters believing that once iPad reached its market leadership, nobody else can have a worthwhile presence in the new market segment of tablets. I reiterate new market segment, because that's what it still is. A high growth market, because a LOT of people both in rich and medium-rich countries decided they can have a tablet to carry around and as a 2nd screen next to the one where they watch TV. What has this 2nd screen done? 3 things I can think of: 1) It postponed upgrades and replacement of conventional Wintel PCs 2) it highlighted that a whole generation of buyers is not valuing familiarity with Windows as much as previous generations 3) it opened up a new market where every little app can be sold rather than offered as freeware
The first 2 are seriously bad news for a late entrant Microsoft. The upside is that BYOD has more than one meaning: on one hand, conventional Wintel machines are seen as too complex to be practical when compared to ARM tablets; on the other it means that keyboards and work apps are not optional for a lot of people.
Should Microsoft quit or believe that a high growth market can accommodate more than one player and more than one form factor? Slashdot says QUIT, but that might be more wishful thinking than business sense.
So, back to Surface (RT). Hated by many because it doesn't run desktop applications. It does run Windows 8, hated by many because of the tablet-centric start screen. What do people not hate? Surface Pro, because it allows people to spend 2x as the price of the iPad to run desktop applications on a machine built for touch UI. WTF.
The other day, an article about Windows (RT) being useless because Haswell is good enough to run "proper" Windows x86 rather than having to rework everything to work on ARM. So where we're getting is to a state of affairs where x86 improves its efficiency so much faster than ARM that it is conceivable that machines of every size, shape and price can run x86 Windows (or Linux). Just my opinion: I find that hard to believe.
Clearly Microsoft needs the Surface to work. Both to dilute the difference between the conventional PCs and Tablets so that the 2 cash cows don't die and also to have some sort of presence in this new market that sells hardware + cloud services + music&film subscriptions. Should they just drop Surface to cut their losses? only if MS is OK with becoming an Enterprise-only company and risking that the definition of Enterprise services, software and devices changes so much that their slice of that cake becomes unbearably small.
Would I buy a Surface Pro? More likely for me to continue buying low-mid range laptops. A Surface RT? when my Nexus 7 dies I'll think about it.
If Roku can sell an ARM box capable of decompressing Full HD streams for $49, why can't Google get one to run ChromeOS?
Maybe there is more that on reason for that:
a) even Google can't develop 1000000 products and variants at a time: b) Such a cheap box would compete with android tv box/console offerings, and maybe the DRM isn't ready yet.
There is one thing that Apple could do that a conventional electronic devices or software house competitor cannot: shift the discussion from wearable tech to pieces of fashionable clothing. If we think about it, the white earbuds are a fashion item as much as an accessory for MP3 players. People made or adapted existing bracelets to wear the iPod Nano as a wristwatch. Loads of armbands were built to accommodate wearing iPods and iPhones when exercising. Nike has sensors for shoes that link up with the current generation of iPod. The tech part they've got nailed already (Sony, Samsung, Apple, Google,... all of them). Getting people to wear it without looking silly is the challenge and has been for a long time.
What Apple can do rather than try to out-gadget the gadget makers is to design beautiful items of clothing that have the right pockets in the right places to carry the iPhone. Maybe some way to get a microphone and headphones built in to make calls and chat with Siri. There's always money for fashion items and I suspecct that Apple fanboy/girl would be happy to wear the team's colours. Pay £150 for a turtleneck? No problem. They can all wear the same model of iClothes until next year's is released. It would be a bit like Star Trek, with everyone on the planet wearing the same type of clothes.
I saw this article headline on Feedly, loaded it, went to get a glass of water and when I came back there were only 14 comments, all under my visibility threshold. It sure looked like I was on the wrong side of the exodus.
Slashdot Mirror
that's not an equation.
Hi,
When you say that it is not properly sandboxed and using admin user permissions, does that apply to people using IE11 (Windows 8)? I thought the defaults on Windows 8 were not as careless as back in the day of XP pre-SP.
All those are relevant considerations that nobody seems to have when producing and selling more and better weapons. There's nothing you said that would be wrong in the context of rifles, cannons or fighter aircraft.
That's two different things, IMHO:
1) RT needs to be different from Windows Phone because MS needs Office to run on tablets. They cannot have underpowered hardware for tablets messing up that selling point. Even though Intel is releasing x86 mobile chips, it is expected that ARM and other mobile CPU specialists will carry on building really good products with a much lower power consumption than that of the high end phone and tablet market segments. Windows Mobile OS needs to exist so that Windows OS and devices can compete in a small device market (watches, hats, motorcyclist suits, whatever..).
2) Windows RT needs to be different from Windows x86 because of what that article says about giving the OS away with hardware. Unifying Windows around x86 compatibility would make it hard to sell Windows x86 bundled with hardware at a price MS likes; while unifying Windows around RT and bundling it with hardware would lead to lawsuits for anti-competitive behaviour.
Must be that fragmentation that they talk about in the news...
wired has an article that could clarify this for you: in a world where hardware companies are pushing their own brand of OS and app store, selling the OS is becoming very hard. rather than accepting this without a struggle, MS may give away RT with surface and sell x86 Windows as usual for as long as possible.
"Part of whatâ(TM)s going on here is that the low-cost mobile ecosystem has changed the way people think about operating system software. Smartphones and tablets have left traditional computers in the dust, and their operating systems and apps are overwhelmingly free. Upgrades to Appleâ(TM)s iOS platform â" which powers the companyâ(TM)s iPads tablets and iPhones â" have long been free, as have new versions of Googleâ(TM)s Android mobile OS. Like Microsoft, Google supplies operating systems to outside hardware makers, but unlike Microsoft, it doesnâ(TM)t charge them for the software. Phone and tablet makers can load Android on their devices for free."
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/
I can't speak for "everyone" who is not using Windows 8, but I'll tell you about my experience this weekend after upgrading from 8 to 8.1: I am wishing more applications are re-written for Metro. That's how I see that "personality disorder" conversation going away. The UI needs to be experienced for people to accept or reject it on its own merits. First of all, the thing feels faster than before the upgrade. Applications launch faster and switching back and forth does not slow things down, no matter if there's desktop or Metro apps involved.
IE looks great and loads really fast. I'm so used to Firefox that it is a hard sale. If the guys at Mozilla move Firefox to Metro while retaining the extension foundation, I'll be happy. The first beta (or was it alpha?) of Firefox Metro didn't bring anything new to the table in exchange for losing all extensions, so things are not looking good. With IE you can pin sites to the Start screen, I am hoping to do the same with RSS feeds. So far, the "read it later" application that is included is much faster than what I'm getting with Pocket (the original readitlater.com).
The Music app is probably the most elegant I've seen working "out of the box". It is worth trying. The 10 hours of free access to the Zune music collection (per month) sounds like a really nice thing to have. I have yet to try if the stereo mix input is still working ;)
The way I see it, when Microsoft puts out 95, XP, Vista or Windows 8, there is no shortage of people saying that the product feels unfinished and therefore the whole of Microsoft is DoOoOoOoMED. In this day and age, if we judged all companies and web-based services like that, nobody would be good enough.
To the OP who said that nobody wants Windows 8 - that sounds true: Nobody asked for a new version. However, since Microsoft needs to compete and sell more, at some point you'd be facing an upgrade. There are plenty alternatives out there but if you are using Windows this one is more worthwhile than the effort to keep XP running on 2014's PCS.
If it's not right, don't ship it. If it's not ready, don't ship it.
A company I used to work for lived by these words, if only the rest of the world did. (and if only they did too, they kinda don't anymore)
bankrupt, I presume?
Wow. That looks really complicated. So far I've bought 3 used cars after shopping around on eBay and at used car lots. If that's the kind of effort that is needed, I'll stick to used cars...
I think we share the same hope, though Bangladesh is a good case study of #1 being enacted as we speak.
Bangladesh? Don't need to go that far. We see the tools and techniques used by armed forces being transferred to police forces quite regularly. Why should flying drones (with cameras and guns) not be part of that trend? It sure is harder to to have a revolution than 100 years ago...
I wouldn't go as far as to say the rest of the world is laughing. I would however say that China and the other non-democratic countries are keeping score.
I'm not a software developer or anything of that sort. Maybe school children can have some sort of programming lessons as part of maths, just organised in a different way than it was back in my younger days.
My school maths curriculum included logic operations when I was in 10th grade (16-17 years old)
Converting numbers from base 10 to base 2, base 8, base whatever when I was in 5th grade (10-11 years old)
Is that the basis for "coding", or do people mean clicking on UI elements and assigning them existing functions?
If Ubuntu declines, then the question is to what?
Right now, Id say... Android.
I've signed up for a broadband service which is bundled with a sports TV channel. I can access that TV channel via the web or using a native app for Android and iOS. When I try using Firefox (on Windows 8 Pro 64) it just will not work. I try IE. Not compatible with that browser, tells me to try a different one.
I tap the Android app and... It just works. Now let's think of what can I do to have that same channel on a larger TV screen. Since I don't have a smart TV box (only free to air channels), I can use that old media centre PC I've been trying to set up for 2 years. Pay £100 for Windows and then get that kind of experience? nah. Pay £100 for Apple TV? Looks great at the shop but will not touch my local media collection. Install Ubuntu? OK, but during a recent upgrade the wifi stopped working with no explanation. Maybe I can get Android x86 and hope for the best, or I can get a cheap £50 android box and just get it over with.
ah yes, but you forget that Market = quantity times price. I don't think that we'll see how the real numbers stack up but my gut feeling is that between hardware, cloud service rents and app sales, Apple is ahead of Google.
I read these things and I don't get the Surface (RT) hate, nor the Surface Pro love. For some reason, there are plenty of Slashdotters believing that once iPad reached its market leadership, nobody else can have a worthwhile presence in the new market segment of tablets. I reiterate new market segment, because that's what it still is. A high growth market, because a LOT of people both in rich and medium-rich countries decided they can have a tablet to carry around and as a 2nd screen next to the one where they watch TV. What has this 2nd screen done? 3 things I can think of:
1) It postponed upgrades and replacement of conventional Wintel PCs
2) it highlighted that a whole generation of buyers is not valuing familiarity with Windows as much as previous generations
3) it opened up a new market where every little app can be sold rather than offered as freeware
The first 2 are seriously bad news for a late entrant Microsoft. The upside is that BYOD has more than one meaning: on one hand, conventional Wintel machines are seen as too complex to be practical when compared to ARM tablets; on the other it means that keyboards and work apps are not optional for a lot of people.
Should Microsoft quit or believe that a high growth market can accommodate more than one player and more than one form factor? Slashdot says QUIT, but that might be more wishful thinking than business sense.
So, back to Surface (RT). Hated by many because it doesn't run desktop applications. It does run Windows 8, hated by many because of the tablet-centric start screen. What do people not hate? Surface Pro, because it allows people to spend 2x as the price of the iPad to run desktop applications on a machine built for touch UI. WTF.
The other day, an article about Windows (RT) being useless because Haswell is good enough to run "proper" Windows x86 rather than having to rework everything to work on ARM. So where we're getting is to a state of affairs where x86 improves its efficiency so much faster than ARM that it is conceivable that machines of every size, shape and price can run x86 Windows (or Linux). Just my opinion: I find that hard to believe.
Clearly Microsoft needs the Surface to work. Both to dilute the difference between the conventional PCs and Tablets so that the 2 cash cows don't die and also to have some sort of presence in this new market that sells hardware + cloud services + music&film subscriptions. Should they just drop Surface to cut their losses? only if MS is OK with becoming an Enterprise-only company and risking that the definition of Enterprise services, software and devices changes so much that their slice of that cake becomes unbearably small.
Would I buy a Surface Pro? More likely for me to continue buying low-mid range laptops. A Surface RT? when my Nexus 7 dies I'll think about it.
If Roku can sell an ARM box capable of decompressing Full HD streams for $49, why can't Google get one to run ChromeOS?
Maybe there is more that on reason for that:
a) even Google can't develop 1000000 products and variants at a time:
b) Such a cheap box would compete with android tv box/console offerings, and maybe the DRM isn't ready yet.
Quite remarkable idea for a Firefox extension. I have to try it immediately!
5) every other iPhone release is 'meh'. I'll just wait.
There is one thing that Apple could do that a conventional electronic devices or software house competitor cannot: shift the discussion from wearable tech to pieces of fashionable clothing. If we think about it, the white earbuds are a fashion item as much as an accessory for MP3 players. People made or adapted existing bracelets to wear the iPod Nano as a wristwatch. Loads of armbands were built to accommodate wearing iPods and iPhones when exercising. Nike has sensors for shoes that link up with the current generation of iPod. The tech part they've got nailed already (Sony, Samsung, Apple, Google, ... all of them). Getting people to wear it without looking silly is the challenge and has been for a long time.
What Apple can do rather than try to out-gadget the gadget makers is to design beautiful items of clothing that have the right pockets in the right places to carry the iPhone. Maybe some way to get a microphone and headphones built in to make calls and chat with Siri. There's always money for fashion items and I suspecct that Apple fanboy/girl would be happy to wear the team's colours. Pay £150 for a turtleneck? No problem. They can all wear the same model of iClothes until next year's is released. It would be a bit like Star Trek, with everyone on the planet wearing the same type of clothes.
I wonder what kind of battery and charging frequency is needed for this kind of device.
In fact, what we should say is that if the authorities have done nothing wrong, they should not be concerned with openness and public scrutiny.
Can it play a DVD film stored as an .iso file?
(thanks in advance)
How about strapping a normal smartphone to your wrist? I tried it with elastic bands just for a laugh.
Please do keep your slashdot username active. I will be in touch 5 years from now to check on this.
so what was the correct way forward for those 4 important areas?
I saw this article headline on Feedly, loaded it, went to get a glass of water and when I came back there were only 14 comments, all under my visibility threshold. It sure looked like I was on the wrong side of the exodus.