Sigh... another fool on the Internet with bad grammar and no understanding of economics.
Books don't cost that much to bind and ship. This is definitely part of the cost of a physical book, and should be left off of the cost of an ebook. However, writing and even the non-physical portions of publishing (meaning editing, typesetting, getting cover art, and especially marketing) are not free. Writing in and of itself might not cost much of anything, but there is a huge opportunity cost; the time spent writing could be spent doing some other job that pays a direct wage. For writing professionally to be economical, it needs to be possible to pay off that huge investment of time.
Now, as to what an actually reasonable price is for an ebook... that's an interesting question (and of course there's no one solid answer, because different types of book will command different prices). For your typical mass-market fiction novel of ~300-400 pages, the kind of thing that would be maybe $8 as a paperback at a bookstore, something around $3-$5 (my mother is a published author, but I'm not familiar with the details of cost for each step of the process) for an ebook would still give a decent return on investment for the publisher and author (who might or might not be the same person)
Space is not, in fact, "extremely cold" within the regions of the solar system which a trip to Mars would be concerned with. In fact, the biggest heat-related problem in space engineering is dissipating it fast enough. The sun emits loads of infrared radiation, some of which strikes your spacecraft and raises its temperature (think about the warmth of lying on a tropical beach at noon under a cloudless sky; in or near Earth's orbit, it's *always* that hot). Radiative cooling (the only kind that works in space, unless you carry ejectable mass to use as an expendable heat-sink) depends on the temperature and the area of the radiating object.
In real-world terms, this means that unless you can run the temperature up to very high levels (think "glowing visibly" levels, where blackbody radiation creeps into the visible range), you'll need a lot of radiative surface to dissipate the heat generated by the life support, the electronics, the engines (when applicable), and of course the energy absorbed from the sun (what did you thing happens to the energy in that radiation when the water absorbs it?).
Freezing is definitely not the biggest threat (although it's worth noting that, if somebody were to go wrong with the heat dissipation, water's extremely high specific heat and relatively low thermal expansion make it an excellent heatsink material until the problem can be solved).
BTW, my grandfather builds antennas for NASA space probes. He says the cooling (not something else, like the direction-finding or signal strength, and definitely not the heating) was the biggest challenge for antennas on probes heading out-system from Earth; the antennas are always on the sun-ward side (that also being the Earth-ward side) of the spacecraft.
The general public has never driven 300 miles (without stops of far more than 5 minutes) in their life. Seriously... never. Most people never take road trips. A lot of them never leave a hundred miles or so radius of where they were born. If they need to go somewhere more than a couple hour's driving away, they drive to the airport and take a plane.
When you can charge the car up to full every night while asleep (and energy is cheap), the odds are good that most Tesla owners will never even drive 100 miles - well within the range of even the lowest-tier Model S - without having at least half an hour to charge up. Five minutes for 300 miles is useful for truckers and serious road trippers, but nobody else cares. Hell, even on backpacking trips into the mountains I don't need that; the trailhead is rarely more than 100 miles away, and whiler I can't charge up there, I can recoup some of the energy from regenerative braking coming back down the mountain, and 200 miles is within the range of the larger-battery Model Ss anyhow.
Alt-F4 works perfectly well for Finance (or any other Metro app). Not sure how you managed to mess that up, but I use that shortcut regularly. The mouse action to close a Metro app is not terribly unintuitive, though (drag from the top edge of the screen to the bottom).
I hate to break it to you, but unless your PC doesn't even *have* a graphics card (in which case Win8 will fall back to software rendering), Aero is actually lighter on system resources than the old, non-hardware-accelerated UI. Yes, Microsoft *could* have re-written a "Classic Mode" theme that ran in the desktop compositor, just to keep people who like legacy UI appearances (and uninformed fools like yourself) happy, but there are plenty of higher-priority things for them to do.
Um... no, you twit. Unless you're trying to shoehorn in a completely unrelated discussion about Xbox here, in which case you should have been modded Offtopic, then you're either ignorant or trolling. The new feature does not have the mic or webcam on constantly, nor is everything it hears automatically getting uploaded. Instead, it's the same as a feature in Windows Phone (both WP7 and WP8): whip out your phone (or in this case, tablet or possibly laptop), tap a button, and enter a locked-down version of the Camera app that allows you to a picture without needing to enter your password.
Useful feature, nothing new in a Microsoft product (just not previously in this product line), no privacy issue at all, and not even vaguely related to Xbox One... but your post bashes Microsoft, so you apparently got modded up for it anyhow. Idiots.
SkyDrive integration doesn't even make sense (in a conceptual sense, not a "what were they thinking" sense) unless you're signing in with a "Microsoft" account (what used to be called Live account). A business machine will be using domain accounts, not Microsoft accounts, so your whole concern is meaningless... as you'd have seen if you thought about it a bit.
Or just WinKey, then type calc and hit enter. The classic calc.exe will hit before (Metro) Calculator in the search results, possibly unless you ran the new Calculator first instead.
That's blatantly untrue for a large number of reasons, the most obvious one being that Win7, Vista, XP (for a while), Server 2003, Server 2008, and Server 2008 R2 are all still supported, and all still have classic Start menus. Therefore, they obviously still have the code, even if they did have to re-integrate it.
Also, the early (but post-BUILD) betas still had the Start menu (if you disabled the "redpill" in the registry). I suppose it's possible they obliterated it later, but I doubt it.
Finally, while they might have done the equivalent of "p4 obliterate", I rather doubt that's what they actually did; Microsoft doesn't use Perforce (although the Windows team does use something similar).
Things Win8 does that Win7 doesn't (out of the box):
* Mount ISOs.
* Include anti-virus.
* Sync settings and bookmarks across systems.
* Allow you to access Exchange servers (through ActiveSync, not just IMAP/POP3).
* Let you launch things like Command Prompt as Admin with two clicks from anywhere (right-click on Start button / Win+X menu).
* Automate the process of reinstalling the OS while preserving your files.
* Powerful virtualization (Client Hyper-V, though it's disabled by default).
* A more informative and more powerful Task Manager.
* Smaller memory footprint (page combining).
* Improved scheduling support for the latest AMD processors.
* Improved multi-monitor support (wallpaper spanning, taskbar spanning, icons showing on specific taskbars, etc.)
* First-party PDF reader.... lots more, but that's a good start. Every version of Windows - even the much-reviled ME - has introduced new features that no previous version had. Without going into "Metro" at all except for the built-in email and Reader apps (which are fully usable without a touchscreen, as all Metro apps are required to be), I've given you a non-exhaustive list of Win8 advantages for non-touchscreen users. It's not that hard to find them; just actually use the OS (even without a touchscreen and staying almost entirely on the desktop) for a while.
Yes, and always has in fact. The trick is to make sure you've got the Desktop (and not something running *on* said Desktop) selected. One way to do this is the Win+D (Show/Hide Desktop toggle) shortcut. In Win8, Win+D also will take you directly do the desktop from anywhere, including either a Metro app or the Start screen.
I do wonder if you actually know what you're talking about...
I don't. He (or she) doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, not when it comes to security.
If this wasn't eminently reproducible it probably wouldn't be an exploit to begin with.
That's a dead giveaway, even if it wasn't already obvious. Many, many security bugs repro under specific conditions that may be common (or not; it really doesn't matter) on real-world deployments, but don't closely match developer/tester machines (for example, the POC requires having some software installed that the person reporting the issue has but the developers don't, so it never repros for the devs and the researcher doesn't know why. Or, something that only repros on single-core computers would still hit a non-trivial portion of the world, and would have hit a lot more of it a few years ago, but no dev in the last five years would tolerate working on such a crippled box). Or they may be due to a 1-in-65000 chance, which sounds small (and is, when it's one person trying to reproduce it) but when each infected machine is repeatedly attacking every potential target it can find, that's still plenty dangerous. There's lots of other eye-roll-worthy material in that line, too (for example, the suggestion that vulnerability reports are likely to correctly assess the impact of exploitation is not well borne out in reality).
As for automated regression testing, that will catch a lot of the potential issues, but it won't catch all of them and (most tellingly, here) it is very unlikely to catch security issues. Security testing is very different from functionality testing; the difference between "does it work correctly?" and "can I make it work incorrectly?" is huge. Many of the types of security testing that can practically be automated take a very long time to run; a web scanner looking for XSS might finish in minutes or hours (and I've yet to see one that can find as many issues as manual testing can), but a serious fuzz testing pass can easily take at least a week all by itself, and that's assuming that you are ready to start running it (fuzzer is configured, templates are available, infrastructure is ready) as soon as the fix is checked in. Some types of security issue, like TOCTOU, aren't going to be tested for at all unless the test is explicitly designed to check for the possibility (generally speaking, TOCTOU-vulnerable code functions perfectly unless an outside actor - the attacker - intentionally gets into a race with it). Quick and dirty fixes, even if "correct", also tend to introduce lots of side-channel attacks that may only be possible to spot through code review, such as a fix to an authentication system introducing the possibility of a timing attack.
Security is a messy, nasty, and time-consuming business, and the attackers are always the ones with all the time. Writing secure code requires training/domain-specific knowledge that most developers don't have, accepting costs (both in development time and execution speed) that most developers try to optimize away, and avoiding assumptions (one of my favorites is "but the user would never do that!") that are otherwise accurate enough for most development. Security test requires thinking like an attacker (a skill relatively few people seem to have), writing test code that explicitly stresses the unlikely scenarios (the things that normal testing didn't cover), and patience, and at the end of the day all you can do is hope it's good enough.
That's... wow. I could see a miscalculation of the weight based on systematic rounding errors piling up across a huge number of individually inconsequential items, for example (although getting to 100T error would be impressive). But displacement? That's just absurd. For a sub, displacement is just the volume of the sub (something extremely easy to calculate) and byouancy (what I suspect the AC above me meant) is displacement multiplied by the density of the displaced water (this number varies a bit based on what kind of water you're in, but the ranges are relatively constrained and very well known). Maximum buoyancy being 100T too low is a collossal cock-up of a design error.
Well, Windows RT has IE with Flash (and that's not even x86, but is very locked down by default). IE is already present in Box 360s, and was mentioned several times for the Xbox One, so that will definitely be present (Flash is unknown). Arbitrary third-party plugins are almost guaranteed to be not present, though.
There is an NT kernel in there, as well as a whatever-they-call-the-Xbox-kernel for the gaming portions; you'll be able to switch back and forth between a gaming mode and a "runs stuff that runs on NT" mode very quickly... but I suspect that the "stuff that runs on NT" part is going to be extremely limited. Music, videos, web browsing, and probably not much more.
Linux is right out until the root of the system is cracked, I suspect. Too bad; it's a powerful x86 box.
Annoyingly, Indies these days are showing a trend toward only publishing on Steam. If I can't buy the game straight from the developer, or through a quality (DRM-free, among other characteristics) retailer like Good Old Games, I won't support it (it's OK if they *also* want to publish on Steam so long as the other copies don't languish unmaintained). Unfortunately, sometimes they don't bother announcing "oh by the way, this will only be available on Steam" until after the Kickstarter (or other such thing) period ends....
... except that you can, have been able to for years, and tons of people *have* made Xbox 360 games and published them online. They're even distributed on Xbox Live, under the completely sneaky and unexpected name of Xbox Live Indie Games. http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-US
There are catches, of course: the online publication requires a $100/year account, and the games can only be developed using XNA (which is a quite nice framework but produces CIL assemblies, not native code). The tradeoffs are at least a modicum of curation of the store content and an architecture independence that should (don't know if this has been announced) allow running XBLIG, unmodified, on the Xbox One even though it runs on a different architecture than the 360.
Eh... I've seen a lot of misinformation on this subject. Not saying that the core message (no back-compat for XB360 games) is wrong, but there's a lot of details out there which are.
For example, the usual reason given - the switch from PPC to x86 - is invalid on the face of it; the 360 runs original Xbox games, which were written for x86 (it uses emulation to do this). Relatedly, the XB1 should be able (by that logic) to run OXB games (same architecture). There's also no legitimacy to the claim that indie arcade games won't run because of the architecture; those games are written using XNA (a variant of the.NET framework aimed at gaming) and compile to CIL, which will run on any architecture with the requisite JIT compiler (r interpreter, if you didn't mind it being very slow). For example, WP7 and ZuneHD games are also XNA games, but both devices run on the ARM architecture (although the WP7 "emulator" is actually an x86 VM and can load the same package files as the phone, so you can be damn sure that the code produced by the XNA compiler is architecture-agnostic). Ignore any idiots who claim that the ORX used the same architecture as the 360; that is flat-out wrong, and the difficulties in getting the emulator just right are why many OXB games didn't initially work quite right on the 360.
Of course, the 360's CPU is not nearly as much less powerful than the XB1's CPU than the OXB's CPU is than the 360's. There may just not be room for emulation overhead in the difference between the 360 and the ONE. XNA and OSB games should still work, though...
How is the Surface *Pro* a disaster? Microsoft appears to be selling them about as fast as they can manufacture them. The Surface RT (uses ARM chips and runs the crippled-desktop Windows RT) has had disappointing sales, not the Pro.
Re:I wonder what's going on at Google's management
on
Google Drops XMPP Support
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't usually say this, but mod this AC up! I don't know what the hell Larry is smoking, but it's like he's trapped inside a reversed RDF that completely hides the real world from him. Well, either that or he's the most two-faced liar I've seen outside of a career politician in years...
Um, what? Unless it's for WiFi or NFC or something, I really doubt it does.
Typical cellular bands are at frequencies like 800, 850, 900, 1700, 1900, 2100 MHz. 2100 to 2400 may not sound like a big jump, but in radio it's quite significant.
The first three are valid responses. The fourth, although I despise it, is actually illegal under the DMCA (circumvention of DRM). Microsoft doesn't have to circumvent anything to display ad-free YouTube videos; they're just playing the files as Google serves them (currently freely, unrestrictedly, and without ads in them).
Microsoft also used to develop and distribute IE for the popular Unix systems of the day. That didn't mean people wouldn't (rightly) rag on them for failing to follow web standards.
Not that the situation is actually as analogous as JustNiz implied, but your response isn't really a meaningful counterpoint either. I can block ads on YouTube.com all I want (it's easier on not-phone platforms than on phones, but it can be done on either).
The whole point of "you bought it" is a total red herring here. Is region locking OK by you and free DVDs that are handed out to anybody who asks? Because that is exactly how YouTube serves video files!
Also, no, they don't need to generate revenue. They want to generate revenue, but they aren't entitled to it. It's not a good business model to spend money (hosting/serving video files) giving stuff away for free. However, that's what Google is doing here; it's not the responsibility of any other entity (not the government, and certainly not a competing company) to ensure that they manage to earn revenue despite giving the content away for free. If Google doesn't like what Microsoft's app does, they can either (try to) refuse to serve it any video content (good luck with that), or they can stop giving away the content for free.
Well, or they can go complain to somebody in government, I guess. The courts have been braindead enough to uphold TOS as though they're actual contracts on occasion, though not often. The usual argument is copyright law, and that's completely off the table here; Microsoft is displaying the videos exactly as Google is serving them!
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh... another fool on the Internet with bad grammar and no understanding of economics.
Books don't cost that much to bind and ship. This is definitely part of the cost of a physical book, and should be left off of the cost of an ebook. However, writing and even the non-physical portions of publishing (meaning editing, typesetting, getting cover art, and especially marketing) are not free. Writing in and of itself might not cost much of anything, but there is a huge opportunity cost; the time spent writing could be spent doing some other job that pays a direct wage. For writing professionally to be economical, it needs to be possible to pay off that huge investment of time.
Now, as to what an actually reasonable price is for an ebook... that's an interesting question (and of course there's no one solid answer, because different types of book will command different prices). For your typical mass-market fiction novel of ~300-400 pages, the kind of thing that would be maybe $8 as a paperback at a bookstore, something around $3-$5 (my mother is a published author, but I'm not familiar with the details of cost for each step of the process) for an ebook would still give a decent return on investment for the publisher and author (who might or might not be the same person)
Space is not, in fact, "extremely cold" within the regions of the solar system which a trip to Mars would be concerned with. In fact, the biggest heat-related problem in space engineering is dissipating it fast enough. The sun emits loads of infrared radiation, some of which strikes your spacecraft and raises its temperature (think about the warmth of lying on a tropical beach at noon under a cloudless sky; in or near Earth's orbit, it's *always* that hot). Radiative cooling (the only kind that works in space, unless you carry ejectable mass to use as an expendable heat-sink) depends on the temperature and the area of the radiating object.
In real-world terms, this means that unless you can run the temperature up to very high levels (think "glowing visibly" levels, where blackbody radiation creeps into the visible range), you'll need a lot of radiative surface to dissipate the heat generated by the life support, the electronics, the engines (when applicable), and of course the energy absorbed from the sun (what did you thing happens to the energy in that radiation when the water absorbs it?).
Freezing is definitely not the biggest threat (although it's worth noting that, if somebody were to go wrong with the heat dissipation, water's extremely high specific heat and relatively low thermal expansion make it an excellent heatsink material until the problem can be solved).
BTW, my grandfather builds antennas for NASA space probes. He says the cooling (not something else, like the direction-finding or signal strength, and definitely not the heating) was the biggest challenge for antennas on probes heading out-system from Earth; the antennas are always on the sun-ward side (that also being the Earth-ward side) of the spacecraft.
The general public has never driven 300 miles (without stops of far more than 5 minutes) in their life. Seriously... never. Most people never take road trips. A lot of them never leave a hundred miles or so radius of where they were born. If they need to go somewhere more than a couple hour's driving away, they drive to the airport and take a plane.
When you can charge the car up to full every night while asleep (and energy is cheap), the odds are good that most Tesla owners will never even drive 100 miles - well within the range of even the lowest-tier Model S - without having at least half an hour to charge up. Five minutes for 300 miles is useful for truckers and serious road trippers, but nobody else cares. Hell, even on backpacking trips into the mountains I don't need that; the trailhead is rarely more than 100 miles away, and whiler I can't charge up there, I can recoup some of the energy from regenerative braking coming back down the mountain, and 200 miles is within the range of the larger-battery Model Ss anyhow.
Alt-F4 works perfectly well for Finance (or any other Metro app). Not sure how you managed to mess that up, but I use that shortcut regularly.
The mouse action to close a Metro app is not terribly unintuitive, though (drag from the top edge of the screen to the bottom).
I hate to break it to you, but unless your PC doesn't even *have* a graphics card (in which case Win8 will fall back to software rendering), Aero is actually lighter on system resources than the old, non-hardware-accelerated UI. Yes, Microsoft *could* have re-written a "Classic Mode" theme that ran in the desktop compositor, just to keep people who like legacy UI appearances (and uninformed fools like yourself) happy, but there are plenty of higher-priority things for them to do.
Um... no, you twit. Unless you're trying to shoehorn in a completely unrelated discussion about Xbox here, in which case you should have been modded Offtopic, then you're either ignorant or trolling. The new feature does not have the mic or webcam on constantly, nor is everything it hears automatically getting uploaded. Instead, it's the same as a feature in Windows Phone (both WP7 and WP8): whip out your phone (or in this case, tablet or possibly laptop), tap a button, and enter a locked-down version of the Camera app that allows you to a picture without needing to enter your password.
Useful feature, nothing new in a Microsoft product (just not previously in this product line), no privacy issue at all, and not even vaguely related to Xbox One... but your post bashes Microsoft, so you apparently got modded up for it anyhow. Idiots.
Searching doesn't take more clicks than before... open Start (WinKey or single mouse click), then type.
SkyDrive integration doesn't even make sense (in a conceptual sense, not a "what were they thinking" sense) unless you're signing in with a "Microsoft" account (what used to be called Live account). A business machine will be using domain accounts, not Microsoft accounts, so your whole concern is meaningless... as you'd have seen if you thought about it a bit.
Or just WinKey, then type calc and hit enter. The classic calc.exe will hit before (Metro) Calculator in the search results, possibly unless you ran the new Calculator first instead.
That's blatantly untrue for a large number of reasons, the most obvious one being that Win7, Vista, XP (for a while), Server 2003, Server 2008, and Server 2008 R2 are all still supported, and all still have classic Start menus. Therefore, they obviously still have the code, even if they did have to re-integrate it.
Also, the early (but post-BUILD) betas still had the Start menu (if you disabled the "redpill" in the registry). I suppose it's possible they obliterated it later, but I doubt it.
Finally, while they might have done the equivalent of "p4 obliterate", I rather doubt that's what they actually did; Microsoft doesn't use Perforce (although the Windows team does use something similar).
Things Win8 does that Win7 doesn't (out of the box): ... lots more, but that's a good start. Every version of Windows - even the much-reviled ME - has introduced new features that no previous version had. Without going into "Metro" at all except for the built-in email and Reader apps (which are fully usable without a touchscreen, as all Metro apps are required to be), I've given you a non-exhaustive list of Win8 advantages for non-touchscreen users. It's not that hard to find them; just actually use the OS (even without a touchscreen and staying almost entirely on the desktop) for a while.
* Mount ISOs.
* Include anti-virus.
* Sync settings and bookmarks across systems.
* Allow you to access Exchange servers (through ActiveSync, not just IMAP/POP3).
* Let you launch things like Command Prompt as Admin with two clicks from anywhere (right-click on Start button / Win+X menu).
* Automate the process of reinstalling the OS while preserving your files.
* Powerful virtualization (Client Hyper-V, though it's disabled by default).
* A more informative and more powerful Task Manager.
* Smaller memory footprint (page combining).
* Improved scheduling support for the latest AMD processors.
* Improved multi-monitor support (wallpaper spanning, taskbar spanning, icons showing on specific taskbars, etc.)
* First-party PDF reader.
Yes, and always has in fact. The trick is to make sure you've got the Desktop (and not something running *on* said Desktop) selected. One way to do this is the Win+D (Show/Hide Desktop toggle) shortcut. In Win8, Win+D also will take you directly do the desktop from anywhere, including either a Metro app or the Start screen.
I don't. He (or she) doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, not when it comes to security.
That's a dead giveaway, even if it wasn't already obvious. Many, many security bugs repro under specific conditions that may be common (or not; it really doesn't matter) on real-world deployments, but don't closely match developer/tester machines (for example, the POC requires having some software installed that the person reporting the issue has but the developers don't, so it never repros for the devs and the researcher doesn't know why. Or, something that only repros on single-core computers would still hit a non-trivial portion of the world, and would have hit a lot more of it a few years ago, but no dev in the last five years would tolerate working on such a crippled box). Or they may be due to a 1-in-65000 chance, which sounds small (and is, when it's one person trying to reproduce it) but when each infected machine is repeatedly attacking every potential target it can find, that's still plenty dangerous. There's lots of other eye-roll-worthy material in that line, too (for example, the suggestion that vulnerability reports are likely to correctly assess the impact of exploitation is not well borne out in reality).
As for automated regression testing, that will catch a lot of the potential issues, but it won't catch all of them and (most tellingly, here) it is very unlikely to catch security issues. Security testing is very different from functionality testing; the difference between "does it work correctly?" and "can I make it work incorrectly?" is huge. Many of the types of security testing that can practically be automated take a very long time to run; a web scanner looking for XSS might finish in minutes or hours (and I've yet to see one that can find as many issues as manual testing can), but a serious fuzz testing pass can easily take at least a week all by itself, and that's assuming that you are ready to start running it (fuzzer is configured, templates are available, infrastructure is ready) as soon as the fix is checked in. Some types of security issue, like TOCTOU, aren't going to be tested for at all unless the test is explicitly designed to check for the possibility (generally speaking, TOCTOU-vulnerable code functions perfectly unless an outside actor - the attacker - intentionally gets into a race with it). Quick and dirty fixes, even if "correct", also tend to introduce lots of side-channel attacks that may only be possible to spot through code review, such as a fix to an authentication system introducing the possibility of a timing attack.
Security is a messy, nasty, and time-consuming business, and the attackers are always the ones with all the time. Writing secure code requires training/domain-specific knowledge that most developers don't have, accepting costs (both in development time and execution speed) that most developers try to optimize away, and avoiding assumptions (one of my favorites is "but the user would never do that!") that are otherwise accurate enough for most development. Security test requires thinking like an attacker (a skill relatively few people seem to have), writing test code that explicitly stresses the unlikely scenarios (the things that normal testing didn't cover), and patience, and at the end of the day all you can do is hope it's good enough.
That's... wow. I could see a miscalculation of the weight based on systematic rounding errors piling up across a huge number of individually inconsequential items, for example (although getting to 100T error would be impressive). But displacement? That's just absurd. For a sub, displacement is just the volume of the sub (something extremely easy to calculate) and byouancy (what I suspect the AC above me meant) is displacement multiplied by the density of the displaced water (this number varies a bit based on what kind of water you're in, but the ranges are relatively constrained and very well known). Maximum buoyancy being 100T too low is a collossal cock-up of a design error.
Well, Windows RT has IE with Flash (and that's not even x86, but is very locked down by default). IE is already present in Box 360s, and was mentioned several times for the Xbox One, so that will definitely be present (Flash is unknown). Arbitrary third-party plugins are almost guaranteed to be not present, though.
There is an NT kernel in there, as well as a whatever-they-call-the-Xbox-kernel for the gaming portions; you'll be able to switch back and forth between a gaming mode and a "runs stuff that runs on NT" mode very quickly... but I suspect that the "stuff that runs on NT" part is going to be extremely limited. Music, videos, web browsing, and probably not much more.
Linux is right out until the root of the system is cracked, I suspect. Too bad; it's a powerful x86 box.
Annoyingly, Indies these days are showing a trend toward only publishing on Steam. If I can't buy the game straight from the developer, or through a quality (DRM-free, among other characteristics) retailer like Good Old Games, I won't support it (it's OK if they *also* want to publish on Steam so long as the other copies don't languish unmaintained). Unfortunately, sometimes they don't bother announcing "oh by the way, this will only be available on Steam" until after the Kickstarter (or other such thing) period ends....
... except that you can, have been able to for years, and tons of people *have* made Xbox 360 games and published them online. They're even distributed on Xbox Live, under the completely sneaky and unexpected name of Xbox Live Indie Games. http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-US
There are catches, of course: the online publication requires a $100/year account, and the games can only be developed using XNA (which is a quite nice framework but produces CIL assemblies, not native code). The tradeoffs are at least a modicum of curation of the store content and an architecture independence that should (don't know if this has been announced) allow running XBLIG, unmodified, on the Xbox One even though it runs on a different architecture than the 360.
Eh... I've seen a lot of misinformation on this subject. Not saying that the core message (no back-compat for XB360 games) is wrong, but there's a lot of details out there which are.
For example, the usual reason given - the switch from PPC to x86 - is invalid on the face of it; the 360 runs original Xbox games, which were written for x86 (it uses emulation to do this). Relatedly, the XB1 should be able (by that logic) to run OXB games (same architecture). There's also no legitimacy to the claim that indie arcade games won't run because of the architecture; those games are written using XNA (a variant of the .NET framework aimed at gaming) and compile to CIL, which will run on any architecture with the requisite JIT compiler (r interpreter, if you didn't mind it being very slow). For example, WP7 and ZuneHD games are also XNA games, but both devices run on the ARM architecture (although the WP7 "emulator" is actually an x86 VM and can load the same package files as the phone, so you can be damn sure that the code produced by the XNA compiler is architecture-agnostic). Ignore any idiots who claim that the ORX used the same architecture as the 360; that is flat-out wrong, and the difficulties in getting the emulator just right are why many OXB games didn't initially work quite right on the 360.
Of course, the 360's CPU is not nearly as much less powerful than the XB1's CPU than the OXB's CPU is than the 360's. There may just not be room for emulation overhead in the difference between the 360 and the ONE. XNA and OSB games should still work, though...
How is the Surface *Pro* a disaster? Microsoft appears to be selling them about as fast as they can manufacture them. The Surface RT (uses ARM chips and runs the crippled-desktop Windows RT) has had disappointing sales, not the Pro.
I don't usually say this, but mod this AC up! I don't know what the hell Larry is smoking, but it's like he's trapped inside a reversed RDF that completely hides the real world from him. Well, either that or he's the most two-faced liar I've seen outside of a career politician in years...
Um, what? Unless it's for WiFi or NFC or something, I really doubt it does.
Typical cellular bands are at frequencies like 800, 850, 900, 1700, 1900, 2100 MHz. 2100 to 2400 may not sound like a big jump, but in radio it's quite significant.
The first three are valid responses. The fourth, although I despise it, is actually illegal under the DMCA (circumvention of DRM). Microsoft doesn't have to circumvent anything to display ad-free YouTube videos; they're just playing the files as Google serves them (currently freely, unrestrictedly, and without ads in them).
Microsoft also used to develop and distribute IE for the popular Unix systems of the day. That didn't mean people wouldn't (rightly) rag on them for failing to follow web standards.
Not that the situation is actually as analogous as JustNiz implied, but your response isn't really a meaningful counterpoint either. I can block ads on YouTube.com all I want (it's easier on not-phone platforms than on phones, but it can be done on either).
The whole point of "you bought it" is a total red herring here. Is region locking OK by you and free DVDs that are handed out to anybody who asks? Because that is exactly how YouTube serves video files!
Also, no, they don't need to generate revenue. They want to generate revenue, but they aren't entitled to it. It's not a good business model to spend money (hosting/serving video files) giving stuff away for free. However, that's what Google is doing here; it's not the responsibility of any other entity (not the government, and certainly not a competing company) to ensure that they manage to earn revenue despite giving the content away for free. If Google doesn't like what Microsoft's app does, they can either (try to) refuse to serve it any video content (good luck with that), or they can stop giving away the content for free.
Well, or they can go complain to somebody in government, I guess. The courts have been braindead enough to uphold TOS as though they're actual contracts on occasion, though not often. The usual argument is copyright law, and that's completely off the table here; Microsoft is displaying the videos exactly as Google is serving them!
DVRs with "skip forward 30 seconds" button are also evil in your book, I take it?