In this particular instance, you actually want to say "password" of the person - it's actually right there in the protocol name - but yes. SRP is fantastic for situations where you want to authenticate over an unsecured connection. It is incapable of handling registration over such a connection though, unless there's somebody else's password you use first to establish a secure channel. This means it is not a viable replacement for SSL/TLS in common web usage.
SRP does also have a "key" of sorts, but it's public info. Additionally, the server doesn't actually store the password, only a password verifier. Once a password is verified, as a side effect of the verification both sides now have a high-entropy random value which has never been sent over the wire and cannot be deduced from traffic that was (without knowledge of the password); this value is suitable for a symmetric session key. In many ways, SRP looks like an ideal protocol... until you ask how the server gets the password verifier in the first place. Doing that part over an unsecured channel opens you up to MitM attack as surely as trusting a malicious SSL certificate authority does.
Thank you, yes. I forgot CondoInternet, because they only service specific buildings (yes, buildings - not neighborhoods, never mind cities, but actual specific apartment/condominium complexes). It's (currently) a great incentive to be in one of those buildings... but I can't really count them as a viable ISP option in Seattle in general. Of course, GigabitSeattle won't roll out across the entire city (never mind the suburbs) for some time, but a decent portion of the city's population will be covered within the year.
What I'm hoping for are some other upstart competitiors to Google Fiber. Here in Seattle we have (or rather, should soon have) http://gigabitseattle.com/ which looks to be similar service to Google Fiber but without the Google part. I don't want Google to become the next 800lb gorilla (or Comcast) of ISPs, I just want A) something better than the current sorry state of ISP options B) an end to ISP giants of *any* sort C) some actual competition in this space.
Right now, at least in the Seattle area, we *almost* have C, though Comcast is the definite giant. But if Google Fiber (or Gigabit Seattle) crushes Comcast and Centurylink and Clear and Frontier, we might get A but only at the cost of making B and C much worse for at least the local market.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. The specific improvements that Win8 brings (which mostly relate to things like taskbar spanning and keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures) are irrelevant to tablet usage. If you're using a tablet with mouse, keyboard, and one or more external monitors for any length of time, you're not really using a tablet - you're using a desktop that happens to store its computing guts in a tablet shell. That's a perfectly valid thing to use a tablet for on occasion, but at best it's one less reason against buying a tablet; it's not a reason *to* buy one because, if that's the environment you want, a desktop makes far more economic sense.
Bear in mind that I was arguing against the claim that using Win8 on a desktop was an afterthought. The basic multi-display functionality most relevant to tablets - things like the ability to choose between mirrored and independent displays, move windows between displays, do things like PowerPoint's presenter mode (your notes and such on the small screen, your slides maximized on the other), and disconnect an external display gracefully... well, that's nothing new. Windows has had all that since Vista if not earlier.
That's a good point. I was looking at it from a typical-use-case scenario, rather than a can-it-be-used-for scenario - it makes little sense to buy a tablet plus a bunch of peripherals when what you really want is a workstation, but it makes a lot of sense to buy a workstation with multiple monitors and indeed most Microsoft offices that I've seen seem to have at least three - but I could see somebody using multi-mon from a tablet on an as-needed basis. It's definitely more of a desktop-oriented feature, though; basic multi-mon support was already present, but the improvements in Win8 (taskbar spanning, sticky corners so you can hit corner buttons easier, wallpaper spanning, hotkeys to send apps to different displays, etc.) are pretty much all intended for a situation where you have two or more equal-sized and permanently connected displays.
I don't think that Microsoft people do use Metro much, if at all. I know a number of folks on the Win8 security team, and none of them or anybody they know inside the company has much use for Metro on their workstations.
The Start screen is a red herring; except in very specific cases it's not meaningfully slower or faster than the old ways of launching programs, mostly due to the fact that taskbar pinning, Start search, and muscle memory all still work - it's just a slightly different muscle memory if you use a mouse. The actual Metro programs, though... unless Microsoft has some secret internal Metro versions of Visual Studio, Outlook/PowerPoint/Word/Excel, Visio, WinDbg, Hyper-V Manager, and whatever other tools they use on a regular basis (bug trackers, source control and build automation systems, test automation tools, etc.), I doubt they have any more use for Metro than I do. (Metro) Windows Mail doesn't have anywhere near the features needed. They might use a Metro version of Lync, I guess...
I can't tell if you're bashing MS for adding a feature, claiming it's not actually a feature because it involves typing commands, claiming that it's something new to Windows in any way, or are simply trolling. You seem to think that search and command lines have anything whatsoever to do with each other, though.
I'm going to conclude the one thing that your post *does* clearly indicate: you're an idiot.
Keyboards are far faster than mice for any competent computer user. Desktop icons can also be covered up by open windows, and there's limited space on the taskbar. Hierarchical menus with a mouse are slow as hell, and require knowing and understanding the path; search only requires knowing your target.
supporting non-touch screen devices like most recent laptops and desktops was an afterthought
If you sincerely think that, you're so deluded by Microsoft-hate that there's really no hope for you. Are you unaware that the entire Windows team (from developers to designers) is required to "dogfood" Windows versions in development, and that the entire company is encouraged to switch to new versions well before they hit release? Here's another tip: Microsoft employees develop on desktop computers, using desktop applications, and the vast majority of them don't have touchscreens. Trust me, Microsoft employees knew what Win8 was going to be like, and made damn sure it was usable for their work; they had to, because it's what they use for work.
If you'd actually try using it much you might have noticed that Win8 actually has a large number of productivity enhancers for desktop use. Improved multi-monitor support is irrelevant on tablets, as is Client Hyper-V. The Start search is still present, which is obviously not a tablet-oriented feature (but, since its introduction in Vista, has been a far quicker way to launch programs on a desktop than either the old Start menu or the new Start screen). Task Manager was greatly improved, despite being very much a tool for desktops, not tablets. The new Win+X menu (also reachable by right-clicking the Start button) is very handy as well, especially if you customize it. That's purely a desktop/laptop feature; it's almost inaccessible on most tablets!
The user-facing ads are full of Metro and tablets, yes... but it is nonetheless extremely useful and usable on the desktop as well (I've been using it on mine). I pretty much completely avoid Metro, aside from occasionally pinning Skype to the side of the screen while on a call. Visual Studio, EVE Online and all my other games, VMs with Linux and FreeBSD, VLC for media, Office and Foxit for productivity, Pidgin for chat... what do I need Metro for? The OS works fine without it. Install one of the classic Start menu utilities if the new Start screen offends you too badly...
Down with DRM! We hate your DRM! We demand you use our preferred DRM!
s/Steam/Good Old Games/
(or any other non-DRM vendor).
Steam is just another form of DRM. Can't play on two machines at once, even on different games, if they share Steam accounts. Can't resell or loan games. Can't play games without an internet connection to Steam (either current, or recent within the time limit on Steam's offline mode). Can't play games if Steam's service goes away. Can't play games if Valve decides they don't like you and kills your Steam account. Can't play games if somebody jacks your Steam account and you can't sign on anymore.
Since the point at which I wanted to re-sell a game that I felt Valve had damaged the gameplay experience of beyond repair, and was unable to do so due to the DRM, I have refused to purchase any more Valve products and try to avoid even buying anything through Steam, because they get a cut of that and it shows support for a DRM scheme. Don't "buy" DRMed products! This isn't a new problem, yet for some reason people keep buying Steam stuff anyhow...
It's a shame that reading comprehension is so poor on this site that you, JabberWokky, are currently rated higher than Loosifur.
Loosifur's post was that it was tasteless and cruel to make cracks about a person immediately after his death, and he therefore, despite admiring Ebert's skill as a critic, feels less sympathy than he should. That's a well-reasoned argument, goes out of its way to point out that he was familiar with the person in question, and was certainly not in any way intended as humorous nor written in a cruel fashion. It was also not even derogatory about his death or manner thereof; it merely highlighted the connection between Ebert and speaking on death. It was, at worst, merely a comment on the man himself made at a time when you didn't want to hear it. It was, however, a quite proper critique of the man's behavior.
Then you, long-time/. member JabberWokky, come along and cry "Hypocrisy!" This is apparently based solely on the content of his post and your lack of reading comprehension. You're even quite snarky about it - making "cracks", in fact - though not of course about anybody's death. For your conveinece, here is a summary of some of the finer points of the English language with which you appear to be unfamiliar:
"attacked somebody" is not at all the same thing as "made cracks about the death of [somebody] following his death".
Tastelessness, as a matter of taste, is a personal thing, however I see absolutely nothing cruel in pointing out that one does not feel more sympathetic toward somebody else than they should.
Note that Loosifur never claimed to be unsympathetic to the man's death, merely that he did not feel an excess of sympathy.
Excess: a greater amount than there should be, a wasteful amount, more than their should be.
Nothing in Loosifur's post states that to attack somebody - or even to crack jokes about their death - following their death is tasteless or cruel. Some people may feel that way, but he never stated it. Instead, he stated that when Ebert did so, he did so in a manner that was unacceptably tasteless and cruel. You apparently believe that Loosifur felt that the "attack" itself was tasteless and cruel.
One could certainly imagine cracking jokes which were tasteless but not cruel. The usual response to such things is merely "too soon" and nothing worse.
You'd have had a stronger argument if you'd chosen the "cast aspersions" sentence to target your sarcasm, but at least Loosifur targeted Ebert's behavior while still showing his resepct for the man in other areas... which is more than Ebert did, hence the fully appropriate casting of aspersions.
The hack to remove that "forbidden"-ness of third-party desktop apps is widely published, has been noted and then ignored by Microsoft, and works great (the current version also allows kernel-mode code).
Sideloading (a term which only reasonably applies to store apps; anything else would just be called "installing") is fully possible; Microsoft has not only failed to forbid it, they actually publish step-by-step instructions for it along with a warning to beware of untrusted sideloaded apps. It is also free. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/Hh974578.aspx
Win32 is an API, and is very much present on Windows RT (along with WinRT, the new API for Windows Store apps, which can be used on x86 and x64 machines as well). It's true that x86-compiled software is difficult (not impossible - there's an emulation layer, but it currently supports relatively few system DLLs - and support is all the time) to run on RT, but open-source software can be recompiled,.NET software can usually run unmodified, Java software can run with some restrictions (via a.NET-based Java runtime called IKVM), Python is partially available (the foreign function interface is full of assembly and taking time to port), and in theory other languages are also possible.
A large number of people appear to actually believe that RT has no desktop at all, possible because MS almost never shows it in their ads. I was attempting to correct this misconception. "Windows 8 without the normal desktop mode" and "Windows 8 compiled for ARM and requiring a small unlock utility before it can runt third-party desktop apps" are very different things.
Not really true (to take an example from the parent himself, he claims that he runs "multiple VMs" which, with the amount of RAM and CPU capabilities of a netbook, will run like shit) but beside the point - his "argument" if you can call it that is that a netbook can do anything the Surface Pro can do; mine was that he was full of shit and I backed up that statement.
Lighter weight and thinner chassis are *huge* determining factors in laptop/tablet choice. A netbook will be thicker and heavier, while being made of vastly inferior matericals and therefore also much less durable. You may claim that durability doesn't matter when the price is that low, but that's really not true; unless the HDD manages to survive unscathed and can be transferred into a waiting body immediately, the hassle of needing to replace netbooks is going to rapidly exceed the value of their low price tag if you use them in any kind of mildly rough environment.
Full disk encryption is a huge deal for business users. The average bum on the street doesn't give a damn, but for the large number of people who have jobs involving sensitive data of any kind (client info, patient info, tax info, PII, financial info, source code, unreleased audio or video, cryptographic keys or other important credentials, important company memos or other internal communications, the list goes on an on...), it's vital. You may think that losing a $300 device hurts a lot less than losing a $1100 one, but to a business, the cost of dealing with the potential leak of the data on an employee's laptop - even just email - is far, far higher that the price difference of the machines. In my particular job, it would also cost me quite dearly; the price difference would have been made up in a couple days of the salary I would no longer have.
As for the digitizer, I'm not personally an artistic sort, but I know many people who are. The ability to use a pressure-sensitive stylus directly on a high-resolution display? That's a huge, huge deal. For the rest of us, it's an alternate input device that's faster that touch for entering text (assuming you passed second-grade handwriting classes, which is actually more than it really needs for recognition), more accurate than touch for precise clicking, and works with gloves on.
Your $300 netbook uses solid-state storage, has a Wacom digitizer, weighs 2lbs (under one kilo), has 4GB of RAM and runs a 64-bit OS to be able to use it all, sports a quad-core CPU (not "four hardware threads" dual-core-with-hyperthreading, but actual quad-core i5), has USB3, supports hardware virtualization, supports full-disk encryption using a TPM, has a multi-touch screen, and a 1920x1080 ("1080p" in merketing-speak) resolution, Gorilla Glass, and is durable enough it can be dropped from shoulder hight onto cement with no appreciable damage?
It actually has the normal desktop mode. Office, the legacy Control Panel, Windows Explorer, all the old admin tools (from Task Manager to Registry Editor and Local Security Policy editor), all the command-line or scripting environments (CMD and PowerShell, plus WSH scripts), the built-in Remote Desktop (there's another one in the store), and one of the two Internet Explorer modes (the one that looks like, and includes all the features of, IE9 on Win7) all must run in the Desktop. It's definitely still there.
However, by default, desktop mode applications must be signed by Microsoft before they can run on RT. This has only limited impact on scripts - there are.CMD and.PS1 scripts to automate a number of things in RT, both written by MS and by independent third parties - but it means that the average independent software vendor can't just distribute an ARM-compiled version of their Win32 app and expect it to work. That said, there's a hack which has been out for months (and multiple Patch Tuesday cycles) which unlocks (some say "jailbreaks") Windows RT to remove this signature restriction. At that point, you actually can just fire up Visual Studio, set the target platform to ARM instead of Win32/x86 or x64, compile your app (VS will complain a little, but it's easily fixed), and run it on RT. In fact, you can even just download a.NET 4.x (4.0 or 4.5, currently) app and run it right on RT with no forther effort at all, assuming it was compiled with the "AnyCPU" target platform.
The Surface Pro is a full Win8 x64 machine. It's usable for everything from running Android apps (BlueStacks works pretty well, I'm told) to playing AAA PC games (at lowered settings due to the Intel graphics, but it can run the games). Along the way, there's a few things it's great at; it makes an excellent artistic platform, for example (Wacom digitizer with pressure sensitivity and all that). It's also an acceptable tablet (heavier and thicker and lower battery life than a modern iPad, but still usable - and there are people who used old-school Windows tablets that make Surface Pro look absurdly portable), and an acceptable laptop (assuming you have one of the keyboard covers, which also provides a touchpad) and, while not excelling in either role, it's lightweight and fast and compact and gets good-enough battery life for most use cases.
Surface RT, on the other hand, is definitely more gimped. Even if you use the various unlock/"jailbreak" hacks that are available, there's still only a limited amount of software available for it right now.
It's fully possible, and supported, to sideload "Metro" apps. It is not encouraged, and is harder to find than the "unlock for sideloading" on Android, but it's present, documented, and works. It's also free (i.e. no annual charge like developer-unlock for Windows Phone or iOS) and not limited in the number of apps you can install that way.
As for the desktop (which still has no such restrictions at all, except on RT where they were quickly broken) going away... bullshit. Microsoft got to where they are now, and where they have been, by building a first-tier you-can-depend-on-us story for backward compatibility in business, academia, and home software. Win8 will happily play Total Annihilation, a game released 15 years earlier and unsupported for the vast majority of that time. It can execute batch scripts written for Windows 95 or NT 4.0. Even many legacy drivers from the NT 5.x family (2000 - Server 2003) are still supported in NT 6.2 (Win8 / Server 2012), architecture being accounted for (only NT 5.2 from the last major version family supported x64).
You know what all of those things have in common? They all require the desktop. Windows Store apps can't run external software, and existing software can't be re-bundled as an app without significant effort and source code access. Windows Store apps can't run any form of standard Windows script except for JS in an HTML5 app, which is hardly the typical way Windows scripts are written. Windows Store apps lack the permissions to install drivers. Windows Store apps have no support for legacy APIs; they don't even support the full modern Win32 or.NET APIs. Windows Store apps lack the dead-simple user experience of OLE (embed anything in anything) that is part of what has made Office so successful. Windows Store apps can't create arbitrary long-running background processes; good for battery life, bad for anybody trying to replicate anything that uses a Windows Service in Metro. Windows Store apps always run with low, sandboxed privileges; good for containing malware, useless for any kind of system utility.
There's no way the desktop is going away. Home users *might* be able to mostly get by on Metro right now - although there's no chance that the current full versions of Office will fit, so the desktop certainly isn't dead even for them - but schools, businesses, and servers still rely on the desktop and even the most boneheaded managers at Microsoft aren't going to tell their entire locked-in customer base that they can no longer serve their needs.
There's a huge difference between being concerned about security issues and delaying the inclusion of potentially security-risky features, and omitting them entirely even after having enough time to thoroughly examine the risks, develop mitigations, test extensively, and so forth.
Microsoft did the former (they were concerned - and probably rightly so - about allowing incredibly untrusted code [anything on the web] to interact with incredibly delicate system components [video drivers]). Microsoft is not doing the latter (instead, they have apparently, according to a very early leaked build, decided that the security ramifications can be dealt with).
What's the "actually plays games" bit about, anyhow? Win8 is a great platform for gaming; it has lower base system requirements than Win7! Compatibility has been a total non-issue in my experience, with exactly zero incompatible games.
IE10 is out for Win7. Have you seen any documented evidence that IE11 won't be available for Win7? I mean, I have no evidence either way, but since they're now releasing browser versions on a more accelerated schedule it seems likely they'll support them on the current generation most-popular Windows variant.
Believe it or not, this was my biggest gripe with IE9. In my opinion, it was more a downgrade or regression than anything else, and I can think of no reason for it to go through. I frequently have too many tabs open to read the titles there, so I use Ctrl+Tab to cycle through them quickly. On older browsers I could use the title bar to see the name of the tab I wanted very quickly. On modern browsers, including IE9 and 10, that doesn't work. Frustrating...
Word, Microsoft Word, winword, and winword.exe *all* work. That's the beauty of a well-designed search tool; you don't need to know the "correct" thing to search by. Search by file name, search by program name, search by descriptive shortcut name ("proxy" on Windows opens the system proxy settings, even though that's actually a tab of the Internet Options control panel, which is stored in file inetcpl.cpl and opened using RunDLL.exe). Whatever floats your boat.
Shortcut path: "explorer.exe f:\" The one for SSH depends on the SSH client you use, but if you can put it in the Start menu, you can create (by definition) create a shortcut to it, and any shortcut can either be placed in the taskbar, or have a direct shortcut provided (or both!). The direct shortcut keys option has no such "10 items" restriction, either; there are a whole lot of key combinations which can be used for that.
Also, Microsoft Office does (and has for many years) include the option to send the currently-open file as an email attachment already. As for copying the "URL" of an app, that's almost always possible just by selecting "Open" or "Save As" as it will open to the folder with the file already present, and you can easily either select the path, or shift+right-click (admittedly this is not at all discoverable) and choose "copy as path". You can paste a copied path into any program that uses the Windows common control library to open files.
The word "year" doesn't appear anywhere on the page you linked (at least for me, and as of posting). My guess is it was some boilerplate that didn't get replaced when it should have.
Slashdot Mirror
In this particular instance, you actually want to say "password" of the person - it's actually right there in the protocol name - but yes. SRP is fantastic for situations where you want to authenticate over an unsecured connection. It is incapable of handling registration over such a connection though, unless there's somebody else's password you use first to establish a secure channel. This means it is not a viable replacement for SSL/TLS in common web usage.
SRP does also have a "key" of sorts, but it's public info. Additionally, the server doesn't actually store the password, only a password verifier. Once a password is verified, as a side effect of the verification both sides now have a high-entropy random value which has never been sent over the wire and cannot be deduced from traffic that was (without knowledge of the password); this value is suitable for a symmetric session key. In many ways, SRP looks like an ideal protocol... until you ask how the server gets the password verifier in the first place. Doing that part over an unsecured channel opens you up to MitM attack as surely as trusting a malicious SSL certificate authority does.
Thank you, yes. I forgot CondoInternet, because they only service specific buildings (yes, buildings - not neighborhoods, never mind cities, but actual specific apartment/condominium complexes). It's (currently) a great incentive to be in one of those buildings... but I can't really count them as a viable ISP option in Seattle in general. Of course, GigabitSeattle won't roll out across the entire city (never mind the suburbs) for some time, but a decent portion of the city's population will be covered within the year.
What I'm hoping for are some other upstart competitiors to Google Fiber. Here in Seattle we have (or rather, should soon have) http://gigabitseattle.com/ which looks to be similar service to Google Fiber but without the Google part. I don't want Google to become the next 800lb gorilla (or Comcast) of ISPs, I just want
A) something better than the current sorry state of ISP options
B) an end to ISP giants of *any* sort
C) some actual competition in this space.
Right now, at least in the Seattle area, we *almost* have C, though Comcast is the definite giant. But if Google Fiber (or Gigabit Seattle) crushes Comcast and Centurylink and Clear and Frontier, we might get A but only at the cost of making B and C much worse for at least the local market.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. The specific improvements that Win8 brings (which mostly relate to things like taskbar spanning and keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures) are irrelevant to tablet usage. If you're using a tablet with mouse, keyboard, and one or more external monitors for any length of time, you're not really using a tablet - you're using a desktop that happens to store its computing guts in a tablet shell. That's a perfectly valid thing to use a tablet for on occasion, but at best it's one less reason against buying a tablet; it's not a reason *to* buy one because, if that's the environment you want, a desktop makes far more economic sense.
Bear in mind that I was arguing against the claim that using Win8 on a desktop was an afterthought. The basic multi-display functionality most relevant to tablets - things like the ability to choose between mirrored and independent displays, move windows between displays, do things like PowerPoint's presenter mode (your notes and such on the small screen, your slides maximized on the other), and disconnect an external display gracefully... well, that's nothing new. Windows has had all that since Vista if not earlier.
That's a good point. I was looking at it from a typical-use-case scenario, rather than a can-it-be-used-for scenario - it makes little sense to buy a tablet plus a bunch of peripherals when what you really want is a workstation, but it makes a lot of sense to buy a workstation with multiple monitors and indeed most Microsoft offices that I've seen seem to have at least three - but I could see somebody using multi-mon from a tablet on an as-needed basis. It's definitely more of a desktop-oriented feature, though; basic multi-mon support was already present, but the improvements in Win8 (taskbar spanning, sticky corners so you can hit corner buttons easier, wallpaper spanning, hotkeys to send apps to different displays, etc.) are pretty much all intended for a situation where you have two or more equal-sized and permanently connected displays.
I don't think that Microsoft people do use Metro much, if at all. I know a number of folks on the Win8 security team, and none of them or anybody they know inside the company has much use for Metro on their workstations.
The Start screen is a red herring; except in very specific cases it's not meaningfully slower or faster than the old ways of launching programs, mostly due to the fact that taskbar pinning, Start search, and muscle memory all still work - it's just a slightly different muscle memory if you use a mouse. The actual Metro programs, though... unless Microsoft has some secret internal Metro versions of Visual Studio, Outlook/PowerPoint/Word/Excel, Visio, WinDbg, Hyper-V Manager, and whatever other tools they use on a regular basis (bug trackers, source control and build automation systems, test automation tools, etc.), I doubt they have any more use for Metro than I do. (Metro) Windows Mail doesn't have anywhere near the features needed. They might use a Metro version of Lync, I guess...
I can't tell if you're bashing MS for adding a feature, claiming it's not actually a feature because it involves typing commands, claiming that it's something new to Windows in any way, or are simply trolling. You seem to think that search and command lines have anything whatsoever to do with each other, though.
I'm going to conclude the one thing that your post *does* clearly indicate: you're an idiot.
Keyboards are far faster than mice for any competent computer user. Desktop icons can also be covered up by open windows, and there's limited space on the taskbar. Hierarchical menus with a mouse are slow as hell, and require knowing and understanding the path; search only requires knowing your target.
Back under your bridge, troll.
If you sincerely think that, you're so deluded by Microsoft-hate that there's really no hope for you. Are you unaware that the entire Windows team (from developers to designers) is required to "dogfood" Windows versions in development, and that the entire company is encouraged to switch to new versions well before they hit release? Here's another tip: Microsoft employees develop on desktop computers, using desktop applications, and the vast majority of them don't have touchscreens. Trust me, Microsoft employees knew what Win8 was going to be like, and made damn sure it was usable for their work; they had to, because it's what they use for work.
If you'd actually try using it much you might have noticed that Win8 actually has a large number of productivity enhancers for desktop use. Improved multi-monitor support is irrelevant on tablets, as is Client Hyper-V. The Start search is still present, which is obviously not a tablet-oriented feature (but, since its introduction in Vista, has been a far quicker way to launch programs on a desktop than either the old Start menu or the new Start screen). Task Manager was greatly improved, despite being very much a tool for desktops, not tablets. The new Win+X menu (also reachable by right-clicking the Start button) is very handy as well, especially if you customize it. That's purely a desktop/laptop feature; it's almost inaccessible on most tablets!
The user-facing ads are full of Metro and tablets, yes... but it is nonetheless extremely useful and usable on the desktop as well (I've been using it on mine). I pretty much completely avoid Metro, aside from occasionally pinning Skype to the side of the screen while on a call. Visual Studio, EVE Online and all my other games, VMs with Linux and FreeBSD, VLC for media, Office and Foxit for productivity, Pidgin for chat... what do I need Metro for? The OS works fine without it. Install one of the classic Start menu utilities if the new Start screen offends you too badly...
Down with DRM! We hate your DRM! We demand you use our preferred DRM!
s/Steam/Good Old Games/
(or any other non-DRM vendor).
Steam is just another form of DRM. Can't play on two machines at once, even on different games, if they share Steam accounts. Can't resell or loan games. Can't play games without an internet connection to Steam (either current, or recent within the time limit on Steam's offline mode). Can't play games if Steam's service goes away. Can't play games if Valve decides they don't like you and kills your Steam account. Can't play games if somebody jacks your Steam account and you can't sign on anymore.
Since the point at which I wanted to re-sell a game that I felt Valve had damaged the gameplay experience of beyond repair, and was unable to do so due to the DRM, I have refused to purchase any more Valve products and try to avoid even buying anything through Steam, because they get a cut of that and it shows support for a DRM scheme. Don't "buy" DRMed products! This isn't a new problem, yet for some reason people keep buying Steam stuff anyhow...
It's a shame that reading comprehension is so poor on this site that you, JabberWokky, are currently rated higher than Loosifur.
Loosifur's post was that it was tasteless and cruel to make cracks about a person immediately after his death, and he therefore, despite admiring Ebert's skill as a critic, feels less sympathy than he should. That's a well-reasoned argument, goes out of its way to point out that he was familiar with the person in question, and was certainly not in any way intended as humorous nor written in a cruel fashion. It was also not even derogatory about his death or manner thereof; it merely highlighted the connection between Ebert and speaking on death. It was, at worst, merely a comment on the man himself made at a time when you didn't want to hear it. It was, however, a quite proper critique of the man's behavior.
Then you, long-time /. member JabberWokky, come along and cry "Hypocrisy!" This is apparently based solely on the content of his post and your lack of reading comprehension. You're even quite snarky about it - making "cracks", in fact - though not of course about anybody's death. For your conveinece, here is a summary of some of the finer points of the English language with which you appear to be unfamiliar:
The hack to remove that "forbidden"-ness of third-party desktop apps is widely published, has been noted and then ignored by Microsoft, and works great (the current version also allows kernel-mode code).
Sideloading (a term which only reasonably applies to store apps; anything else would just be called "installing") is fully possible; Microsoft has not only failed to forbid it, they actually publish step-by-step instructions for it along with a warning to beware of untrusted sideloaded apps. It is also free. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/Hh974578.aspx
Win32 is an API, and is very much present on Windows RT (along with WinRT, the new API for Windows Store apps, which can be used on x86 and x64 machines as well). It's true that x86-compiled software is difficult (not impossible - there's an emulation layer, but it currently supports relatively few system DLLs - and support is all the time) to run on RT, but open-source software can be recompiled, .NET software can usually run unmodified, Java software can run with some restrictions (via a .NET-based Java runtime called IKVM), Python is partially available (the foreign function interface is full of assembly and taking time to port), and in theory other languages are also possible.
A large number of people appear to actually believe that RT has no desktop at all, possible because MS almost never shows it in their ads. I was attempting to correct this misconception. "Windows 8 without the normal desktop mode" and "Windows 8 compiled for ARM and requiring a small unlock utility before it can runt third-party desktop apps" are very different things.
Not really true (to take an example from the parent himself, he claims that he runs "multiple VMs" which, with the amount of RAM and CPU capabilities of a netbook, will run like shit) but beside the point - his "argument" if you can call it that is that a netbook can do anything the Surface Pro can do; mine was that he was full of shit and I backed up that statement.
Lighter weight and thinner chassis are *huge* determining factors in laptop/tablet choice. A netbook will be thicker and heavier, while being made of vastly inferior matericals and therefore also much less durable. You may claim that durability doesn't matter when the price is that low, but that's really not true; unless the HDD manages to survive unscathed and can be transferred into a waiting body immediately, the hassle of needing to replace netbooks is going to rapidly exceed the value of their low price tag if you use them in any kind of mildly rough environment.
Full disk encryption is a huge deal for business users. The average bum on the street doesn't give a damn, but for the large number of people who have jobs involving sensitive data of any kind (client info, patient info, tax info, PII, financial info, source code, unreleased audio or video, cryptographic keys or other important credentials, important company memos or other internal communications, the list goes on an on...), it's vital. You may think that losing a $300 device hurts a lot less than losing a $1100 one, but to a business, the cost of dealing with the potential leak of the data on an employee's laptop - even just email - is far, far higher that the price difference of the machines. In my particular job, it would also cost me quite dearly; the price difference would have been made up in a couple days of the salary I would no longer have.
As for the digitizer, I'm not personally an artistic sort, but I know many people who are. The ability to use a pressure-sensitive stylus directly on a high-resolution display? That's a huge, huge deal. For the rest of us, it's an alternate input device that's faster that touch for entering text (assuming you passed second-grade handwriting classes, which is actually more than it really needs for recognition), more accurate than touch for precise clicking, and works with gloves on.
You think XP is less of a "Great Big Virus in Disguise" than Win7? Hahahahahhaha. XP is outdated, insecure crap.
Your $300 netbook uses solid-state storage, has a Wacom digitizer, weighs 2lbs (under one kilo), has 4GB of RAM and runs a 64-bit OS to be able to use it all, sports a quad-core CPU (not "four hardware threads" dual-core-with-hyperthreading, but actual quad-core i5), has USB3, supports hardware virtualization, supports full-disk encryption using a TPM, has a multi-touch screen, and a 1920x1080 ("1080p" in merketing-speak) resolution, Gorilla Glass, and is durable enough it can be dropped from shoulder hight onto cement with no appreciable damage?
Yeah, didn't think so.
It actually has the normal desktop mode. Office, the legacy Control Panel, Windows Explorer, all the old admin tools (from Task Manager to Registry Editor and Local Security Policy editor), all the command-line or scripting environments (CMD and PowerShell, plus WSH scripts), the built-in Remote Desktop (there's another one in the store), and one of the two Internet Explorer modes (the one that looks like, and includes all the features of, IE9 on Win7) all must run in the Desktop. It's definitely still there.
However, by default, desktop mode applications must be signed by Microsoft before they can run on RT. This has only limited impact on scripts - there are .CMD and .PS1 scripts to automate a number of things in RT, both written by MS and by independent third parties - but it means that the average independent software vendor can't just distribute an ARM-compiled version of their Win32 app and expect it to work. That said, there's a hack which has been out for months (and multiple Patch Tuesday cycles) which unlocks (some say "jailbreaks") Windows RT to remove this signature restriction. At that point, you actually can just fire up Visual Studio, set the target platform to ARM instead of Win32/x86 or x64, compile your app (VS will complain a little, but it's easily fixed), and run it on RT. In fact, you can even just download a .NET 4.x (4.0 or 4.5, currently) app and run it right on RT with no forther effort at all, assuming it was compiled with the "AnyCPU" target platform.
Link: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2092158
Strictly speaking, this is actually possible. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2096820
It requires some hacks, though, and RT is missing most of the legacy libraries plus missing any form of OpenGL support. Nonetheless, there are a reasonable handful of programs which have been ported ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2092348 ) and a few written specifically for (desktop mode) RT ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2095934 ).
Erm what? Did you mis-read the parent post?
The Surface Pro is a full Win8 x64 machine. It's usable for everything from running Android apps (BlueStacks works pretty well, I'm told) to playing AAA PC games (at lowered settings due to the Intel graphics, but it can run the games). Along the way, there's a few things it's great at; it makes an excellent artistic platform, for example (Wacom digitizer with pressure sensitivity and all that). It's also an acceptable tablet (heavier and thicker and lower battery life than a modern iPad, but still usable - and there are people who used old-school Windows tablets that make Surface Pro look absurdly portable), and an acceptable laptop (assuming you have one of the keyboard covers, which also provides a touchpad) and, while not excelling in either role, it's lightweight and fast and compact and gets good-enough battery life for most use cases.
Surface RT, on the other hand, is definitely more gimped. Even if you use the various unlock/"jailbreak" hacks that are available, there's still only a limited amount of software available for it right now.
Wrong about both.
It's fully possible, and supported, to sideload "Metro" apps. It is not encouraged, and is harder to find than the "unlock for sideloading" on Android, but it's present, documented, and works. It's also free (i.e. no annual charge like developer-unlock for Windows Phone or iOS) and not limited in the number of apps you can install that way.
As for the desktop (which still has no such restrictions at all, except on RT where they were quickly broken) going away... bullshit. Microsoft got to where they are now, and where they have been, by building a first-tier you-can-depend-on-us story for backward compatibility in business, academia, and home software. Win8 will happily play Total Annihilation, a game released 15 years earlier and unsupported for the vast majority of that time. It can execute batch scripts written for Windows 95 or NT 4.0. Even many legacy drivers from the NT 5.x family (2000 - Server 2003) are still supported in NT 6.2 (Win8 / Server 2012), architecture being accounted for (only NT 5.2 from the last major version family supported x64).
You know what all of those things have in common? They all require the desktop. Windows Store apps can't run external software, and existing software can't be re-bundled as an app without significant effort and source code access. Windows Store apps can't run any form of standard Windows script except for JS in an HTML5 app, which is hardly the typical way Windows scripts are written. Windows Store apps lack the permissions to install drivers. Windows Store apps have no support for legacy APIs; they don't even support the full modern Win32 or .NET APIs. Windows Store apps lack the dead-simple user experience of OLE (embed anything in anything) that is part of what has made Office so successful. Windows Store apps can't create arbitrary long-running background processes; good for battery life, bad for anybody trying to replicate anything that uses a Windows Service in Metro. Windows Store apps always run with low, sandboxed privileges; good for containing malware, useless for any kind of system utility.
There's no way the desktop is going away. Home users *might* be able to mostly get by on Metro right now - although there's no chance that the current full versions of Office will fit, so the desktop certainly isn't dead even for them - but schools, businesses, and servers still rely on the desktop and even the most boneheaded managers at Microsoft aren't going to tell their entire locked-in customer base that they can no longer serve their needs.
There's a huge difference between being concerned about security issues and delaying the inclusion of potentially security-risky features, and omitting them entirely even after having enough time to thoroughly examine the risks, develop mitigations, test extensively, and so forth.
Microsoft did the former (they were concerned - and probably rightly so - about allowing incredibly untrusted code [anything on the web] to interact with incredibly delicate system components [video drivers]).
Microsoft is not doing the latter (instead, they have apparently, according to a very early leaked build, decided that the security ramifications can be dealt with).
What's the "actually plays games" bit about, anyhow? Win8 is a great platform for gaming; it has lower base system requirements than Win7! Compatibility has been a total non-issue in my experience, with exactly zero incompatible games.
IE10 is out for Win7. Have you seen any documented evidence that IE11 won't be available for Win7? I mean, I have no evidence either way, but since they're now releasing browser versions on a more accelerated schedule it seems likely they'll support them on the current generation most-popular Windows variant.
Believe it or not, this was my biggest gripe with IE9. In my opinion, it was more a downgrade or regression than anything else, and I can think of no reason for it to go through. I frequently have too many tabs open to read the titles there, so I use Ctrl+Tab to cycle through them quickly. On older browsers I could use the title bar to see the name of the tab I wanted very quickly. On modern browsers, including IE9 and 10, that doesn't work. Frustrating...
Word, Microsoft Word, winword, and winword.exe *all* work. That's the beauty of a well-designed search tool; you don't need to know the "correct" thing to search by. Search by file name, search by program name, search by descriptive shortcut name ("proxy" on Windows opens the system proxy settings, even though that's actually a tab of the Internet Options control panel, which is stored in file inetcpl.cpl and opened using RunDLL.exe). Whatever floats your boat.
Shortcut path: "explorer.exe f:\" The one for SSH depends on the SSH client you use, but if you can put it in the Start menu, you can create (by definition) create a shortcut to it, and any shortcut can either be placed in the taskbar, or have a direct shortcut provided (or both!). The direct shortcut keys option has no such "10 items" restriction, either; there are a whole lot of key combinations which can be used for that.
Also, Microsoft Office does (and has for many years) include the option to send the currently-open file as an email attachment already. As for copying the "URL" of an app, that's almost always possible just by selecting "Open" or "Save As" as it will open to the folder with the file already present, and you can easily either select the path, or shift+right-click (admittedly this is not at all discoverable) and choose "copy as path". You can paste a copied path into any program that uses the Windows common control library to open files.
The word "year" doesn't appear anywhere on the page you linked (at least for me, and as of posting). My guess is it was some boilerplate that didn't get replaced when it should have.