The vents are on the x86 version, not the ARM version. The "competitive with the iPad" model is thin (a hair thinner than an iPad), lightweight (heavier than an iPad by about an ounce), and probably has very comparable battery life (based on the specs revealed so far and a reasonable assumption as to how much battery Microsoft would put in the thing as compared to Apple).
The x86 model vents all around the periphery of the device, and according to the presenter on stage, you can't even feel the venting. He specifically stated that it was intented to avoid the "gets too hot to use" issue. Battery life is more up in the air, but it's using the same CPU as the latest-gen MBA, and actually has slightly more room in the chassis for battery space (since the keyboard is external).
As for pricing, that's much too early to say. Price is a business decision, flexible up until the devices actually ship for the market's first impression (and obviously flexible past that for the lifetime of the product). Considering that there's essentially zero chance of these things hitting the market in less than three months (I'd guestimate closer to four, personally) I'm sure there's lots of time for the businesspeople to make a business decision. Who knows, they might even make the right one (not that I know what that is, though I could come up with my own ideal price list if asked).
Yet, cars are also protected by property laws. I can't legally just wander onto a dealer's lot and drive off in a car, even though there's no un-circumventable technical reason that prevents me. What does the auto industry know about morality or ethics or engineering that the rest of us don't?
I'm sorry, but compared to luxury models, most cars are crap. Yet they're everywhere; why should I have to pay for one when I could just use one parked on some asphault somewhere instead? I don't see why they should get special treatment from the law.
I'm not hostile, just trying to point out that property laws are all legal codifications of ethical principles.
Also, while I can't speak for you or the rest of the Internet in general, not all of us are so selfish as to think that we're entitled to something just because the fundamental cost of acquiring it is very low. I've never written a song in my life, either... but I do, for example, take a considerable number of photos and if you wanted to use some of them in a commercial endeavor, I'd expect you to compensate me for the right to make those copies.
Seriously, don't be absurd. Different types of property are taxed differently. For example, I own a car. I paid tax when I purchased the car. I also pay a licensing cost (a type of tax, in that it goes to the governement for the purpose of supporting public services) to legally operate the car. However, I certianly don't pay tax on it every year. I also own a number of books, which were subject to sales tax when I bought them but nothing else (and certianly no ongoing tax).
On the flip side, you have the various producers of copyrightable works ("artists" for brevity). To an artist, their (intellectual) property is their source of income. That is, of course, taxed (on a continuous basis... assuming they are selling anything from it). Nothing special about that. In the case of the modern publishing industry, artists receive royalties for the copies of their property that the artists have allowed a publisher to create and sell. Those royalties are taxed as income. Often, there's also a contract (occasionally, there's a contract but no royalties) where the artist is paid a lump sum up front. Those payments are also taxed as income.
Your argument is completely empty. A warehouse doesn't pay tax on everything it contains on an annual basis. A farm doesn't pay an annual tax on its livestock, despite those unequivocally being the property of farm. Why in the world should artists pay an annual tax on their intellectual property? Forget empty; your argument is ludicrous...
If the.Net runtime is ported to ARM, then X86 apps will compile and run on ARM as well
This statement makes nothing even slightly resembling sense..NET and x86 have absolutley nothing to do with eachother. Programs writtten for the.NET framework compile to Common Intermediate Language, which is architecture-independent (similar to Java bytecode). Programs written for x86 are, obviously, x86-specific, and will not run on a CPu with a different instruction set architecture, such as ARM.
The.NET runtime has already boon ported to ARM anyhow. First of all, both Windows Mobile and Windows Phone have.NET components, and both run on ARM (for that matter, so does the Zune HD, which is also programmable using C# and a subset of.NET). Parts of "big Windows" (Win8, in this case) use.NET, so even if it's not available to third-party developers, you can bet that WinRT includes.NET, and Windows RT runs on ARM.
Finally, and stupidest of all, Microsoft has already published the build tools for Win8 Metro-style apps, which will run on all Win8 systems including ARM (Windows RT) ones. These apps are written against the "WinRT" API (not the same as "Windows RT", which refers specifically to "Win8 on ARM"). WinRT is natively a C++ API, but it *already* has.NET bindings and it's perfectly possible, even today, to write Metro-style apps using.NET languages. In fact, this has been possible for months...
The hilarious thing is, you're wrong *twice* in two completely different ways.
First of all, CE is hardly archaic. It originally came out in the mid 90s. The NT, Linux, and Mach kernels are are all years older. Although it was designed much more limited than those others, CE served its purpose quite well enough for the time.
Second, CE7 (which is the closest documented thing to the WP7 kernel) bears almost no resemblence to prior versions of CE except for the API. They're re-written the memory manager (removing the per-process RAM limit and process number limits) and added a full accounts-and-permissions-based security system. I'm sure there are a number of other improvements too, but those strike me as the biggest problems CE had, and they're gone. WP7 also appears have better reliability than any prior CE-based consumer OS that I know of, which might also be due to kernel changes.
If you're running Windows NT 6.2 on x86, It's just called "Windows 8". Windows RT is specifically the ARM version of Win8, with support for third-party legacy apps removed. There are already x86-based tablets running NT (mine has a preview build of Win8 on it, even). Yes, it runs legacy apps just fine.
Despite AT&T's best efforts, their Windows phones do actually receive their updates (later than most carriers, but they get them). T-Mobile and most other carriers have pushed updates regularly. What "lies" do you feel you've been told about updates on WP7? The biggest lie that I've seen is that current Windows phones *won't* receive WP8; that's been stated nowhere official. Quite the opposite; MS has said they'll continue supporting the hardware for long enough that I can guarantee that at least the gen2 and probalby gen1 phones (many of which have the same specs) will indeed get WP8.
The only modern smartphone OS user who hsould have to expect "lies and contempt" is an Android user, and that's a fault of how much control Google lets the carriers and OEMs have. Require a service contract for a specific period of time, including updates, for them to use the Google services (Google Play, etc. - these are *not* part of the Android open-source projet, and must be licensed from Google for terms including payment, contrary to popular belief).
This entire thread is not aimed at you (or, apparnelty, at the people who modded you up). Read the question; if you haven't used WP7, why are you even answering? If you don't have a problem with WP7, why are you answering? It has nothing to do with "why aren't you switching?" the way you seem to think it does. Instead, it's "why are people so activley opposed to the OS?" and "What do other people who have actually used the OS think of it?"
That said, here are a few reasons why somebody might switch, since you asked:
More hardware variety (I can't stand the iPhone's 3.5" screen, for example, and some people really want things like hardware keyboards and replaceable batteries).
Zune and Xbox Live support (neither of which may appeal to you, but I find Zune Pass to be a killer feature even though I don't give a damn about the Xbox stuff).
Many people who've tried both much prefer the Metro launcher interface to the "sea of icons" approach of iOS, though that's a personal decision of course.
The iOS keyboard autocorrect implementation drives me nuts; WP7's is much less likely to result in the kinds of things you see on DYAC.
I don't know how good the Windows Phone connector app for OS X is, but iTunes sucks soemthing awful on Windows.
A few more false ones: 5. Only support up to 16GB storage (Dell Venue Pro comes in up to 32GB, you can put a 32GB uSD card in most of the HTC ones if you open them up, the Samsung Focus can reach 40 with an added 32GB card). 8. Your contact details are automatically uploaded to cloud service whether you like it or not. (You don't have to use this. The phone loses functionality if you don't, but it is optional.) 24. Cannot stream audio from video playback to Bluetooth devices as A2DP profile is not implemented. (A2DP is definitely supported, but using it with video is not because many A2DP receivers [most notably, as found in cars, contrary to the claim of #23] add significant lag that makes the video and audio end up out of sync 34. No way to close an app except pressing back button all the way to the first screen. (Just hit the Start button; the app will receive a notification that it is being suspended, given a few seconds to clean up, and then consume no resources until resumed. You can force the app to restart by launching it from the list instead of going back to it using the Back button or switcher.) 39. Cannot close music player, can only pause. Music player on lockscreen will stay until you reboot. Be careful not to touch it in a meeting. (This *is* stupid, but there's a free app explicitly to clear the currently-playing list.) 46. Cannot recognize phone numbers in sms or email to save or use as calling number. (Quite simply flat-out false.) 61. No screenshots or app to do it. (There is an app. I don't think it's in the Marketplace yet, but it's been around homebrew sites for ages and is being submitted.) 69. Cannot open zip or rar files received as email attachment. (Total lie where ZIP is concerned; I do this all the time.) 70. Cannot send or receive video by MMS. (Outdated) 72. No native Google maps and Bing maps is useless for most countries outside U.S. (Depends how you define "most" but it worked for me in Thailand, for example.) 80. Cannot send/receive MMS without enabling 3G data connection. MMS does not use 3G data (Lie; MMS does use exactly the same service as "normal" data including 3G. The carrier just bills it differently.) 81. Phone cannot be charged when off. (Misleading; phone turns on when plugged in.) 85. Phone can be rebooted without entering security code (Author retard mode engaged; this can easily be done to any phone.) 109. Wifi- hotspot and internet tethering not integral features in the OS but need to be provided by manufacturer on a case by case basis (Incorrect; Nokia's Lumia phones - which the author has - just shipped with a crippled driver. Very dumb on their part, but hardly the OS's fault.) 121. No over the air (OTA) firmware upgrade. All upgrades must be via PC installed Zune. (The OS is capable of it. MS hasn't used this because they want to be able to recover the phone in the case of a problem mid-update.)
Finally, almost all of the remaining items are available with homebrew that breaks out of the normal permissions model of the phone. Many Windows phones, including all Lumia 710s and some of the other Lumias, can be unlocked and "rooted" for free through various methods.
Yes, a shiny and touch-optimized UI. And a trusted app marketplace. And a far more stable and capable OS kernel (no 32MB RAM limit, proper security system, etc.). And an app model that prevents massive battery drain by background apps. And a massively upgraded builtin browser. And a great software keyboard. And integration with the most popular social networks (you may not care, but a ton of people do). And standard hardware configurations, so apps written for one phone will work on pretty much all of them. And updates that actually arrive, in reasonably timely fashion (unlike both WinMo and most of Android). And Zune Pass music streaming. And Xbox Live integration. And without carrier/OEM shit forced upon the user And...
There's more, but I figure you're getting the idea. There's a lot of new stuff that WinMo didn't have. Some of it, even much of it, may not be of interest to you; that's fine. I doubt you used anywhere near all the features of WinMo either. On the flip side, there's the unofficial side of WP7. Just like the custom ROMs that were needed to make many WinMo devices usable, many of the WP7 phones have unlocked or unlockable bootloaders and custom ROMs, which bring back a number of the capabilities of WinMo (even including compatiblity with some WinMo apps). There's also many hacks for stock ROMs, unlocking features and adding capabilities that many people don't even realize WP7 can provide...
You've expressed a number of fallacies here. In fact, I don't think you've made any one of your points cleanly at all:
1. The WP dev tools are far easier to get than the iOS ones, simply because they run on a far more widely-used OS. Students can also get AppHub (Marketplace submission + phone dev-unlock) accounts for free (Apple may have a similar program, but I have seen no mention of it here or elsewhere). You can test apps in the emulator; the AppHub account is only seriously needed for submitting apps to the Marketplace. I'll grant that the "well-established" part is lacking for now.
2. Chevron Labs users were not "loyal developers" in the sense you mean. I too think it was a stupid move on MS's part, but they were actually monitoring how Chevron Labs dev-unlocks were used, and in almost every case it was to install homebrew (or even pirated) apps, not to allow developers to test their own apps before purchasing an AppHub (developer) account. In theory, the latter is what Chevron Labs was intended for, and if people were actually doing that, then you'd be right to claim that MS was screwing over developers. The problem is, those people weren't developers; they just wanted to be able to sideload apps. Finally, that XDA "feature" article was honestly rather poorly written, with several leading (or misleading) statements that imply things for which there is no evidence.
3. Your references to "shenanigans" do not exactly constitute a coherent point. After decades of majority market-share on the desktop, with great dev tools and excellent commitment to backward compatibility... developers have produced vast quantities of code for the platform! Why should that prevent people from developing for mobile? If you actually wanted to make a point here, you should have mentioned "shenanigans" (preferably with a little more specificity) regarding Microsoft's history in the mobile space, where (for example) you have WinMo developers who have no easy way to port their apps to WP7.
4. The platform limitations you mention are the same as on iOS. Skype, for example, *could* use push notifications on WP7. There are a number of other VoIP and IM apps that do so, and they work fine. The decision by Skype's developers (technically, therefore by MS) to not use push notifications at all on Skype for WP7 is just bizarre and arguably outright stupid. However, it is not due to any inherent limitation of the platform; push notifications for apps have existed since the platform launched. On the other hand, the restriction against running apps in the background (as Android permits) is specifically to avoid the increased battery usage and decreased phone performance that you complain of...
Considering that the LG phones are currently the easiest WP devices to unlock (courtesty of a built-in registry editor), I'm surprised at your complaints. You can manually (and for free) dev-unlock and interop-unlock the phone. The SDK with app deployment tools is free. Sideload WP7 Root Tools, and then almost anything else you want (support for WinMo apps is not complete yet, but people are working on it).
Now, for your other complaints... The lack of a built-in RD client is annoying, and yes, the good ones cost a bit (though there are trials, at least).
I assume by "change things like backgrounds" you mean the area behind the tiles / app list? The lock screen background is very easy to change. You can easily change the color of the background, as well as all the other theme colors, using the homebrew theme editors.
Custom ringtones have been officially supported since Mango, and unofficially since launch. There are a number of apps, but in the Marketplace and homebrew, that allow you to create/add/select ringtones with ease, (which is nice, because admittedly the Zune-sync method is lame). Using homebrew, it's easy to also change other notification sounds.
USB tethering has been (unofficially) available for about a year; it's a bit of a hack but works just fine (and AT&T doesn't have to know). WiFi tethering is an official Mango feature (meaning it came out over 6 months ago) under settings as "Internet Sharing", though you do have to pay AT&T for the privilege of using your data plan that way... unless you use one of the apps that removes that restriction (disclaimer: I've not tried any of them on an LG).
The store is a bit of a mish-mash, I'll grant. I rarely browse it, preferring to search for what I want. The search works quite well enough for me.
Have you actually tried it, especially any version from the past 5 years (the 6.x family)? It works quite well enough for my use, to the point that I havne't bothered to run a Linux system (virtual or not) on either my home or work computer in a few months, despite using POSIX-based apps extensively.
There are package managers and repositories, compilers and debuggers, shells and standard utilities. X11 clients can connect to X11 servers (I use a win32 one locally). Access control uses the Windows credentials but POSIX conventions. Non-win32 feaures like setUID and setGID work fine, as does case-seneitive filesystem operation. POSIX apps can invoke Windows ones, and even share some libraries.
It's not perfect, but it definitley gets the job done.
What do you mean, "never goes away"? Even in Office 2007 (first release of the UI), you could hide the ribbon by double-clicking the ribbon tab that was currently open. In subsequent versions, there's even a button on the left side of the ribbon to hide/show it.
What menu system are you expecting Word to be using where you can show more than one menu at once? The items on a non-expended tab of the ribbon no more or less visible than the ones on an unexpanded menu...
The ribbon actually allows much more one-click access than a traditional menu does; if you don't hide the ribbon, then everthing at the tab you last used is exactly one click away. Unless you pin a menu upen (something Word doesn't generally do) you'll always have to click the menu, then go to the menu item... how is this in any possible way fewer clicks than using the ribbon?
Ribbon is quite the opposite of inefficient, in terms of finding things and clicking them. Some people claim to be incapable of operating it properly, but I truly do not understand this. It groups and sub-groups in a way similar to a menu, but with much more visible at-a-glance, without submenu delays, and with more images and less text. Additionally, sections are shown when relevant and removed otherwise, instead of having a fixed menu bar that, if you don't have an image slelected (for example), is clickable but has every option under it greyed out.
The problem with the ribbon is that, while it aids discoverability and rapidly performing common actions, it's less space-efficient. Given the truly phenomenal number of configurable options and user-initiatable actions in Visual Studio, it might just not be possible to fit a suitable number of items on a ribbon for any display of less than excellent horizontal resolution. Sure, many developers will have such a display, and for them (us), an optional ribbon might actually work very well. For people still coding on screens less than 1500 pixels wide or so, or for people who like to tile Visual Studio with another window on the same screen, the ribbon would just be too truncated.
Dolphin is a browser app for Android. It's probably newer than the KDE filesystem browser of the same name, but it's also probably used by more people...
1. Powershell is included by default on all recent Windows systems. If that's not your cup of tea, there's plenty of alternatives. My preferred is bash, and it's "native" (POSIX syscalls, not win32, which among other things means it uses UNIX-style paths).
2. It's an in-the-base-install Metro-style app on the latest preview build. This article is shit, but you could have done the trivial research to discover this for yourself. By the way, "Linux" has no PDF support at all, although many distros include a PDF viewer.
3. Remote Desktop works well enough for most Windows users (and is a lot faster than X forwarding over the same network connection). Powershell supports secure remote operation, effectively covering SSH's use case between Windows machines. If you want SSH specifically, enable the POSIX subsystem and install openssh like I did (it's in the SuaCommunity repository, server and client).
Ways to open a second session of a program:
* Start menu (two clicks of the mouse, since it should be in the recent list, or a surprisingly few keystrokes using the instant search).
* Right-click the taskbar button for the program, or left-click and drag upward, then select the program name from the menu.
* Shift+click on the taskbar button.
I guess those may count as "magic" since there's no obvious clues to do it, but they're trivially easy to discover either by accident or by searching online.
For the record, the following shortcuts also exist:
* Ctrl+click Taskbar button: restore/foreground the most recent window/tab of the program (makes the grouping function quite usable to me).
* Ctrl+Shift+click the taskbar button: launch a new instance of the program as Administrator (will prompt for UAC as needed).
GNU (especially in the context of the GPL) is very much strongly in favor of copyright. Without copyright law, there's no way to legally enforce the GPL. Copyright licensing law is exactly how the GPL prevents people from taking a project, forking it, and making it proprietary.
Now, you can certainly claim that, as a libertarian, you're just fine with people having the ability to do that, but that's fighting the GPL (even if you personally would honor it, you're still fighting against what it stands for - the protection against misuse by the unscrupulous).
WinCE / Windows Embedded Compact (same thing, just rebranded; it's CE 7) are availalble in source form with a Visual Studio project type explicitly to allow you to build your own versions (I believe the source license requires you to get a paid license if you want to redistribute your customized version).
In university (junior year of undergrad) our professor got us access to the Win2000 source code, and had us modify certain parts of it (mostly just tweaking some kernel-mode code, adding a new syscall and the like). Next year (in another class with the same instructors), we were again given the source, and told to come up with our own project to modify / improve on it. I don't think anybody ever installed our custom builds on anything other than a VM - the OS was almost a decade old even then - but some of them had impressive improvements in certain situations (tweaking the scheduler to optimize for certain types of apps, for example).
Before anybody cries foul, I also had classes that used Linux, including writing my own device drivers in it, and I could have taken the general OS courses using the Linux kernel for the projects as well, if I'd wanted to.
The *only* downside? Lack of Fog of War meant serious cheese with scouting once. Demons and Water Elementals were ludicrously powerful. The inability to play more multiplayer than 1v1 matches was sad. The lack of defensive structures except for multi-player-only walls was unpleasant, especially given the awful per-unit AI.
Don't get me wrong, WC:O&H was a great game for its time, but but even leaving aside the things which I assume to have been due to technical limitations (the low-res graphics, the 4-unit-selection limit, the terrible unit AI, the snap-everything-to-a-square engine) or due to not having the time to implement features that weren't viewed as important at the time (the lack of any kind of map generator or editor, the lack of TCP or UDP play, the lack of air or water units and also of the ability to build or destroy bridges), there was plenty of things that they could have done better.
I actually thought the road system was clever, except that they could have improved on the implementation. First of all, allow multiple town halls, or allow long-distance roads so you can build expansions. Second, allow faster unit movement on roads for a defensive advantage (or offensive, if you know where the enemy is and want to shorten your logistics at the risk of also shortening theirs in the case of a counterattack, or economical, so late-game wood and gold harvesting sucked less). Third, seriously, allow bridges (make them cost 100G per square and required to be build by peons directly adgacent to a road or other bridge, but allow player to make and possibly destroy them).
Dammit, now I want to go make a mod of Orcs and Humans with modern multiplayer, decent graphics, UI improvements, and better roads. Maybe tweak the balance a bit, but otherwise leave things as-is except possibly to fix the tile system slightly (break it down to much smaller tiles, give units a multi-tile collision size, etc.) Throw in a map editor and a proper spell editor, leave the current campaigns but add some new ones, and maybe also add some more units (possibly including water and air).
Yes, I'm aware that that's about 60% of "re-write WC2"... but WC2 has its own long list of things that needed fixing, and this is already a long post.
To be fair, given how long it took Blizzard to go from WarCraft 3 to StarCraft 2, we really won't be overdue for another Blizzard RTS for at least another five years. That's leaving aside the fact that the RTS team is currently working on SC2 expansions.
I have some hope of seeing a WC4 (though it'll be the first one where I haven't played all the prequels through before starting it). Of course, if they cripple it the same way they did SC2 (I'm sorry, but I like my single-player and LAN games to be playable without an Internet connection, TYVM - I actually still use this "feature" in SC1 when traveling).
The ability to create stack-allocatable objects, give them their own functions, and access them by reference instead of by value if you wish... Yeah, these are features of a good language.
Java has primitives (stack-allocated, can't invoke functions on them, can't add your own, can't add any sort of complex type). C# has a sub-set of its "structs" that are simply slightly fancier versionns of the Java primitives, plus some more complex structs. If you don't *like* your Point to be a pass-by-value type, use Nullable (which is conveniently available in shorthand Point?).
C# also has a number of types that Java could stand to pick up, like unsigned integer types. Especially when working with native code, which is sadly a requirement of a number of real-world programs, the lack of unsigned types in Java is messy.
Delegates are exactly type-safe function pointers. The concept of calling them "unsafe" is ridiculous. In what possible way are they unsafe?
You don't have to write properties. They're handy at times, but are completely optional. Having lots of Java-style public fooType getFoo() { return this.foo; } public void setFoo(fooType f) { if (validateFoo(f)) this.foo = f; } public barType getBar() { return this.bar; } functions is hardly shorter to write, and doesn't seem any easier on the user of your API either. You can certainly do it that way if you want, though; C# won't stop you. Java will, however, prevent going the other direction...
Java's generics system is just broken. This becomes especially apparent if you want to create an array of any generic type. The existence of a separate namespace for the generics classes may seem awkward at first, but the actual experience of using a well-designed generics system is well worth that little bit of hassle.
A few other points:
There are good uses for operator overloading. Not the extremes that C++ takes it to, but things like being able to implement an addition operator for a numeric type, or a multiplication operator for a vector times a scalar, or other intuitive uses.
Somewhat similarly, another aspect of peroperties, being able to define your own index operation is really nice (there's no good reason why ArrayLists and Arrays need different syntax to use them; in C# they don't).
Being able to define both implicit and explicit casts manually is lovely. Yes, you can still use public bazType toBaz()... functions, but if it makes perfectly good sense that somebody might want to use your type as a bazType, and it's safe to do so, why not let the cast be implicit?
The existence of the "preprocessor" in C# is great. Your debug code isn't even compiled into your release binary, resulting in more compact files and better runtime performance without needing to maintain debug branches (debug being merely an example here, but one of the most common). No C-style macros, though - both a blessing and a limitation.
Out and Ref parameters... the ability to return multiple values from a function call is incredibly handy sometimes. It's never technically mandatory to implement an API this way, but it's frequently convenient.
P/Invoke (DllImport) is an incredibly easy way to call native code from managed code. Of course, it requires that the managed code support the same types and behaviors as the native code, or directly analogous ones, so things like unsigned types and user-defined structs and out parameters do become quite beneficial again...
Single-core Android devices tend to have laggy UI due to the way their rendering works. I believe that iOS offloads the rendering to the GPU (I know Windows Phone does, but of course it's not available in tablet form-factor) which is much better-suited to such things. Same idea as hardware-accelerated browsers on the PC, except that Apple (and Microsoft) can optimize the code for a few specific chips. Android doesn't have that option, not without re-writing a good chunk fo the OS for each new chipset (something that is possible on Android, but removes the allure of a "free" OS by adding a bunch of developer time).
Look up the Pwn2Own contests. They're specifically designed to remove both the economic advantage of targeting the widely-used platform, and the issues of patching frequency and amount of vulnerable third-party software.
Apple typically does worse than Microsoft, who in turn are behind "Linux" (typically Ubuntu, which consists of software written by a wide range of groups).
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The vents are on the x86 version, not the ARM version. The "competitive with the iPad" model is thin (a hair thinner than an iPad), lightweight (heavier than an iPad by about an ounce), and probably has very comparable battery life (based on the specs revealed so far and a reasonable assumption as to how much battery Microsoft would put in the thing as compared to Apple).
The x86 model vents all around the periphery of the device, and according to the presenter on stage, you can't even feel the venting. He specifically stated that it was intented to avoid the "gets too hot to use" issue. Battery life is more up in the air, but it's using the same CPU as the latest-gen MBA, and actually has slightly more room in the chassis for battery space (since the keyboard is external).
As for pricing, that's much too early to say. Price is a business decision, flexible up until the devices actually ship for the market's first impression (and obviously flexible past that for the lifetime of the product). Considering that there's essentially zero chance of these things hitting the market in less than three months (I'd guestimate closer to four, personally) I'm sure there's lots of time for the businesspeople to make a business decision. Who knows, they might even make the right one (not that I know what that is, though I could come up with my own ideal price list if asked).
Yet, cars are also protected by property laws. I can't legally just wander onto a dealer's lot and drive off in a car, even though there's no un-circumventable technical reason that prevents me. What does the auto industry know about morality or ethics or engineering that the rest of us don't?
I'm sorry, but compared to luxury models, most cars are crap. Yet they're everywhere; why should I have to pay for one when I could just use one parked on some asphault somewhere instead? I don't see why they should get special treatment from the law.
I'm not hostile, just trying to point out that property laws are all legal codifications of ethical principles.
Also, while I can't speak for you or the rest of the Internet in general, not all of us are so selfish as to think that we're entitled to something just because the fundamental cost of acquiring it is very low. I've never written a song in my life, either... but I do, for example, take a considerable number of photos and if you wanted to use some of them in a commercial endeavor, I'd expect you to compensate me for the right to make those copies.
Seriously, don't be absurd. Different types of property are taxed differently. For example, I own a car. I paid tax when I purchased the car. I also pay a licensing cost (a type of tax, in that it goes to the governement for the purpose of supporting public services) to legally operate the car. However, I certianly don't pay tax on it every year. I also own a number of books, which were subject to sales tax when I bought them but nothing else (and certianly no ongoing tax).
On the flip side, you have the various producers of copyrightable works ("artists" for brevity). To an artist, their (intellectual) property is their source of income. That is, of course, taxed (on a continuous basis... assuming they are selling anything from it). Nothing special about that. In the case of the modern publishing industry, artists receive royalties for the copies of their property that the artists have allowed a publisher to create and sell. Those royalties are taxed as income. Often, there's also a contract (occasionally, there's a contract but no royalties) where the artist is paid a lump sum up front. Those payments are also taxed as income.
Your argument is completely empty. A warehouse doesn't pay tax on everything it contains on an annual basis. A farm doesn't pay an annual tax on its livestock, despite those unequivocally being the property of farm. Why in the world should artists pay an annual tax on their intellectual property? Forget empty; your argument is ludicrous...
If the .Net runtime is ported to ARM, then X86 apps will compile and run on ARM as well
This statement makes nothing even slightly resembling sense. .NET and x86 have absolutley nothing to do with eachother. Programs writtten for the .NET framework compile to Common Intermediate Language, which is architecture-independent (similar to Java bytecode). Programs written for x86 are, obviously, x86-specific, and will not run on a CPu with a different instruction set architecture, such as ARM.
The .NET runtime has already boon ported to ARM anyhow. First of all, both Windows Mobile and Windows Phone have .NET components, and both run on ARM (for that matter, so does the Zune HD, which is also programmable using C# and a subset of .NET). Parts of "big Windows" (Win8, in this case) use .NET, so even if it's not available to third-party developers, you can bet that WinRT includes .NET, and Windows RT runs on ARM.
Finally, and stupidest of all, Microsoft has already published the build tools for Win8 Metro-style apps, which will run on all Win8 systems including ARM (Windows RT) ones. These apps are written against the "WinRT" API (not the same as "Windows RT", which refers specifically to "Win8 on ARM"). WinRT is natively a C++ API, but it *already* has .NET bindings and it's perfectly possible, even today, to write Metro-style apps using .NET languages. In fact, this has been possible for months...
The hilarious thing is, you're wrong *twice* in two completely different ways.
First of all, CE is hardly archaic. It originally came out in the mid 90s. The NT, Linux, and Mach kernels are are all years older. Although it was designed much more limited than those others, CE served its purpose quite well enough for the time.
Second, CE7 (which is the closest documented thing to the WP7 kernel) bears almost no resemblence to prior versions of CE except for the API. They're re-written the memory manager (removing the per-process RAM limit and process number limits) and added a full accounts-and-permissions-based security system. I'm sure there are a number of other improvements too, but those strike me as the biggest problems CE had, and they're gone. WP7 also appears have better reliability than any prior CE-based consumer OS that I know of, which might also be due to kernel changes.
Mildly pedantic, but...
If you're running Windows NT 6.2 on x86, It's just called "Windows 8". Windows RT is specifically the ARM version of Win8, with support for third-party legacy apps removed. There are already x86-based tablets running NT (mine has a preview build of Win8 on it, even). Yes, it runs legacy apps just fine.
Despite AT&T's best efforts, their Windows phones do actually receive their updates (later than most carriers, but they get them). T-Mobile and most other carriers have pushed updates regularly. What "lies" do you feel you've been told about updates on WP7? The biggest lie that I've seen is that current Windows phones *won't* receive WP8; that's been stated nowhere official. Quite the opposite; MS has said they'll continue supporting the hardware for long enough that I can guarantee that at least the gen2 and probalby gen1 phones (many of which have the same specs) will indeed get WP8.
The only modern smartphone OS user who hsould have to expect "lies and contempt" is an Android user, and that's a fault of how much control Google lets the carriers and OEMs have. Require a service contract for a specific period of time, including updates, for them to use the Google services (Google Play, etc. - these are *not* part of the Android open-source projet, and must be licensed from Google for terms including payment, contrary to popular belief).
This entire thread is not aimed at you (or, apparnelty, at the people who modded you up). Read the question; if you haven't used WP7, why are you even answering? If you don't have a problem with WP7, why are you answering? It has nothing to do with "why aren't you switching?" the way you seem to think it does. Instead, it's "why are people so activley opposed to the OS?" and "What do other people who have actually used the OS think of it?"
That said, here are a few reasons why somebody might switch, since you asked:
More hardware variety (I can't stand the iPhone's 3.5" screen, for example, and some people really want things like hardware keyboards and replaceable batteries).
Zune and Xbox Live support (neither of which may appeal to you, but I find Zune Pass to be a killer feature even though I don't give a damn about the Xbox stuff).
Many people who've tried both much prefer the Metro launcher interface to the "sea of icons" approach of iOS, though that's a personal decision of course.
The iOS keyboard autocorrect implementation drives me nuts; WP7's is much less likely to result in the kinds of things you see on DYAC.
I don't know how good the Windows Phone connector app for OS X is, but iTunes sucks soemthing awful on Windows.
Just a few off the top of my head...
A few more false ones:
5. Only support up to 16GB storage (Dell Venue Pro comes in up to 32GB, you can put a 32GB uSD card in most of the HTC ones if you open them up, the Samsung Focus can reach 40 with an added 32GB card).
8. Your contact details are automatically uploaded to cloud service whether you like it or not. (You don't have to use this. The phone loses functionality if you don't, but it is optional.)
24. Cannot stream audio from video playback to Bluetooth devices as A2DP profile is not implemented. (A2DP is definitely supported, but using it with video is not because many A2DP receivers [most notably, as found in cars, contrary to the claim of #23] add significant lag that makes the video and audio end up out of sync
34. No way to close an app except pressing back button all the way to the first screen. (Just hit the Start button; the app will receive a notification that it is being suspended, given a few seconds to clean up, and then consume no resources until resumed. You can force the app to restart by launching it from the list instead of going back to it using the Back button or switcher.)
39. Cannot close music player, can only pause. Music player on lockscreen will stay until you reboot. Be careful not to touch it in a meeting. (This *is* stupid, but there's a free app explicitly to clear the currently-playing list.)
46. Cannot recognize phone numbers in sms or email to save or use as calling number. (Quite simply flat-out false.)
61. No screenshots or app to do it. (There is an app. I don't think it's in the Marketplace yet, but it's been around homebrew sites for ages and is being submitted.)
69. Cannot open zip or rar files received as email attachment. (Total lie where ZIP is concerned; I do this all the time.)
70. Cannot send or receive video by MMS. (Outdated)
72. No native Google maps and Bing maps is useless for most countries outside U.S. (Depends how you define "most" but it worked for me in Thailand, for example.)
80. Cannot send/receive MMS without enabling 3G data connection. MMS does not use 3G data (Lie; MMS does use exactly the same service as "normal" data including 3G. The carrier just bills it differently.)
81. Phone cannot be charged when off. (Misleading; phone turns on when plugged in.)
85. Phone can be rebooted without entering security code (Author retard mode engaged; this can easily be done to any phone.)
109. Wifi- hotspot and internet tethering not integral features in the OS but need to be provided by manufacturer on a case by case basis (Incorrect; Nokia's Lumia phones - which the author has - just shipped with a crippled driver. Very dumb on their part, but hardly the OS's fault.)
121. No over the air (OTA) firmware upgrade. All upgrades must be via PC installed Zune. (The OS is capable of it. MS hasn't used this because they want to be able to recover the phone in the case of a problem mid-update.)
Finally, almost all of the remaining items are available with homebrew that breaks out of the normal permissions model of the phone. Many Windows phones, including all Lumia 710s and some of the other Lumias, can be unlocked and "rooted" for free through various methods.
Yes, a shiny and touch-optimized UI.
And a trusted app marketplace.
And a far more stable and capable OS kernel (no 32MB RAM limit, proper security system, etc.).
And an app model that prevents massive battery drain by background apps.
And a massively upgraded builtin browser.
And a great software keyboard.
And integration with the most popular social networks (you may not care, but a ton of people do).
And standard hardware configurations, so apps written for one phone will work on pretty much all of them.
And updates that actually arrive, in reasonably timely fashion (unlike both WinMo and most of Android).
And Zune Pass music streaming.
And Xbox Live integration.
And without carrier/OEM shit forced upon the user
And...
There's more, but I figure you're getting the idea. There's a lot of new stuff that WinMo didn't have. Some of it, even much of it, may not be of interest to you; that's fine. I doubt you used anywhere near all the features of WinMo either. On the flip side, there's the unofficial side of WP7. Just like the custom ROMs that were needed to make many WinMo devices usable, many of the WP7 phones have unlocked or unlockable bootloaders and custom ROMs, which bring back a number of the capabilities of WinMo (even including compatiblity with some WinMo apps). There's also many hacks for stock ROMs, unlocking features and adding capabilities that many people don't even realize WP7 can provide...
You've expressed a number of fallacies here. In fact, I don't think you've made any one of your points cleanly at all:
1. The WP dev tools are far easier to get than the iOS ones, simply because they run on a far more widely-used OS. Students can also get AppHub (Marketplace submission + phone dev-unlock) accounts for free (Apple may have a similar program, but I have seen no mention of it here or elsewhere). You can test apps in the emulator; the AppHub account is only seriously needed for submitting apps to the Marketplace. I'll grant that the "well-established" part is lacking for now.
2. Chevron Labs users were not "loyal developers" in the sense you mean. I too think it was a stupid move on MS's part, but they were actually monitoring how Chevron Labs dev-unlocks were used, and in almost every case it was to install homebrew (or even pirated) apps, not to allow developers to test their own apps before purchasing an AppHub (developer) account. In theory, the latter is what Chevron Labs was intended for, and if people were actually doing that, then you'd be right to claim that MS was screwing over developers. The problem is, those people weren't developers; they just wanted to be able to sideload apps. Finally, that XDA "feature" article was honestly rather poorly written, with several leading (or misleading) statements that imply things for which there is no evidence.
3. Your references to "shenanigans" do not exactly constitute a coherent point. After decades of majority market-share on the desktop, with great dev tools and excellent commitment to backward compatibility... developers have produced vast quantities of code for the platform! Why should that prevent people from developing for mobile? If you actually wanted to make a point here, you should have mentioned "shenanigans" (preferably with a little more specificity) regarding Microsoft's history in the mobile space, where (for example) you have WinMo developers who have no easy way to port their apps to WP7.
4. The platform limitations you mention are the same as on iOS. Skype, for example, *could* use push notifications on WP7. There are a number of other VoIP and IM apps that do so, and they work fine. The decision by Skype's developers (technically, therefore by MS) to not use push notifications at all on Skype for WP7 is just bizarre and arguably outright stupid. However, it is not due to any inherent limitation of the platform; push notifications for apps have existed since the platform launched. On the other hand, the restriction against running apps in the background (as Android permits) is specifically to avoid the increased battery usage and decreased phone performance that you complain of...
Considering that the LG phones are currently the easiest WP devices to unlock (courtesty of a built-in registry editor), I'm surprised at your complaints. You can manually (and for free) dev-unlock and interop-unlock the phone. The SDK with app deployment tools is free. Sideload WP7 Root Tools, and then almost anything else you want (support for WinMo apps is not complete yet, but people are working on it).
Now, for your other complaints... The lack of a built-in RD client is annoying, and yes, the good ones cost a bit (though there are trials, at least).
I assume by "change things like backgrounds" you mean the area behind the tiles / app list? The lock screen background is very easy to change. You can easily change the color of the background, as well as all the other theme colors, using the homebrew theme editors.
Custom ringtones have been officially supported since Mango, and unofficially since launch. There are a number of apps, but in the Marketplace and homebrew, that allow you to create/add/select ringtones with ease, (which is nice, because admittedly the Zune-sync method is lame). Using homebrew, it's easy to also change other notification sounds.
USB tethering has been (unofficially) available for about a year; it's a bit of a hack but works just fine (and AT&T doesn't have to know). WiFi tethering is an official Mango feature (meaning it came out over 6 months ago) under settings as "Internet Sharing", though you do have to pay AT&T for the privilege of using your data plan that way... unless you use one of the apps that removes that restriction (disclaimer: I've not tried any of them on an LG).
The store is a bit of a mish-mash, I'll grant. I rarely browse it, preferring to search for what I want. The search works quite well enough for me.
Have you actually tried it, especially any version from the past 5 years (the 6.x family)? It works quite well enough for my use, to the point that I havne't bothered to run a Linux system (virtual or not) on either my home or work computer in a few months, despite using POSIX-based apps extensively.
There are package managers and repositories, compilers and debuggers, shells and standard utilities. X11 clients can connect to X11 servers (I use a win32 one locally). Access control uses the Windows credentials but POSIX conventions. Non-win32 feaures like setUID and setGID work fine, as does case-seneitive filesystem operation. POSIX apps can invoke Windows ones, and even share some libraries.
It's not perfect, but it definitley gets the job done.
What do you mean, "never goes away"? Even in Office 2007 (first release of the UI), you could hide the ribbon by double-clicking the ribbon tab that was currently open. In subsequent versions, there's even a button on the left side of the ribbon to hide/show it.
What menu system are you expecting Word to be using where you can show more than one menu at once? The items on a non-expended tab of the ribbon no more or less visible than the ones on an unexpanded menu...
The ribbon actually allows much more one-click access than a traditional menu does; if you don't hide the ribbon, then everthing at the tab you last used is exactly one click away. Unless you pin a menu upen (something Word doesn't generally do) you'll always have to click the menu, then go to the menu item... how is this in any possible way fewer clicks than using the ribbon?
Ribbon is quite the opposite of inefficient, in terms of finding things and clicking them. Some people claim to be incapable of operating it properly, but I truly do not understand this. It groups and sub-groups in a way similar to a menu, but with much more visible at-a-glance, without submenu delays, and with more images and less text. Additionally, sections are shown when relevant and removed otherwise, instead of having a fixed menu bar that, if you don't have an image slelected (for example), is clickable but has every option under it greyed out.
The problem with the ribbon is that, while it aids discoverability and rapidly performing common actions, it's less space-efficient. Given the truly phenomenal number of configurable options and user-initiatable actions in Visual Studio, it might just not be possible to fit a suitable number of items on a ribbon for any display of less than excellent horizontal resolution. Sure, many developers will have such a display, and for them (us), an optional ribbon might actually work very well. For people still coding on screens less than 1500 pixels wide or so, or for people who like to tile Visual Studio with another window on the same screen, the ribbon would just be too truncated.
Not sure if serious...
Dolphin is a browser app for Android. It's probably newer than the KDE filesystem browser of the same name, but it's also probably used by more people...
1. Powershell is included by default on all recent Windows systems. If that's not your cup of tea, there's plenty of alternatives. My preferred is bash, and it's "native" (POSIX syscalls, not win32, which among other things means it uses UNIX-style paths).
2. It's an in-the-base-install Metro-style app on the latest preview build. This article is shit, but you could have done the trivial research to discover this for yourself. By the way, "Linux" has no PDF support at all, although many distros include a PDF viewer.
3. Remote Desktop works well enough for most Windows users (and is a lot faster than X forwarding over the same network connection). Powershell supports secure remote operation, effectively covering SSH's use case between Windows machines. If you want SSH specifically, enable the POSIX subsystem and install openssh like I did (it's in the SuaCommunity repository, server and client).
Wow, seriously??
Ways to open a second session of a program:
* Start menu (two clicks of the mouse, since it should be in the recent list, or a surprisingly few keystrokes using the instant search).
* Right-click the taskbar button for the program, or left-click and drag upward, then select the program name from the menu.
* Shift+click on the taskbar button.
I guess those may count as "magic" since there's no obvious clues to do it, but they're trivially easy to discover either by accident or by searching online.
For the record, the following shortcuts also exist:
* Ctrl+click Taskbar button: restore/foreground the most recent window/tab of the program (makes the grouping function quite usable to me).
* Ctrl+Shift+click the taskbar button: launch a new instance of the program as Administrator (will prompt for UAC as needed).
GNU (especially in the context of the GPL) is very much strongly in favor of copyright. Without copyright law, there's no way to legally enforce the GPL. Copyright licensing law is exactly how the GPL prevents people from taking a project, forking it, and making it proprietary.
Now, you can certainly claim that, as a libertarian, you're just fine with people having the ability to do that, but that's fighting the GPL (even if you personally would honor it, you're still fighting against what it stands for - the protection against misuse by the unscrupulous).
WinCE / Windows Embedded Compact (same thing, just rebranded; it's CE 7) are availalble in source form with a Visual Studio project type explicitly to allow you to build your own versions (I believe the source license requires you to get a paid license if you want to redistribute your customized version).
In university (junior year of undergrad) our professor got us access to the Win2000 source code, and had us modify certain parts of it (mostly just tweaking some kernel-mode code, adding a new syscall and the like). Next year (in another class with the same instructors), we were again given the source, and told to come up with our own project to modify / improve on it. I don't think anybody ever installed our custom builds on anything other than a VM - the OS was almost a decade old even then - but some of them had impressive improvements in certain situations (tweaking the scheduler to optimize for certain types of apps, for example).
Before anybody cries foul, I also had classes that used Linux, including writing my own device drivers in it, and I could have taken the general OS courses using the Linux kernel for the projects as well, if I'd wanted to.
The *only* downside? Lack of Fog of War meant serious cheese with scouting once. Demons and Water Elementals were ludicrously powerful. The inability to play more multiplayer than 1v1 matches was sad. The lack of defensive structures except for multi-player-only walls was unpleasant, especially given the awful per-unit AI.
Don't get me wrong, WC:O&H was a great game for its time, but but even leaving aside the things which I assume to have been due to technical limitations (the low-res graphics, the 4-unit-selection limit, the terrible unit AI, the snap-everything-to-a-square engine) or due to not having the time to implement features that weren't viewed as important at the time (the lack of any kind of map generator or editor, the lack of TCP or UDP play, the lack of air or water units and also of the ability to build or destroy bridges), there was plenty of things that they could have done better.
I actually thought the road system was clever, except that they could have improved on the implementation. First of all, allow multiple town halls, or allow long-distance roads so you can build expansions. Second, allow faster unit movement on roads for a defensive advantage (or offensive, if you know where the enemy is and want to shorten your logistics at the risk of also shortening theirs in the case of a counterattack, or economical, so late-game wood and gold harvesting sucked less). Third, seriously, allow bridges (make them cost 100G per square and required to be build by peons directly adgacent to a road or other bridge, but allow player to make and possibly destroy them).
Dammit, now I want to go make a mod of Orcs and Humans with modern multiplayer, decent graphics, UI improvements, and better roads. Maybe tweak the balance a bit, but otherwise leave things as-is except possibly to fix the tile system slightly (break it down to much smaller tiles, give units a multi-tile collision size, etc.) Throw in a map editor and a proper spell editor, leave the current campaigns but add some new ones, and maybe also add some more units (possibly including water and air).
Yes, I'm aware that that's about 60% of "re-write WC2"... but WC2 has its own long list of things that needed fixing, and this is already a long post.
To be fair, given how long it took Blizzard to go from WarCraft 3 to StarCraft 2, we really won't be overdue for another Blizzard RTS for at least another five years. That's leaving aside the fact that the RTS team is currently working on SC2 expansions.
I have some hope of seeing a WC4 (though it'll be the first one where I haven't played all the prequels through before starting it). Of course, if they cripple it the same way they did SC2 (I'm sorry, but I like my single-player and LAN games to be playable without an Internet connection, TYVM - I actually still use this "feature" in SC1 when traveling).
The ability to create stack-allocatable objects, give them their own functions, and access them by reference instead of by value if you wish... Yeah, these are features of a good language.
Java has primitives (stack-allocated, can't invoke functions on them, can't add your own, can't add any sort of complex type). C# has a sub-set of its "structs" that are simply slightly fancier versionns of the Java primitives, plus some more complex structs. If you don't *like* your Point to be a pass-by-value type, use Nullable (which is conveniently available in shorthand Point?).
C# also has a number of types that Java could stand to pick up, like unsigned integer types. Especially when working with native code, which is sadly a requirement of a number of real-world programs, the lack of unsigned types in Java is messy.
Delegates are exactly type-safe function pointers. The concept of calling them "unsafe" is ridiculous. In what possible way are they unsafe?
You don't have to write properties. They're handy at times, but are completely optional. Having lots of Java-style
public fooType getFoo() { return this.foo; }
public void setFoo(fooType f) { if (validateFoo(f)) this.foo = f; }
public barType getBar() { return this.bar; }
functions is hardly shorter to write, and doesn't seem any easier on the user of your API either. You can certainly do it that way if you want, though; C# won't stop you. Java will, however, prevent going the other direction...
Java's generics system is just broken. This becomes especially apparent if you want to create an array of any generic type. The existence of a separate namespace for the generics classes may seem awkward at first, but the actual experience of using a well-designed generics system is well worth that little bit of hassle.
A few other points:
There are good uses for operator overloading. Not the extremes that C++ takes it to, but things like being able to implement an addition operator for a numeric type, or a multiplication operator for a vector times a scalar, or other intuitive uses.
Somewhat similarly, another aspect of peroperties, being able to define your own index operation is really nice (there's no good reason why ArrayLists and Arrays need different syntax to use them; in C# they don't).
Being able to define both implicit and explicit casts manually is lovely. Yes, you can still use
public bazType toBaz()...
functions, but if it makes perfectly good sense that somebody might want to use your type as a bazType, and it's safe to do so, why not let the cast be implicit?
The existence of the "preprocessor" in C# is great. Your debug code isn't even compiled into your release binary, resulting in more compact files and better runtime performance without needing to maintain debug branches (debug being merely an example here, but one of the most common). No C-style macros, though - both a blessing and a limitation.
Out and Ref parameters... the ability to return multiple values from a function call is incredibly handy sometimes. It's never technically mandatory to implement an API this way, but it's frequently convenient.
P/Invoke (DllImport) is an incredibly easy way to call native code from managed code. Of course, it requires that the managed code support the same types and behaviors as the native code, or directly analogous ones, so things like unsigned types and user-defined structs and out parameters do become quite beneficial again...
Single-core Android devices tend to have laggy UI due to the way their rendering works. I believe that iOS offloads the rendering to the GPU (I know Windows Phone does, but of course it's not available in tablet form-factor) which is much better-suited to such things. Same idea as hardware-accelerated browsers on the PC, except that Apple (and Microsoft) can optimize the code for a few specific chips. Android doesn't have that option, not without re-writing a good chunk fo the OS for each new chipset (something that is possible on Android, but removes the allure of a "free" OS by adding a bunch of developer time).
Look up the Pwn2Own contests. They're specifically designed to remove both the economic advantage of targeting the widely-used platform, and the issues of patching frequency and amount of vulnerable third-party software.
Apple typically does worse than Microsoft, who in turn are behind "Linux" (typically Ubuntu, which consists of software written by a wide range of groups).