Posts by Epobirs

BIONIC MAN makes it to top of Chicago skyscraper

Re: The updated version

Actually, it was mentioned in the original TV movie and follow-ons before they went to series. My siblings and I avidly followed the series early on because so much of the exteriors were shot in or near my childhood home town, Thousand Oaks, CA. For instance, in an early first season episode Steve has to cross a minefield to get to a strange looking bunker in the distance. The 'bunker' was the old Thousand Oaks Civic Center and the minefield was the open patch where the Oaks Mall was built a few years later. (The same building was the home of Proteus IV in the movie 'Demon Seed.')

Anyway, Rudy Wells mentions in passing early on that Steve's remaining biological parts benefited from not having to to oxegenate the blood for the three replaced limbs and that this meant greater endurance. It was exactly the kind of nerd detail my brothers and I would delight in knowing when others had ignored that bit of dialogue.

The updated version

There is a recent comic series, The Bionic Man, (They could get the rights to the name of the TV series but it is Steve Austin and Oscar Goldman) written by Kevin Smith that takes an updated approach to Martin Caiden's 'Cyborg' story. One change is that they remove and replace Austin surviving arm because it makes him unbalanced. There is also a framework running throughout his body to support the bionic limbs and the stresses they cause.

In one scene a discussion of the project's cost comes up and someone estimates it at $6 million... a day.

Apple to ditch Intel – report

I find it highly doubtful myself but there are some intriguing possibilities. Microsoft is in business to sell Windows licenses more than anything else. If they cut a deal with Apple to allow a special version of Windows RT for Boot Camp that allowed desktop apps under x86 emulation, this speed things up considerably by having the OS and APIs be in native code. Sort of like WINE but with an emulator.

Remember the emulator for running x86 Windows apps on the DEC Alpha under NT/2000? It was called FX!32 and had a remarkable feature unlike other emulators: it saved the translated code produced by the emulator. This meant the app's performance increased with use as more and more of it became native and optimized. (Some hints suggest Microsoft used something similar in the emulation of the original Xbox on the Xbox 360, which is why a download is needed when an old Xbox game is run for the first time on a 360.) In this day and age most popular apps could have existing translated code downloaded automatically, greatly speeding up the process.

If Apple and Microsoft collaborated on such a scheme Microsoft would of course retain the rights to use the technology on other ARM platforms, after a period of exclusivity for Apple, offering a path for Windows RT to be leveraged further against Intel the next time Microsoft needs something Intel doesn't want to give them.

USS Enterprise sets out on its final mission

Are there unicorns in your fantasy world?

A world without guns just means that those with muscle get to bully those without. Especially women.

The saying goes: God made men but Colonel Colt made them equal.

Xbox SmartGlass hits Android ahead of schedule

Samsung Galaxy SII ICS is a go

installs and works fine on my phone. I haven't any other Android devices to test against.

N00bs vs Windows 8: We lock six people in a room with new OS

Re: There. Is. Just. No. Point.

Why would printing be a problem? My Windows 8 system found and installed the printer on my network automatically. It just works. I can install drivers from Win7 via the desktop if necessary but so far that hasn't been an issue. I've yet to have a single instance where something I used on Win7 didn't work on my Win8 desktop or laptop.

The interface is fine. If it really bothers you you can remove all but the tiles for the items you use and leave everything else invisible until summoned with the 'all apps' command. You can even edit the whole thing to be a nice monochrome as you seem to desire. A number of such apps already exist in the Store.

There used to be a saying in the Royal Society that Astronomy advances by funerals. The same can be said for other fields.

Re: There. Is. Just. No. Point.

Fine. And we'll stay off your lawn, too.

Re: Charm bar thing....

If your UI cannot benefit from a tutorial you aren't doing much of anything new or interesting with it, nor offering much to the more intelligent users.

The traditional GUI was heavily influence by the business desktop of yore, which is why we call it the desktop and have metaphorical filing cabinets, trash cans, etc. Vast numbers of people have grown up with this and never really knew what it was aping. The world has moved on. Our interfaces now don't rely on simulating a real world structure.

The hot corners are readily discoverable, as everyone on the test appears to have found. That none of these people asked 'Where is the Windows key?' and made use of its substitute once informed suggests none of them had done more than use what they could discover without exercising any curiosity in the past. I've lost count of the number of clients I printed hot-key reference sheets for. All of them greatly appreciated it once they'd memorized a few and found how much it sped things up. Any one of those people would have tried the Windows key immediately when try to return to the Start screen.

Re: Next time

Perhaps you've noticed Apple flogging really big track pads for desktop users for a while now. Microsoft is going the same route. A big multi-touch track pad works quite nicely where touchscreens are impractical.

Re: @Psyx ...In a positive an unbiased manner." I agree. There was not a snide bone......

No, it's more like handing a calculator to someone who hasn't ever seen one before and expecting them to do better than otherwise on a maths test.

If you'd paid attention you'd know that the tutorial about the hot corners is unavoidable. It comes up the first time a new user logs into a Win8 machine. It was grossly unfair to test these people as first time users without giving them the full first-time user experience. The single biggest complaint would have been nullified if this test were better executed.

Try thinking a little, even if it hurts

The Windows key was created for good reason as part of Windows 95. There was a vast amount of software that had already staked out the Function keys, along with the bulk of other key combos using Control and ALT. All going back to the pre-GUI days with Win3.x staking out a scant few for itself, such as Alt-Tab and even that had a history in multi-tasking DOS variants..

To make Windows really work well for those of us with the capacity to remember useful keyboard combos, a new key was needed. This was no different than Apple had done on the Mac a good decade earlier. Imagine trying to be a power user on a Mac with no Command key on its keyboard.

The Windows key continues to make sense, being reserved for functions specific to the OS while leaving more universal commands like cut and paste to the more generic keys, along with app specific commands on the function row. Just because it's a GUI doesn't mean a perfectly good keyboard should go to waste. You should be able to unplug eitherthe keyboard OR the mouse and still get everything done. It may be less comfortable but such functionally is essentially, especially for enabling input methods for those who cannot use the regular keyboard or mouse.

WTF is... Microsoft Xbox SmartGlass?

When did they ever do that?

I don't recall Microsoft ever claiming they didn't compete for gaming consumers with Nintendo. But consider the range of features offered and it's obvious that Nintendo is the one playing catch-up. The Wii U will bring functions to a Nintendo console for the first time that have been standard on Sony and Microsoft gear for a generation.

The first time I saw the Wii U demoed my first thought was that either of the two existing consoles could easily match that with just software. And that is exactly what is happening.

Nor does this render Kinect obsolete. It's an entirely difference experience and set of inputs. In fact, the sensors in your phone could be used in coordination with the Kinect to allow still more the current model. Bringing in the better aspects of the PS3 Move and Wiimote while retaining the Kinect advantages. It's all fodder for the developers to run with. The big difference with Microsoft is they're seeking to use the stuff you likely already own, so they can focus on just selling software instead of a most costlier software/hardware combo.

Re: But but, can you switch it on??

The Xbox 360 controllers can wake up the Xbox by pressing the logo button. So it becomes an issue of whether WiFi/Bluetooth equipped devices can be made to emit a compatible signal.

When did you last see a new Xbox?

Are you at all familiar with the current shipping model of the Xbox 360, which has been the standard for close to two years? It runs quite cool and makes little discernible noise.

Re: Utterly irrelevant

Actually, the Android version has already been out for a few days. I've had it on my Galaxy SII since Friday. You can't buy a Windows Phone 8 device yet, so it hardly appears Microsoft is playing favorites here. They shipped the stuff that is ready.

Headaches, delays plague Windows Store, dev claims

Did they not talk to anyone in the Xbox department?

There is a section at Microsoft that has plenty of experience interacting with third party developers: the Xbox crew. Did they not ask any of them for input on how to establish this infrastructure? Not that the Xbox operation is necessarily perfect but it's been ticking over pretty smoothly for about a decade now. Most notably in the area most comparable tot he Windows Store, the XBLA games download service.

Re: It's a free app..

The same reason free to play games exist. There may be a more elaborate paid version down the road or the developer is seeking publicity for their ability as a talent for hire. Showing up in a setting like the Android/iOS/Windows, etc. stores carries an impression that make more impact than a site like Download.com.

Shareware sites were once a good venue for resume/CV enhancement, today it's the app stores.

Windows RT still haunted by the ghost of Microsoft's 2001 tablet fiasco

Re: The people were the problem

But that is a problem faced by every product that tries to bring something new to the market: what people understand. Figuring out the right way to sell the product can be at least as important as developing the idea into something on a store shelf. 'Build it and they will come' really only works for the RealDoll.

A big part of the problem for past Windows tablets was that they only built the foundation, with the rest of the building expected to be put together by the tenants. Outside of OneNote there was hardly any good tablet software for the wider market. Vertical apps weren't much help in reaching consumers.

This is a big part of why Microsoft is doing their own hardware this time around. They cannot rely on OEMs and ISVs to pick up the ball and run with it, just because Microsoft has made a nice ball to play with. They have to be out there, too.

Entirely different situation

The big problem with past versions of Windows as a tablet OS was the policy of not making software developers be aware of and incorporate support of the touch/pen user. The pen/touch support was an extension of the UI, not a standalone environment like Metro with all-new software.

Using Windows 8 is a hugely different experience from using previous generations of Windows on a tablet or convertible laptop like my old Compaq that I inherited when the owner moved on to a different model. While a software designer could do apps specifically for a vertical market where high pen usability was required, this didn't matter much to the bulk of applications in the market. Except for the rare item like OneNote (which showed what could really be done and was the killer app for Windows pen enthusiasts) most of time this meant you were made to feel like a handicapped person operating through a special needs interface.

With Windows 8 it's all different. Along with far better hardware, especially now that we have affordable SSD and don't feel the need to have an optical drive on-board, a convertible laptop can be highly usable as both a touch oriented device and a conventional keyboard/pointer machine. What is really needed to fill the gap is some lightweight versions of the Office apps for Metro. Versions focused on the stuff you're likely to do while standing or only able to do touch input, while the full complex feature set is left to the desktop apps when you have a chance to sit down at a table and have some elbow room.

Microsoft has long supplied free viewer apps for the Office file types. Some Metro apps of that sort with light editing capability would be a big help for moving between usage modes. It would also avoid the power draw of the big apps since you're likely to be on battery if you're in tablet mode.

This seems entirely doable to me. I'd have never have bought the Compaq convertible I have but having the use of it has taught me a great deal about what works and what doesn't. Windows 8 convertibles can work and very well, given the right touch apps to supplement the heavy duty desktop apps.

Microsoft: Welcome back to PCs, ARM. Sorry about the 1990s

Re: CISC vs RISC

Not really an issue in this day and age.

Long ago, there was a lot of conjecture about what was going to bring down the curtain on x86. Intel itsef thought this was looming, which is why they had products like the 80860 and Itanium. BYTE magazine first discussed the 80860 under the headline "Cray on a chip" and they were used as accelerator boards to run custom code in a PC ISA card slot. Ultimately, their biggest use was as controllers for laser printers.

One thing they thought was going to kill x86 was the cost in transistors to decode the x86 instruction set. The 486 design had a good chunk given over to this. But this failed to consider Moore's Law, which was much more obscure back then and process nodes weren't discussed much. But not only did Moore's Law continue, it accelerated. The pace of new, smaller process nodes picked up and it wasn't long before the decode stage for an x86 processor was a trivial bit of real estate on the chip.

The same thing happened with video chips. When DVD was the next big thing the big concern was how much a dedicated decoder for MPEG-2 cost. CPUs couldn't do decent playback unaided but adding parts of a decoder to offloading from the CPU was going to make for pricey video chips. This ended up only being a genuine problem for about 18 months. Again, the transistor real estate involved became a trivial item as chip transistor counts soared with much smaller and cheaper transistors.

Imagine having a quad processor workstation in the Pentium II era. The sheer physical size of the processors in their packaging would have been an issue all by itself. Now we have quad-core CPUs in phones.

Re: QEmu

The ARM chips in the first generation of Windows RT devices, mainly Tegra 3 chips, is pretty pokey in sheer performance compared to current low-end x86 CPUs. I'd expect any major chunk of Windows x86 software running under emulation on a Tegra 3 to be painfully slow. It would complicate things a great deal without delivering much of use.

Microsoft has some experience with x86 emulation. You may recall they acquired Connectix, who were once the leader in PC emulation on 680x0 and PowerPC Macs, for their expertise in that areas and some related needs. Some of those personnel wrote the software for letting the PowerPC Xbox 360 run a big portion of the original x86 Xbox's game library.

So, I'm pretty sure they gave serious consideration and found it just wasn't going to be workable. The other big problem is one of the big reasons they introduced the new UI: battery life. It's the same reason Apple doesn't give iOS the OS X desktop. That kind of windowing, multi-tasking environment is a big power draw. Running Windows desktop apps under emulation, even if it was usably fast, would really kill the battery life on a Windows RT tablet.

Re: Missing the point about RISC

MIPS got big by being the CPU of choice within Silicon Graphics, once a name to reckon with. A vast portion of the game console and PC video hardware that appeared in the 90s had a history in what SGI did in the 80s. Consequently this meant a lot of business for MIPS.

After SGI stopped being so influential and stopped driving innovation there was less interest in using MIPS processors in new designs. Competitors were pushing forward hard and taking away business. Especially in the emerging market for mobile devices. MIPS hadn't much focus on the needs of mobile compared to ARM and that cost them dearly in the long term. There were any number of MIPS Windows CE PDAs and such but by the turn of the century it was plain that ARM was the company to beat for mobile designs. MIPS didn't have as good a handle on power issues and its advanced features didn't matter much for mobile. In the non-x86 workstation market IBM and Motorola were advancing the PowerPC platform strongly.

After the Sony Playstation 2 it's hard to recall a major design win for MIPS. I suppose it may have come down to a lack of good leadership to seek out and develop the next market.

Microsoft has no plans for a second Windows 7 Service Pack

Re: Autopatcher or the like?

It hasn't anything to do with Windows 8. Anyone who believes that is delusional.

But anyone who thinks creating a Service Pack is a trivial undertaking is also delusional. At best you hope to get the number of systems with weird setups that don't work right after the SP to a minimum. The range of machines within the PC standard just makes it impossible. There is always going to be something not covered by your testing regime that turns out to have thousand of users who are not pleased when their machine breaks.

Recall the incident a few years ago when Microsoft discovered the hard way that many OEMs were creating images that were used to prep both Intel and AMD based machines. Each processor family needs its own version of the HAL, which is selected and installed when the OS is installed. A system normally shouldn't have both HALs on the boot volume. So somebody at Microsoft thought it was useful to check the HAL to know which versions to use of some files the Service Pack updated. The problem was that the installer would see the AMD file first, even if it was an Intel machine. DOR (Dead on Reboot.)

It was an innocent mistake. Both HALs should not exist on the same machine. At least not in the directory in question. But it was convenient to the OEMs to do it that way and the result was a lot of machine needing attention.

The Service Pack worked fine on the great majority of systems. But when you're talking about the Windows installed base it only takes a couple percent to make for millions of broken PCs. So, putting together a Service Pack is not trivial or cheap.

Re: Service Packs stopped making sense years ago

No, Service Packs also result in new version for OEMs to install. If you buy a machine today with Windows 7, it's going to be the SP1 release. This makes a new machine a bit less vulnerable when first fired up and getting the latest update installed. It also means a lot less to download and install for the updater.

Enterprises don't care about this because they roll their own images. They can add updates to the image on whatever schedule makes sense to them. They also have infrastructure for handling new updates better than individual consumers.

Where the Service Packs save a lot of time is for someone like me who does work on individual consumer and small business systems. If they've screwed up the machine so badly the most practical course is wiping and restoring the lot, and if it is a big brand OEM system, I'm not going to install the older version the machine shipped with and install a massive amount of updates and SPs. I'm going to install from the OEM most recent version of the OS for that machine. Those versions recognize their brand signature in the firmware, so there is no issue with activation.

So, if someone brings me a thoroughly infest Dell that shipped with XP SP1, I'm going to rebuild it with XP SP3 and save a bit of time. It's a convenience to people working at my level but the lack of a Win7 SP2 is not going to be a major problem. For starters, machines needing to be completely rebuilt has come up a LOT less in the post-XP era. This means less income for me but I'd rather make my money helping people set up and understand new stuff for their business than do repairs. An SP4 for XP might have been nice to have but I'm not the one footing the bill at Redmond.

I expect there will still be things like roll-ups that combine a bunch of updates. If you look at the history of any OS, you'll see the patches tend to be focused on a small critical set of files. Installing 100 updates on an old version of XP can mean the same file gets overwritten with a slightly newer version may times, until finally arriving at the most current version. (At least until some obsessive figures out a way to break it that has been there for ten years but was never discovered before.) So why not just cut to the chase with a rollup that is essentially a mini-SP focused on a single portion of the system?

Updating isn't the same process it was during XP's reign. It used to be common to be brought machines that hadn't been updated in over a year. That just doesn't happen much with the post-XP versions of Windows.

TiVo: Cisco and pals could owe us BILLIONS over DVR patents

Does no one remember RePlay?

TiVo didn't invent the DVR and wasn't first to market. The RePlayTV, under the Panasonic Showstopper branding, was in stores many months before the first TiVo model.

My 12 year 4080 model is still plugging away for my mother, though the original remote has worn out. She insists on still using it because she cannot wrap her head around the multi-device remote I got to replace it.

The old RePlay had a lot of features TiVo didn't offer until many years later, like a real networking port and moving video files between DVRs (or PCs using a Java app called DVarchive), remote scheduling over the web, sending video to other DVRs over the internet, etc.

I still find its interface better than all of the cutie-pie crap on the TiVo, especially the TiVo default of relentlessly trying to tell me what I should want to watch. (The TiVo thinks if you record Fullmetal Alchemist you must also be interested in shows ratted for small children. Because isn't all animation for small children? Then there is the 'my TiVo thinks I'm gay' gag that found its way into dozens of sitcom scripts a few years back.)

RePlay came under fire from Hollywood, Inc. a lot because it pretty much let users do whatever they wanted and that didn't sit well with the broadcast industry. So ownership of the RePlay IP changed hands a few times. Who has it now?

Ballmer's lightened pay packet is the least of his problems

Utter non-story

For a large portion of companies to widely adopt Windows 8 any time soon would be a radical change from past behavior. Many huge companies only got rid of the last of their Windows 2000 machines a few months before support ended at long last. Right now, Wells Fargo is rolling out Windows 7 to all its bank branches after over a year of testing their entire app suite. They'll likely be looking at Windows 10 before considering another big deployment and only then if an end date on Win7 support is looming.

Business isn't what drives the OS market. Business is what drives the business software market. Shock. Surprise. They're far more concerned about what the next generation of SQL offers. Shifting to a newer OS is only a consideration if the must-have software requires it or support ends or some other reason forces the issue.

This also avoids the training issue. Windows 8 will have thoroughly penetrated the consumer sector, for better or worse, long before many businesses are concerned with it. A major portion of the workers will already be familiar with how Win8 works at home well before they're likely to see it at the office. The transition to the Ribbon versions of Office didn't have this advantage as Office is less likely to be bought for a home PC by someone who works with it in their job and might get it for free on a company laptop or heavily discounted through the company. So what ever version the company is using is what they'll have at home. But far more people buy their own computers for home separate from their job.

Microsoft spruces up crap apps in early Win8 update

Unfair comparison

The Mail app isn't intended to compete with Outlook. The better comparison would be for someone currently using a freebie app like Live Mail or Thunderbird. Both of those are much better than Mail in its current state but the nature of Windows 8 allows for rapid evolution of the apps without much effort on the users' part.

I've been running the RTM for a while now and it seems hardly a week goes by that doesn't have updates for nearly everything I've installed.

Intel: Behold the TABLETS of our partners, proof of Win8's MIGHT

Re: BBC reporting that Android Apps will run on AMD Win8 devices

Go to the AMD AppZone section for Android on Windows and the reality is far less exciting. Most of the apps are simply useless. The good ones already have native Windows versions or web versions. The remainder are a bunch of generic games of the sort that exist in vast numbers already on Windows and aren't very usable on a non-touchscreen device.

It's an interesting stunt but not much else.

Windows Store size doubles: Now 0.3% the size of Apple's

Compare to Mac Store for equivalence

How many apps are in the Mac Store so far? That is the more direct equivalent until such time as Windows tablets have a significant chunk of the market where the iPad lives. Until then the Windows 8 world will be an outgrowth of the PC software market rather than a direct competitor.

It isn't the lack of a desktop mode, which isn't quite true BTW, that keeps old Windows software off RT devices. It is the lack of binary level compatibility. Windows RT runs on ARM chips, not x86 systems. Having a desktop mode available to third party developers would aid in porting apps but not in running any off the shelf.

Who's afraid of Windows 8? Trio leads Microsoft migration pack

Re: Migration can go more than one way

A lot of people have forgotten or never knew how the IE6 problem occurred. The W3C was moving at a glacial pace and everybody in the browser business had a ton of stuff they wanted to do with no semblance of a standard to follow. They could wait for years or just do it and hope their version was the winner.

So Microsoft went ahead and did a number of critical items that made things doable in the browser that had previously been very hard. Stuff we all take granted now and the eventually standard was a fair bit different. But it was too late. A huge amount of investment had been made in apps that worked in IE5 and IE6.

Even Microsoft wants IE6 to die. They've done a big push to get in alignment with the HTML standards, especially HTML 5. They have to move slowly because of the nature of their customer base, while Chrome can have a new release every week without putting anyone out of business.

It's a weird situation when your most difficult competitor is your past self but that is what Microsoft is up against. If not for IE6 the number of migrations from XP to 7 would be far higher. There are workarounds but a lot of companies just can't be bothered. I'm kind of surprised Microsoft hasn't released a Win7 app just for running IE6-only sites that is simpler than a virtualization solution.

Re: "XP won't run IE8 or 9" ???

Have you tested the app in DOSbox or any of the many other options for running ancient apps on newer systems?

There are solutions and most of them can be made fairly transparent to the users.

Final Office 2013 for ARM may not ship until January

Re: What does seem to be the most worrying

Amazing level of logic fail in this comment section.

Office 2013 on x86 isn't done yet, so how in the hell can they ship a completed version on RT? I've been using the preview version on Win8 and it's been quite good. But I'm just one user accessing a small subset of the total package. Who knows, outside of Redmond, how much work remains?

The article author also neglected to mention the email alternative that many people use by default these days: the web. I may be set in my ways acquired in the 80s but a lot of people who are newer to email got started with a web based account and have never seen fit to use a local client to download message on a permanent basis.

I've little doubt there will be a dozen or more email alternatives on RT within a few months, including ports from Android, like Kaiten. WinRT will probably get a full Outlook in the next revision of Office when they get it off the desktop completely.

Microsoft throws open Windows Store to all developers

Re: No software for Windows?

When I installed the RTM of Win8 a couple days ago I was surprised to see how much new stuff was in the store. Still a very limited selection compared to the more established platforms but I didn't expec any of it to be visible ahead of the official release.

On launch day the Store for RT may seem a bit meager but I'm expecting there will be a few hundred items there, including some of the big names from the iOS/Android worlds. A lot of it will be encapsulated web sites, like the one for this site, that present little challenge in being recompiled for RT.

Re: >$999.99 Metro apps?

A search of most expensive apps for each platform shows Android prices topping out at just a few hundred while a few iOS apps command the remarkable $999 price tag. Unsurprisingly, they're extremely specialized and suspect the price tag has little to do with how they're actually sold.

>$999.99 Metro apps?

Somehow, I don't think the $999.99 price ceiling is going to be a problem for the kinds of apps intended to be offered through the Windows Store. Windows 8 users will still be able to install from other sources and the really pricey stuff is likely to remain desktop oriented for the foreseeable future.

As for Windows RT, where the Windows Store is the only option for non-enterprise users, what kind of software is going to demand such a price for a single system?

What are the most expensive items in the iOS App Store and Google Play?

HTML5 still floundering in 'chicken and egg' era, says Intel

IE 10 on Xbox 360

IE 10 is going to be added tot he Xbox 360 in the next big firmware update. I chose to not join the beta but I wonder how it scores compared to other non-PC platforms. Even IE 6 would be an improvement on the PS3 browser. Opera on the Wii is horribly constrained by the display and limited memory.

There is the ongoing conflict between selling native apps and selling the platform with more capable browsing. It'll be interesting to see how MS deals with the problem.

Re: @AndrueC

Where do you think Microsoft gets the drivers from? The hardware makers, you dolt!

The drivers on a Windows disc or from Windows Update have been through the WHQL process, which is costly but provides the level of testing enterprises prefer. This is why there can be such a version gap between the driver Windows offers and the latest for a device that is frequently updated, especially video cards. It would be horribly expensive and slow to have every Nvidia driver release go through WHQL but it isn't necessary since the customers who will only use WHQL certified drivers aren't concern with gaming performance.

Ballmer predicts 400 MILLION Win 8 Surface and Lumia fumblers

Re: I hate the way Microsoft deliberately confuses the market...

You haven't read much about Windows Phone 8, have you? The overlap for developers with Windows 8 and Windows RT is far higher than with Windows Phone 7.x. It is not at all unreasonable for a developer to look upon them as all facets of a single ecosystem for selling products.

Re: 350Million PC Sold with windows 8 but...

Pretty much every big XP shop is preparing to shift to Windows 7 as the plug is pulled on XP support in 2014. I got a lot of work in 2009 and 2010 because of the deadline on Windows 2000. I expect a similar round of new hardware deployments and reimaging of machines in service for less than half their warranty period as the XP deadline looms.

Of the organizations I regularly do work for, I know of at least a half dozen who have already got all of their apps fully verified under Windows 7 and could start shifting over at short notice. These account for nearly two million seats combined. For these companies the cost is entirely in the conversion labor. Their licensing level lets them run anything from Microsoft they choose.

If that experience is typical, then XP should disappear almost entirely from the corporate desktop before the deadline in 2014.

In the SMB segment, it is far more convenient to switch sooner than later. They're much less likely to have custom apps and the free XP Mode handles nearly everything that doesn't have an update to run properly as a native install.

As for people buying a new Win7 box and installing Linux, please. Do we really have to entertain that fantasy any more? When the slice on the pie chart is so small as to require its label to be external, or the item is simply lumped under 'other,' you should realize it isn't a significant market force.

Re: MS need to shed Ballmer

That approach doesn't apply when you are a big player like Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Sony, etc.

The video game market had seen how many companies launch platforms already when Sony decided to get in? And after Sony, Microsoft jumped in as well to become one of the major players. They had a rough start but could afford to learn from their mistakes.

A company mainly known for large construction projects in Asia decided quite abruptly to go into the automobile business. Hyundai has done alright in that field despite numerous existing players.

How many companies had offered smartphones before Apple launched the iPhone?

Do you have any idea how many companies were selling desktop micro-computers when IBM decided it might be a business for them?

When you're already a big player in general, you don't shy away for new product lines.

Safer conjugal rights via electronic skin

This whole business sounds absurd on multiple levels.First of all, for this woman's exhalations to be anything remotely like a threat to others she'd have to be carrying around such a dose as to make her death assured. Her skin should be sloughing off by now.

People have been given a ridiculous fear of anything that can be described as radioactive, no matter how minutely compared to natural sources we life near our entire lives. This has made for some really intensely stupid coverage of the situation in Japan in which the reporters rarely mention the vast gulf between detectability ands levels that might actually have an effect on a person.

Further, a cheap keyboard and mouse cost what these days? You couldn't spare a few quid to let the lady get on with her life instead of feeling like a contaminate spewing freak? Even a low end laptop can be had for remarkably little these days. Though if her husband is this silly of a person she might want to think about the cost of entirely separate living quarters on a permanent basis.

BeBook outs Kindle-beating e-book reader

Don't be silly.

It looks like a Nook.

When you have the same tech at your core and don't want to distract from the primary function, it's hard to make an e-reader distinctive outside of the software.

If your books in the Kindle app were purchased from Amazon they sync to your handheld Kindle automatically. If they just file with no DRM you got somewhere else, yo just copy them to the Kindle as if it were a USB drive. Because at that moment, it is.

Bill Gates, Harry Evans and the smearing of a computer legend

Re: Douglas Adams 1995

Adams had no firsthand idea what things were like before the 80s. Or even before the IBM PC. The Model T was not technologically exciting, even when newly introduced, but it was the critical product that changed the world while more exotic machines came and went with little effect on the average motorist's life.

He also thought it mattered that the original 128K Mac had no Y2K issues lurking in it. As if anyone was still using one for anything important just two years later, never mind sixteen years later. Even those original units that boosted up to 512K to become actually useful machines were still extremely limited to what was being offered for half the price only five years later. And that is just counting Apple and leaving aside the rest of the industry's advances.

Re: Memories of the once cutting edge.

The 'Gary went flying' thing is a myth. What really happened is that Dorothy Kildall, who was Gary's wife and lawyer, looked at the contract IBM offered and said "No way." Gates knew why DR had turned IBM down but decided the potential was so great that he would go with what IBM wanted and renegotiate later. It was the right choice as the IBM PC and MS-DOS market overtook the CP/M world in remarkably little time. Just a few years later, folks who considered themselves fairly savvy had never seen a CP/M system running.

One aspect the article misses is the CP/M was hardly original. It was based on large systems (mainly the TOPS-10 OS of the DECsystem10 mainframe) Kildall had worked with before deciding to create something make small systems usable for non-coders.

Another thing that makes the source code comparison dubious is that CP/M was written in Kildall's own PL/M language. I suppose if a disassembly of CP/M-86 and PC-DOS 1.0 were each created and compared, that might be a useful comparison.

I do know that there was a DR copyright easter egg hidden in CP/M that be reproduced on the original IBM PC. It was coded in such a way as to create incompatibilities if not replicated, I suppose. I find it hard to believe there wasn't an easy workaround and that it was just the quick and dirty way to get it done.

Office for ARM will lack features, report claims

Re: Office for ARM will lack features, report claims

Except the only way OpenOffice for ARM will find its way on to Windows RT tablets is if it operates entirely within the Metro framework. Likewise, on iOS and Android there is desktop environment. If it doesn't run in one of those three environments, it simply may as well not exist.

What else running an ARM CPU is going to offer it any meaningful numbers? A 20+ year old Archimedes?

Re: So...

To compete with iOS (and Android) tablets and other items in the lower price ranges. Those markets don't have much call for VBA apps. Do you know anyone outside of the corporate world doing much with VBA? It takes a certain scale to make the investment in such work worth while.

Re: Oh come on

You've got to be kidding. Office 2010 runs fine on my AMD A6 based laptop under Windows 8 RP, which is far from the fastest four-core option out there. What are you doing to get severe slowdown?

Killing VBA on Mac was not a matter of porting code. It was a genuine desire to kill VBA. It was great in its day but had a lot of issues going forward. MS is trying to shift Office extension work to web oriented tools and APIs, which hooks into where so much else is happening today.

Is this really an issue?

Windows RT will not join Active Directory domains. Which great limits the value of Windows RT for the typical business that builds heavily atop Office. Those businesses are more likely to go with Windows 8 Pro tablets that do everything any other x86 machine is expected to offer.

Also, keep in mind Microsoft is shifting away from VBA to a more web oriented extension platform for Office. Much as Windows RT won't support the desktop for anything other than Office (and that will likely go away as Office gets converted to being more natively Metro but it will be years for that) its version of Office will only support the the most current methods for extending Office.

You have to set cutoffs somewhere and this is as good a place as any. A major cause of failed app installs on Vista/7/2008 was the cutoff of 16-bit support. A surprising number of companies were still using 16-bit installers that should have been done away with a decade earlier.

Transitions are always hard.