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It's because that's the only processor on their roadmap that Microsoft could be using. I think this thing is just a hardware prototype and this is classic Microsoft vaporware in an attempt to light a fire under their partner's asses. They can't tell you the screen resolution (yanking the device out of people's hands when they try to look), they can't tell you the battery life, they can't confirm the processor specs, and they can't even tell you the ballpark price. How the gently caress is that anything other than "look at our engineering samples"? Having two different (and potentially incompatible) processors is a huge problem because some apps (CLR) will run on both but others (x86/x64) won't. It would be way better if they just said the apps had to be separate entirely - at least then you'd know. Or just require *all* apps sold on their app marketplace to support both and ship fat binaries. No one in their right mind will want to use Win32 apps on that tiny rear end screen with a trackpad. The pro product exists so they can dump them on corporate IT departments who I'm sure will snap them up only to have them promptly end up in the dust bin. It's an ultra book with a touch screen, BFD. What's the target market here? The "light" one has an even bigger problem given that the new iPad will be coming out around the same time. If the speculation is correct and it contains an IPS retina display you could see 15-20 hour battery life with the iPad 3's current battery. So I can pay the same price for a Windows tablet with poo poo screen resolution and 5 hours of battery life (and no apps), or I can get an iPad? Tough choice. But the weirdest part of this for me is Microsoft's fetish for trying to cram Windows everywhere. The iPad is already the target market... if they just ported Office they would literally make billions and billions of dollars just putting out iPad software. That's an absolutely zero-risk proposition, as opposed to this venture. Microsoft's entertainment division should be releasing iPad games left and right... again, another license to print money. I'd also have bought MonoTouch/Xamarin out and made Visual Studio the best iOS development environment and sold all those iOS devs a ton of tools to add another billion in revenue... tack on a small license fee to use the CLR in your iOS app store apps and boom - collect revenue on (potentially) thousands of iOS apps (and make developer's lives easier). Instead they've allowed a whole generation of developers to buy Macs, get comfortable with objective-C, and get hooked on the Apple ecosystem. IMHO Bill Gates would have never let that happen - he knew as well as anyone how important developers are to a platform and he would have found a way to monetize it. If I were a Microsoft shareholder I'd be angry they were potentially wasting a ton of money on this while they wasted *years* letting people buy iOS software from another vendor, pushing Macs everywhere, and letting iOS invade the corporate world while I twiddled my thumbs. The new model is Bring-your-own-device and I don't think MS is going to be able to turn back the clock... employees are happier and companies save money.. if that proves true going forward it makes the situation even worse for MS. Simulated fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Jun 19, 2012 |
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Jun 19, 2012 06:41
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spidoman posted:Yeah, because it's totally a monopoly. Indeed! As Beardless Riker points out, this is on the internet for everyone to see! How embarrassing... In all seriousness the operative word is "premature". Even if we take everything Microsoft says at face value, they have no screen resolution, no processor specs, no battery life numbers, and no price. That's vaporware any way you slice it.
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Jun 19, 2012 07:15
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You can't buy one, nor do you know what it will cost when it arrives. In fact it has no release date. Anyone can demo a $2500 engineering sample. That doesn't mean it will make it to market on-time, with the same feature set, or for a reasonable price. How is this controversial? If Apple or Google had announced they were going to ship two incompatible tablets in six-nine months but no you can't have the price, specs, battery life, screen res, etc everyone would be ripping them a new rear end in a top hat and rightfully so. PS: I never said Microsoft should become an iOS development house. I said they should be developing software for iOS alongside their other business. Office on the iPad is a no-brainer. I also want Microsoft to make dev tools for other platforms beause they make great dev tools that I love. I just have no faith in them to deliver on hardware. No after Zune and Kin. Plus my Xbox that has RROD'd but they refuse to replace because the warranty expired and even though it is an admitted manufacturing defect. I am not eager to get burned again.
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Jun 19, 2012 09:04
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Vagrancy posted:You're aware that ASUS unveiled actual Windows 8 Transformers at Computex right? Transformer 600 (RT) and 810 (X86). Is it just me or is that not a replica of a MacBook Air? At this rate I expect Apple to completely change up their look soon. Computers are going to end up like the fashion industry where a few people out out original designs that everyone else apes until the trendsetters put out new designs that go in a different direction.
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Aug 20, 2012 21:15
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teagone posted:First Surface ad is up. I like it. But what does it actually do?
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Oct 16, 2012 03:44
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So at 599 (because who in their right mind would use this without a keyboard?), they're basically competing with an iPad + BT Keyboard that, for the same price 499+99, has a faster processor, way better screen and screen resolution, plus a whole ecosystem, hundreds of thousands of apps... and their big one-up is an extra 16GB of flash and baby-Office? People are going to see Desktop mode running Office on this thing and expect to be able to run Quickbooks or whatever, then be very angry. Hell, they're going open their Excel sheet and be angry the macros don't run, or pull down some menu and be angry their feature isn't there (the old "everyone uses a different 20% of Office" rule that makes it hard to replace). Microsoft could have done lightweight Metro touch UIs for Office that covered all the basics and kept Desktop mode as an option when you needed more... It would have taken some interns 6 months to write and kept people out of Desktop mode for the most part. The same applies to Control Panel... Why not write 100% Metro coverage? But this is the same company that still pops up the Windows NT dialogs for a bunch of Control Panel options even though it has a whole new UI for the rest through Vista/Win7. And God help them if they don't get the keyboard. I was thinking of writing an app for Windows 8 XD Surface EP Oh Microsoft, shine on you beautiful diamond!
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Oct 16, 2012 15:46
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The Merkinman posted:I keep trying to click this. I know underlined words are links, but it's not doing anything! There really should be some sort of feedback on every underlined non-hyperlink on the entire Internet That's a dumb example because hyperlinks are typically styled differently (eg blue), have a different mouse cursor when you hover over them or in touch mode holding down on them for a second brings up a menu.... All of which are hints as to their clickability. If your UI is going to include hidden gestures that you need to memorize to engage in core functionality then there is no excuse for having one of them work only some of the time. I'm sure it "works fine", its just a really bad choice and will be an endless source of frustration that will give people negative feelings about using the device (but not you, uber-nerd tech genius, we get it ok?). No one wants to feel like the computer is ignoring them. When people talk about how much better/easier/friendly Apple is, this is the kind of ineffable quality they are talking about. The number of negative experiences you get with iOS is tremendously low and that reinforces the positive feelings people develop. Besides that, the scroll bounce/overscroll is a good example of feedback even in the absence of something to display. It gives you confirmation that you scrolled correctly but there is simply no more data to show. Using those lists would be much worse without it, even though you can technically do it just fine. It gives you a feeling of control instead of feeling ignored. Same if you tap on something and the second-level detail list is empty, it doesn't just stay on the screen and take no action because "hey there is nothing to display" and no one would argue that it should... You get an empty list with a "no data" message. Edit: how could I forget... On the iPad if you do the four-finger swipe to change apps and you hit the last app in the list, instead of doing nothing you it does the rejected bounce animation so you can see that it "wants" to slide over but there is nothing to slide to. That would be a perfectly acceptable option in this case... Just a simple quick animation to let you know it the gesture worked but there are no running apps. Simulated fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Oct 17, 2012 |
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Oct 17, 2012 15:57
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Is it just me or does every single video of someone using the charms show them accidentally scrolling or otherwise having trouble? P.S. Watching someone try to use Desktop mode with touch is painful. Everything takes several taps to accomplish because they keep missing the intended control. I don't think that bodes well for Windows 8 Pro Surface XP RT++ Graduate Student/Spanish Villa Edition(TM).
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Oct 19, 2012 19:37
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Nope. The MagSafe connectors on my original MacBook, MacBook Pro 17, and MacBook Pro Unibody 15 never had that issue.
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Oct 24, 2012 14:37
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chedemefedeme posted:Totally not. Happens in a variety of lighting conditions too. Right now I'm sitting in a very dark room with surface in my lap. I scroll with my thumb from the side of the screen. The light sensor is in the top bezel, slightly to the left of center. The change in brightness is small. Perhaps a few percent. It only happens when scrolling the screen past areas of different bright or dark colors. Scrolling through a thread here on the forums causes it since every other post has a slightly different background color. I can reliably ramp it up and down by scrolling back and forth over the same spot that causes it. Its super subtle. Not sure I even noticed until I owned the tablet a few days. But it is there and completely reproducible every time. Either a defect or a poor backlight algorithm in the display. All LCDs have to vary the backlight power depending on the average brightness of the screen or you'll get that kind of apparent brightness changes as the dark pixels let less light through, directing more of the backlight through the lightly colored ones. It also causes bleed through on the dark areas, reducing the contrast ratio. That's why the really good TVs have LED arrays so they can control the backlight in different sections independently. But my money's on a defect. The Surface hardware guys don't seem like dummies... They already can't compete with the iPad screen on resolution or color accuracy, I highly doubt they cheaped out on the backlight or display controller.
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Oct 30, 2012 15:48
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Combat Pretzel posted:Then, my piano synth takes the cake. Two voices with mediocre complexity make the SurfaceRT trip over itself. I'm not sure what to make of it. Dicking around with the benchmark function of my current ongoing modular synth project, which has a plain C core (with math optimized to boot) and sheds a lot of overhead due to that, suggests that ARM CPUs can't deal with randomly scattered data access patterns. I will laugh like a maniac if they didn't bother to have the CoreCLR do full optimizations on ARM, that's just sad. Once the code is JIT'd and cached it should be almost as fast as C code unless your C library is hand-tuned with inline assembler. In some cases .NET code is faster since object allocation is simple pointer++ logic. (On server machines the GC is even non-pausing concurrent if you opt into that) Don't fret too much about how much faster the Apple A5/A6 chips are; they bought two semiconductor companies and hired a bunch of engineers on top of that. Those people aren't idle. Of course I've also been spoiled by iOS shipping with CoreAudio... I never want to attempt media on Windows again and managed DirectX can kiss my left butt cheek.
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Nov 1, 2012 04:13
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Are people seriously listing iOS as "archaic" non-ironically? I have a tablet to use the apps, not be impressed with fancy widgets or live tiles. Who gives a poo poo about that stuff after the first few days?
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Nov 7, 2012 21:42
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sethsez posted:People don't like widgets or live tiles because they're "impressive," they like them because it's nice to have certain information at a glance rather than having to open up a bunch of different apps. Why should I have to open an application to check the weather or get a stock ticker when those are the kinds of things that could be conveyed in the space of an icon or two instead? It's slower and a waste of screen space. What else besides weather and stocks would you actually use regularly? How useful is seeing snippets of emails vs how many new messages you have? Either way you need to open the app to get anything really useful. This isn't trolling or sarcastic. I remember gadgets, active desktop, the Windows Mobile start screen, Mac OS dashboard, etc... Some of the many, many attempts to cram a lot of constantly updating information into a smaller space and I can't stand it and have no idea why anyone would want to use it. Do I have a new email or an upcoming appointment? No? Then get out of my face, I've got SPL measurements to take, websites to browse, or games to play. I'm not saying they are completely useless, it just seems an odd thing to crow about the OS or widgets when people spend 99% of their time actually using the apps on the device, not staring at their home screens. Are steering wheels a terrible interface because they haven't been redesigned in many years? More importantly what makes sperglords think most people give a poo poo? (In fact evidence shows people value comfort and consistency - witness reaction to the MS Office Ribbon)
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Nov 8, 2012 03:51
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OK, that makes sense. I don't know that I like it, but I can see why some people would.
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Nov 8, 2012 07:02
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Stumpus posted:Nothing new though. My iPhone does this without having to manually tell it to stop. This isn't really a problem unless there's no way to tell it not to.  iOS devices will sleep the screen but once the update begins installing it will continue in the background. Even app updates/downloads will continue while the device is sleeping, though there is a timer there that stops them if it goes too long to avoid running down your battery. If it's plugged in then it will complete app updates even if they take an hour for some insane reason.
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Nov 14, 2012 22:03
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angry_keebler posted:It's sort of par for the course with the surface. An iPad or android tablet only lets you clone the display, instead of allowing you to extend it, probably because they tested extended displays and found out that it just doesn't work very well and can be pretty disappointing. Yes it's a good feature, but it just isn't ready for prime time on ARM yet, so wait until the hardware catches up. Just FYI, on iOS it is up to the application to decide if it wants to extend to the secondary screen or not. The default behavior is mirroring but you can implement a separate view if you like. This applies to AirPlay and the physical HDMI output equally. It's fantastic for certain games and apps that display heads-up consoles, etc on the secondary or vice-versa. It's also annoying as poo poo when apps like HBO Go use this wonderful capability to hijack the secondary screen and display a "cannot be viewed on this screen" message, thanks to Hollywood content owner douchebaggery. I pay for HBO, I can record the show on my DVR, but catching one that I missed by air playing it to my TV? That's a bridge too far! (Too bad I have an HDMI adapter for my laptop and can do the same drat thing that way)
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Nov 18, 2012 17:16
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Kazy posted:Here's Windows 8's handwriting recognition: The handwriting recognition on my pocket PC and Windows Mobile phones was fantastic. It has never been the technology holding it back, it's the fact that writing by hand sucks. Once the novelty wears off its just so much faster to type with a keyboard, on-screen or physical.
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Nov 27, 2012 00:33
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ljw1004 posted:I reckon the general consumer also wouldn't know how to restore from wifi or from a USB stick. At least with this setup, MS support will be able to tell them "Just hold down whichever buttons for ten seconds as you turn on the machine, and it'll go back to its original state with your documents intact". That seems pretty compelling. You mean how my Mac boots a small (less than 4GB) partition, connects to WiFi, and downloads the OS if needed? And how I can still create a USB restore drive from another Mac if I can't get on the Internet? So much for "No Compromises". We don't even know how big the restore partition is... A bet a lot of that is other stuff you can't uninstall.
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Jan 31, 2013 23:51
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