eckyptang

Probably shitty battery which is the thing that kills viability of a device.

I know this is purely anecdotal, but everyone I've seen recently who has bought a tablet, bought a laptop within 6 months or switched back to their old laptop and got rid of it.

I'm still not convinced by the tablet hype. The star trek wow factor wears off pretty quick for most people.

A $99 tablet may change that (temporarily as it's almost impulse buy pricing), but I'm not sure something of that price will have anything groundbreaking to add.

It's actually very good and always was. There were no extensions that were browser specific.

These were, if you check out output out, simply commented out metadata and custom prefixed CSS rules that allowed it to be imported back into Word if required without losing any information that was lost when exporting to HTML. You could remove all these with a text editor (or a regex) and it'd knock perfectly good HTML + CSS out.

I'd tell them to piss of if they asked that. It's their job to fix it without losing your data.

ChomeBook wouldn't work even in the suburbs of London, UK. We have frequent mobile network and Internet outages.

If you need to rely on the device, sorry but it's local apps + synchronisation or bust.

Centralised computing works fine if your kit is in the office and your clients are in the office and your operations team are shit hot. Otherwise - it's totally retarded.

Some of our corporate clients even have a direct fiber connection to us as they don't trust the Internet not to screw up.

This is reality.

Like all those closed incredibly hidden evil standards that they publish here for interoperability?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313105(v=office.12...

I'd like LibreOffice if it wasn't so clunky. It's entirely lacking polish and quality control. It has potential, but it's not there yet.

This kills it for me as well. Also it's incredibly slow and glitchy even on Chrome.

Considering Office costs me less than 10GBP a month over 3 years, and works entirely offline, Google docs doesn't cut it.

There is one: Excel (Live) or Excel (Desktop).

Try it if you haven't already by creating a Windows Live account and visiting http://skydrive.live.com and clicking the Create button at the top. You can do Word, OneNote, Excel and PowerPoint.

Which makes the things easier to nick...

Club individual on head, yank thing, run away.

I think all it proves there is a fine line between following a religion and being mentally ill.

I work with a lot (80+ developers) in the Microsoft ecosystem. I haven't found a single one who is enthusiastic about Windows 8. Most are looking rather worried as yet again the rug has been pulled from underneath them. They got burned with Silverlight and the first drop of the Foundation series of products and Entity Framework.

Another incompatible API is just more shit to deal with.

They are not happy.

I'm not either as I have to support these guys.

Yes I've trialled Windows 8 heavily for our environment and installed about 50 "popular highly rated apps". They are all simply put: shit. Flakey, broken, hard to use, slow, huge, not useful and poorly integrated and nothing inbetween. Even the microsoft provided apps with Windows 8 are really shoddy.

Seriously I'm a fan of Windows Phone 7.5 and own a handset with lots of apps installed but it doesn't scale up to the desktop at all.

Not a single existing Windows user is going to bother with this crap - it'll end up going to way desktop gadgets went except you can't turn it off any more.

I'd agree. It doesn't feel finished yet. I think the OEMs will be all over it customising it which is going to ruin the experience.

I'd rather be using Lynx on a 1200 baud modem. I was far more productive back then without the distractions of hacker news etc.

I'm old enough to remember reading this reposted on usenet (or was it gopher) at the time. Cue discussion about how gopher was much better as it already did images.

Little did we know back then...

Yes you have to be careful with being messed with on a train. Whilst drunk and unconcious on a train, a friend of mine had a penis drawn on his head in bic biro (this was UK, London, Kingston loop)

That's the first thing I thought of as well and I'm not ashamed to say I found it slightly funny.

On a more serious note, this is really a "how to get your stuff stolen" hat.

This is why we need application sandboxes at kernel level. Selinux for example.

This is normal for Oracle and has been for at least 20 years. They are too busy milking people for new contracts rather than looking after their existing customers.

It's akin to a sit in protest. I think it's adequately placed.

That used to work with ISA cards in the late 80s for me :)

It made the corrosion worse in the long run but it worked good enough for a bit.

A friend of mine used spit as solder flux as well once. Worked quite well.

I disagree. They will either hang themselves with x86-64 or make it a success as it is now. They won't go near ARM as a mainstream CPU.

Ah that broken model which assumes that moral reasoning has a relation to moral action, which it clearly doesn't for the majority of the population of this rock...

It's all about trading the social contract against risk of punishment. It's so absolutely unenforceable that more people break the social contract than adhere to it.

It's all crazy. Absolutely batshit crazy. People hide behind it all the time and defend it as well.

In your example, it is why people buy the plants from someone else. It is purely risk mitigation. It allows them to break the implicit contract without risking severe punishment. The drug dealers are willing to take a larger risk as there is a high probability of financial gain or a higher risk of getting killed by their importer/pusher.

Considering morality is founded on a fear of someone doing to you what you did to them, then yes.

This is a fairly basic interpretation of the golden rule but it stands up to the majority of counterpoints.

It's fine.

The bedrock abstraction (usable languages etc) is higher than the hardware. The hardware we don't care about. It's disposable. In fact, you can drag pretty much anything you can do from the Pi onto another platform and carry on.

If the languages chosen were pretty tied to the hardware, then I'd worry i.e. if people were using it to learn ARM assembly or were developing early UNIX versions on PDP11s. But they're not.

It's suitable for education only because it's very cheap, it's functional and the bedrock abstraction is higher than the hardware.

There is no social contract either. It evaporates in a moment's notice when you break the speed limit or download an mp3.

Some thoughts on this:

You have no obligation to conform to these laws at all. You are not born into a contract. A contract is a piece of paper which you can use to wipe your bum with if you wish.

You can in theory do what the hell you like. People regularly do. You can kill people, not pay tax, walk over the border of any country and urinate anywhere you like.

The only downside is that someone who does subscribe to the rules will probably throw you in jail or kill you without respecting your choice.

Fear of the above is the only reason that the law works at all.

When the law becomes bad for the population, which it really is under many common ethical principles these days and it is getting worse, we need to have a revolution to reset the badness.

There is no happy solution to adding legislation other than resetting it completely occasionally.

Dying and emigrating just bring their own legal problems.