It's not just time and space that are relative...

...there's also price tags. Amazon sells a 4TB drive for TWICE what it sells a 3TB for. That's still a hefty premium even if you have foggy memories of 10MB drives.

Re: @JEDIDIAH

You obviously don't contract for them either.

Otherwise you wouldn't be fixating on the tip of the iceberg there.

Talk about short memories...

> I cant recall anyone in the EU needing American help!

Try the French RIGHT NOW for starters...

Re: Interesting dichotomy ...

> The biggest threat to us is not some company using browsing habits to sell us chewing gum.

No. That is the real threat. Who do you think the government uses to get it's information from? Most likely, it gets both tech and the actual information from some outside data aggregator that collects all of this cruft and slices and dices it for easy sale and consumption (to corps or government).

Re: More EU beauracracy. Business costs up once again

>> P.S. I don't own a business myself.

>

> Most people who can't spell 'competitive' don't.

...like you would know. What do you know of business or business owners. You're just a prole from the peanut gallery.

Re: Fuck 'em

It's almost like the idea of national sovereignty doesn't matter until it's YOUR nations sovereignty.

Clueless rubes from somewhere else...

Peak time in the evening? Are you kidding? Peak time is going to be in the middle of the day when you've had the sun up long enough to bake the landscape. By the time evening rolls around, things are actually starting to cool off a bit.

Peak time is going to be when the Sun is cooking you because all of the rubes from back east have built dwellings and offices that aren't adapted to the climate and they're all blasting their ACs.

Daytime AC is going to be the biggest power drain on the system by far.

Coming full circle...

The only alternative to shelves of boxes gathering dust is lots of spinning rust.

Trusting "The Cloud" is just silly. I have music that predates MP3s being offered by Apple and I have video that predates that being offered by Apple and now they are being displaced by a new flavor of the month and there still isn't anything that's portable across all devices (no Vudu isn't it).

Any droning on about "my isn't that obsolete" needs to include a plausible answer to the question "What are you going to replace it with?".

My local stuff will still be usable when your current Cloud based fad is long gone.

Re: Death of optical

A USB drive is much easier to replace once you've worn it out. You don't have to crack the case or anything.

Re: Strange, I never stopped using'em.

Your "play anywhere" content has to come from somewhere and the Cloud centric conventional channels aren't providing it. If you want choices beyond the iPad and Kindle, optical disks aren't going anywhere.

Re: Great!

Not only do we have price stagnation but we also have capacity stagnation. 4TB drives have lingered on the edge of being commonly available for quite some time now and newer and larger drives haven't been introduced. I would like to move on to the next step up in terms of capacity but it doesn't seem to be coming. I really wonder if I will be replacing my latest batch of drives with more of the same capacity once those get too old to be trusted anymore.

Re: Ah the Woolworths syndrone....

Windows is an extension of MS-DOS.

Attempting to fixate on Windows while ignoring MS-DOS is just dishonest. Microsoft was already using dirty tricks to bury everyone else and getting slapped by the feds for doing it.

When Windows 3 was first released, the common PC wasn't able to handle it very well. It was not quite as bad as OS/2 or Unix but it still really required more machine than what most people had. In the end, Microsoft's legacy relationships with OEMs and 3rd party vendors is what won the day.

Re: Ah the Woolworths syndrone....

> If you don't buy the products, they don't sell them. It's called economics.

They can't sell them if they don't bother showing them.

These machines were too cheap. No one except consumers wanted them. Both merchants and manufacturers want to sell you something MORE EXPENSIVE. The local Best Buy just plain hid machines like these and Frys was always out of stock.

You would be hard pressed to buy these things from a B&M store even if you wanted to.

Re: There is a simple fix

If Samsung missed this, then what else did they miss? What other ticking time bomb is lurking in their products. They get to go straight to the top of the PC sh*t list. There they will stay until they get their act together or someone screws up worse.

...not that they would have been the first name to come to mind even before this debacle.

Re: Licence agreements

> Which they do. BMW, Porche and some other from the list of our "favorite" car companies

...perfect reason right there to reject both of those companies and their products out of hand.

Excessively proprietary products are always much more of a bother.

Re: Ah UEFI.

What's there to stop an old backup program from backing up a new OS really?

Why should the new OS make old system utilities useless? Why would any man with the least bit of self-respect tolerate such shenanigans?

Re: As I recollect

> If you wanted to avail yourself of Windows 3.x

All blatant nonsense.

You can't re-write history. Some of us were actually there. Alleged msoffice supremacy was as much over hyped Lemming nonsense then as it is today.

Re: "Domestic cats"

In general, it is very difficult to get a cat to do anything against it's will. Unless it is in a cage, you can pretty much assume that the cat has given it's consent. Otherwise, there would likely be a pretty badly cut human.

"herding cats"

Re: How many creatures

Sometimes I wonder if they could cut out the middle man by just letting all of those cows graze on those fields that are now planted with corn.

Re: How many creatures do humans kill each year to feed cats ?

Goldfish will quite literally eat themselves to death. This is why you aren't supposed to overfeed the fish in your aquarium.

Re: I Hate Cats

Just think. We could go back to the good old days when rats were held in high esteem and plague spread freely throughout the land.

Re: Good to know my physical links are now 2000% efficient

50 hops? Where are you trying to send packets to? Mars?

Re: Or for $200

Never mind msoffice on an x86 tablet. I don't even like using wireless for media transfers on an ARM phone or tablet. Wired interfaces are dramatically faster. Transferring anything "into the cloud" is even worse.

Re: well, err

It's funny seeing people trying to defend the cloud trying to fixate on music. It's funny because any other use case tends to quickly fall apart. Not that the music use case is terribly robust either.

You can either pretend that you are living 20 years in the future with networks that actually match the hype of today, or you can actually get to take advantage of what tech has to offer.

Actually getting to do stuff is much more satisfying than bogus smugness about the Cloud.

If anything, wireless network dependence is going to drive tech churn much more than using local storage. You're going to need this week's phone/tablet just to take advantage of the wireless network du jour.

Arrogant and Insane...

Expecting people to spend $100 per year on a problem that was already solved 20 years ago? Really?

For most people it should be $50 and done, period.

Most people simply don't need Word Perfect style overkill. The only reason this is even remotely an issue is the perception that you need to be compatible and even that is being eroded by tablets.

The mystique is gone already...

The mystique is gone already. As soon as Apple got into heavily subsidized consumer devices, the Apple mystique was doomed. When you have heavily subsidized phones, you just can't keep the secret. Apple devices are nothing special and if anything they are crippled and limited. Apple confuses usability with gutting features and flexibility.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work even with non-geeks. Not everyone is as stupid as your blatantly anti-intellectual attitude implies. Many people are quite able to fend for themselves and are demanding technology users. It's not 1976 anymore. You don't have to be an electronics technician to be a power user.

Attempting to redefine the term "geek" won't alter your fortunes.

Re: You want portable?

> Hell, a MacBook Air isn't much pricier than one of these iPads.

That was a thought that struck me when buying the iPad1.

The tricked out tablet is not that much cheaper than an actual Mac.

Re: The only tablet

> Isn't choice a good thing? if someone really wants 128GB and has the money then let them buy it.

I would rather just plug a thumb drive into my phone.

...and I'm still waiting on something to top my Archos. It has 512GB.

Re: I thought you would be

> I use mine to take notes

Sounds like a palm pilot from the early 90s. It's a media consumption device.

If your use case doesn't sound like "media consumption", then it's going to be a disaster.

Sure, there are business reasons to do "media consumption". That doesn't make your glorified ipod a serious computing device. It makes it a slightly more portable take on a VHS player.

Re: @PatientOne

I find it absurd that someone could be accused of murder for killing a home intruder. It doesn't matter what the extenuating circumstances are. If they are in your house, they should expect to end up DEAD. The most that poor fellow should have been on the hook for was a weapons charge for having the illegal gun.

Puts a whole new spin on Clockwork Orange for me.

Re: @Psyx

Yeah... "no direct physical threat to others". He was just running around like a nut doing insane things and running into people's houses.

No "threat" at all.

As far as "what's the point goes":

A dead burglar discourages the other idiots.

A dead burglar also helps mend your own family, helps them sleep at night, and allows them to feel safe in their own home.

It works for the neighbors too. It feels reassuring after some burglar gets mauled by someone's dog. It helps make a high crime zone feels a little less dangerous.

Re: Americans use such self-explanetory language ... once you learn the vocabulary

"Breaking into a home" is the sort of thing that NEVER required any sort of "stand your ground" law.

Burglary is already considered a violent crime under common law.

The old "your home is your castle" thing applies.

Apparently, wherever you come from you are expected allow lunatics to run free in your home and to menace your loved ones.

Re: @ A Known Coward

We recently acquired an e-ink device around here. The main draw was battery life.

...as far as the survey goes, I think it's a big pile of nonsense.

Book readers are getting better. More people are getting exposed to tablets. Book readers are dirt cheap. Small tablets aren't that much more expensive. So it's very conceivable that people could have a dedicated reader along with all their other devices. Although book readers aren't subject to quite as much churn.

Don't see us getting another e-ink device until this one DIES.

Can't say the same for other tablets. "Tablets" are still in the 80s PC phase.

Re: @ Obviously!

> Maybe so - But Sky is for idiots in society who don't know when they are being shafted!

Cable is something that is seen by many as overpriced and you don't have anything to show for it in the end. It's this big money pit. I get a lot of flack from the missus over my own cable subscription but never hear any complaints about the things I just buy outright from places like Amazon.

It's not surprising that there's discontent out there.

Re: Netflix is good but ...

In truth, there's probably no single service you can depend on if you want to "cut the cord". On the other hand, it's pretty easy to tap into multiple services. A combination of them may be just the thing.

You just might have to pay more than $8 per month.

Re: I thought that flogging had been banned...

> All windows 8 needed to be a contender is a proper classic shell - allow desktop by default and stop throwing us out of it when we want to run another program.

The perfect approach would have been for the device to look like an old copy of Win7 so long as you had a mouse connected or the screen vertical and have the thing switch to touch the moment you actually touched it. Use the magic of computer automation to guess what approach was best for the given situation and allow the user to easily override.

No one was clamouring for a tabletized desktop. Plenty of people were clamouring for a tablet that can be an old school desktop when needed.

"Wrong Way Peachfuzz"

Re: Windows 8 FAIL

Something like msoffice depends on the perception that everyone needs it. Once people realize that they don't need a particular iteration of Word Perfect level overkill for their personal documents, much of the reason for people to use the perceived monopoly evaporates.

Re: Windows 8 FAIL

"The OS is fine" is not really a good argument.

You can use that same type of argument with VMS, Solaris, or Linux but it's not exactly going to get you anywhere.

The "shell" is what users are going to interact with. If that sucks or doesn't adequately address their expertise with the last 10 versions of the product, then you are going to have trouble. No amount of weak excuses are going to change that.

Microsoft finally finds itself in a position where it can no longer dictate. Users now realize that they have other options and that they aren't trapped into being "DOS compatible".

Re: does it matter what OS it is using in this case? Yes!

> If the purpose is to build a test lab which provides a realistic micro test environment for enterprise equipment then it is obvious that Windows Server 2003/2008 has to be in it.

Hardly.

Windows is for small shops that can't affort IT staff.

If you are talking "enterprise", then some form of Unix is the obvious way to go.

Re: "Windows Server is $750" - Word to the wise - a Linux server does the job better for $0

...except I don't need to use a "supported" version of RHEL.

I can just use Debian.

This a domain of computing where you don't have suffer from the "learned helplessness" of a desktop PC user.

Re: Regulation

Heathrow may be an auto-pilot only landing zone but there are still two real pilots sitting behind the yokes just in case something goes sideways.

Re: Psychologists as a measure of normal?

Psychology used to run a math department? That's a riot.

It sounds like a bunch of paper pushers overthinking something simple while simultaneously screwing it up.

Let competent people do the job. Don't discourage the student. Somehow the "educational professionals" can't manage this despite it being painfully obvious to an engineering student.

Re: Doctors caring & empathetic?

It sounds like it sucks to be a (quasi)doctor in the UK. Ha-zah for socialized medicine.

Re: Microsoft has winner - albeit a hidden one!

> Think Retail and Industrial,

Windows RT simply does not address any of the problems that commerce or industry may have with iPad or Android. Windows-on-ARM offers no advantages when compared to iPad or Android.

It is not the tablet they were looking for. That's the whole f*cking point of everyone's complaints.

A solution in search of a problem...

What solution that needs Direct3D?

There really isn't one. At that point, you are far better off using local hardware. Use something just slightly less lame and eliminate the need for some noisy monster in another room that's being forced itself to do things in the least effective way possible.

Re: @Eadon - openness selling Android

> If I was looking to get something simple for my parents to use I would go for the iPad

That's a common fallacy: that it has to be crippled to be easy. The opposite is actually true.

Developers need to be completely free to innovate on the platform. THIS is what leads to a more usable product. A more open environment is what allows the same platform to address different use cases all at the same time. It prevents a system from being "for rubes only". The tyrant is not perfect. They have missed something. They may not be agile enough to adapt quickly.

It's like communism/fascism versus capitalism. Central management will always be less effectve. The thing that gets rejected in committe might end up being your killer app.

Assuming that "rubes need an Apple device" may end up actually being a disaster.

Re: Surface Pro will also fail

"Full USB support" is no selling point for any Microsoft device. My PHONE has "full USB support". The rest of your post is similar marketing nonsense that's simply out of touch with reality. You need to step outside of the Redmond echo chamber and so does the upper management at Microsoft.

Re: Surface Pro will also fail

> It's obvious you are not aware that the Mac OS and therefore all mac os software is also based on open source code called Darwin.

People are "not aware" because Apple does it's best to hide it. It's like a Tivo. It's like a tree falling in a forrest. If no one actually hears it, is it really there?

Anything the user sees on an Apple system is strictly proprietary and is for Apple brand hardware only.