Posts by fzz 45 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2010
Interestingly Winbeta has an article about a new ARM-based Windows tablet in the works. Also, if some version of Windows 10 can run on Raspberry Pi 2s, it should also be able to run on ARM tablets with at least the same RAM and storage.
It'd be more than a little amusing if MSFT sold Windows for ARM as retail licenses and provided how-to guides for jail breaking tablets with other OSes and replacing the OS with Windows.
What about the awkward detail that Office Home & Student has a noncommercial use license? NBD if everyone with a Surface RT also had a desktop or laptop with a commercial use Office license dedicated to their exclusive use. However, you can't REPLACE desktops and laptops with Windows RT tablets and use Office Home & Student for work.
It seems constant reminders are needed whenever comparisons are drawn between Surface/Windows RT and Xbox. Xbox lost money its first few years, but it also sold out in its first 2 holiday seasons. It was clear Xbox would become profitable. Surface/Windows RT are no where close to that type of sales activity. Rather they're much closer to Zune.
Science isn't about proof as you probably mean it. It's about stating a hypothesis that fits observations, then trying to refute the hypothesis. Those which can't be refuted after some considerable effort to do so are accepted until they are refuted.
Observing correlations doesn't prove causality. Until we observe gravitons, we can't prove the causal mechanism for gravity, but we get by pretty well with Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravity.
With regard to US Republican legislators, we know guns with bullets kill and injure tousands of people per year, and most of those killings and injuries are either due to criminal intent or accident rather than to people defending themselves, but Republican legislators are as immune to that evidence as they are to evidence of man-made climate change.
Simple faith is bliss.
Picky: Office Home & Student is noncommercial. Not a problem if you have a work machine with Office under volume licensing, but otherwise not OK to do work with H&S.
If Office on small tablets were only for light tweaking, I suppose 8" tablets would be better than 4" phones, but I wonder whether Android and iOS productivity software would handle light editing about as well. If Android software could, hard to see much of an advantage for small Windows tablets.
Odd that more hasn't been written about this, but MSFT started selling the Surface RT in late October 2012, less than 2 weeks before the US presidential election. The rest of the world doesn't get to revel in the raw display of democracy energy which US political advertising has become, but for those of us living in the US, it's wise to pay as little attention as possible to TV and radio ads for at least a month before election day.
What a great time to launch an ad campaign. I want whatever MSFT's marketing people we taking when they came up with this!
BlackBerry would be thrilled with 3rd place and unit sales in the high millions or low tens of millions. They could even do reasonably with a close 4th place, certainly muddle through to another version.
MSFT, OTOH, with voracious management egos to feed, couldn't stand 4th place, but a distant 3rd place, say, 20 million Windows Phone sales per year at US$30 per phone means revenues of just US$600 million, which by MSFT standards is rounding error. I'd be very surprised if last year MSFT wasn't targeting at least US$1 billion in WP8 revenue in 2013. Doesn't look like they'll get there.
Office 365 Home Premium and Office 2013 Home and Student are for noncommercial use only. Hard to enforce the license terms, but not impossible. So if customers are doing their best to abide by the license terms, it's unlikely they'd be using any Word, Excel or Access advanced features. If that's so, Google Drive may be sufficient, and LibreOffice is certain to provide nearly all users with what they need.
As for commercial use, if you work for a large enterprise with a volume licensing agreement, you can purchase a commercial use license for US$10 (ten!) for each home device. Such licenses would continue as long as you remain employed by that enterprise and it maintains its volume licensing.
Theoretically you'd lose out on the neat new features MSFT would distribute periodically. Just ask the suckers, er, valued customers who bought Windows Vista Ultimate about promised future features.
Who's left? Workplace users of advanced features. From what little I know of legal briefs, nothing has been added to Word in the last decade which has revolutionized lawyers' use. As for people needing to produce technical papers, equation editing is still a toy compared to Lyx and LaTeX. Moving on to Excel, there are always a few new features, but it seems Excel 2013 has finally fubarred the MDI. Meaning anyone with models relying on multiple workbooks (files) open at the same time in the same Excel instance aren't going to be upgrading from Excel 2010 without spending $$$$ on model rewrites.
So, really, who's left? Sycophants with their noses permanently affixed to MSFT's posterior is about all I can think of.
There was a time strict 1-2-3 compatibility was necessary for Excel, and a few years later it wasn't feasible to correct this due to many existing workbooks relying upon/working around this error. Stupidity and/or ignorance on Lotus's part, intentional nose-holding and just doing it on MSFT's.
However, this is only an issue with the 1900 date system (epoch beginning 1 January 1900). The 1904 date system doesn't share this because its epoch starts on 1 January 1904. Also, FWIW, Excel's 1900 date system only fubars 1900. The formula ="2100-02-28"+1 formatted as an ISO date returns 2100-03-01.
Lotus had chances even past 1989 and 1-2-3 Releases 2.2 and 3.0. They came out with Notes in the early 1990s, and it was huge. The article says hated, but my own opinion differs.
What killed Lotus was Jim Manzi's lack of vision and his focus on lawsuits against clone makers Mosaic and Paperback Software and later Borland. [I continue to believe Paperback Software's VP-Planner scared the crap out of Lotus because in 1985 it provided database functionality (OK, working with dBase files) similar to what it took Lotus another 4 years to produce in 1-2-3 Release 3, as well as a multidimensional database which provided a little of the functionality of Lotus Improv, along with a near perfect copy of 1-2-3's menu for 1/5 the price of 1-2-3.] So much concern over protecting the character mode menu in the late 1980s and early 1990s that when Lotus came out with its first Windows version, 1-2-3 for Windows 1.0, it REALLY SUCKED! MSFT came out with Excel 4 shortly afterwards, and then Excel 5 with VBA before Lotus came out with 1-2-3 Release 4 for Windows. That was game over.
Lotus wasn't unique in delivering a really poor first attempt at a Windows version. WordPerfect's first attempt was even worse. Neither company could believe customers actually wanted to use Windows until Windows was on more than half of new PCs sold.
Credit where due: the most innovative spreadsheet in its own time was WingZ, which defaulted to a 32K by 32K grid of cells which could be rearranged into grids with more rows/fewer columns or vice versa. And the most innovative modeling tool was Javelin Plus.
1-2-3 required every formula to begin with either a numeric constant, a + or -, or @, the last being the necessary and unavoidable first character in all functions. If you wanted to enter decimal numeral as the first characters in a text label, you had to precede those entries with a label prefix ', ", or ^ or 1-2-3 would throw a syntax error because the entry wasn't a valid formula. All things considered, I think most people preferred Excel's approach of consistently and uniformy expecting a = at the beginning of all formulas. Besides, Excel provided and still provides 1-2-3-like formula entry, without initial =, as an option. 1-2-3 never provided such an option.
The worst failing in Excel, persisting to date, is lack of context-sensitive help. If you began typing a formula in 1-2-3 and had just typed @VLOOKUP( and pressed [F1], it'd display that function's syntax. Excel, OTOH, would just display the top-level help screen, and if you're foolish or inexperienced enough to turn off default web connection for the help facility, you'd be waiting a minute or two the first time you press [F1] in every Excel session.
1-2-3 may have wasted aggregate years of users' lives, but Excel has wasted aggregate millenia.
Bigger than Bob? Hard to imagine.
Windows RT may have a future, but it'd be without a desktop at all, only be available on the Surface, so only as a MSFT-branded hardware product, and cost less. It's not going to go the more business-friendly route because that'd cannibalize MSFT's Windows 8 license sales. Besides, and I ask this in all ignorance, if the only thing a Surface RT could run were Windows Store Style apps (Wuss apps?), how much group policy would be needed?
Anyway, it seems the future as only 2 paths: only MSFT still making Windows RT tablets, or no one making them. Corporate face saving leads me to figure the former wins out.
Running screaming from the cinema implies the movie inspires me to some action. I'd think a better criteria for worst would be sucking viewers into a miasma of boredom, enervation and psychic despair that it sucks out all motivation leaving viewers unable to move or turn aside.
In other words it has to get progressively worse as it goes on so viewers keep wondering whether it can get any worse.
Anyway, how about a remake of 'My Dinner with Andre' but starring Eddie Murphy and Tom Cruise, with either playing either role.
In part because WP7 has different hardware specs than previous WM versions, so WP7 may simply not work on older phones. If so, nothing nefarious about no OS upgrade options.
However, the reason MSFT isn't willing to sell Windows Mobile Marketplace to another party is that continued use of WM phones may retard uptake of WP7 phones. Lesson to be learned: a very old adage in business is that sunk cost doesn't matter. There's a revenue corollary: only present and future revenues matter. IOW, don't expect loyalty from software vendors after you've paid them.
There are registry keys under HKCU and HKLM which has been around since Windows 95 which allow users to choose different Windows shells. This raises the question whether those keys are still effective, meaning whether Metro will honor it, or whether Metro is unavoidable. If Metro can't be bypassed in this way, then it may take ugly hacks to disable it, and only MSFT would be to blame for that.
After 20+ years Windows users have a reasonable expectation of customizing much of Windows including the program launching UI. Maybe phone, tablet and game console users don't have that expectation, but there's too much PC history/inertia for MSFT to expect all users meekly to fall into line.
As an ending point, agreed. However, as a starting point, it would mention Mac versions from the 1980s and 1990s. At that point easy to find other, corroborating sources. And in this particular case, possibly only by happenstance and dumb luck, the Wikipedia article actually get the facts right.
So you've never run statistical analyses using R. Or edited journal articles using Lyx. Or checked circuit board designs using SPICE and variants. Or noticed that CERN, arguably the highest tech facility on the planet, uses a massive Linux grid for handling much of its data.
But I'll accept that Windows is the premier platform for cobbling together PowerPoint slides.
Author either was too stupid to find Office for Mac in 2000 or is too stupid to check Wikipedia. Take your pick. The original versions of Word and Excel were on Macs, and there have been Mac versions of both continually since 1985, and Mac versions of the whole Office suite since 1989.
So given the complete BS of the premise, what are we to make of the ensuing argument?
The big question would be what OSes would be available if Android became closed. Unless all the other device mfgs were run by complete morons, all versions of Android released as open source would remain open source, so an obvious possibility would be forking the last open source version. If that weren't practical, there are options other than webOS besides Windows, but I'd figure device mfgs would be more comfortable with Windows, even if OEM licenses cost $$, than with webOS.
TSA doesn't hire people who can spell it much less know what it means.
ALL utterances are taken literally, and that's been so for decades in US airports. Don't bring booze to Saudi Arabia, and don't joke when coming to the US. Flippancy will get you into more trouble with DHS than religious fundamentalism.
US citizens have the same absence of rights at US borders, so at least this is nondiscriminatory.
US customs and DHS personnel are screened for total lack of humor and immunity to irony/sarcasm.
Finally, in the middle of the Republican party's presidential primaries, I doubt two fewer drunken Brits in the country will cause Americans any concern.
When can I expect News Corp papers and Fox News to break the headline that money influences US politicians? Or that companies spend big bucks lobbying politicians in the US?
I'm sure the saintly Murdoch has never sullied his hands with such base efforts. No, only the high road for him!
No question, MSFT has invested heavily in making styles easier to use/apply in Office 2007 and later. Is that necessarily a good thing? Maybe in Word and PowerPoint, but not Excel.
In terms of functionality, OpenOffice/LibreOffice provide 2 features in particular in Calc which Excel has lacked for decades: regular expression support in MATCH and SEARCH functions and Edit - Find/Replace, and relative/absolute worksheet references.
Actually the only parts of OpenOffice I find disappointing are Base and the entire object model used in scripting. OpenOffice can't be automated anywhere near as easily as MS Office can.
'I was (and still am) a Lotus user'
Yes, and there are still things 1-2-3 Release 5 could do in 1994 which Excel still can't do in 2011, such as criteria expressions in [@]DSUM functions, query tables, relative worksheet references or pretty much anything 3D. But is that relevant to your clients? It's been years now since IBM marketed SmartSuite, and the new Lotus Symphony is just another OO knock-off, and not a particularly good one. Choice is sometimes like buying beer in the US in the early 1980s: Bud, Miller or Coors? I.e., degrees of flavorlessness.
For word processing, there are still lots of choices. For presentations, there are fewer choices, but I never saw huge need for a separate application vs assembling presentation slides in word processors.For databases, toy ones like Access or Base are just that, toys. Which leaves spreadsheets, and like it or not Excel is the single alternative for nearly everything corporate or governmental.
@Gary Bickford,
I wouldn't put it past MSFT to have encumbered worksheet form controls, which I believe are COM objects, with IP restrictions. IOW, maybe it's not possible for OO/LO to provide compatible controls. But there's also the matter of Excel's relatively simple object model vs OO's rather baroque (or even byzantine) one. Simply put, OO is a royal PITA to script.
For most business users it'd be Impress able to replace PowerPoint that would be the big selling point. Calc may be used by many people, but most of its capabilities are untapped, just like Excel.
For the real quants, better integration between R and gnumeric would be sufficient grounds to ditch Excel. Unless one lusts after coditional formatting eye candy.
Never used either Word or WP under DOS. Lotus Development Corp was the bigger competitor in 'productivity' software, and was much more the focus of MSFT's attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s. MSFT was lucky beyond belief that Lotus was a collectively stupid as it was.
Lotus was focused (gross understatement) on the look-and-feel lawsuits against Mosaic and Paperback Software, protecting the crown jewels of its character mode interface. So much so that they didn't bother bringing to market a Windows version of 1-2-3 until a year after Windows 3.1 shipped. And their first Windows version was GARBAGE compared to their latest DOS version.
They didn't have a serious Windows version until Release 4, which was 1 or 2 years after Excel 5 came out, and 1-2-3 Release 4 just had 'classic macros' while Excel 5 had VBA. Too little too late. By 1995 Lotus had become a former leading software company all because their top execs really did think their character mode interface was more valuable than Windows.
Gary Kildall in his airplane, Jim Manzi in his court room - software legends.
Neither DEC nor Sun were primarily software companies, and neither had a lock on two major software markets. Nor did most OECD inhabitants' grandparents own DEC or Sun products.
MSFT isn't dying off any time soon.
Neither are laptops. There are still a lot (tens of millions) of users who do spend most of their work computer time using business applications which stubbornly remain either desktop-bound or run on terminal servers. Speaking only for myself, if I have to run business applications via Citrix, please give me a laptop rather than either a smart phone or tablet to do so.
All this has nothing to do with W7 or WP7 on tablets. I figure MSFT will choose whatever would generate the most short-term revenue. I figure MSFT has given up trying to figure what'll make them money in the long term.
Whatever it is, I doubt W7's superior printer support vs WP7 would be a huge advantage.
How many tablets already support barcode readers? How many connect to digital cameras or video recorders which provide higher resolution images than tablets' built-in lenses? Any tablets with more than 2 USB ports? How easy is it to change a tablet's battery vs a laptop's? Currently not many recharging opportunities on transoceanic or transcontinental flights.
As I see it, tablets may be ideal for delivering content, but I've yet to be convinced they'd be any good for creating content (or just data). If data streams would be mostly inbound for tablets, MSFT is probably making a fatal error saying W7 is the right OS for tablets.
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