Discussions

@wkempf: The problem is the subscription concept can be hard to sell someplace. Buying a physical license I get to spend a well-known amount of money if and when my budget allows, something I don't get to do with a subscription. Peace of mind is priceless.

1 hour ago, ManipUni wrote

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I'd prefer to pay £89 for the physical boxed copy of Office 2010. I only buy Office once every eight years anyway, plus there is no assurance that Office 365 even gives you the newer versions of Office when they come out in the future (i.e. there might be an "upgrade fee").  

Looking at the Microsoft Store, it says "Ongoing access to updates", which seems to suggest that you just keep getting the latest and greatest.

The pricing looks rather different when you compare current versions: the cheapest I can find on the MS Store is Office Home and Student 2013, which installs on just 1 PC, lacks quite a few features and goes for GBP 109.99. Hmm...

15 minutes ago, Dan276 wrote

Also what are the penalties if you're caught cheating on Visual Studio Achievements?

You get to program in COBOL.

27 minutes ago, blowdart wrote

@davewill:

Step 1: Buy a children's game for XBox 360

Step 2: Play game and earn "cheevos". Don't forget to open the basement window and say thank you to mom when she brings you your PB&J sandwich

Step 3: ?????

Step 4: PROFIT

Actually it's also interesting the other way around:

1. Create a game. Doesn't have to be nice, just pretty hard and full of Xbox Achievements.

2. Make sure the fact is well known to the gaming masses

3. Sell it for $100.

4. If you don't have enough money, make a sequel, or a prequel, or just change the achievements and go to step 2.

5. Retire early and help billg eradicate Polio.

10 seconds ago, evildictait​or wrote

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Well, it would at the very least mean that Microsoft could claim credit for every TV in every seat in every airline in the west, as well as every ATM in America.

Not every one of them. Both Delta and Continental have in-flight entertainment systems based on Red Hat Linux, and maybe a few others.

@DeathByVisualStudio: The problem is we don't know what we are looking at, and that is pretty disconcerting.

For instance, what happened in 2004? The iPod, of course, so that has to be what makes Apple jump from 5% to 21%, but something else must have happened that year, to make "Others" jump from zilch to 29%. I cannot remember what might have been so big to make more of a splash than the iPod, maybe it was a number of things, but I cannot really figure this out (unless some specific OS, e.g. Symbian, got "computing device" status in 2004).

Another disconcerting fact is that Apple stays almost flat after 2004, in the 20's range; flat enough that it's impossible to say when the iPhone or the iPad were introduced in this timeline. Of course the PC business have been growing in the double digits until very recently, so the graph is kind of skewed, but I was still taken by surprise.

We have an important milestone for our comparisons: 2008. That's when, according to Gartner, the 1 billion PC mark was reached. According to those percentages, there were roughly 500 million Apple devices back then (Mac + iPod + iPhone); and there were about 650 million "Others" devices. Any clue as to what those are supposed to be?

Fast forward a few years; as I mentioned the PC market keeps growing until very recently, so that billion must have grown significantly, but let's keep it as it's a nice round figure. If PC's are 20% (and that's our conservative estimate of one billion units), there are more than one billion Apple devices out there and more than two billion Android devices (plus the usual 700 million unknown "Others"). Does that even remotely sounds possible? Android gets there in just 4 years, which means that, assuming linear growth, they must have sold some 500 million units per year (without any turnover: every unit sold goes to a new customer).

The chart isn't bogus, of course, and is probably indicating something important. What I know is it's probably not numbers that can be compared to net applications or similar statistics. Maybe it's units sold that year, maybe it's revenues. Without proper labeling and some background information, any number means pretty much anything.

Wouldn't that mean that mobile devices constitute some 80% of the total?

@JoshRoss: The problem I see is that what people expect from a Windows 8 app is not what they expect from a website. If you don't want to go for the least common denominator, then I'm not sure what JS would buy you in this case unless, of course, you are so familiar with the language that it would cut significantly your development time.

Every version of Windows sold big, even Vista the terrible, even Me the blue-screener. Regardless of what we think of it, Windows 8 is going to be a huge platform, huge enough that comparing it to some fancy flavored vodka is not the correct simile IMO. Try coffee... yes, you can drink it in nondescript paper cups, but there's a huge market for ceramic mugs.

4 hours ago, SteveRichter wrote

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exactly. If it is doable to put a battery in a laptop, why not have an option to put a small battery in a desktop. I would pay for that.  ( figuerres, there are not problems shipping laptops with connected batteries. )

btw, I lost power last week and today. IE both times lost stuff. Where I lost my IE most popular sites, had to reenter passwords.

It is doable; it's only expensive. If widely adopted it could be less expensive than an external UPS (and more efficient), but for most people black-outs are infrequent enough that it wouldn't make sense to pay more for their desktops.

If you are into DIY electronics, it's not very difficult to make it yourself; again, it's just expensive.

@SteveRichter: if all you want is your PC to survive a power glitch in the split second range, you could theoretically just use a simple circuit that adds large capacitors on the low voltage lines of your PSU; the problem is that handling the "Power Good" line properly may not be straightforward.

My advice: get a laptop.