devx

Didn't Microsoft basically reverse engineer Google's Youtube API's to make that WP8 Youtube app? I wonder if Google will consider integrating a reverse engineered Skype into Hangouts. Not that I'm particularly excited myself about joining a fully spied upon chat service, but it would be an interesting move.

I'm happy for Mozilla, but I hope OEM's start experimenting with another native open source OS like Ubuntu Touch, too.

But having that color covering a whole laptop does seems a lot tackier. Now, a black Macbook Air would be interesting - or perhaps even a "space grey" one.

They have actually, I think at least a couple of times with the 3GS and then the 4, when they said they "doubled the memory". But not sure if they said exactly how much that was, but everyone knew how much they had before anyway, so it was easy to guess.

Yeah, it might be pressure sensitive, but I doubt it's anywhere as close to accurate as active digitizer pens. It looks like a capacitive pen with a thick rubber tip, so I doubt it's much more useful than a $20 capacitive stylus.

I know at least 2 people who'd love to have the option to buy Wacom pens for iPads. Right now it doesn't really work unless you use some very hacky solutions. I wish Apple supported pressure sensitive pens.

I'n also still hoping for an 11"-12" 16:9 iPad Pro (they can just make it longer like they did with the iPhone 5 that comes with a keyboard. It should basically be an iPad laptop (not hybrids, no point) that costs $700, and comes with a new A8 processor in spring, or at least A7X, and maybe 64 GB by default.

I think the bigger hit to Microsoft, or just as big, is the free and much improved iWorks. Now there are 2 office suites from 2 big companies being offered for free (Docs and iWorks), which are becoming increasingly more popular not just with consumers, but a lot of enterprise customers, too.

Microsoft should be terrified. Both of their cash cows are getting rapidly commoditized.

It's possible they wanted to be misleading like that. So the A7 in iPhone 5S could have a certain level of performance, while the "A7" in iPad Air has its GPU clocked twice as higher, but the same name.

Hoping it will appear in Android 5.0. Six months or so should be enough to implement this, right?

Also, they should probably acquire these guys, too:

http://www.genymotion.com/

The emulator is also one of Android's longstanding problems, and it would be nice if they fixed that once and for all, too.

I'm also hoping that with the arrival of powerful ARMv8 hardware in the couple of years, maybe they'll make their SDK for ARM, too, so it doesn't even need to be emulated in x86.

I don't usually post comments like that, but I thought yours deserved it. I've never seen a whole list of specs like that being copy pasted on HN. It just comes off as a desperate attempt to promote a product. The specs were already in the linked article for crying out loud...

Thanks Nokia PR team.

I also thought his explanation for why this stuff is unconstitutional, and more importantly, immoral, was one of the clearest I've read online. I hope he gets called to Congress hearings so they hear him say the same things there, too.

Serious question: what happens if say Wikileaks or Snowden or the next important whistleblower uses this service, and then the head of DHS, FBI, DOJ, etc (not a Court) "gives a call" to Google? Will Google "protect their free expression", or comply with the order within hours, like Amazon did [1]?

Google may have great lawyers and a lot of money, but what if they tell them "hey, you know that tax-free money you're sending to the Bermuda [2]? Yeah, FTC will be knocking on your door tomorrow to ask you about that".

So I guess what I want to know is if Google will actually stand their ground and protect their users till the end by doing the right thing, or they'll "compromise" if the potential cost to their business is too great. Maybe in the past it was easy to believe Google would actually do the right thing, but it's becoming increasingly harder to believe that.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-websi...

[2] http://www.cnbc.com/id/101104483

Since Microsoft is so "popular" today on HN, have you seen Pogue's hands-on review of Windows 8.1 yet?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=u-vDf...

But that's the thing. They did create the hardware, and it isn't even the first generation, and it still performs poorly. The problem isn't the hardware. It's the software. So either Microsoft makes a new OS from scratch that only works on their hardware, or this problem won't be fixed anytime soon, either way.

> Because re-writing for a new platform isn't trivial

That's not the consumers' problem, is it?

> Because the customers want it.

That's not reflected in sales yet. If you're talking about the 100 Microsoft fans that upvote and comment all positive Microsoft stories on Reddit, HN and Verge - that doesn't count. We're talking about the market as a whole.

Also, even Microsoft themselves barely even promote the "legacy app" thing in their commercials. All they are showing is Metro. But if they think Metro is their tablets' competitive advantage, then why wouldn't the consumer just get an iPad or Android tablet instead - and for a lot less?

I disagree. WP7 would've been a much better and more efficient OS for tablets, and they already built that, but in the name of keeping OS licenses for tablets at ~$100 like for notebooks, and some kind of "unification strategy" (which still hasn't been realized yet), they've also made Windows RT for tablets and WP8 out of the NT kernel for phones. But even WP8 would've be better than Windows 8 or Windows RT (which is 95 percent Windows 8 anyway).

It's actually how Apple built iOS, too. But will they put WP8 on tablets? No of course not. Instead, they'll try and push Windows RT to phones, which is the totally wrong way to do it. But just watch it happen.

Why would you need "legacy apps" on a tablet?

The old Windows tablets had 4 main problems:

1) apps not optimized for touch

2) OS not optimized for touch

3) expensive hardware

4) inefficient hardware/small battery life

It seems to me that with devices like Surface Pro, the 1) and 3) problems are still ported to the new devices. I don't see legacy apps that aren't optimized for touch and on a 10" screen, as an "advantage" for Windows tablets. For all practical purposes, they are not.

Even if you want to do "work" with legacy apps when in "laptop mode" - are you sure you want to do that on a 10" screen? Because I'm telling you 10" is too small for productive work, and the keyboard is too crammed at that size.

Yes, that's the correct answer. This problem today, on tablets especially, also comes from Microsoft's unwilling to use anything other than the full Windows on almost any product they have. So instead of starting something from scratch, they'd rather force all that legacy bloatware into devices that need very efficient software and have smaller batteries.

No, you're seeing comparison with the Surface Pro 2, which has same battery size as MBA, and hardware made by Microsoft themselves.

Which Linux? I'm sure something based on LXDE will outlast everything, while Ubuntu or other Gnome 3-based systems probably won't fare too well.

I expect great performance and battery life improvements with Mir and Unity 8, though, but that won't happen at least until 14.10, and won't be stable until 16.04. By then the Linux drivers should be a lot better and more efficient, too.

When Windows 7 launched, I had a netbook with XP on it, on which I got about 5 hours on Wi-Fi with just browsing. I put Windows 7 on it, the battery life dropped to 3.5 hours, which is a huge 30 percent decrease. So it's incredible that Windows 8 has become even worse at battery life since then, instead of becoming better.

What worries me more is that Google is increasingly choosing to put brands at the top of the search results.

Don't get me wrong, if I'm looking for the Apple website, I should absolutely get Apple.com first in Google, and not a medium-sized blog talking about Apple. So relevancy should matter most.

However, I fear that they are ranking bigger sites and bigger brands above more relevant posts from medium-sized, sites, too. And that I don't like. Give the little guy a chance, especially if his post is of higher quality.

And no I don't think that if the big site's post gets retweeted 100 times and the medium-sized' post gets retweeted 10 times, it should matter much, because resharing is just a side-effect of being big and having a big audience, and I think it's less about the "quality" of the post.

Google ends up promoting bigger and bigger sites at the top, while downranking the smaller ones, who are impacted negatively by a lot of factors (smaller age, fewer backlinks, fewer reshares, etc).

So I guess my point is, on-page "performance" (for lack of a better word) should always count more than off-page performance.

Now what? Another $600 million down the drain to fix the problems of the first $600 million?

I know this is potentially dangerous in the future (I worry more about NSA having direct access to all the phones in the world through Google), but in terms of user experience, I welcome this. In order to have an ecosystem that is "as unified and standardized as possible" you need to have one company controlling it, and the vision behind it. Too many companies pulling in too many directions is not that good.

Here's a different perspective:

http://techtainian.com/news/2013/10/20/editorial-how-kitkat-...

Agreed. I think there was a period of like 5 years soon after they launched it big, where they did almost nothing to improve it or promote it. Same goes for Google Docs. I think only like a little more than 2 years ago they started caring about Google Docs again, probably because of Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Before that the development for it felt very dry for years, too.

This seems to solve it:

IE11 -> Tools -> Compatibility View Settings. Remove check on "Use Microsoft Compatibility lists".

While this may be a huge improvement in computer power/space occupied compared to today's classical computers, since nature tends to "compute" stuff so much more efficiently than our PC's, it still feels like a pretty transitional phase to me versus quantum computers.

We need to learn how to compute at the sub-atomic level with mind-blowing efficiency (trillions of trillions more operations for insignificant power consumption). Once we learn how to do that, we'll be the masters of our galaxy, or potentially even the universe.

Carmack said we need 5 petaflops for truly realistic graphics.

But I'm not even sure if he considered 4k+ resolutions, 120+ FPS and 3D when he said that, because all of those may play a role too in the future if we want "Matrix-like" graphics in our virtual reality goggles or holodecks. So we might need orders of magnitude more powerful hardware than that still.

Indeed. The Everything Is A Remix series has been great for showing this. The 3rd part actually covers Apple and their "inventions", too, but all are very interesting, and even enlightening:

http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/