Judging from the outsourcing job that's been done on my company, the motivating philosophy behind it is that, with enough formalization of the 'process', all work is grunt work. This is horribly untrue. The Indian outsourcers that got all our software dev jobs are pretty good at process. The problem is they're really bad at actually programming. And the turnover is horrendous. Apparently they think that training developers to work on a large, complex system is also just a 'process'. Problem is, they're not very good at that one.

The problem with wearables is that they are by definition battery dependent. And if they're not low-powered enough to run for years on a battery like a traditional watch is, then the issue is going to be how useful are they vs. how much of a pain is it to remember to plug it in every day.

I have two 7" Android tablets, and I never use either of them. Sure, for some of the stuff they can do, they do it better than my Android phone. But the phone is the thing that goes on the charger every night. And for all the niceness of the bigger screen, I can't be bothered to keep the tablets charged. There's also the issue of the tablets not supporting separate user accounts, so where they might be useful as a household device for reading email, etc, I won't put my email account on it without separate lockscreen passwords. I suppose I could buy yet another tablet to get one that runs Jelly Bean, with multi-user accounts - but seriously... I'd upgrade the current ones in a minute, but the OEM won't provide an upgrade or allow it to be unlocked so I can install Cyanogenmod. So, I'll never buy another on some faith that that one would actually be used. I suppose iPad fans might chime in with how much use they get out of their pads, but I see all of the same problems there - except the upgrades, but iPads aren't multiuser either.

So, essentially, the only thing I ever used my tablets for was to watch Netflix streams - and then I got a Bluray player with Netflix built in. Netflix has moved to the TV - Big screen, no charging. I suppose I might charge a tablet up to take on a trip for reading the NYTimes online, but seriously...

Right - I'm not denying the benefit for those who use MSO and pay up. Just saying that Microsoft was waiting out the clock hoping for an MSO-fueled success of its tablets. But they must see the free competition as too compelling to wait it out - even if their fans don't. If LibreOffice had hit the iPad before MSO, it could've provided considerable incentive for users to switch to that pretty damn capable free alternative that, oh yeah, happens to 'work on all my devices'.

The thing is, people used to buy Office for use at home, because that's what they used at work, and they needed it to work from home. So they bought a copy for their home PC - or pirated a copy from work. Or, just followed the path of least resistance and paid for a copy along with their PC, which has on and off been hard not to do.

But these days, most occasional work from home is best handled by RDP'ing into your home system (or possibly taking home your company-issued laptop). In other words, if your work uses Office, you can use your work copy of the code. So, sure Office - as a de-facto standard - isn't going away. But most casual home users don't really need it. Some users might derive enough benefit to bother springing for a home copy - and the iPad version might actually be a nice option for business travelers that don't want to lug a laptop around. But, unless you are a heavy user, or computer-phobic enough to think you can't learn to use a different app, LibreOffice will serve your purposes fine - even if those purposes have to do with docs created in MSOffice.

But getting back to why iPad, why now. That bit about casual home users is key. They haven't had Office, and they haven't missed it enough to switch to Surfaces. For a while Microsoft was hoping that would be the case, but apparently they were smart enough to hedge their bets and develop an iPad version anyway. Because they must've sensed an inflection point where a sizable portion of their user base was finally realizing they were less locked in than they thought they were. Even the arguments on here about "you just don't understand how invaluable MSO is in the real world" are arguments for accepting lock-in as inevitable. So you folks making that argument might consider that Microsoft seems to understand where the industry is going better than you do.

I wonder, though. When you buy a new Android phone and sign in to Play, it downloads (or at least offers to) all the apps you had on your old phone. Does the same thing happen there - i.e. if you had apps with privileges that weren't available on your old phone, do they get automatically installed on the new phone with all the privileges - or is it treated like an update with new privileges, where you need to agree to the installation before it will install? If so, I imagine that could be changed in the Play Store without having to get an OS update out to devices currently on the shelves.

In any case, Android permissions could use to be a lot more specific (i.e., limited). "Modify or delete the contents of your USB storage" is a bit vague at best. Aren't apps given their own data folder that they can use? Does this permission grant access to all data folders, and if so, why? And 'full network access' - that could mean just about anything. Sure, it's needed for just about any app that accesses remote data, but what - if any - limits are placed by the OS once you grant it. It's pretty much to the point where you'd better only ever install very well-known apps (since just about everything asks for "modify usb storage", "view contacts" and 'full network access').

Except when it isn't. It turns out that if the free market is focused on making the CEO and his cronys rich, it can do that quite well without making good investment decisions. If the CEO's investment horizon is much shorter than the company's - and the guy's a crook - you'd be amazed at the awful investments he'll make. So free market, sure. But you'd better at least have a good and powerful cop on the beat.

I agree. We use AIX at work. No X or GUI of any kind, but the systems are rock-solid and essentially never need to be rebooted - even for fairly serious filesystem changes. My only complaint about AIX vs Linux for our server-based apps is that it's harder to find pre-built binaries when I want to incorporate a new open source library into our system. Sometimes it's hard even to get the code to build with the standard 'configure - make' process (though I've always been able to get it to work eventually). In any case, I assume that's just a function of mindshare, not technology.

I would assume that this idea falls under the category of 'thought experiment'. The point being to highlight that the coal industry accounts for 'only' 50 billion dollars worth of assets, which is a smaller portion of our economy and total assets than the hysteria of 'anything you do to attempt to phase out coal will destroy America' would suggest.

Now if the country could shift to renewables for a mere 50 billion it might well be worth it. Of course, as others have pointed out, buying up all the coal plants won't accomplish that.

Could be. But did anybody ask her if she'd have preferred a Windows 7 laptop plus a nexus 7 tablet for the same price? Then she wouldn't have to lug around this 11 or 13 inch ultrabook just to look at recipes in the kitchen. It sounds like she's using it as though it's two separate devices - which it kind of is (that's the problem with Windows 8 and Metro). I'm sure you (assuming you bought the Christmas gift) thought it was a great solution, but unless there's little to no price premium for these things, they really don't make much sense as all-in-one's.

Unlikely. But your post points out the real situation. It's Microsoft that wants dual-booting phones. They can't get anybody to buy their phones, so they hope to use dual boot to encourage people to at least try their OS. Apple or Google have nothing to gain there, so Apple would never cooperate. Google has less control in this case.

But this article is about convertible laptop/tablets, and in that market, I imagine it's Asus that wants dual-booting. Anybody who would buy one of these is buying it for the Windows laptop capability. And Asus wants them to pay a premium for it to be convertible into a tablet. Other than the possibility that Asus has made it easy to share files between the Android tablet and the Windows laptop worlds, there'd be no advantage to this over a cheap laptop plus a Nexus tablet. Microsoft would probably prefer Asus to build an all Windows convertible, since again, the buyer's buying the Windows laptop. If MS can give their unpopular tablet OS a boost, that'd be preferable to them over a Windows/Android hybrid. Google might prefer an all Android convertible, though. But even they probably realize Android laptops at this point are a stretch.

In any case, we're talking about the high-end (i.e. expensive) laptop market. That's not a happy place to be these days. Cheap laptops or even Chromebooks serve the real laptop market better. Power hungry games and productivity apps do better on a desktop (and for the most part, a cheap one will do fine there too). The rest of the market is for phones and 7" tablets, and I don't see Asus pushing for dual booting there...

As far as I know you're allowed to include competing services on a Google-blessed Android device. I think Verizon at one point was selling Motorola devices with Bing as their primary search engine - they just didn't sell. Sure, Google doesn't want to allow 'real Android' to be a platform for excluding Google services (as with the Nokia X devices), but they don't (or can't) try to prevent you from including other services in addition to Google's.

On the other hand, I think even after their anti-trust sanctions, Microsoft still doesn't allow OEM's to include, say Firefox or Chrome to be installed (let alone as the default browser) - or Google preset as the default search engine. Sure, they've been forced to allow users to jump through hoops of their design to get Google as the default search, but still. And don't tell me only idiots consider those hoops too much trouble. I've seen enough users at work typing in google.com to get to google search rather than using the Bing search bar. They're either too lazy or intimidated to change the default, but they're all too glad to have me change it for them...

And had the nuclear plant not melted down, another 20,000 people could've moved back into the area and attempted to devise ways to survive the next tsunami. But as it is, the meltdown has rendered a big swath of land uninhabitable. The tsunami would've killed those 20,000 either way. But the nuke didn't have to be there making things worse.

Fair enough. I would at least hope, though, that the finger tap combinations that correspond to an alphabet in this invention are not themselves patentable. It's one thing to patent the input mechanism, but an entirely different thing to patent the input itself. Imagine a world where millions learned to 'type' this way, and somebody came up with another mechanism for processing finger taps that didn't infringe Samsung's mechanism. There'd be a huge barrier to adoption if everybody had to learn a new alphabet in order to use the new input device. Kind of like patenting the QUERTY keyboard (or was that patented in its day?).

That may be, but once the behavior was observed, the observer didn't have to find the owner of the code to get it diagnosed. They may have, but the point is that anybody who found this behavior could've gone into the code and found out what caused the problem. Of course, if a black hat happened to be the one that found the bad behavior, they could've gone into the code to figure out how best to exploit it. So, the situation's not perfect, but still, it's probably a good thing that there were lots of eyes allowed to diagnose and fix the problem once it displayed itself.

...as opposed to another Windows Phone OEM making a loss?

the only winners at Nokia are the ones that got bonuses for engineering the MS buyout. It's an all-too-common business plan.
1. Put out a largely vaporous business plan.
2. Operate for a few years as though that plan can work.
3. Sell the company to company B that you've duped into believing that success is just around the corner.

rinse, repeat...

The company I work for is currently on step 6:
4. Company B realizes they've bought a lemon, outsources all development so the financials look okay short term.
5. Sell off at a big loss to a private equity firm.
6. Private equity firm cooks up a new, largely vaporous business plan...