However, those insistent on trashing open source will still forget that the issue is a solved one for anyone willing to do a little work.
Yeah, like reading couple millions lines of code... Good luck with that. I have seen 100 line magic functions that could not be understood in couple of days. I bet in a bigger code base the number of such magic functions could be quite significant. Open source only gives us illusion.
Nice how you neatly dismissed it. If hardware is such a small problem, why didn't previous generations of CE-based Microsoft tablets work? If hardware is such a small problem, why not laptops, after all, it even has a keyboard for precise data entry.
Battery life.
But the hinge can't hold the screen up. Laptops have been able to do that for decades.
Exactly. I have laptop from 1968 and it can hold screen up. It even has touch interface. Dumb, dumb Micro$$$oft!
If those were meaningless points, Microsoft wouldn't just have had to dump a billion dollars worth of Surface tablets because no-one wanted to buy them.
'Surface Pro' is just a continuation of the long line of x86 tablets that hardly anyone wanted to buy for the last decade or more.
Are you really that dumb? Surface pro is continuation of the last decade of tablets? It is damn different. It is like comparing iPhone with Palm Pilot from 2000. It is so dumb that it is not even funny.
Screen size, resolution, storage capactiy, storage speed, processor speed, active digitizer, RAM, x86 architecture are all advantages the Surface Pro has over the tablets you mentioned.
So, nothing most people care about, then.
Do people care about anything?
Well then that CPU is effectively fucked, as I can tell ya that folks HATE Windows 8. Can't say as I blame 'em, I spent half the night having to hack the living shit out of Win 8 to make it into a system that was actually usable. For those that want to know how here are the steps and note that you can NOT "just add Start8 and be done", not by a long shot!
I use Win8 on my desktop. I learned to ignore charms and use start button on the keyboard. I also do not use any metro apps. That is about it.I do not see why win8 is such a big problem. I see win8-specific stuff maybe 20-30 seconds a day max. It is entertaining to see people pissed for no reason but man.. relax. Get a beer or something. We lived through XP mickey mouse interface with unremovable moviemaker. We can handle charms, apps and metro. Man up!
Strange; where I am sitting, I hear of and see endless numbers of problems with Word with my colleagues: Word crashing on or garbling documents with too many floating figures, equations that suddenly turn into un-editable bitmapped images, documents full of "Error reference not found" (try remembering exactly what you wanted to refer to a month ago...), "save as PDF" generating pages with a gray toner-wasting background.
Aren't they the same people who love office 97 and windows XP so much that they refuse to upgrade?
Vanilla VS2012 won't let you build an installer for a Windows service either,
Vanilla VS2012 won't let you build an installer for anything. That type of project is gone. You are welcome to use some crappy open-source substitute WiX (windows installer xml toolkit). I tried it and it sucks. What previously was a 5 minutes of mouse clicks became few hours of reading and experimenting with horrendous XML. Discarding features is the worst thing that happens to VS devs. Macros - gone. ATL SOAP support - gone. Deployment projects - gone. Static linking for mixed native/.NET C++ projects - gone. "Old" managed C++ syntax - trying to die since VS2005? 2008? Even STL is changing from version to version. As a C++ developer I feel like I am in a dumpster looking for leftovers of features. I wonder how long VS is going to support C++. The language itself is a trainwreck in ASCII.
HOLY MACRO!