Android is available and in direct competition with Windows 8.1. Ultimately, it's not about Android, it's about OEMs defying Microsoft's 25+ year exclusivity deal: If you wanted to ship hardware with Windows and wanted OEM discounts on the Windows licenses, you had to agree to sell only Windows. So these guys are breaking the exclusivity deal.

As things stand, that means if you buy the hardware with Windows, either the vendor takes a huge hit on the cost of Windows or they forward it on to you.

RESULT: Vendor will able to offer you the "System + Android" for /cost of system/, or "System + Windows" for /cost of system + *full* cost of Windows license/.

That's the real threat to Microsoft - loss of that "comes with" throne. As long as the other options are free, there's no way back from that for MS.

after reading white house staff emails/facebook/IMs and realizing the president wasn't planning to visit the agency.

Not "makes salt-water safe for drinking" or "desalinates sea water", but 'turns salty water fresh'.

Ok, so.

Me: "Hey, Brian, did you turn this salty water fresh?"
Brian: "Sure did"
Me:
Brian to ghost me: "for some value of fresh"

It's unfortunate that you can't be with the kid, but who is this idea of a phone about - is it about the kid or you, because do you really think that a kid is four year old can really understand that this is a compromise and accept it? Do you really think that child who does not yet really understand the concept of independent actors will incorporate a video-dad properly into their life when real-dad is missing out on major events?

No phone.

Sure, people are asking "is that even legal?" but "is it legal" is not exactly the point of what they are asking.

Emphasis mine:

"Customers who want to develop their own implementation of the VirnetX patented techniques for supporting secure domain names, or other techniques that are covered by our patent portfolio for establishing secure communication links, will need to purchase a patent license."

Hard not to notice the lack of links for say, SDK documentation, samples, registration -- just a statement that you can email them to ask. There are no demos. Also, they have crawling disabled. So I can't, for example, use webarchive to tell how long they have actually been on the web.

That was MS's chance at doing something mobile - it was ballsy, but here's what it did: IT SEVERED THE TIE WITH DESKTOP. It threw out the legacy and started over.

3rd party developers were hesitant, because Microsoft had a recent history of vomiting out and then abandoning new tech with heightened frequency; W7P/Metro came out of nowhere and people were kind of low on arms and legs to spend on another MS-tech right then.

So, MS put a spin on it, in the way MS tends to recently, with chain saws. I'd actually just gotten home with "Windows Phone 7 Application Development" and started reading it when I saw the /. "Windows 8 will be based on Metro"-esque announcement.

As a result, I never got past chapter 1 of the book, cause I knew right then, Windows 8 was seriously f**ked up and that my beloved HTC Trophy wasn't going to be getting any more of the amazing pure-metro apps :(

Metro - the thing that appeared in Windows 7 Phone - is a thing of beauty, but fundamental to that was the premise: Start from scratch with touch as the basis.

When you develop a UI that way, you can do it without chrome - a pure Windows 7 Phone app had no chrome because the interface was its own chrome. They didn't take the chrome away, they started over and didn't need it.

Windows 8 UI is not Metro. It's the Windows UI with the chrome removed, and then reintroduced in 8.1.

I really liked Windows 7 Phone up until MS killed the marketplace by announcing Windows 8 wasn't going to be the same thing (infact, they're actually compatible, but nobody bothered developing apps after the announcement and 8.1 breaks Metro so much I'll be sticking with my return to 'droid)

... but don't let it slide.

In the past, I've given up code foregoing credits in the interest of improving a product or (extremely naively) hoping to get someone to cooperate with me on a project. It seemed trivial because either it was as a part of a fairly active community or it was an aside to, what seemed then, a bigger project I was working on.

And eventually it became something of a habbit: look, what you did is broken, here's the code that'll fix it, what will it take to get you to apply it? Losing credit? Fine, make the software better.

Start by bringing it up with the individual. There's always the possibility that there's a misunderstanding. In my case, "thttpd". I was working at Demon Internet and tasked with fixing problems with thttpd so we'd be able to run a massive virtual web service off it, giving all of our dialup customers their own personal website. thttpd had some horrible issues like using a blocking "gets" to retrieve the query after a connection. I fixed all of that up and added a bandwidth throttling system. We got it working, and I let a colleague roll up all of our changes and submit them back. Silence. And then thttpd 2.0 is announced. The changes looked *suspiciously* like everything I'd done, just reformatted.

But I'm not willing to say "he stole my shit" - because it was different in just enough places that I couldn't be sure, and the reality is it was long enough since his last release that he could have worked on solving the same issues - they *were* the big issues, and my code was deliberately written to try and fit in with his code base, so perhaps I just did a really good job of making my code look like his.

In the last 5-6 years, desktop hardware has stabilized *a lot*, and Microsoft has done nothing to improve the bottom-line experience of it's product users, so there's been no real reason to upgrade (see the desperation with which many people cling to XP; Windows 7 is nicer but it's not really, truly better).

Microsoft, though, cannot see this. They - not the individuals, but the corporation - cannot see, are incapable of seeing, that their products are not remotely the best they *can be*.

Consider Outlook/Exchange. Corporations use Outlook not for it's mail services but for it's integration of key services. And people hate it with a passion. Microsoft have worked hard try and create the impression that PC is King and Microsoft are King of the PC, and frankly nobody actually wants Microsoft software.

It's like the odd-smelling creepy guy who comes with the movers; you'll let him in, you'll be polite, offer him a drink maybe, but you're not going to invite him back and, no, thanks, you really don't want to visit his parents.

People are turned off by MS products because they have to work with them, and that's enough to convince you to use something else at home.

Metro... Ok, I know, this is slashdot, people here have to hate on Metro. I actually had a Windows 7 Phone, and aside from the lack of apps after MS announced they were doing Win 8, I really enjoyed it. It was lean and mean, but unlike W8's UI, it was a back to basics approach. It wasn't about *removing* UI chrome, it was about starting over with the assumption E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G that gets displayed is an interaction hook/button. If you can see it, you can tap it or press it, and it will do something.

The apps that sucked on W7P were the apps that weren't raw Metro apps.

Again, MS couldn't see it, and W8 is a castrated b*****d version of it.

Unless Ballmer steps down in the next 6 months, this is it people - this is when Microsoft died :)

I've noticed in recent years that the verbiage used to describe quantum physics has changed; when I was a kid, they would use passive words that made it sound like awareness of a state caused it's destruction rather than today when they seem to be more clear that some states require interaction-with-side-effects (measurement or interference) to obtain the information. Yay progress.

That gif reminds me of a thought experiment: Imagine a person living in a 2d universe that happens to be on a flimsy, square piece of tissue paper loosely attached to a square, wire frame. The piece of paper is placed in a rocket and launched into space. Now it's at rest in a pressurized capsule, and for things are normal. The 2d man is running around kicking a ball obeying 2d-physics in his 2d-universe but subject to external forces from the surrounding 3d universe. So what will he experience when someone taps or nudges the frame and sets his 2d-universe rotating or drifting? How will he explain why sometimes the ball seems to experience more or less friction? If the paper ripples enough, will the ball seem to blink out of existence?

In 2011 they speculated the universe might have a slight spin to it. But what if it is also moving and/or turning/rotating on/along one or more axis. How would we perceive that?

Also, given their skill in escapology, how many mice actually managed to make it off the ship?

I think you missed the "continued development" in my original post. I don't see Windows 8 as an end-product that Microsoft actually cares about - like it didn't care about ME or Vista. They don't care about end-user adoption. Pushing it out provides a costing point for the post-Windows-7 development, it increases income (think about all the people who bought a Windows 8 license when they buy new hardware and then go out and buy a Windows 7 license for actual usage), and it lets them claim OS-every-X years rather than OS-every-2X years.

A secondary factor in each case is the chance to push critical new tech (drivers in the case of ME/Vista, UI in 8) but again that's all about numbers.

As I see it - two possibilities: Nobody in engineering, design, creative or marketing at Microsoft could see or express the pending clusterfrak - even after ME and Vista - or the suits at the top saw something in the numbers that outweighed the potential harm. In any normal company, that would be crazy - even to the extremes of New Coke - but Coke weren't living in the same luxury boat that MS has quite managed to sink ... yet.

Windows ME, Windows Vista, Windows 8.

Folk-wisdom is that these were all mistakes - because they were awful, and we ask ourselves "why would you sell this P.O.C"?

But I don't think people really stop to think about that. Yes - the Coca Cola company reversed course after less than 3 months, but not because of popular backlash, because of the bottom line.

And yet - here we are on Microsoft's 3rd "New Coke".

Not least because, while PC sales may be dry at the moment, MS has a cornered market there that ensures they're going to make most of cost back simply on people buying PCs, and even if those people don't actually use Windows 8, that doesn't hurt Microsoft; infact, if some portion of them go out and buy a replacement, older, MS operating system, that's still good on the bottom line.

If Microsoft have decided not to release Windows 8 and continued development to the next version, there would be this big gap on their books and the actual development cost of Windows 9 would appear much greater.

My take is that it's not a mistake, it was a calculated gamble to manipulate the books.

Bear in mind that it's the degradation of normally smooth artery walls by, e.g., high blood pressure that enables plaque build up. What happens if they impact a plaque deposit?

I ask because the treatments might start to get expensive if it's not quantified before people start using the treatment and J. Edgar Pure-Butter-Diet takes them to court over their "contribution" to the arterial furring that put his head in a jar.