Comment Re:Free market means exactly that ! (Score 5, Informative) 405
Adam Smith himself wrote about the need to put legal limits on unethical business practices.
CERN Antimatter Experiment Produces First Beam of Antihydrogen 136
An anonymous reader writes "Matter and antimatter annihilate immediately when they meet, so aside from creating antihydrogen, one of the key challenges for physicists is to keep antiatoms away from ordinary matter. To do so, experiments take advantage of antihydrogen's magnetic properties (which are similar to hydrogen's) and use very strong non-uniform magnetic fields to trap antiatoms long enough to study them. However, the strong magnetic field gradients degrade the spectroscopic properties of the (anti)atoms. To allow for clean high-resolution spectroscopy, the ASACUSA collaboration developed an innovative set-up to transfer antihydrogen atoms to a region where they can be studied in flight, far from the strong magnetic field (scientific paper)."
Comment Re:HP has the pull to get MS to fix windows by 8.2 (Score 4, Insightful) 513
So? What else do you need to look at while selecting something from a menu?
You're right. When I open the bookmarks menu in Firefox, everything on my screen should go away and be replaced by a scrolling mass of big tiles. It just makes perfect sense.
Not everything has to be a tree control.
You're right. When I look for Photoshop to start it, it makes no sense for it to be under 'Adobe', with InDesign and Premiere. They should all just be scattered at random in a big scrolling mass of tiles.
WTF? I mean, really, WTF? Aren't
That why most of us can see what a disaster Window 8 is.
Comment Re:New MS business plan (Score 1) 513
Does it actually close a hung program when you tell it to close the program, or does it still force you to find the actual executable and close that way?
Comment Re:Now is your chance to try Linux... (Score 1) 513
You should try a Linux distro released after 1993. It's actually improved a lot in the last twenty years.
Comment Re:It will never go away (Score 1) 513
You've got to realize we're seeing 1.5+ GHz, quad-core tablets with 2GB RAM come down to a couple hundred dollars now. That's genuinely a lot of power no matter how you slice it, enough to serve most people's needs if only it had the interface they need.
I have a 1.5GHz quad-core tablet with 2GB of RAM. And no, it's not 'enough to serve most people's needs'. It still feels like running Windows XP on a 90MHz Pentium.
Comment Re:Touch-screen desktop PCs are a fad (Score 1) 513
'Search' was the Big New Shiny Thing before 'Mobile' became the Big New Shiny Thing. When Google became enormously rich from 'Search', everything had to do 'Search'. Now Apple have become enormously rich from iPhone and iPad, everything has to do 'Mobile'.
It's tiresome, but the fads die when a new fad comes along. Unfortunately, we'll be stuck with the crap created during the old fad for years to come.
Comment Re:It will never go away (Score 1) 513
When all tablets come with USB-A ports (people want to use thumb drives, and their SD cards, etc) and RJ45 ports (not all networking is wireless), then they could make a run at laptops and desktops.
Dude, they're tablets. You're supposed to carry them around in your pocket and use them when you're not at a desk. Why would anyone in their right mind want a USB port and RJ45 port on a 7" tablet?
Why this insane desire to build 'one size fits all', when it just results in a horrible kludge that no-one wants? Your attitude is precisely why Window 8 has been such a failure.
Comment Re:It will never go away (Score 1) 513
If what you say is true, that's exactly what you can tell the Linux zealots who claim that if you just put a Linux PC on the store shelves, people will buy them.
Gnome 2 (and now MATE) looks pretty much like Windows XP. No-one I've put in front of my Linux machines who's previously used Windows XP has had any problem with using it.
Window 8 looks nothing like Windows XP. Most people can't even start Notepad in Window 8.
Comment Re:Touch-screen desktop PCs are a fad (Score 3, Funny) 513
Try using it for once in your life.
We have. That's why we hate it.
Comment Re:meanwhile.... (Score 1) 513
Yeah, so? That's a heck of a long way from 'people just aren't buying new PCs at all'.
BTW, aren't Mac sales up significantly? I know several people who've dumped Windows and gone all Apple in the last few years.
Comment Re:It will never go away (Score 2) 513
The current slow take up of Win8 has more to do with Moores Law running out.
No,. it's due to Joe Sixpack going to their local computer store, looking at the screen of a Window 8 PC and going 'WTF is this crap? Where's Windows?' and going home.
Business is far less impacted because they can just install Windows 7 instead. And they probably upgrade once the old PCs have been written off against their taxes, not when they wear out.
Comment Re:Touch-screen desktop PCs are a fad (Score 4, Insightful) 513
What I genuinely don't understand is - why break backward compatibility? Why not just layer touch on top of the existing UI?
Microsoft are desperate to get into mobile.
No-one wants a smart phone with no apps.
No-one wants to write apps for a smart phone OS with no users.
Hence Microsoft had to push the smart phone OS onto the desktop so developers might think they'd have a market for their apps.
Except no-one wants to buy a desktop PC with a smart phone OS.
Comment Re:meanwhile.... (Score 1) 513
Actually, if the sales numbers are to be believed, people just aren't buying new PCs at all.
Well, if you ignore the nearly one million PCs sold every day last quarter.
Short Notice: LogMeIn To Discontinue Free Access 408
An anonymous reader writes "The remote desktop service LogMeIn sent an email to its users today notifying them that 'LogMeIn Free' will be discontinued — as of today. This is a major shock with minimal warning to the millions of users who have come to rely on their service, made all the more surprising by the fact that 'consensus revenue estimates for LogMeIn in 2014 are $190.3 million,' suggesting that their system of providing both free and paid accounts for what is ultimately a straightforward service that could be duplicated for well under $1 million was already doing quite well." Asks reader k280: "What alternative tools are available for free, and how do they compare to LogMeIn?"
