There was a post a few days ago about how the quality of SnowHN had gone down with people asking how they could block this category of submissions - so I wouldn't be too quick to equate an increase in ShowHN with anything positive.
1. Boredom
2. Infamy (although nobody seems to claim responsibility for attacks like this so not sure how that can be a motivating factor - but who knows).
Here is the TLDR as I see it: If you insist of hiring over-qualified people, they are more likely to jump-ship as soon as something better comes along - staff turnover is a major issue.
More FUD about the disk space issue... yes - there is a large recovery partition and yes - you can delete it to free up space. Any yes - perhaps MS would have been better off if they included a USB drive for recovery purposes (although I imagine trying to walk the average user through "booting from USB" to restore their partition would be a support nightmare).
This is just like the "omg - the desktop is gone and all we are left with is Metro!". Um yes... unless you "show desktop" and move on with your life...
And the "purpose of the surface pro"? How about "a tablet for those who need to be productive in a windows environment"?
>although I imagine trying to walk the average user through "booting from USB"
How is that any worse than the current status quo of every Windows product ever sold? I'd say it would be harder to walk mom through deleting the restore files when she calls and says her tablet won't hold all her movies and music.
Let's just face it, MS made a very stupid decision. I could see this happening during the Vista era, but SSDs have been mainstream for YEARS now. Windows should have a smaller footprint and holy hell, should not have a 12-18gb cab file to restore from on limited storage.
Enthusiasts spend way too much time making Windows SSD friendly. We need to delete superseded update from winsxs, shrink the default massive page file, delete the hibernate file on machines that don't need it, manually stop superfetch/defrag even though windows is supposed to do this on its own, etc.
>And the "purpose of the surface pro"?
In the age of affordable ultrabooks, who knows. Essentially you're buying an ultrabook without a keyboard and with a super tiny screen.
That said, I love the RT product and if the RT tablet was $299 it would sell like hotcakes. Especially if the 'desktop mode' didn't exist. MS should never have bothered with the Pro line and instead should have made a proper android and ios competitor.
> MS should never have bothered with the Pro line and instead should have made a proper android and ios competitor.
What for?
MS competitive advantage is backwards compatibility with an EXTREMELY HUGE catalog of Windows apps. Nothing more. Anything else doesn't matter.
A 'proper RT tablet' would throw away that competitive advantage and sell as well as the Windows Phone 7.
In fact, the mere existence of an 'RT runtime Store' practically throws away that competitive advantage. Specially now that Steam is expanding from selling games to sell some Windows applications.
What is the right way to me: sell Windows (7 is good enough) computers, with good hardware (competitive with Apple laptops) and with a Full Windows App Store. Not RT Store, Full Windows API applications Store.
I should be able to buy Office, Autocad, Adobe Acrobat, etc from there. Now that would have been huge. The first week would have been a financial success for WinRar, Sublime Text, Ditto, and lots of other programs people use everyday.
The screen isn't "super-tiny". It's 10.6". Compared to an 11" ultrabook, you're not loosing a lot of screen space (especially when you consider the 11" ultrabook probably has a much lower resolution than the Surface Pro). If you're comparing against 13" or larger ultrabooks, then sure, the Surface Pro's screen is small (though still higher resolution than most 13" ultrabooks), but then that's a different conversation, and one that people already have every time they choose between an 11" and a 13" ultrabook.
The popular ultrabooks and all of the ones I've seen in real life are 13". My comparison is between 10.6 and 13, which is a pretty big difference. Regardless, I can see how this is arguable.
Definitely, if you want a 13" screen, the Surface is a poor substitute. But by the same token, if you want a 15" screen, a 13" Ultrabook is a poor substitute. It's a tradeoff between portability and screen size. If you're willing to go down to the low-end of screen size for sake of portability, the Surface Pro looks very competitive with 11" ultrabooks. If you're not willing to go to that screen size, then the Surface Pro isn't really an option.
We are buying two PROs the minute they come out. They have expandable memory slots and the beauty of having a nice tablet and a full blown laptop is great. My wife can't wait for it to come out.
When the best way to defend your new OS is to say "You can do this and pretend it's just like the old one!" you're probably in for a hard time.
The surface pro seems to be a weird use case. It's going to come in at a price point where you could get a mid range Windows 7 laptop and an ipad mini or Nexus 7 for the same price and the combination of these 2 devices is probably more useful.
It's not in defence of the OS - it's a rebuttal to the people who ignore all the other benefits of upgrading to a newer OS and cite the (often repeated) notion that the desktop as we know it is gone for good.
I think most gmail overhauls have been significantly less major than Windows->Metro. The complaints against Metro don't seem to be so much that people haven't warmed to it yet so much as that it doesn't gel with the way they want to work on a desktop/laptop computer at all.
I'm not really afraid, uncertain, or doubtful of the disk space issue. I just think it's straight-up misleading and represents Microsoft's gross misunderstanding of what makes the mobile model successful.
They give you hardware that is capable of storing the advertised amount of data - they advertise it the same as any other vendor (nobody advertises "usable diskspace" unless there is a 59GB iPad out there).
When do you think hardware vendors should start specifying available disk space as part of their SKU? When it's less than 10%? 20%? Should this value include pre-installed applications?
That is pure Ignorance to what the user wants. And we dicussed that on this site already. It seems to be fairly obvious to most that there is a big difference between having more than the half unusable and having a tiny bit used.
Defending Microsoft in that brainwashed-looking way serves neither you nor them.
For those that want the modern equivalent to relive your old time crisis, HOD, op-wolf days, (e.g. for mame cabinets), apparently the ones that use a dedicated infrared sensor (like the wii) are the most accurate (e.g. www.arcadeguns.com).
The commercial license is the basic licensing model and it has the same functionality as a personal or an academic licenses. JetBrains offers discounted personal models to support private individuals. It is only the following exception, which allows you to buy a discounted personal license model: If you have to pay it out of your own pocket, you are not getting reimbursed for buying it and you do not use any company detail (company name, company address, company VAT ID) during the purchasing process.
Personal licenses are not available to companies in any way or form. Transfer of personal licenses to any third party and/or reimbursement for personal license purchase by a company are prohibited by the Personal License Agreement.
So not sure what to make of that exactly... Individuals can buy it and use it commercially but companies can't? Even if you're a contractor working in your spare time, you are likely to be registered as a limited company.
Yes and the contractor issue is important. Like most contractors in the UK I work through a limited company for tax reasons; that means the tools have to be owned by the company.
However... in effect I am the company, no one else will use it. JetBrains need to give us an official answer on that situation. I qualify for the personal license, but I have to enter a VAT number
i have a personal licence and use it for work. no-one has sued me. it's my ide. i bought it. i use it. that is how i expect things to work.
surely the commercial licence is for when a company is buying it, and expects to have N programmers, who are replaceable, using it at any one time. that's a completely different use case.
the only frustrating thing is that if you have multiple machines (say a desktop and a laptop) and switch between them (eg working one project on the laptop in living room; leaving the ide open for another project in the office) then it complains. you can fix this by blocking some firewall port (bonjour iirc). oh, that and the complete LACK OF SUPPORT FOR C / C++... in intellij idea.
Personal license means it's in your name, nothing more. Whereas Commercial license means it's in your company's name and therefore unnamed, so it does not belong to a single individual but to the company.
The way I understood it, a personal license is if you're paying for it (and the company isn't reimbursing you for it). You can still use it for commercial purposes.
I own personal licenses for 3 of their products. I use all three products for commercial work, but those licenses are my personal property. Two of those I use in my day job, the other I use for my spare time iOS development.
That's the issue; JetBrains seem entirely unaware of that. I am one man operating through a limited company. According to them I have to buy the commercial edition even though I am the company...
You can buy a personal licence using your own credit card. What you can't do is buy a license using your company credit card, or claim back the expense.
Maybe if you're only building a simple app, but I suspect most people at some point need other components like date pickers, format masks, form validation, table filtering/sorting etc. of which many require jQuery anyway.
This is just a re-imagining of the Steam interface to be optimised for large screens - I think the post above yours is referring to the rumoured "Steambox" that Valve themselves are supposedly working on.
Been waiting for this for two reasons: a) websocket support and b) now the version of IIS that runs under visual studio 2012 and the server matches hopefully avoiding any surprises (v8).
Oh - and provisioning a new server doesn't require 3 hours to apply updates :-)
"Look, there is what you intend and what you write. Your bugs are in between the two."
Umm no. Bugs are usually
a) a misinterpreation of the requirements (no amount of comments are going to save you) or
b) a (hopefully) subtle error in the code - again - I don't see how a comment is going to help you unless the comment is practically pseudo-code which I (hope) nobody is advocating.
Anyone have an example of the typical type of bug that is easier to fix when there are comments around? I agree about commenting "non-obvious" code though - at least in terms of it's intentions. Not necessarily as a way to fix bugs, but to prevent the next programmer from removing something that looks superfluous because nobody can remember why it's there. Something like (totally made up):
"Assign the customer id as a prefix to the comment field; SAP expects the format of <customer_id>__<comment> during import".
