skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I generally hate Microsoft stuff (including Windows 8), but this is a refreshingly original and good design (personal opinion, of course.) Since Zune and XBox, Microsoft seem to have sharpened their game to the point where they are capable of delivering small, compact, and useful hardware which functions well. Some people mocked the Microsoft Mouse in the initial stages of the presentation, but come to think of it, most people I know prefer Microsoft's ergonomic laptop mice to Apple's Mighty Mouse, which, quite frankly, is rubbish.

Priced at the right point, this could take aim at a number of different devices, which it seems to fit at the smooth spot between:

- Stylus-capable tablets you can actually write on (IBM x series)

- Small media-capable tablets like the iPad/Kindle Fire (for consuming eBooks, media and the Web).

- eBook readers like the standard Kindle. I don't know what digital Ink capable means, but if it goes any way towards making eBooks more readable than they are on the Fire/iPad, consumers will buy this device just so they don't have to buy different things for watching videos and reading books with lesser eyestrain.

I bet that both this and the Lumia and other Windows phones are going to be massive in markets like India, which know Microsoft and Nokia well, and have never seen much of Apple tech.
The era of installed PC/MAC applications will end soon
While the US system may help nuisance lawsuits, it also allows the justified Davids to take on the Goliaths. Not sure how to stop the former while not stopping the latter.
Ah, look, rounded corners. Almost indistinguishable from my Galaxy Tab. I wonder if Apple will sue them for design patent violation too.
The Microsoft Surface: Suitable for featherless bipeds with flat nails
I'm not sure they can. They don't have the supply chain advantages that Apple has developed over the last five years, they won't have the volume to drive component prices down, and unless this is really a reference design that OEMs will be producing and distributing, they'll irritate the beejeezus out of their partners.

I don't blame them for trying to vertically integrate, especially after seeing what it has done for Apple. But I think they're too late to the party.
So they're releasing two versions that look much the same, but one of them can run all of your existing (x86) applications, and one of them can't? That sounds like confusion waiting to happen.
Who said?

Assuming that Apple and the iPad is "the way things are done these days", then there's plenty of in depth specs available: http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

Exact pixel resolution and ppi of the screen.

Number of CPU cores and the precise CPU model.

Exact listing of wireless protocols and bands supported.

Megapixel counts of the cameras and video recording format limits.

It would be nice to have even this data for the Surface.
Great implementation! This is a superb method of guerilla marketing. I actually mentioned a few of mine in a blog post a while back: http://blog.zaheer.me/2012/05/guerilla-marketing.html
1) Make some great apps on your own.
2) Get some recognition for your great apps.
3) Tell people about your apps and the clients will come to you.

:)
I had not seen your presentation but it's got a lot of really detailed, useful information. I will certainly revisit it.

Likewise, very interesting to see the same diagram come out of someone else's brain. 'Great minds think alike' as they say.
-tejaswiy

No, I'm in the Midwest, far from the sea. Unless you consider cornfields a sea of sorts.
No, they had laptops. The problem that Microsoft will solve is that people want to have a low powered device that can be a laptop sometimes and a tablet other times.
Microsoft are trying so hard to be Apple, and failing so badly.

I don't know much about the Surface, but this preview website is an abomination...
The point was that he still needed to add the strike price to the calculation.
Startup Productivity: Social Coding with HipChat & Github
I think Microsoft was really smart to cut the legs out from under the OEM manufacturing market: no device sales == no licensing revenue.

OEM's haven't proven themselves as viable producers of tablet hardware that gets people into stores.
One I caught recently: The difference between the current time and one week from the current time is not always 7 * 86400 seconds.

By noticing an automated test that failed 2 weeks out of the year.
WinRT (ARM) and a Intel version

The dual CPU thing still worries me. I think it's going to cause a ton confusion for consumers when Windows 8 comes out. These two tablets look the same, they're named the same, they use the same accessories. One will cost more than the other. They look like a 13" MacBook Air vs 13" MacBook Pro.

But it won't be, because they run completely different OSes. The ARM one won't run your old software. It won't run the windows desktop you're used to. Some big game comes out? I wonder if it will run on WinRT. Since all the devices will have lower specs, will AAA titles be available?

You could buy the more expensive one. I bet it has lower battery life. It won't come with Office, so not only do you have to pay $200 more for the device (random guess), but you also have to pay $100-$500 for a copy of Office on top just to match what's on the ARM tablet.

The tablets are clearly quite different. They should be positioned differently, they should look physically different.

I really want to see how consumers take to Intel vs. ARM. I can't help but think it's going to be a disaster.

As for these tablets? The cover looks great, and MS does know how to make hardware (I've loved my Natural keyboards since '95 or '96). It's great to know there will be one device on the market that (should be) well made and not crazily under-specced for cost reasons.

But does all this make third parties very nervous. Are these "demo" units to start the market, or the first wave of MS competing directly?
If we weren't successful at our startup, I'm not sure how I'd pay to defend myself. The reality is that I probably would not have been able to, which would have resulted in a default judgement followed by bankruptcy.

I'm not from money. I'm the son of factory worker and a stay and home mom who cleaned houses to help pay the bills. This whole ordeal is utterly terrifying. I (along with my other partners) bootstrapped our company on money earned and saved by working our assess off. I personally contributed over $60,0000 to start our company, and that money came from nothing. I earned it fixing computers and working on our startup in-between customers and at night.

The thing that keeps me going is anger. That's the only emotion that trumps my fear. I'm outraged at the absurdity of the allegations levied against me.
Mozilla's lightweight iOS browser
A meta-misconception: It's possible to establish a total ordering on timestamps that is useful outside your system.

Virtual machines can be screwed with comprehensively. So can non-virtual ones, come to that, and your software likely isn't in a position to tell that it's already seen 02:34:17 GMT 2013-05-25 five times already.

So what can you do about that? Bloody nothing. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. You're screwed. Everything you could do can be screwed with in ways your program can't defend against.

The lesson: Don't worry about bugs you can't fix. Refusing to play games you can't win will keep your hair in your head a lot better than knowing the intricacies of human timekeeping systems past and present.
I didn't know of it while the presentation was happening. But now I've checked it, and you seem to be right, it looks much better.

Also, had checked a live coverage from Ars ( http://s3.amazonaws.com/liveblogs/microsoft-tablet/index.htm... ) but they had just a few pictures. (Now, it seems that he had a problem: "I wish I could take pictures, but EOS Utility is being awkward for me unfortunately." )

Anyway, while following this coverage, I was also watching the live streaming from Cnet.
You can watch also their live-blog:
http://live.cnet.com/Event/Microsofts_mystery_event_in_Los_A...

Both, the verge's and cnet's are better for the ones coming now :)
What the heck is an xrange?
The moment Retina displays came out was the moment ClearType died. They're thrashing a dead horse.
Successful companies have learned that a (shockingly) large proportion of consumers form impressions and make decisions on a primarily emotional, rather than rational or practical, basis. That's what this video is designed for. It inaugurates the brand, piques the viewer's interest, and plants the seeds of desire.

Trust me, there will be plenty of time in the coming months for in-depth product reviews, spec comparisons, etc. ad nauseam.
You're right! I remember it being one size smaller than the other HDD players at the time. I thought it was the 2.5" that had just come out, but it was 1.8".
Did they run out of money to design the back or something? They can't have Jony Ive but was there no one else they could hire to approximate 60s era Braun? Like a 4th year design student?
these guys?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4127620
What got me is the narrator. Eerily like Kevin Costner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj2A0LybwPA
http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...
> "aside from the Fire/Nook Tablet is their an Android tablet that hasn't been dead on arrival"

The ASUS Transformer line.
> You have provided no support for the idea that MOST scientists don't understand statistics.

That's true, but neither did you (or anyone else ever, for that matter) provide support for the idea that MOST scientists do understand statistics. See how easy it is to discard anything you disagree with?

> I am much more prepared to believe that reporters don't understand statistics than scientists.

That's fine, but (a) it doesn't say anything about how bad scientists are with statistics (only that they are slightly better than reporters, which I tend to agree with), and (b) this is an argument from bias/faith/religion/prejudice, not from science or data. You are just as guilty as anyone you criticize. You might be more right or less right, but you* don't have the moral ground. (* general you).

> Still, you have provided an anecdote in support of broad sweeping statements.

What was that statement of yours about learned people digging into science? So now it is not enough for those people to know what they are talking about, they have to do it in a format you approve of.

I can provide tens more valid criticisms. I charge $200-$1000/hour for my line of work, and I'd be happy to take as much to work for you finding them, when I have some free time.

But I'll throw in a freebie: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ - though I suspect it will stop at most people's "no true scotsman/scientist" filter...
Samsung Galaxy Ace S5830 Price in India & Pakistan-Features | RaviMobiles.com
And this is why people will forget about this unless MS spends a bushel trying to keep it in view. This announcement just seems so clumsy. Microsoft just finished with TechEd last week, and could have announced it then. But they want to vaporware for a bit longer.

Seriously, no release date, no pricing, no real demo (rendered images instead), no software announcements other than Netflix and Office. This type of product announcement might have worked pre-Internet, but nowadays people expect to be able to find out concrete details and pricing once a product is announced.

No demo units shipped to Walt Mossberg or David Pogue, or even a John Dvorak...

This isn't like the Zune however. The Zune was peripheral to Microsoft's core business. This is central to where a large portion of the computing market is headed. If this takes two or three revisions to gain traction, then Microsoft might be too late.
Done. There are. But which ones do resonate with people, that's the big question. This one did mighty good actually, quantitatively speaking. But qualitatively looking at this option I agree with you, the term is pretty edgy.
Both http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/windows/apps/hh46542...

> Decide how to lay out your app in each view. Windows 8 supports landscape, portrait, snapped, and fill views. Users can put your app in any of these views at any time, and you want your app to look and work great in each one.
"Screwing around with iTunes"?

You've either both not worked in any large companies lately AND never really used an iPad, or you are just blinded by platform bias.

The fact is that iPads are being massively adopted in Fortune 500 companies. And I can assure you that those users are not "screwing around with iTunes". In fact, iTunes doesn't even exist on the iPad, so you don't really know what you are talking about, at all.

(edit: Two instant downvotes on this, but I notice nobody is refuting my facts.)
I think that would be reasonable. From my perspective data caps don't solve an actual problem I'm having, and I find it difficult to believe they're solving an actual problem for Comcast either.
The iPad doesn't come with a BT keyboard, but there are quite a few keyboard/cover combos available. It's not something that you have to "schlepp around inconveniently":

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31747_7-20091329-243/keyboardin...
Remember :CueCat? [1]

The marketers may just be repeating the same mistake.
Fortunately it does not require specialized hardware anymore (since most smartphone cameras can read QR codes.)

[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html
I know - I opened the site and my first thought was, oh it looks quite nice. Then went to gallery and my heart sank that no-one had bothered to look at the thing side-on.
Increasing the marginal cost discourages adding users. You punish people for having a lot of users, which creates a pain point, which creates an exploitable opportunity for your competition.

Better to charge a flat rate per user, or follow the 37 Signals example and not charge per user at all.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201206/jason-fried/huge-accounts...
>On the x86 one, sure
It's Windows. Of course you can plug in a thumb drive. Everything you can do on Windows, you'll still be able to do on Windows.
http://axonflux.com/how-facebook-uses-scribe-hadoop-and-hive...
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That's definitely what got us going. We wouldn't have even done the diff on the legals if the blog post wasn't put up with such vague language so late on a friday afternoon.
>On the x86 one, sure

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The certification process for Windows 8 sticker needs that. But.. that certification is done by.....guess who? Microsoft. So they could easily lock down their own hardware.
That's a misleading analogy. Microsoft's goal here is not to get you to visit a Microsoft store, since the device won't come out for months anyway. This is the first step in a months-long marketing campaign leading up to launch.

The goal is not to convey information, but rather to form an emotional bond, whether conscious or subconscious.
But these all look rather clunky and unattractive, and the point about needing to select among them still stands. They'll always be niche accessoires for that reason.

The Touch Cover is a sanctioned, obvious choice. It's simple to grok. The iPad doesn't have that yet.

It doesn't even matter if the clunky-looking ones perform better, or serve an edge case better.

This is Microsoft learning from Apple. What you're doing is a role-reversal of the situation where anti-Apple folks point to some obscure niche solution as equivalent to Apple integration.
The Last 35 Miles
Doh! This completely slipped my mind. I guess I would hope and assume they wouldn't do something like that, but you're right, it's certainly a possibility. Thanks for pointing it out.
After reading several reviews, and looking at MS Surface website, I am still not clear what this is. Is it going to run full featured Windows OS? Whats the price point going to be? Is 10.2 inch keyboard really going to make it possible for me to type things fast? (Remember those notebook keyboards? I could not really type on it). Is Microsoft going to build hardware for this? If no, who is building it? When is it going to be available on the market? Oh common give me something. All I get it, is Microsoft now has a tablet, which has a keyboard. thats it... cmon. I need bit more details than that.
This is the big takeaway from this.

Microsoft knows that Windows 8 has to succeed. Clearly it does not trust Dell, HP, Lenovo et al to build machines that shows the OS in its best light to help it succeed. So long and thanks for all the fish OEMs.

Right now Meg Whitman is probably regretting deep sixing WebOS.
Thanks.

Seriously. How hard was that? I have to do a browser plugin upgrade just to watch and ad?! The whole ship is made of fail.
I assure you there is sexism in developing and undeveloped countries, too.
The Transcension Hypothesis - Jason Silva *video*
Some examples that come to mind:

1) You're (possibly) assuming that both timestamps come from the same machine. They could be from two machines (Server timestamps a transaction start, client timestamps the end.) Clocks are not accurate, so the delta time is not correct.

2) Time A is before a DST change forward or back, Time B is after. Delta would be wrong by +/- 1 hour (assuming all other factors are tracking with accuracy.

3) Both times are taken on the same machine, but far enough apart that clock drift plays a factor.

4) Both times are taken on the same machine, but an ntptimesync cron job kicked off in between them and adjusted the system clock.
(Posted as a joke after talking with people how the same libraries get posted on HN every couple months [ghost.py, Chosen JS, etc])
Every time I am in a meeting about QR codes I share this: http://wtfqrcodes.com/ We all have a good laugh and then somehow, no one wants to suggest QR codes anymore.
You're right. Where Apple tends to emphasize family, connectedness, ease of use, utility, and general happiness, Microsoft has chosen to emphasize technology in a harsh, dominant manner that reminds me of the Borg.
The reasons on Slashdot are both coarse (no detail: just a few adjectives; on the negative side, we have flame air, troll, offtopic, redundant, and overrated... I am not even certain which one I would have picked for "poster is arguing an anecdote without even providing his single datapoint), transient (when I spent years on Slashdot, and maybe currently still, you could only see one of these adjectives, even if a bunch of people downvoted you), and anonymous (your decisions could be meta-moderated, but the meta-moderation did not disclose who you were).

Your issues with not knowing who downvoted you for what reasons seem nearly identical to Slashdot, then (modulo I guess being marked "troll" when you were really downvoted for something more readily corrected). You had previously mad it clear that you cared deeply about the moderators being anonymous, and boy if Slashdot didn't maintain that.

Regardless: you have still, to this point, not stated even a single other web community you were a part of, only that they existed. The conversation becomes interesting an useful when you can point at actual examples (as it has now for Slashdot).

To look at this from another analogy, imagine it you claimed that you had never seen a bank that charged fees. Someone else responds saying they had never seen a bank that didn't charge fees and then lists ten banks that charge fees. You then respond with simply "I don't agree those are banks" but don't provide a list of banks that don't charge fees. I fail to see how you can claim you are then being helpful in that conversation.
Saying that sexism is wrong and saying that a victim of sexism should stand up for herself are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and just because the former is true the latter isn't necessarily "blaming the victim".

Suppose a student leaves his laptop on a table in the school library while on a bathroom break and it is stolen. Is it "blaming the victim" to tell him not to leave his valuables unattended, just because it is clearly the thief who did something morally wrong?
Harvard Square isn't a warzone at night. Central West End is more like Harvard Square.
As the price point is a deciding factor, do you think Microsoft will subsidize the Surface as they did with the XBox?
I'm seeing more hotels' providers go to private VLANs so in those cases I can't see how such a DoS attack will work any longer. Hopefully, if the provider is sophisticated enough to set up a private VLAN for each room or WiFi connection, they can write the rules for enforcing QoS on the uplink.
> schlepp around inconveniently

This is the opposite of inconvenient:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31747_7-57415771-243/logitechs-...

This, plus a good SSH client and the Google apps app, makes a laptop redundant, and is a very nice cover and perfect airplane tray stand to boot (thanks to offsetting the screen away from the seatback in front of you).
Working at a startup: week one at Funzio
How you can tell they don't get it in one sentence (tucked in the bottom right corner):

"Images are design renderings and not photographs."
I have freebox too but I still use a linksys wrt54g router with Tomato behind their router (which can be disabled btw) and I have great results. No resets, no slowdowns, uptime is very high and the wireless works well enough for my needs. There might be a little bottleneck in the wifi cause the chip is a bit older but it compensates with the fact that is very reliable. So I would recommend Tomato and Linksys over any ISP provided router.
Let us not forget the Apple Newton Emate 300:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300

Probably the best computer ever designed for children. I used one myself in school from 4th grade through 8th grade when I upgraded to a "real" laptop. The main reason for the upgrade: I couldn't program on the emate. Other than that it was in every way superior: Instant on, touch, nice keyboard, no distraction interface, usable in all lighting conditions, ect...

Now of course people would sneer at it since it didn't have any form of internet. However, at the time my teachers were more comfortable with it in the classroom due to those limitations.
I was reading this and realizing that he was mixing two very different things: design considerations and design errors. Treating every year as 365 days is a design error. Leap years will break it. "Timezones next to eachother don't require changes of more than 1 hr" might also doom that F22 flying across the international date line (ok, I am assuming that was more of a test assumption than a code assumption).

On the other hand, requiring that clocks be set to within, say, five minutes (Kerberos 5) is a design consideration. This is why Kerberos is usually used with something like NTP.

But beyond this there are a lot of things you can't do (like expire cookies) if you don't assume that client and server have similar times on their clocks. Sometimes it makes sense to require things you can't assume to always be true.
Computerized handwriting recognition will never be good enough because even people have trouble recognizing handwriting--even their own.

And once the recognition fails, you're left with computer text that needs to be corrected. How? With a keyboard. So most people just gravitate toward using the keyboard in the first place.

A stylus is better for drawing (see: Wacom) but most people don't draw.
Can you install linux on your ipad?
I think their QR codes us a URL shortening service like http://bby.us/12345.