Introducing Surface Laptop • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#521

Post by mixmastamyk » Wed, May 03, 2017, 6:32 AM UTC

72deluxe wrote: post #435

uranian wrote: post #257

The bad news is they're targeting students. Who wants to see his children being locked into MS Windows software by school? Besides, we just found out Windows 10 has almost complete control over your system and calls home, now sending your kids private data as a bonus! I would never accept my kids using a device like this on school. Schools are just ignorant and stupid if they make a deal for these laptops with MS. Sc…

Out of interest, how is it more educational? I had a fun time educating myself back in the day as I tried to get X to work with my video card. I jest! In all truth I suspect there are millions of system administrators who have never even used 'Lye-nucks' so attempting to get students (who need support) to use Linux devices will probably never happen (unless the admin/IT staff is extremely pro-Linux) or the school wis…

Whoa, blast from the past.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#522

Post by tn135 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 6:33 AM UTC

natch wrote: post #424

PuffinBlue wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what was this one-time childish mistake that lead to losing the account?

She saw a chain email (i.e. forward this to 10 people!) and decided it would be fun to make up her own. Apparently it was successful enough to get somebody's attention. Edit: To be clear, I would never blame them for wanting to stop a cascading explosion of emails. But I also wouldn't say it's impossible for a child to get an account banned.

And why is that a problem ? Does it violate Google's policies in any way ?

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#523

Post by gcb0 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 6:44 AM UTC

krzyk wrote: post #234

russellbeattie wrote: post #217

Do any of you have children at a school using Google Chromebooks and Google Drive? Calling Windows S a Chromebook competitor completely misses the point. Chromebooks are instant on, and your profile/data is 100% cloud based. You can grab any Chromebook from the rack in the back of the classroom, open it up, log in and immediately get to work on your report or whatever. I got an original Chromebook from Google I/O yea…

Until you loose internet connectivity (happens from time to time), or go abroad and don't want to pay high fees for net access. Or when Google decides that you broke some of their rules (frequently happens in AdSense) and blocks all of your accounts.

or google gets tired of supporting whatever server those machines won't function without.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#524

Post by gcb0 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 6:51 AM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #267

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pricing is one thing I don't understand. If you're asking a customer to pay the same price as a MacBook air, which comes with productivity apps and a basic cloud service for free, why don't you let them use O365 for free, in perpetuity, at least on that machine? The other thing I don't understand is the overarching message. The line we've been fed from Microsoft's marketing team is that the "convertibility" of th…

I heard from a surface book user that he never use the tablet mode in practice, outside sometimes to make it a tablet in a plane. I owned a surface pro myself, and I tend to agree. It's a terrible device as a tablet. Slow to wake up, buggy, low battery life, not really the kind of device you can carry around and check something on it quickly. And if you use it as a laptop, it's better to have a proper laptop with mor…

you used it wrong. its not a single task tablet like android or ios. it is a computer. which you can interact with as a tablet (touch, pen).

it can do things a mobile device will never be able to. the downside is that instant on is 2s instead of 0.5

I dont use it myself. while I loved the interaction of touch+pen, it wont run linux well. so thats a no go for me, as with any mac product.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#525

Post by devrandomguy » Wed, May 03, 2017, 6:54 AM UTC

popuptent wrote: post #273

romanovcode wrote: post #265

I think this is great! Average Joe doesn't need any Win32 applications anymore and this will do nicely. If you want to upgrade to Win10 Home it's just 50 dollars.

$50 to switch a boolean?

If you can predict a cosmic ray strike with great precision, then you might be able to get that bit flipped for free.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#526

Post by devrandomguy » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:10 AM UTC

iamNumber4 wrote: post #8

We should all be taking offense by this. This is the drug dealer play book, Hook the kids early, so that when they are adults they go with what they know, instead of being critical thinkers and evaluating the available products to pick the best technical solution for the needs at hand. this is why small to mid-sized companies are struggling with MS server products, and are locked into this merry-go-round licensing fe…

Parent is right, a mix of platforms is inevitable. Might as well take advantage of the opportunities, instead of trying to preserve a monoculture. The school board could quite reasonably insist that all digital school work must be submitted in open file formats. They could acquire a wide range of hardware, continuously, and allocate higher or lower spec machines depending on the actual needs of each class or grade year.

What the school loses in simplicity, they gain in budget flexibility. What the student loses in familiarity, they gain in resiliency. Change and diversity cannot be stopped or squashed. Open source does take a bit of work, but it pays for itself, partly in lowered risk, especially for large non-profit or low-budget organizations.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#527

Post by Top19 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:19 AM UTC

russellbeattie wrote: post #217

Do any of you have children at a school using Google Chromebooks and Google Drive? Calling Windows S a Chromebook competitor completely misses the point. Chromebooks are instant on, and your profile/data is 100% cloud based. You can grab any Chromebook from the rack in the back of the classroom, open it up, log in and immediately get to work on your report or whatever. I got an original Chromebook from Google I/O yea…

Found the Google employee.

For many reasons, Hacker News is FILLED TO THE BRIM with Google employees. I know this because anytime an article comes on here about Google Cloud that thread is immediately taken over by employees (many of whom to their credit identity as such) talking about how much better GCP is than AWS.

Now GCP today is kind of cool, still somewhat away from AWS but they certainly could catch up for sure, especially as the world shifts to more AI stuff where Google is already beating AWS.

However I remember back in 2014 seeing comments about how much better GCP was than AWS. Let me just state that that was physical impossible back then. Laughable and again, physically impossible. It's so impossible I'm still mildly upset all these years later.

Sorry for the rant but did want to document that here. That being said my sister uses Google Adsense for work and she has no complaints :)

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#528

Post by codeisart » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:23 AM UTC

donalhunt wrote: post #369

zepto wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we should worry about google building advertising profiles on children, as they have been doing.

I do not believe this statement to be true. The privacy notice provided by Google for their G Suite for Education is available here: https://gsuite.google.com/terms/education_privacy.html It clearly states "Google does not serve ads in the Core Services or use personal information collected in the Core Services for advertising purposes." Is the evidence that indicates this is not true? Is this in relation to non-core…

No matter what the privacy notice by Google says, you should absolutely discount it since Google has a history of steadily making privacy agreements looser over the years (and they are legally allowed to do so). In 2014 they amended their policies to join the Google and DoubleClick cookies for targeted advertising. In 2016 they started joining that with YouTube history for targeted advertising.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#529

Post by Dibes » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:23 AM UTC

Top19 wrote: post #527

russellbeattie wrote: post #217

Do any of you have children at a school using Google Chromebooks and Google Drive? Calling Windows S a Chromebook competitor completely misses the point. Chromebooks are instant on, and your profile/data is 100% cloud based. You can grab any Chromebook from the rack in the back of the classroom, open it up, log in and immediately get to work on your report or whatever. I got an original Chromebook from Google I/O yea…

Found the Google employee. For many reasons, Hacker News is FILLED TO THE BRIM with Google employees. I know this because anytime an article comes on here about Google Cloud that thread is immediately taken over by employees (many of whom to their credit identity as such) talking about how much better GCP is than AWS. Now GCP today is kind of cool, still somewhat away from AWS but they certainly could catch up for su…

Just to let you know, that person is not and never was a Google employee according to their resume

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#530

Post by mcintyre1994 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:29 AM UTC

There's a fascinating story I'd love to hear about Microsoft's education strategy and how they seem to have lost it to Google. At least in the UK in comprehensives when I was in school (I guess I left 4-5 years ago) Microsoft absolutely dominated - every computer was Windows, and if you did a presentation it was PowerPoint, a poster it was Publisher etc etc. In fact I believe that the curriculum for most subjects involved some sort of computer skills.. which was always Microsoft stuff (or I guess computer research counts too).

ICT was exclusively Microsoft too. It's so bad that when I was looking at universities for Computer Science many actively discouraged an ICT A Level and I can't think of any that rewarded it in any way. They owned the ICT curriculum, I wouldn't be surprised if they literally wrote it. The closest thing to practical programming was recording VB macros. My ICT teacher told us they got major discounts from Microsoft and I imagine that goes for every similar school.

There is a computing curriculum but my course didn't even offer it - which isn't a surprise because our ICT teacher had no programming knowledge. I imagine most similar schools were in the same situation, where all they taught was Microsoft-sanctioned ICT to an exam/curriculum that might as well have been written by Microsoft, using Microsoft software exclusively, to the extent that ICT is a negative for technical further education where it should be a boost.

Everyone leaving school knowing only how to use Microsoft things was obviously good for them, they controlled or might as well have the entire judgement of student's ICT knowledge through exams, I wonder how they blew it.