231–240 of 255 posts
As it happens I bought a second hand Surface Pro from ebay and it arrived today. Moving to it from a laptop thats a couple of years old, the Surface Pro is absolutely blowing me away. Faster than my old laptop, also acts as a tablet, using desktop applications via touch actually works, the pen is brilliant. The 128gb will be fine for me, because I've got used to living within about 120Gb.
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Is there a usable handwriting recognizer which can deal with heavy math notation?
I came across MyScript yesterday, and have been very impressed. It's an SDK which can recognize handwritten math (among other things). It has correctly recognized everything I've thrown at it so far, even though I'm using a mouse so my writing's pretty crappy. I'm seriously considering trying to build something with the API. I'm not sure what; I just want to play with the cool technology. Perhaps an app which gives y…
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I'm a student also, but I've been using the iPad for this. I don't take any notes on the iPad itself because the courses I need to take notes on are mathematical, so I simply write on paper and then when I come back home I scan it and append the scans to an evergrowing PDF file that is synced to my iPad. I'm looking for a replacement for my iPad 2, but I can't settle on anything because all the non-iPad tablets have…
Your problem is that you have an iPad 2. If you use a retina iPad, you will be able to read a PDF in landscape if you can read a book. The screen simply becomes almost as good as print. I've read many math papers and books this way.
Btw, do you have a good way to read two-column papers?
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I think all of the products are surprisingly compelling, but the naming has arguably become an even bigger and more glaring issue. The original Surface lineup was very compelling. The only real issue with it was the majorly confusing marketing message with having two products with a major qualitative difference sharing essentially the same name. It kind of pains me that rather than learning from their $900 million mi…
You could argue the same point regarding Apple's naming of their Macbook line prior to the discontinuing of the original Macbook moniker. Even now, the difference between the standard and the advanced Macbook line (purely on naming) are the words "Air" and "Pro".
The Air/Pro/normal macbooks all run the same software binaries. Microsoft was/is selling two products with different machine architectures that run different software but with almost identical names. That's a marketing and customer-service disaster.
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Surface marketing was everywhere. I don't think it was particularly bad marketing at that. The devices were definitely to blame. Surface RT squandered Microsoft's ace in the whole in this space: Office + Outlook + Windows network integration. Not only did Office RT not ship in Metro form, but the product that shipped initially was a buggy pre-release. It was disastrous execution. Besides that, Surface RT sold for an…
> I don't think it was particularly bad marketing at that. I think Microsoft marketing was definitely to blame for their failure to properly distinguish the two (Surface Pro vs. Surface RT). They really were two very different devices for different uses. Trying to call them both Surface tablets was a mis-step in my opinion because of their very different use-cases: one is a desktop replacement, the other is a tablet.…
And here we are observing them do it all over again. Surface 2, Surface Pro 2. Just by the name you still could figure they are the same machine and maybe the pro is a little bit faster or has a bigger flash drive etc. Just as you figure with the different Windows editions. "Ultimate", "Professional" "Home" etc.
People who get the Surface 2 will still be very surprised to see that that they cannot do anything with it seeing as not one "exe" they already have will work on them.
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Play vs. Work probably isn't the right dividing line between the two devices. The RT is more than just work, hence the 'Pro' moniker does fit well with that device. The problem with just calling it Surface 2 is that people won't get the difference. We used to complain about Microsoft's multiple versions of Windows with "Home", "Media Centre", "Professional", but strangely, now we seem to be asking to go back to that…
Home/pro would have worked well. It would be nice to have a different name for the ARM stuff though, to avoid confusion.
As it happens I bought a second hand Surface Pro from ebay and it arrived today. Moving to it from a laptop thats a couple of years old, the Surface Pro is absolutely blowing me away. Faster than my old laptop, also acts as a tablet, using desktop applications via touch actually works, the pen is brilliant. The 128gb will be fine for me, because I've got used to living within about 120Gb.
How much did you pay for it, if you don't mind me asking?
NB: I buy second hand because of 'blood minerals' etc, not because I'm trying to save money exactly. Due to moores law second hand tech from last year is rarely much cheaper compared to new stuff from this year.
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> I hope this is compatible with my Surface Pro Everything's compatible with the SP. Only the original Surface is missing the extra contacts on bottom for some of the new hardware. Myself, I'll be picking up the Power Cover when that shows up (I'm expecting 2014), but not replacing the tablet. 8ish hours of battery life is plenty for me. I'll save the big money for a real laptop when the rest of the PC makers finally…
Any word on why it's taking manufacturers so long to get Haswell-based devices out?
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I'm a student also, but I've been using the iPad for this. I don't take any notes on the iPad itself because the courses I need to take notes on are mathematical, so I simply write on paper and then when I come back home I scan it and append the scans to an evergrowing PDF file that is synced to my iPad. I'm looking for a replacement for my iPad 2, but I can't settle on anything because all the non-iPad tablets have…
FYI with OneNote and a digitizer stylus as the Surface Pro comes with you can just write your notes on the screen. OneNote will recognize the handwriting and allow you to search through it etc. Sorry if you already know that, from the way your comment is phrased it looks like you don't so I thought I'd throw it out.
This little-known feature is as old as Windows XP Tablet Edition....
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Office RT being a desktop app is as it should be - no learning curve, and each pixel works harder than in Metro. What was wrong was the lack of Outlook at launch, and then the other things like no AD integration, and the inability to run non-signed desktop apps.
...which is one reason why I think a lot of people were really infuriated by the Surface RT. Microsoft didn't apply their own rules to themselves: they couldn't be bothered / didn't want to re-write Office for Metro, but they insisted that for everyone else the RT only support Metro apps. If Office had been converted to Metro there would be no reason for the RT to even let you see the traditional Windows desktop. I w…
Maybe the long term goal is Modern versions of Office apps but the Office port is probably an essential bridge to it.
* In theory because they may be most familiar with Office 2003 or whatever, and now they're faced with something that looks completely different.