Slashdot Mirror

This sort of business strategy is as old as the hills. I'm not sure why this particular example is all that surprising or reprehensible. Savvy consumers can beat the system in other areas by, e.g., reusing razor blades much longer than the manufacturer intended or refilling toner cartridges, and here it's even easier -- they can just not use the "smart TV" functionality.

In order for the ARM processor to gain traction in the market for laptops, we must start buying computers with an ARM processor.

Consider the Yoga C630 by Lenovo.

The retail price is $939.99. The discount price is $699 at Best Buy.

that can't leave a lot of room for paying all the middle men.

It's Chinese labor, remember? Cheap!

The fraudsters selling the OEM-quality components to repair shops might be doing it over Alibaba, so they might be fetching US-scaled pricing for the repair parts and netting even more of a margin.

Keep in mind, this is the region of the world where the fake 500GB USB hard drive scam was born. Assigning programmers capable of creating crazy firmware for a 128mb flash drive is cheap enough to be supported by a street-level scam.

So NVIDIA doesn't have discrete graphics cards? https://www.neowin.net/news/nv...

Windows is probably the most complex and advanced creation in the history of humankind...

You don't understand the difference between "you" and "al'y'all". Microsoft couldn't give a shit about what "you" do. However aggregated data about everyone is used for development decisions. So feel free to download and read the Anarchists Cookbook, the police won't come knocking on your door.

So can you guarantee that any information that MS collects is protected and cannot possibly identify me in any way as to not sacrifice my privacy? That depends on how much I trust MS on their motives and their competency.

And so does MS which is precisely why they pulled the release before it was released to the general public. Admins everywhere should be cheering at their decision as a triumph of software development over marketing bozos pushing out garbage in favour of an artificial deadline.

Huh? Some publicly released updates have BSOD issues. That's the complaint and worry. Yes MS delayed the April update but a patch in March caused BSODs. A patch in October 2017 caused BSODs. The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update also caused BSODs.

Win 7? the version of windows along with 8.x that have vram limits only allowing the total space to 4064MB to be allocated? Because both OS's blew their shit all over the place and all that. Which is really, like really, really good if you have a single, pair, or more video cards with 8GB of onboard memory that can't be fully used. Maybe you can get developers to use vulkan more and that won't be a problem for gaming, or well development, or even cad programs.

I'm starting to think that Geekbench scores for the iPhone are bullshit. The A11 Bionic has 2 high performance cores, but somehow out performs chips with 4 high performance cores. Yet iPhones don't appear to be any faster than Android phones, and in fact they are often quite a bit slower in real world use due to having only 2GB of RAM.

Many have criticized the Geekbench processor benchmarks, unbelievably, even Linus Torvalds. But he relented with version 4.0, saying it looks much better. Version 4.2's GPU test fixes put it in line with OpenCL and CUDA results. I don't see any problem.

I've not tried either the SD845 nor the A11 Bionic processors. If you have, you're a better geek than me, which isn't saying very much. I'm sure you're right about the 2GB bottleneck. As I look over their different specs, there are two other things that stand out in the SD845's favor: the GPU, and the core\cache organization.

1) Snapdragon 845's has modest CPU improvements over the SD835, but the GPU upgrade is 32%-40% better, depending on the graphics test. And it beats the A11 in all but two of those tests.

2) The A11 does have a better CPU performance than the SD845, hands down, but there may be more to it than that. The A11 can use all six cores simultaneously, and has AI hardware called a "Neural Engine" that can perform 600 billion operations per second. Some or all of this may help explain why it's a speed demon at multi-core tasks. But not so much at single-core tasks. Just guessing, but maybe that's because it has discrete core clusters and caches. In contrast, the SD845 uses ARM's DynamiQ CPU cluster organization, letting different cores be hosted within the same cluster and cache hierarchy.

That's all I got, except the links below.

http://bgr.com/2017/09/14/iphone-x-vs-iphone-8-a11-bionic-benchmarks-macbook-pro/

https://www.neowin.net/news/qualcomms-snapdragon-845-benchmarks-show-massive-gains

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12420/snapdragon-845-performance-preview

https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/11/geekbench-42/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geekbench

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/263774-qualcomms-snapdragon-845-strong-gpu-performance-less-cpu-improvement-advertised

Well, at least it's not their whole product catalog... https://www.neowin.net/news/ar...

I had one of these

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Problem is it's not a very practical form factor. As crappy as touch screens are it's actually easier to get used to one for typical 'phone' stuff than it is to open up a Communicator type device and try and type on a physical keyboard.

It's worth experimenting with though. I could see myself buying a Windows 10 or Android ARM or x86 device if it was the the same width and height as my LG V20 but was a bit thicker, had a physical keyboard and could run Android apps.

Microsoft have got x86 applications running on ARM but with a fairly heft performance penalty - they only run about 40% as fast as they would natively. And they also apparently managed to get Android applications running on Windows Phone before it was cancelled.

https://www.neowin.net/news/it...

Apple have never really taken security seriously. Remember how when iPhones came out Apple fans claimed Apple was more secure and also that the iPhone being locked down wasn't a problem because you could jailbreak it by visiting a site with a malformed TIFF?

This was in 2007, five years after Microsoft's focus on security initiative.

The quote is about Windows phone profits, not Microsoft as a whole. Microsoft did see a downturn in overall profits last year when phone revenue tanked, but this year a boom in cloud products has turned that around nicely.

The article is still wrong, though, because it confuses profits and revenues (Windows phone is not profitable at all, and I don't think it ever was). If you click through far enough the original article doesn't make that mistake:

https://www.neowin.net/news/ye...
During the quarter ending in December, Microsoft's phone revenue dropped to just $200 million, which included some sales of feature phones, before the company completed its sale of that business unit to Foxconn in November. That figure has now dropped to virtually nothing.

According to the company's 10-Q filing to the SEC for Q3 FY2015, its phone hardware revenue for that quarter totalled $1.397 billion. One year later, in its 10-Q for Q3 FY2016, Microsoft said that phone revenue had fallen by $662 million, reducing it to $735 million.

Today, as Microsoft published its earnings report for Q3 FY2017, it revealed that its "Phone revenue declined $730 million". Based on its earlier financial disclosures, that means the company's phone hardware revenue fell to just $5 million for the entire quarter ending March 31, 2017.

Is if Cook and his cronies are getting massive offices with real door(s), walls and windows.

The article says,

The open floor work spaces will only be for standard employees, while the high-level executives will be exempt from the collective work environment and will have their own offices on the fourth floor of Apple Park. Other employees won’t even be moving to the new HQ, on this list is Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services; he and his team will remain at the current headquarters at Infinite Loop.

The high-level executives who move to Apple Park get their own offices. So I guess they know the value of having an office.

I wonder if Eddie Cue fought to keep his group at Infinite Loop, to protect them from open offices.

Link:
https://www.neowin.net/news/calibri-font-plays-its-role-pakistan-now-sans-sharif-as-prime-minister-is-disqualified

Explanation of Wordplay:
Sans here is used as "Without". The Prime Minister's name is Nawaz Sharif.
"Sans Sharif" is a nod to Sans-Serif.

I was going to say something like this: https://www.neowin.net/forum/t...

Hello,

I guess it was a slow day at CBS Interactive's CNet web site, or perhaps they are not very familiar with using Windows. This behavior can easily be disabled by a simple registry tweak. Here's a .REG file which does exactly that:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
"NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers"=dword:00000001

If you would rather script it using a .CMD file, that's easy enough, too. You can even do it in one line:

REG ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU /v NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers /t REG_DWORD /d 1

Or, for the PowerShell-inclined, here's a three-line version:

New-Item HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
New-Item HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU
Set-ItemProperty HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU -Name "NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers" -Value 1 -Type DWord

As always, you are responsible for your computer and should make a backup before making any changes to it.

Yes, Windows can be difficult to use at times, and the learning curve can be quite high. But these days that's pretty true of any operating system if you're coming to it for the first time. You can find the answers to a lot of questions by searching the web, and in case you can't (or you still have questions), you can go to a web site with an active Windows user forum like BleepingComputer. GeeksToGo, Neowin, Scot's Newsletter,Sysnative, WindowsForums or even Microsoft's own Microsoft Answers forum and someone will help you. Those are just a few off the top of my head, there are plenty of others, although you should probably avoid CBS Interactive's own CNet forums.

Regards

Aryeh Goretsky

When was the last time you heard of an Nvidia crash? Never.

Err, not that long ago actually.

Yep AMD is so crappy you cannot even remove the drivers under add or remove programs?!

I'm 99% certain that is how I've done it every time I've needed to.

you cannot even upgrade their drivers. It will bsod.

I've also had absolutely no issues with this when upgrading my AMD drivers.

Anecdote is not evidence etc. etc. but it sounds more like an issue with your system specifically rather than AMD in general.

There are a lot of Steam gamers already with Oculus or Vive rigs.

No, there aren't. In fact, almost nothing you've claimed is born out by the statistics.

1) There have only been about 140,000 Vive unit sales so far according to HTC. That was as of last month.

2) Vive represented 60% of SteamVR gaming according to the latest survey. If we generously assume (for your benefit) that all 140,000 Vive users were active in SteamVR this last month, that'd mean that the other 40% number about 95,000. Put together, we can say that...

3) There are less than than 235,000 active SteamVR gamers. And again, that's if we make some generous assumptions for your benefit. In reality, the actual number of active SteamVR gamers is likely MUCH lower. But either way...

4) Not even one-fifth of 1% of Steam gamers have used SteamVR in the last month. Steam had over 125,000,000 active users in early 2015. If we ignore (for your benefit) the fact that the number has likely grown since then, we can see that less than 0.19% of Steam gamers have used their VR rig in the last month.

5) Even if every single active SteamVR user was a closet Mac/Linux dual booter who would go back to Mac/Linux if SteamVR was available, it'd only shift the OS statistic by, at most, 0.19% away from Windows. Mac/Linux dual booters are clearly not throwing a wrench in the statistics like you claimed.

6) Contrary to your suggestion that Mac and Linux gamers are staying booted into Windows for SteamVR, their numbers are actually higher today than they were before VR. Mac and Linux have been growing at Windows' expense all along, with VR having no noticeable impact.

7) As for consoles, the Playstation VR is on track to outsell both the Vive and the Oculus by the end of the year, despite there being far fewer PS4 owners (~40M) than active Steam users (125M). So, no, VR is not "a much larger percentage of the PC gaming market than it is if you factor in consoles". But even if you had been right, so what? If VR was even less significant in another market, that doesn't make it significant in this market.

Finally, there's this (emphasis mine):

[...] they would be people capable and possibly willing to run SteamVR on the Mac if they were able to, with no new computer purchase.

And what Mac model would these people be using, exactly? One of the big complaints from Mac users when it comes to VR is that there isn't a Mac with the horsepower to run VR. The Mac Pro was last updated in December...of 2013. It's woefully insufficient. The iMac, MacBook Pro, and most other lines have seen updates, but they all use mobile-class dedicated graphics or integrated graphics, both of which are currently insufficient for VR. Given that the hardware doesn't exist, I think it's safe to say that today's Mac users aren't influencing the numbers by booting into Windows for SteamVR.

Mind you, I say this as someone who has continuously used a Mac as his primary machine since the late '80s, including for gaming. My current Mac is my primary gaming machine, just as the one before it and the one before it and so on. So I'm speaking from experience when I say that we're a vocal group, but that we don't account for much.

As for VR, it has a lot of hype, and it may eventually amount to something, but it's barely even a rounding error at this point, so your assertions that it's affecting those numbers in any sort of a meaningful way are demonstrably false.

True but I've seen similar stories re: MS - "Microsoft is betting big that HDR displays will be much more popular in the near future compared to 4K screens or those that offer a wider color gamut." - https://www.neowin.net/news/mi...

And they did release the Xbox One S to address HDR. It just looks like they didn't count on Sony adding additional power as well as HDR.

The big growth will be in China, Russia and India, where MS will help the government track everyone. They will do for these countries what the NSA has done to the US. Every computer will be a full time spy. Local data centers with 100% access to the contents of all computers. It is possible that the US will take advantage of this as well. Not that anyone will ever hear about it.

Not necessarily. In fact, it could end up being the exact opposite. President Putin has been pushing to ban Microsoft products in Russia because of security concerns. Microsoft is very much an American company that works closely with the American government. While they might help those countries spy on their people, they are just as likely to phone home to America with the same information or more. In the end, the surveillance nature of Windows makes it a liability for foreign nations in regard to security. Those three nations you mentioned may very well black-list Microsoft products which would be a huge hit to their bottom line and spell their eventual demise.

The epicenter of the world is in the process of shifting to the East, and those companies that are inextricably tied to the West may find themselves in a very uncomfortable position as the shift continues.

Yeah, they are so elite. Just recently they have encypted their whole main site over https! Their main site, just think of the processing power required for this. Of course, slashdot is much more advanced than them, we already have encryption since months now.

Windows 10 makes Vista the grandchild of stability.

I write pro MS comments here since 2011 when I gave up on Unix on the desktop these days from my past. However, I still use Windows 8.1 with a start menu replacement due to so many problems I wrote here listing my compliants.

Folks Windows has improved tremendously and is no longer the POS of win98 ... with the exception of 10.

SAP, Oracle, and many products do not work right yet and HP printers will get constant disconnects with NFS so IT IS NOT ENTERPRISE READY.

Personally, I do not see the pint of this in 2016. If you need Linux or better yet if you need Windows use a VM. SSD's and ram are cheap and Windows 8.1 and later come with Hyper-V and Virtualbox is available too for Linux. Run the OS for hte job you need. Windows Powershell deals with objects and would be better than Bash in an win32 environment. Apple is at least based on Unix. So if you love Bash and mysql fire up a VM. I have like a dozen on my pc at home.

Don't forget: When Linux supports some hardware before it's commercially available, it's a waste of time because no one can use it!
 

What a milestone (not). No hardware available but linux supports it!

Why is this news???

The world is not homogenous. In many areas, Windows Phone's market share is far higher than its global average. A lot of those areas are also areas of very high WhatsApp usage, so it makes sense that the company would want to keep that market.

When I was in India for a couple weeks last year, I saw more Windows phones than iPhones (according to an admittedly old article - 2013 - iOS has only a 2.3% market share in India, Android has 91%, Windows Phone has 5.4%). Based on what I saw last year, Windows Phone and iOS has probably both made gains there - if you have more recent statistics, it'd be interesting to see them - but Windows Phone more than iOS. Another example where WP market share exceeds its global average (even though, unlike India, it's still only in third place) is Europe last year: 10.1% across UK, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy.

In the case of Europe, some of that is probably brand loyalty to Nokia, even though they were already owned by Microsoft at that point (although if that were the case, I'd expect northern Europe - especially Finland - to feature in the list). In the case of India, it's simpler: low-end Windows phones are nearly as cheap as low-end Android phones (you can get a Windows phone, new, contract-free, and SIM-unlocked, for $50 even in the US if you know where to look, or a bit less if you don't mind previous-generation hardware) but are much more functional. A Lumia 520 - one of the lowest of the low when it comes to Windows Phone devices - is still supported and can be upgraded to Windows 10 Mobile. This on a handset that launched as a minimum-specs WP8.0 device in 2013 and available on Amazon.com for $40 new. An equivalent Android phone would have been lucky to get the first major OS upgrade (8.0 to 8.1, for Windows Phone), or even be hardware-compatible with the second.

Yep. They have really fucked up with this.

I dont get it either, they were in a great position to refresh, and be the peoples os of choice and then did this shit. It is going to really hurt them, Im already considering mac os because of ms being jerks about this.

Yeah, I'm sure they are really hurt

If Windows 10 Mobile is not out then why do 8+% of devices have it so far? http://www.neowin.net/news/win...

The GWX (get windows 10) Control Panel is a great tool. It lets you kill everything associated with the W10 upgrade. You can pick it up at several places including NeoWin.net.

http://www.neowin.net/news/gwx...

I noticed that Windows 7 Ultimate (basically Windows 7 Enterprise edition for consumers) is selling for $300 over at eBay now. Should tell you something.

Anyway, a more reasonable person uses hosts files when they are the correct tool for the job, frequently combining them with a good ad blocker in order to gain the multiple layers that good security demands.

APK agrees that hosts files are only one component in a layered security strategy. Eight years ago, he wrote a detailed article about the other layers.

it also needs to convince people that when you use an ad blocker, "That's stealing. It's no different than ripping music. It's no different than pirating movies."

Go die in a fire, you asshole. It's not stealing. This prick reminds me of Jamie Kellner (chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting) who equated going to the bathroom during commercial breaks with stealing:

When asked if he considers people who go to the bathroom during a commercial to be thieves, he responded: "I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom. But if you formalize it and you create a device that skips certain second increments, you've got that only for one reason, unless you go to the bathroom for 30 seconds. They've done that just to make it easy for someone to skip a commercial."

By this 'reasoning', not looking at ads or not listening to commercials is 'stealing'. No. No no no. That's not what stealing is.

Informal polling would tend to disagree with you.

http://www.phonearena.com/news...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.androidcentral.com/...
http://www.androidcentral.com/...
http://forums.androidcentral.c...
http://www.neowin.net/forum/to...
http://www.phonearena.com/news...

If the goal of systemd creators is to slowly move users back to Windows, these are all capabilities that need to be eliminated. So UNIX/Linux users can't use them as reasons not to move.

Yes it's all a big conspiracy! Red Hat isn't actually a supporter of Linux, despite being one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and creating and supporting client and server distributions of Linux systems from which most of their revenue is derived they are actually trying to destroy Linux and drive people to Windows so they can kill their own business and profitability!

Others disagree with your assertion of 10.

It is very beta compared to 8.1

Do not bother upgrading folks if what you have works fine unless you have a pyschotic episode with the flat look of 8.1 and can't find classic start.

There are many many bugs. Items do not fill in properly in menus. Adhock wifi not available, disjointed tiles in TV and music, Edge crashing, Edge having no extensions, poor battery life on the surface pro 3, One drive not having placeholders, Grove not having select all on playlists, .NET 4.6 JIT tail bug where arguments get scrambled, and many many others in just the first few days reported

This reminds me 0f XP. Yes, XP pre - SP1. XP was not considered God by users and IT departments in 2001. It was buggy and had compatibility and network probloems before SP1 and SP 2 was where it finally got somewhat solid.

Windows 10 has an unfinished and baked feel. It won't touch my systems until Redstone update 1 something later this fall ... or maybe next summer as I see it more as just hittting beta now as MS rushed this.

Lennart already has two forums, why would he need a third?

Then again, I guess neowin and tenforums don't mind the competition. I can imagine them saying, "Welcome back into the fold!" instead.

Apparently W10TP users (in addition to 7/8 users) will get a free upgrade to RTM.

It most certainly is a fork

Cool box but really bad design. This guy was able to fix all of the heat problems for ~$15

Windows 10 has an adaptive UX and user control api to get around this problem.
Haven't used it yet but plan to fire a vm tonight and play with it.

VS 2015 supports android and linux development with cordova. No really you did not miss read that. I like this newer Microsoft

Windows 10 has an adaptive UX framework to get around using css hacks

Screw APPLE!

Windows 7 is the best OS ever made. It is still modern and I could list 30 defects in WIndows 8.1 It is a terrible unusable operating system that can't even stay up or be stable on a server grade Asus Sabertooth Mark II board. The UI is schizophrenic and suffers from closed door syndrome in almost everyway from UAC prompts which take away the background, to no aero to show the background. It is loaded with pastel nursery school colors. Even with a start menu program it is just awful and 10 will be even more flat and low color

Like refrigerators there is no reason to change until they break. Xp worked for over 12 years and operating systems are advanced enough to where like cars there is a diminishing return for each update. So they need to move things around and confuse people so the other one looks dated I guess is the new goal.

Oh yah

Windows 10's icons all sooo modern and crisp compared to 7?

I found this very disturbing.

Especially the new look here which mimicks old in the latest build.

Hey Hairy if this drives you crazy you got to take a look at the new Windows 10 screenshot icons? All 8 color galore in these pics. :-)

Take a look at these low color icon beauties.

The art professors I am sure who teach this UI stuff to future designers are drooling already.

Hey it beats adding leather to the addressbook in skuemorphic design right? You all whined and complained. Well you got it.

In other news, Superfish has now been added to the Windows Defender malware database.

It might be an extremely rare issue. Following the links in the article, the last update they pulled in August of 2014 was pulled because it was causing blue screen errors for 0.01% of users, but they pulled it anyways.

Yes there will be aero in future builds as evident in that screenshot.

Not too much of a biggie as long as the colors are not too bright or pastelish. It seems that is toned down in 10.

You sir are in luck as Aero is returning

There's now OneGet in Windows 10. It's also open source.