Not every country has schools that amount to prisons... here in Germany even elementary school kids are free to come and go as they please and find their own way to and from school.
Ever wonder why carpooling to and from school is so popular in the States and, well, pretty much nowhere else in the world?
All the more reason to move people like this to walled gardens. Let them roam free in the relative safety of iOS or (maybe, if they stick to the Market only) even Android...
Although some people are too stubborn. Just last month my girlfriend's dad asked me for help picking out a new PC... why not just an iPad? Because he does photo editing - as in rotating, resizing, and captions that look like they were done with the "WordArt" feature from Office 97. And since that's only possible on a high-horsepower, dual core PC, well... he wanted one. Unfortunately, I didn't find this out until after the purchase *facepalm*...
Ah OK, now I understand. I think that doesn't bother me because I use keyboard shortcuts for all the more common tasks... and those end up switching the ribbon tab for me anyway:p
They are - we've barely had decent Flash acceleration for a year and they're already killing it. I wonder if HTML5 video will be fully hardware accelerated on graphics cards that support H264 hardware acceleration...
On the subject of ribbons in general, I think they are okay but not perfect. There is obvious merit in making a UI task centric, but the ribbon UI hides buttons under tabs and forces people to think for a second, guess which tab a button is contained by, click on the tab, search for the button and click again.
Hmmm, not sure what you mean there exactly. Menus are exactly the same, with the exception of clicking and holding instead of clicking multiple times. Do those two clicks really bother you that much? Interesting, maybe there's an add-on somewhere that allows you to click and hold with ribbons...
I don't think the explorer ribbon is a touchscreen optimization, tbh. The buttons are still often not much bigger than the text buttons in a typical Windows menu bar...
I'm very much a keyboard + trackpoint person, and I quite like the ribbon in Office, because it makes it easier to remember where stuff is optically, and the keyboard shortcuts are mapped out better.
The problem is that the UI changes (improvements, in my eyes - new copy dialog, Explorer ribbon...) are apparently tied to the new tablet UI. If you turn off Metro in the registry (in order to get the start menu including search back for launching applications and such), all these improvements disappear and you're left with Windows 7.
Also, there don't seem to be many more improvements at all on the desktop side... seems like all the effort has gone into the tablet interface. Couldn't they have improved a few of Win7's UI quirks?
App store? Shouldn't bother anyone - it's not like you have to use it.
Tablet UI? Again, good old explorer.exe is still there, there's no need to use Metro.
And as for the ribbon: Close it and just use keyboard shortcuts... in fact - I find keyboard shortcuts actually become easier to learn with the ribbon:)
Maybe a cell repeater with a directional antenna... might be worth it if the signal is better somewhere close to/around the house in a spot where you could safely place such a device.
Lately, I've been absolutely amazed at the amount of detail Flash games have gotten... my girlfriend plays Facebook games every now and then, and things like The Sims actually look better than their standalone counterparts - full screen native res and everything.
The games peg the CPU, of course, but hey, it's smooth;)
Video playback, when it works, is also alright. Youtube's implementation works well... others... meh, often not so much. It even works well on my smartphone, so watching TV/Movies off of streaming sites at the gym is a favorite...
Now "Flash multimedia experiences" (i.e. Flash web sites) on the other hand, are atrocious - that's something that just absolutely needs to go away - but those seem to be limited to private sites and maybe just a few businesses these days (like restaurants... what is it with restaurants and Flash?). If these go away completely and the rest stays the way it is (OK, maybe a bit better hardware acceleration for the games, so the CPU doesn't need to work as much), I'll be more or less satisfied with my experience - on a year-old smartphone and a 3-year-old subnotebook, no less!
"I'm sure it'd be I/O bound if you were just bltting the whole pagefile back to memory, but there's probably a bit more to it than that."
Why would there be more to it? When you wake from standby, nothing much happens at all, and the stuff in memory afte rstandby is likely to be the same as what's written back in when waking from hibernate...
I'm out of my depth here too, so this is just speculation on my part:)
No no, you misunderstand - my devices sleep and hibernate just fine. It's just that I was hoping for improvements in the time it takes to perform a full reboot, like after Windows Updates or driver installation...:)
Is decompressing data that much work? I'd assume modern CPUs (say, starting from Athlon X2 or Core Duo) are more than capable of handling the amount of data a hard drive can pump out sequentially... hell, these are processors that benchmark at 100MB/s+ for encrypting AES. Shouldn't reading and decompressing the page file be much less CPU-bound?
Also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well... at least in systems which are CPU-limited (as opposed to IO-limited) when coming out of hibernate.
They didn't really figure out anything new - it's more like they're forcing a half hibernate on people who'd usually just shut down or reboot.
For those of us who already use the available sleep/standby states or hibernate, the difference will be unnoticeable, because the reboots we perform (i.e. after software or driver installation, or after Windows updates) will probably still require the full shutdown we've come to know and loathe.:(
The problem you're describing is present on many devices without exact 8.5x11" screens... I actually meant rendering problems, i.e. graphical elements not rendering at all, overlay/transparency problems and so on. The public transport company here in my small town distributes a huge PDF of its rail and bus lines - takes about half a minute to open on a Core 2 Duo laptop with 8 gigs of RAM and G2 Postville... my Android devices render it perfectly thanks to Adobe's official Reader app, while I've heard nothing but complaints from eReader owners - missing layers, overlay problems... not to mention the lack of color that maeks the color coded bus and rail lines difficult to tell apart;)... and a few of the readers would just plain crash when you loaded it:p
The Android devices render slowly (zooming/panning is a bit clunky), but the output is pixel perfect...
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Not every country has schools that amount to prisons... here in Germany even elementary school kids are free to come and go as they please and find their own way to and from school.
Ever wonder why carpooling to and from school is so popular in the States and, well, pretty much nowhere else in the world?
If only you'd talk to someone in charge at the school about this policy... possibly with some of the other parents in the same situation...?
All the more reason to move people like this to walled gardens. Let them roam free in the relative safety of iOS or (maybe, if they stick to the Market only) even Android...
Although some people are too stubborn. Just last month my girlfriend's dad asked me for help picking out a new PC... why not just an iPad? Because he does photo editing - as in rotating, resizing, and captions that look like they were done with the "WordArt" feature from Office 97. And since that's only possible on a high-horsepower, dual core PC, well... he wanted one. Unfortunately, I didn't find this out until after the purchase *facepalm*...
Well that sounds good. Do you have a sample page that works on Firefox with Win7x64? I'd like to check CPU usage :)
Ah OK, now I understand. I think that doesn't bother me because I use keyboard shortcuts for all the more common tasks... and those end up switching the ribbon tab for me anyway :p
I can see the issue though.
They are - we've barely had decent Flash acceleration for a year and they're already killing it. I wonder if HTML5 video will be fully hardware accelerated on graphics cards that support H264 hardware acceleration...
On the subject of ribbons in general, I think they are okay but not perfect. There is obvious merit in making a UI task centric, but the ribbon UI hides buttons under tabs and forces people to think for a second, guess which tab a button is contained by, click on the tab, search for the button and click again.
Hmmm, not sure what you mean there exactly. Menus are exactly the same, with the exception of clicking and holding instead of clicking multiple times. Do those two clicks really bother you that much? Interesting, maybe there's an add-on somewhere that allows you to click and hold with ribbons...
Grandmas love dumbed down touchscreen interfaces, so no need. :p
I don't think the explorer ribbon is a touchscreen optimization, tbh. The buttons are still often not much bigger than the text buttons in a typical Windows menu bar...
I'm very much a keyboard + trackpoint person, and I quite like the ribbon in Office, because it makes it easier to remember where stuff is optically, and the keyboard shortcuts are mapped out better.
Windows 8 isn't exactly a new version, as far as I can tell, so there's no need to upgrade from Win7.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
Changing RPEnable enables and disables the Metro interface.
If you do that, the interface is EXACTLY the same as on Windows 7. Nothing has changed...
I was actually hoping for a few small usability & UI improvements, like side-scrolling in the Explorer folder tree or a revamped notification area...
The problem is that the UI changes (improvements, in my eyes - new copy dialog, Explorer ribbon...) are apparently tied to the new tablet UI. If you turn off Metro in the registry (in order to get the start menu including search back for launching applications and such), all these improvements disappear and you're left with Windows 7.
Also, there don't seem to be many more improvements at all on the desktop side... seems like all the effort has gone into the tablet interface. Couldn't they have improved a few of Win7's UI quirks?
So far, those have all ended up being tablets with attachable keyboards... the "laptop" part has always been severely gimped.
App store? Shouldn't bother anyone - it's not like you have to use it.
Tablet UI? Again, good old explorer.exe is still there, there's no need to use Metro.
And as for the ribbon: Close it and just use keyboard shortcuts... in fact - I find keyboard shortcuts actually become easier to learn with the ribbon :)
A few manufacturers (like Lenovo with the T400s/T410s) have already tried the touchscreen route... it didn't go particularly well.
Maybe a cell repeater with a directional antenna... might be worth it if the signal is better somewhere close to/around the house in a spot where you could safely place such a device.
Pretty expensive though, like $250 and up...
Lately, I've been absolutely amazed at the amount of detail Flash games have gotten... my girlfriend plays Facebook games every now and then, and things like The Sims actually look better than their standalone counterparts - full screen native res and everything.
The games peg the CPU, of course, but hey, it's smooth ;)
Video playback, when it works, is also alright. Youtube's implementation works well... others... meh, often not so much. It even works well on my smartphone, so watching TV/Movies off of streaming sites at the gym is a favorite...
Now "Flash multimedia experiences" (i.e. Flash web sites) on the other hand, are atrocious - that's something that just absolutely needs to go away - but those seem to be limited to private sites and maybe just a few businesses these days (like restaurants... what is it with restaurants and Flash?). If these go away completely and the rest stays the way it is (OK, maybe a bit better hardware acceleration for the games, so the CPU doesn't need to work as much), I'll be more or less satisfied with my experience - on a year-old smartphone and a 3-year-old subnotebook, no less!
"I'm sure it'd be I/O bound if you were just bltting the whole pagefile back to memory, but there's probably a bit more to it than that."
Why would there be more to it? When you wake from standby, nothing much happens at all, and the stuff in memory afte rstandby is likely to be the same as what's written back in when waking from hibernate...
I'm out of my depth here too, so this is just speculation on my part :)
Sounds good - but how big is the real-world performance gain? ;)
No no, you misunderstand - my devices sleep and hibernate just fine. It's just that I was hoping for improvements in the time it takes to perform a full reboot, like after Windows Updates or driver installation... :)
Is decompressing data that much work? I'd assume modern CPUs (say, starting from Athlon X2 or Core Duo) are more than capable of handling the amount of data a hard drive can pump out sequentially... hell, these are processors that benchmark at 100MB/s+ for encrypting AES. Shouldn't reading and decompressing the page file be much less CPU-bound?
Also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well... at least in systems which are CPU-limited (as opposed to IO-limited) when coming out of hibernate.
Those with SSDs are on the safe side, I suppose.
"For people that don't hibernate/sleep their systems, it will probably be nice."
Of course - still sucks for the rest of us though :p
I was hoping for an *actual* speed-up in the full boot process :(
They didn't really figure out anything new - it's more like they're forcing a half hibernate on people who'd usually just shut down or reboot.
For those of us who already use the available sleep/standby states or hibernate, the difference will be unnoticeable, because the reboots we perform (i.e. after software or driver installation, or after Windows updates) will probably still require the full shutdown we've come to know and loathe. :(
The weight of books was the main reason for me to go the e-Reader route... what other reason could there be?
The problem you're describing is present on many devices without exact 8.5x11" screens... I actually meant rendering problems, i.e. graphical elements not rendering at all, overlay/transparency problems and so on. The public transport company here in my small town distributes a huge PDF of its rail and bus lines - takes about half a minute to open on a Core 2 Duo laptop with 8 gigs of RAM and G2 Postville... my Android devices render it perfectly thanks to Adobe's official Reader app, while I've heard nothing but complaints from eReader owners - missing layers, overlay problems... not to mention the lack of color that maeks the color coded bus and rail lines difficult to tell apart ;)... and a few of the readers would just plain crash when you loaded it :p
The Android devices render slowly (zooming/panning is a bit clunky), but the output is pixel perfect...