I realise it took a long time to do these tests and I realise that sites should be compensated in some way to justify their time and expenses. But 38 pages is taking the piss. There must be a better way of arranging an article that balances ad impressions against a visitor's patience. I doubt many people would bother to wade through that many pages and probably just skip to the end so the exercise is counterproductive.
On the subject of AMD drivers, they stink. Both the closed source ones and the open source ones. The flgrx drivers do not appear to like gnome-shell AT ALL and the open source drivers aren't exactly speed demons.
If Google, Paypal, Apple or whoever tries to insert themselves into the transaction it means stores now have the burden of two payment processors to worry about - the credit card that initially funded the "wallet" plus whatever markup Google / Paypal / Apple slaps on top of that.
How is this in any way a good thing for a vendor? I have to wonder what Visa / Mastercard are doing with NFC / contactless payments while all this is going on. I would have thought it would be vastly preferable for stores (and consumers) to have a single payment processor. It means lower transaction fees and the existing infrastructure more or less works like it does now with only small modifications.
On a practical point, it seems plain dumb to have to wave around a $500 phone just to pay for some groceries. It's not hard to envisage scenarios where this could be a terrible idea - e.g. thieves following people into the carpark and mugging them for it.
No, not.NET..NET is a high level runtime. It's absolutely zero use if you have a C/C++ application and wish to support a new architecture. At least if MS introduced a virtual architecture such as LLVM it would be a one shot deal rather than supporting 1, 2, 3, 4 or however many architectures MS has on the go at any one time.
And you might be right about ARM lacking a full Win32.
Without x86 apps, ARM is immediately confined to a niche. It might get some ports of tier 1 apps (MS Office, Firefox etc. ) that have the time and resources to build and QA two platforms but the vast unwashed mass of Windows software in the world will never, ever work on it. And since it's a clean slate I would not be shocked if Microsoft inflicted an app store on users, that the only way to use the device was through Microsoft's service. None of this may not matter so much on tablets running purely Metro apps but it will suck balls for anyone who expects to use an ARM device in two modes.
Whereas x86 Windows 8 will have to remain compatible with the mass of existing code out there in the world, and would therefore be more open and useful. It might have larger system requirements but if you cared about Windows at all, you wouldn't choose any other architecture. And if you don't care, why bother with ARM.
The stupid part is that it should never have gotten to this. Microsoft should, at the very least produced an architecture analogous to LLVM where devs could build and compile their apps just the once and it didn't matter if it was running on ARM or x86 or x86-64 or MIPS or anything else. When the app installed the system could compile native code from the LLVM bitcode and run that. It might not help with x86 emulation but it would offer a migration path, one far more compelling than what's on the table at the moment.
Empathy is not the same as sympathy. I might understand that a man raped and strangled killed children because he was abused as a child. I might emphasize with him putting myself in his place and wonder what abuse might have done to me. It wouldn't mean I have the slightest bit of sympathy if he danced on the end of a rope for his crimes.
I don't see why it should cost more than a few bucks. Even the $25 Raspberry Pi manages to find space in its budget to licence H264. And of course the likes of Flash, Real, Quicktime, Silverlight, DivX hand out codecs like toffee. If it were so expensive that they couldn't realistically recoup their costs they wouldn't even bother to do it.
Windows XP does not. Nor do Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Business, or Windows 7 Starter.
Well go download a free to use commercial one, e.g. Flash, Quicktime or DivX.
These counterparts aren't included with Ubuntu or Fedora due to patent issues in the world's biggest industrialized anglophone market. Which counterparts are you thinking of?
And we all know how hard it is to circumvent that issue.
Flash is available for Linux. And VLC. And if Ubuntu wanted they could flog a codec pack on their store. It'd probably cost a few dollars. Or a commercial vendor could sell such a plugin, perhaps even browser vendors themselves.
The point being that every OS can obtain an H264 codec and the vast majority contain one out of the box. Furthermore every OS has a media framework that browsers can utilise and inspect to see what codecs they support. It should be entirely feasible for a browser to maintain a whiteless of content types & codecs and then inspect the framework to see if its available.
And guess what, you get a licence for those patents when you buy MS Windows. Or when you buy OS X. Or when you buy an Android phone / tablet. Or any other arbitrary media player box. Or if you install Flash player. Or if you install any one of the random commercial H264 players floating around. Or you don't need a licence at all depending on your jurisdiction.
I think VP8 deserves to be available as a codec in browsers, but it should not be the only choice of codec, especially in situations where the user is fully entitled to use H264.
HTML5 was supposed to harmonise browsers and content but if anything it is even more divided than it's ever been. I'd not that unlike in past times where MS was the one doing the embrace & extend, this time it appears to be Google.
What I mean is that in the old toolbar world things were a lot more immediate and obvious regardless of context.
For example if you clicked on a table in an old MS Word, the table tools appeared in addition to the usual formatting / shapes tools. In Office 2010 if you click on a table, it immediately leaps to a "Design" tab that contains only table related actions available. So now if I want to style some text in a table, I've got to click out of the Style tab, onto the Home tab, and then find the button and then style the text. And possibly I have to flip back onto the Design tab again. So where I used to be able to click once, now I click multiple times. I also experience associated mental gaps because I lose context as a I flip around.
I don't necessarily think it's better than menus either because you can hold down and release the mouse in a single action to click on a menu item.
I'm not against the principle of task centric UIs, Ribbons are more accessible to newbies. I don't think they are for advanced users.
I don't know what they're going to do with Metro and the old desktop. My guess is that the touch support on Windows 8 will be superficial in the classic desktop - the start menu and some basic settings like volume, shutdown etc. I think the expectation will be that you don't use classic at all for a touch device, not without a mouse and keyboard I wouldn't be surprised if they produce a dumbed down Metro based explorer for use with touch.
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. It slows advanced users down and could make them lose their train of thought - I know it does for me. I also hate the way that if you tab through the ribbons in Office (for example) that none of them line up. There is no consistency going on from one ribbon to the next.
I think "improvements" is too strong a word for Windows 8's tablet UI. I expect it's a great UI if you have a touchscreen but I expect it would blow hard if you are still using a mouse. By it's very nature touch UIs have to have big, simple chunky buttons with lots of space and a minimal amount of information. That's fine if you're stabbing away with a finger. It's not fine if you have a pixel perfect mouse and a screen capable of showing a lot of information.
From messing around with the developer preview my main takeaway feeling is that if Metro were inflicted on desktop users they would go apeshit. I doubt MS is about to commit corporate suicide so I fully expect W8 to work well in both modes. Hopefully you can even switch modes on the fly as well, e.g. because you dock your tablet into a keyboard / mouse and want the old UI.
I think you have a point about virtualization. The OS doesn't have to worry about supporting a gazillion random consumer devices, just the ones the VM emulates. It's a lot less work and I expect there are practical applications where if the VM goes titsup you can just spawn another one. It might be useful in server farms and the like where it doesn't too much if the GUI is crap and primitive so long as it serves connections. But I think it has a way to go to be useful for that either.
That's a big if. As I said I think it deserves funding (and WINE), but look how long these projects have been going on. Even today it's still a pleasant surprise when WINE actually runs a complex app without doing something obviously wrong.
Try installing Mono on Windows and running some random.NET application. If you're lucky it works. If you're not lucky it falls over in a big heap at some random location. That's on top of a genuine Windows. Real world.NET apps often make bad assumptions about their runtime, make calls to ActiveX controls (e.g. IE), native C calls, interact with various MS technologies and all the rest. There are too many possible ways for things to break. Put it on top of WINE / ReactOS and it's going to be even worse.
It might be possible of course to con a genuine.NET runtime to execute over ReactOS but I see that as a stopgap measure and one Microsoft would put paid to in short order.
I couldn't care less about running IE standalone, but some orgs might for their home grown tools. I'd also point out that IE is embedded in a substantial number of apps. Those apps expect IE to behave the way it's supposed to behave from the programming API to the content it renders.
I think ReactOS is in the same boat as WINE and Mono, forever chasing Microsoft, wherever they lead them. And in many cases the open source effort simply CANNOT provide 100% emulation because parts of Windows are so complex and esoteric it would be impossible to implement them perfectly. Internet Explorer and.NET would be two major examples of functionality which will never be emulated perfectly which impacts the kinds of software ReactOS can run.
I also think that the article hugely embellishes where ReactOS is today and how long it would take to be production ready. ReactOS has a very long way to go. Charitably, it's alpha status and likely to stay that way for a while yet. I still think it deserves funding however. The biggest benefit to Russia / China / whoever of funding the project is they can use it as a stick to threaten Microsoft in any contract negotiations. I don't think it is likely they'd follow through with their threats but obviously the more viable ReactOS is, the more impact the threat could make.
Ignorance is no defence under the law, and there were laws in place that could be used to prosecute him. As for the Westboro Baptist Church, they operate in a different country under a different set of laws. I expect however that even in the US where free speech is more broadly allowed that laws pertaining to criminal threats, stalking, criminal mischief etc could and would be used in many cases. Failing that, even civil suits could be brought against the person.
I expect Phone Story would be equally applicable regardless of the phone OS sitting on top. Even some Android / Windows Phone devices could be accused of planned obsolescence by aping Apple's sealed in batteries, not allowing memory expansions and so on.
The one thing that could be said of Android is that Phone Story would be available whether Google listed it on Marketplace or not - the devs could host the.apk on their own site and people could download it if they wished.
Even if they can prove a particular machine was used to commit the offence, how will they prove who used it? That isn't even taking into account things such as TOR. I'd go as far as to say he is downright lying.
It's not for the police to prove anything, it's for the Crown Prosecution Service. Police gather the evidence and the CPS decides if its enough to take to trial and prosecute. If there were insufficient evidence they wouldn't even bother because they defendant would get off and it would be a waste of time for everyone. That doesn't guarantee a conviction of course but it weeds out the cases where there is little hope of securing one.
As for Tor, yes it would obfuscate things, but you'd have to use it rigourously. You could never, ever visit Facebook or YouTube, or the email provider you're registered on those sites with, or related sites at all except through TOR. Preferably running from a virtual machine running live CD (so nothing gets saved to disk at all) through a host laptop connected to a public network.
Fortunately, most people are too stupid and undisciplined to do any of this. I expect this particular troll was just some sadsack drunk who did stupid shit from his computer and didn't even consider he was committing a crime and certainly didn't have the nous to cover his tracks.
MREs are preserved food with the moisture intact. As the name suggests, they're ready to eat. It's basically tinned stuff except these days they ship in foil flat bags.
Dehydrated food would have to be rehydrated (e.g. like a pot noodle). I'm assuming NASA prefer the latter because they don't want to be hauling a bunch of dead weight water up into space when they'd have systems for recycling it anyway. I doubt it tastes anywhere as nice and takes more time to prepare it.
I think MREs would generally be better for situations where you need to eat rapidly perhaps without the benefit of fresh water and the time to prepare food - war, natural disasters, zombie outbreaks.
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On the subject of AMD drivers, they stink. Both the closed source ones and the open source ones. The flgrx drivers do not appear to like gnome-shell AT ALL and the open source drivers aren't exactly speed demons.
How is this in any way a good thing for a vendor? I have to wonder what Visa / Mastercard are doing with NFC / contactless payments while all this is going on. I would have thought it would be vastly preferable for stores (and consumers) to have a single payment processor. It means lower transaction fees and the existing infrastructure more or less works like it does now with only small modifications.
On a practical point, it seems plain dumb to have to wave around a $500 phone just to pay for some groceries. It's not hard to envisage scenarios where this could be a terrible idea - e.g. thieves following people into the carpark and mugging them for it.
And you might be right about ARM lacking a full Win32.
Whereas x86 Windows 8 will have to remain compatible with the mass of existing code out there in the world, and would therefore be more open and useful. It might have larger system requirements but if you cared about Windows at all, you wouldn't choose any other architecture. And if you don't care, why bother with ARM.
The stupid part is that it should never have gotten to this. Microsoft should, at the very least produced an architecture analogous to LLVM where devs could build and compile their apps just the once and it didn't matter if it was running on ARM or x86 or x86-64 or MIPS or anything else. When the app installed the system could compile native code from the LLVM bitcode and run that. It might not help with x86 emulation but it would offer a migration path, one far more compelling than what's on the table at the moment.
Empathy is not the same as sympathy. I might understand that a man raped and strangled killed children because he was abused as a child. I might emphasize with him putting myself in his place and wonder what abuse might have done to me. It wouldn't mean I have the slightest bit of sympathy if he danced on the end of a rope for his crimes.
The site is too busy ray tracing to service requests.
I don't see why it should cost more than a few bucks. Even the $25 Raspberry Pi manages to find space in its budget to licence H264. And of course the likes of Flash, Real, Quicktime, Silverlight, DivX hand out codecs like toffee. If it were so expensive that they couldn't realistically recoup their costs they wouldn't even bother to do it.
Windows XP does not. Nor do Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Business, or Windows 7 Starter.
Well go download a free to use commercial one, e.g. Flash, Quicktime or DivX.
These counterparts aren't included with Ubuntu or Fedora due to patent issues in the world's biggest industrialized anglophone market. Which counterparts are you thinking of?
And we all know how hard it is to circumvent that issue.
Flash is available for Linux. And VLC. And if Ubuntu wanted they could flog a codec pack on their store. It'd probably cost a few dollars. Or a commercial vendor could sell such a plugin, perhaps even browser vendors themselves.
The point being that every OS can obtain an H264 codec and the vast majority contain one out of the box. Furthermore every OS has a media framework that browsers can utilise and inspect to see what codecs they support. It should be entirely feasible for a browser to maintain a whiteless of content types & codecs and then inspect the framework to see if its available.
OTOH H.264 is covered by a range of patents,
And guess what, you get a licence for those patents when you buy MS Windows. Or when you buy OS X. Or when you buy an Android phone / tablet. Or any other arbitrary media player box. Or if you install Flash player. Or if you install any one of the random commercial H264 players floating around. Or you don't need a licence at all depending on your jurisdiction.
I think VP8 deserves to be available as a codec in browsers, but it should not be the only choice of codec, especially in situations where the user is fully entitled to use H264.
HTML5 was supposed to harmonise browsers and content but if anything it is even more divided than it's ever been. I'd not that unlike in past times where MS was the one doing the embrace & extend, this time it appears to be Google.
As opposed to unpatented shit formats.
For example if you clicked on a table in an old MS Word, the table tools appeared in addition to the usual formatting / shapes tools. In Office 2010 if you click on a table, it immediately leaps to a "Design" tab that contains only table related actions available. So now if I want to style some text in a table, I've got to click out of the Style tab, onto the Home tab, and then find the button and then style the text. And possibly I have to flip back onto the Design tab again. So where I used to be able to click once, now I click multiple times. I also experience associated mental gaps because I lose context as a I flip around.
I don't necessarily think it's better than menus either because you can hold down and release the mouse in a single action to click on a menu item.
I'm not against the principle of task centric UIs, Ribbons are more accessible to newbies. I don't think they are for advanced users.
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. It slows advanced users down and could make them lose their train of thought - I know it does for me. I also hate the way that if you tab through the ribbons in Office (for example) that none of them line up. There is no consistency going on from one ribbon to the next.
From messing around with the developer preview my main takeaway feeling is that if Metro were inflicted on desktop users they would go apeshit. I doubt MS is about to commit corporate suicide so I fully expect W8 to work well in both modes. Hopefully you can even switch modes on the fly as well, e.g. because you dock your tablet into a keyboard / mouse and want the old UI.
It's easy to dismiss Windows, but the reality is even the most diehard Linux fan should know what the enemy is up to, if only to counter it.
We're really spamming the Windows 8 articles recently. Yeah no thanks, Windows 7 works just fine. It's the new XP - didn't you know?
Yes because there is a conference on and MS are making loads of announcements. Slashdot is ostensibly meant to report tech news after all.
I think you have a point about virtualization. The OS doesn't have to worry about supporting a gazillion random consumer devices, just the ones the VM emulates. It's a lot less work and I expect there are practical applications where if the VM goes titsup you can just spawn another one. It might be useful in server farms and the like where it doesn't too much if the GUI is crap and primitive so long as it serves connections. But I think it has a way to go to be useful for that either.
That's a big if. As I said I think it deserves funding (and WINE), but look how long these projects have been going on. Even today it's still a pleasant surprise when WINE actually runs a complex app without doing something obviously wrong.
It might be possible of course to con a genuine .NET runtime to execute over ReactOS but I see that as a stopgap measure and one Microsoft would put paid to in short order.
I couldn't care less about running IE standalone, but some orgs might for their home grown tools. I'd also point out that IE is embedded in a substantial number of apps. Those apps expect IE to behave the way it's supposed to behave from the programming API to the content it renders.
I also think that the article hugely embellishes where ReactOS is today and how long it would take to be production ready. ReactOS has a very long way to go. Charitably, it's alpha status and likely to stay that way for a while yet. I still think it deserves funding however. The biggest benefit to Russia / China / whoever of funding the project is they can use it as a stick to threaten Microsoft in any contract negotiations. I don't think it is likely they'd follow through with their threats but obviously the more viable ReactOS is, the more impact the threat could make.
Ignorance is no defence under the law, and there were laws in place that could be used to prosecute him. As for the Westboro Baptist Church, they operate in a different country under a different set of laws. I expect however that even in the US where free speech is more broadly allowed that laws pertaining to criminal threats, stalking, criminal mischief etc could and would be used in many cases. Failing that, even civil suits could be brought against the person.
I expect virtually every large organisation pays PR companies to astro turf in relevant social mediums. Including Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.
The one thing that could be said of Android is that Phone Story would be available whether Google listed it on Marketplace or not - the devs could host the .apk on their own site and people could download it if they wished.
Even if they can prove a particular machine was used to commit the offence, how will they prove who used it? That isn't even taking into account things such as TOR. I'd go as far as to say he is downright lying.
It's not for the police to prove anything, it's for the Crown Prosecution Service. Police gather the evidence and the CPS decides if its enough to take to trial and prosecute. If there were insufficient evidence they wouldn't even bother because they defendant would get off and it would be a waste of time for everyone. That doesn't guarantee a conviction of course but it weeds out the cases where there is little hope of securing one.
As for Tor, yes it would obfuscate things, but you'd have to use it rigourously. You could never, ever visit Facebook or YouTube, or the email provider you're registered on those sites with, or related sites at all except through TOR. Preferably running from a virtual machine running live CD (so nothing gets saved to disk at all) through a host laptop connected to a public network.
Fortunately, most people are too stupid and undisciplined to do any of this. I expect this particular troll was just some sadsack drunk who did stupid shit from his computer and didn't even consider he was committing a crime and certainly didn't have the nous to cover his tracks.
Dehydrated food would have to be rehydrated (e.g. like a pot noodle). I'm assuming NASA prefer the latter because they don't want to be hauling a bunch of dead weight water up into space when they'd have systems for recycling it anyway. I doubt it tastes anywhere as nice and takes more time to prepare it.
I think MREs would generally be better for situations where you need to eat rapidly perhaps without the benefit of fresh water and the time to prepare food - war, natural disasters, zombie outbreaks.