Not only that, because Windows 7 deals with communication vs. regular audio separately in terms of devices, you can set up a headset to be the default communication input/output when connected, and that will just fall back to the default in/out when not connected - so for instance, when someone calls you on skype and you're just browsing the web or something, and you're too lazy to put on your headset - why bother, all is quiet, not too much audio interference - then you hear the other person through your speakers, and your voice is picked up through the webcam mic. But if you're watching a movie, and someone calls, and you want to keep watching that movie - or even talk to someone while your friend keeps watching that movie... attach/connect your headset - and only the Skype audio will be routed to it, while the movie audio will stay playing through the speakers. It's actually a pretty well thought out system that addresses many use cases with ease.
At which point you set your application to use WASAPI in exclusive mode, and get all the low latency you want. A hell of a lot lower than WDM offers in Windows XP.
Or you use ASIO.
Or whatever. I mean, you probably don't need low latency from EVERY application, so it's not exactly borked is it?
After all, Microsoft worked with companies like Cakewalk when they were designing their new audio stack back in the Vista days. Which is why there IS low latency support in the stack, and why there are less audio crackles when other stuff is happening in Vista/7 when compared to XP.
Besides, there is so much FUD about latency in the audio path. I have a home studio, I deal with a need for low latency all the time... and frankly starting with Windows Vista this became a heck of a lot less painful to get working than it ever was with XP. And for my non-studio stuff, frankly it's not like video and audio are noticeably out of sync on my Win7 system, and that's with onboard audio, and a CRT monitor with pretty much no latency. So there are solutions when it's important, and features when it's not.
Do all applications use PulseAudio though? The Windows 7 model is backwards compatible through to well... I haven't seen an application that doesn't get it's own fader no matter what audio model it uses, at which point the audio stream (even if the application generates an integer stream) is converted to floating point, so that the volume sliders aren't as nearly as lossy as they would be if they were dealing with integer-based audio... and then mixed in floating point... and then converted to whatever format the driver supports (which I suppose is usually integer... I haven't seen many floating point DACs...)
At the very least, it's nice to see some other operating systems playing catch up with that particular feature, because between when the vista betas that implemented the new audio model came out to the time it seems that functionality made it to other operating systems seems to have been a matter of years. I guess not everyone thinks its useful, or have ever even tried using such functionality.
I'm pretty sure, given that my friends and family all keep their computers updated, I can't do any of that stuff. At least not via this vulnerability. You know, because this was patched already...
Most of the public could do all that on their phone. Most of the public don't particularly "need" computers.
Seriously, when the hell did "computers should only do exactly what people need them to do the day they buy them and anything else is a waste" become such a fashionable sentiment?
Yeah, there are ways of protecting the user. WHICH IS WHY THEY PATCHED THE HOLE. This isn't an unpatched vulnerability. The title even notes that this vulnerability was patched. They found the hole. They patched the hole. No more hole. No more trench. No blaming the user.
The only way a user would be vulnerable to this, is if they never updated. At which point, hell yeah, blame the user.
Is there another operating system that has per-application volume faders and a fully floating point audio path? Because I haven't seen any other OS that does... and I find that incredibly useful on a daily basis...
Because 7 has features XP doesn't. Like support for the TRIM command for SSDs. Like an audio mixer that lets you set different volumes for each application, instead of each hardware output, which is floating point from the ground up. Like desktop rendering that is accelerated by your GPU. Like UAC. Like Aero Snap. Etc.
It's not like Windows 7 is just a facelift on Windows XP, There are differences that aren't even hard to find.
Yeah, so it's decent-ish for two applications side by side I guess... but currently I'm tagging my video collection and I have a browser window open, my media library open, Notepad++ which I have set up with several macros to reformat data to an acceptable format, and outlook open, monitoring e-mail, all on one screen. And it works well, because I have a high resolution, large 4:3 screen. The new system seems very much focused on widescreen monitors, and I have yet to see a review address how this system holds up across multiple monitors - which is what I have on my other computer. I can hardly wait to try it and see what I can make of it - but as far as multi-tasking goes, I really like what Windows 7 gives me. Snap an app to the side, then adjust the height, works great for me.
Well, for a home user maybe. For a really small business possibly. But given that XP Mode gives you start menu integration with Windows 7... the seamlessness of the integration might be worth the piddly extra $50 per seat or whatever it is for Win 7 Pro over Win 7 Home. Assuming Microsoft even does volume licenses for anything under Pro...
Of course Windows XP runs beautifully as a VM. In fact, XP as a VM integrates really really well into the upper versions of Windows 7. In fact, it's an advertised feature, and you don't even need a separate XP license.
The new UI is... well... pretty much a toy UI for single-taskers... or at the best, serial multi-taskers. For anyone that does work that requires parrallel multi-taskers (doing more than one major task at once that are all related, and thus require that you be able to easily see the output of more than one application at once)... well frankly the Windows 7 UI is the windows UI better suited to that. By far.
And generally, that's all I ever do on my desktop computers... browser on one side, with video running underneath, a couple of other applications on the other side of the screen... working with all of it at once. My other desktop... well, that's in my home studio, so this new UI is getting removed as soon as Windows 8 gets on that machine.
MAYBE I'll use it on my laptop, because frankly I never do much significant with my laptop... but... I dunno. I'm generally not a fan of these new UI paradigms from both Apple [Full screen apps are the future! Look, our tablet UI as yet another task switching interface!] and Microsoft [Metro UI for every device!] that just seem... to actually take AWAY the power from the user. Or at least regress us to the 1980s where full screen applications were king, and screens were all 640x480 at the best of times so running one thing at a time made sense...
Of course, for many years after the trial, Microsoft was under considerable scrutiny, so I very much doubt they'd be able to pull off such predatory pricing policies with regards to Android without someone at least saying something.
In Canada it seems to have pretty decent success... though Apple is really hindering it...
I know a lot of people who stopped buying DVD when they bought Bluray players/drives, and I admit, I'm one of them - but many of my friends in school or early into their careers never bought TVs and just run everything from their computers - and more than a few of them have Macbook Pros as their only computer. At which point, short of buying an external drive, and a copy of Windows, and installing boot camp, and rebooting into Windows every time they want to watch a commercial Bluray disc, they aren't watching Bluray on their machines.
Many of these people appreciate the visual quality of Bluray, as laptop users they do sit quite close to their screens, and download caps from their campus wireless or their ISP means they aren't exactly in a position to download a whole lot of HD content, but until they get diferent computers (as Apple shows no signs of admitting there is a use for optical media in this world still) they'll just never switch from DVD.
But in terms of success, I mean, even my parents have a bluray player. They actually got one before I did, because they were moving into a new house, buying a bigger TV, and wanted to be able to buy and stuff in HD.
My old blackberry bold 9000 and my new blackberry bold 9700 have both easily gone more than a week without a charge when used as pure phones + push data, and at least a couple of days when used more intensly. AND if I wanted to, I could easily buy a bigger battery for my phone. When Apple users talk about battery life, you have to understand that for the same usage, most Blackberry users have pretty much always laughed, and keep laughing. Besides Apple only provides the battery life that fits their design. It's not like they actually care. If they cared, the 6G 160GB classic wouldn't have far superior battery life to the 6.5G 160GB classic.
Though another way of putting it is that Apple has focused on generating a race to the bottom in terms of functionality. It's a little bit different than a race to the bottom in terms of quality, because all it means now is that the person who decides some day that they want to do more no longer has the economies of scale behind the tools to do more, which has been the great benefit of computers for years now. Many talented people I know started out only needing their computer to watch movies, check their email, and welll, back in the day I guess it was more blog than facebook - but it's the kind of stuff that frankly doesn't require a lot of power in the machine to do. And if someone had sold them a machine that only did those things, they never would have been able to: really delve in to 3D modelling and video effects work; experiment with computer illustrating skills that lead to a career in advertising; record an album on their own, leading to a career in music; create a home photography business with stunning results through the use of Photoshop; etc.
These are people who - because their computers could do more than what they needed when they bought them, more than they were even interested in doing at the time - were able, with bog standard computers, to become inspired and eventually learn skills that have actually lead somewhere that not only benefits them, but frankly benefits the economy. These are people who were able to develop from amateurs to professionals on simliar hardware, by investing only in different software, because their machines were "industrial/commercial level machines."
But Apple is trying to convince the consumer that they aren't a professional. Even look at their page advertising the new Final Cut Pro X - They refer more than once to FCPX being "like professional software". Again - a race to the bottom in terms of features - yes FCPX has many features professional software has, but frankly it misses out on some, and if that were the only option, you'd never be able to do certain tasks. Thankfully there are non-Apple options.
So when you think about everyone else in the world - you have to think not what their needs are now, but what they might be inspired to do over the lifetime of their machine. And realise that perhaps if those people all spend money on machines that can only do what they need, but frankly not at a significant cost savings, that there might be some long term economic consequences.
Yes it's not as convenient. The point is, it's possible. And frankly, it's pretty easy to grab only the images out of something, or only the movies, or whatever. It's not like these filetypes aren't clearly identified by their extensions.
England still acted like the US was part of England. Hence the WAR OF INDEPENDANCE. Which had to be fought, to establish independance. That war ended with a treaty, which was frankly recognized by the Brits before the Americans, which ended the war of independance. Had there been no treaty, there would still have been a war. What's the likelyhood, do you think, of that having lasted for centuries... The success in the war of independance is what earned America it's independance, not the declaration. Had they made the declaration, and lost the war, America would not have been a country for the duration of the war, and then stopped being a country again.
Perhaps it would be helpful to define what a country is. At least in my point of view, the term country in this case must refer to the more specific definition sovereign state. The definition of a sovereign state is "a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood to be a state which is neither dependent on nor subject to any other power or state."
The decleration of independance did not embue the America with an independant federal government. It did not instantly provide the men who signed it the ability to excercise internal sovereignty within the territory they so claimed was independant. Though they were fighting to no longer be subject of the british crown, simply saying so was not enough to actually make that fact. In no way did America, as of the signing of the declaration of independance, actually fulfill the definition of a sovereign state. And until it was recognized by the treaty which ended the war, it certainly had problems entering into relations with other sovereign states.
Therefore: Birth of a nation directly as a result of only the Declaration of Independance, absolutely not. Important date, absolutely. Of course, as important dates go, the decleration was signed on the 2nd, not the 4th.
It's called "nuclear energy". The volume of fuel required is low, so you reduce mining damage. The energy output is nice and clean, and you can reuse waste in appropriately designed reactors. Don't put it on a major fault line near a gigantic body of water, and you're good to go.
Just because you declare independance doesn't make you a country. Try again on April 9, when the treaty that ended the war of independance was ratified, and the former colonies became recognized as their own country.
If anything, July 4 (or July 2, or August 2 depending on which historian you're reading and what your point of view is) is America's "Conception Day".
If only they could use some of the massive amounts of investment they get to develop the replacement products in the background while they get them up to speed, instead of pushing them on users when they are actually worse.
Oh no wait, that kind of "Don't force change on users until you're damn sure it's ready" mentality is essentially why people are avoiding RIM like the plague these days. So obviously it's absolutely an irrational business decision to make. Yes, of course, much better to see how much crap you can push on to consumers with your branding magic.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, because Windows 7 deals with communication vs. regular audio separately in terms of devices, you can set up a headset to be the default communication input/output when connected, and that will just fall back to the default in/out when not connected - so for instance, when someone calls you on skype and you're just browsing the web or something, and you're too lazy to put on your headset - why bother, all is quiet, not too much audio interference - then you hear the other person through your speakers, and your voice is picked up through the webcam mic. But if you're watching a movie, and someone calls, and you want to keep watching that movie - or even talk to someone while your friend keeps watching that movie... attach/connect your headset - and only the Skype audio will be routed to it, while the movie audio will stay playing through the speakers. It's actually a pretty well thought out system that addresses many use cases with ease.
At which point you set your application to use WASAPI in exclusive mode, and get all the low latency you want. A hell of a lot lower than WDM offers in Windows XP. Or you use ASIO. Or whatever. I mean, you probably don't need low latency from EVERY application, so it's not exactly borked is it? After all, Microsoft worked with companies like Cakewalk when they were designing their new audio stack back in the Vista days. Which is why there IS low latency support in the stack, and why there are less audio crackles when other stuff is happening in Vista/7 when compared to XP. Besides, there is so much FUD about latency in the audio path. I have a home studio, I deal with a need for low latency all the time... and frankly starting with Windows Vista this became a heck of a lot less painful to get working than it ever was with XP. And for my non-studio stuff, frankly it's not like video and audio are noticeably out of sync on my Win7 system, and that's with onboard audio, and a CRT monitor with pretty much no latency. So there are solutions when it's important, and features when it's not.
Do all applications use PulseAudio though? The Windows 7 model is backwards compatible through to well... I haven't seen an application that doesn't get it's own fader no matter what audio model it uses, at which point the audio stream (even if the application generates an integer stream) is converted to floating point, so that the volume sliders aren't as nearly as lossy as they would be if they were dealing with integer-based audio... and then mixed in floating point... and then converted to whatever format the driver supports (which I suppose is usually integer... I haven't seen many floating point DACs...)
At the very least, it's nice to see some other operating systems playing catch up with that particular feature, because between when the vista betas that implemented the new audio model came out to the time it seems that functionality made it to other operating systems seems to have been a matter of years. I guess not everyone thinks its useful, or have ever even tried using such functionality.
I'm pretty sure, given that my friends and family all keep their computers updated, I can't do any of that stuff. At least not via this vulnerability. You know, because this was patched already...
Most of the public could do all that on their phone. Most of the public don't particularly "need" computers. Seriously, when the hell did "computers should only do exactly what people need them to do the day they buy them and anything else is a waste" become such a fashionable sentiment?
Yeah, there are ways of protecting the user. WHICH IS WHY THEY PATCHED THE HOLE. This isn't an unpatched vulnerability. The title even notes that this vulnerability was patched. They found the hole. They patched the hole. No more hole. No more trench. No blaming the user.
The only way a user would be vulnerable to this, is if they never updated. At which point, hell yeah, blame the user.
Is there another operating system that has per-application volume faders and a fully floating point audio path? Because I haven't seen any other OS that does... and I find that incredibly useful on a daily basis...
Because 7 has features XP doesn't. Like support for the TRIM command for SSDs. Like an audio mixer that lets you set different volumes for each application, instead of each hardware output, which is floating point from the ground up. Like desktop rendering that is accelerated by your GPU. Like UAC. Like Aero Snap. Etc. It's not like Windows 7 is just a facelift on Windows XP, There are differences that aren't even hard to find.
Microsoft already issued the patch. Yesterday. And systems without bluetooth capability are not affected.
Yeah, so it's decent-ish for two applications side by side I guess... but currently I'm tagging my video collection and I have a browser window open, my media library open, Notepad++ which I have set up with several macros to reformat data to an acceptable format, and outlook open, monitoring e-mail, all on one screen. And it works well, because I have a high resolution, large 4:3 screen. The new system seems very much focused on widescreen monitors, and I have yet to see a review address how this system holds up across multiple monitors - which is what I have on my other computer. I can hardly wait to try it and see what I can make of it - but as far as multi-tasking goes, I really like what Windows 7 gives me. Snap an app to the side, then adjust the height, works great for me.
Well, for a home user maybe. For a really small business possibly. But given that XP Mode gives you start menu integration with Windows 7... the seamlessness of the integration might be worth the piddly extra $50 per seat or whatever it is for Win 7 Pro over Win 7 Home. Assuming Microsoft even does volume licenses for anything under Pro...
Of course Windows XP runs beautifully as a VM. In fact, XP as a VM integrates really really well into the upper versions of Windows 7. In fact, it's an advertised feature, and you don't even need a separate XP license.
The new UI is... well... pretty much a toy UI for single-taskers... or at the best, serial multi-taskers. For anyone that does work that requires parrallel multi-taskers (doing more than one major task at once that are all related, and thus require that you be able to easily see the output of more than one application at once)... well frankly the Windows 7 UI is the windows UI better suited to that. By far. And generally, that's all I ever do on my desktop computers... browser on one side, with video running underneath, a couple of other applications on the other side of the screen... working with all of it at once. My other desktop... well, that's in my home studio, so this new UI is getting removed as soon as Windows 8 gets on that machine. MAYBE I'll use it on my laptop, because frankly I never do much significant with my laptop... but... I dunno. I'm generally not a fan of these new UI paradigms from both Apple [Full screen apps are the future! Look, our tablet UI as yet another task switching interface!] and Microsoft [Metro UI for every device!] that just seem... to actually take AWAY the power from the user. Or at least regress us to the 1980s where full screen applications were king, and screens were all 640x480 at the best of times so running one thing at a time made sense...
Of course, for many years after the trial, Microsoft was under considerable scrutiny, so I very much doubt they'd be able to pull off such predatory pricing policies with regards to Android without someone at least saying something.
In Canada it seems to have pretty decent success... though Apple is really hindering it... I know a lot of people who stopped buying DVD when they bought Bluray players/drives, and I admit, I'm one of them - but many of my friends in school or early into their careers never bought TVs and just run everything from their computers - and more than a few of them have Macbook Pros as their only computer. At which point, short of buying an external drive, and a copy of Windows, and installing boot camp, and rebooting into Windows every time they want to watch a commercial Bluray disc, they aren't watching Bluray on their machines. Many of these people appreciate the visual quality of Bluray, as laptop users they do sit quite close to their screens, and download caps from their campus wireless or their ISP means they aren't exactly in a position to download a whole lot of HD content, but until they get diferent computers (as Apple shows no signs of admitting there is a use for optical media in this world still) they'll just never switch from DVD. But in terms of success, I mean, even my parents have a bluray player. They actually got one before I did, because they were moving into a new house, buying a bigger TV, and wanted to be able to buy and stuff in HD.
My old blackberry bold 9000 and my new blackberry bold 9700 have both easily gone more than a week without a charge when used as pure phones + push data, and at least a couple of days when used more intensly. AND if I wanted to, I could easily buy a bigger battery for my phone. When Apple users talk about battery life, you have to understand that for the same usage, most Blackberry users have pretty much always laughed, and keep laughing. Besides Apple only provides the battery life that fits their design. It's not like they actually care. If they cared, the 6G 160GB classic wouldn't have far superior battery life to the 6.5G 160GB classic.
Though another way of putting it is that Apple has focused on generating a race to the bottom in terms of functionality. It's a little bit different than a race to the bottom in terms of quality, because all it means now is that the person who decides some day that they want to do more no longer has the economies of scale behind the tools to do more, which has been the great benefit of computers for years now. Many talented people I know started out only needing their computer to watch movies, check their email, and welll, back in the day I guess it was more blog than facebook - but it's the kind of stuff that frankly doesn't require a lot of power in the machine to do. And if someone had sold them a machine that only did those things, they never would have been able to: really delve in to 3D modelling and video effects work; experiment with computer illustrating skills that lead to a career in advertising; record an album on their own, leading to a career in music; create a home photography business with stunning results through the use of Photoshop; etc.
These are people who - because their computers could do more than what they needed when they bought them, more than they were even interested in doing at the time - were able, with bog standard computers, to become inspired and eventually learn skills that have actually lead somewhere that not only benefits them, but frankly benefits the economy. These are people who were able to develop from amateurs to professionals on simliar hardware, by investing only in different software, because their machines were "industrial/commercial level machines."
But Apple is trying to convince the consumer that they aren't a professional. Even look at their page advertising the new Final Cut Pro X - They refer more than once to FCPX being "like professional software". Again - a race to the bottom in terms of features - yes FCPX has many features professional software has, but frankly it misses out on some, and if that were the only option, you'd never be able to do certain tasks. Thankfully there are non-Apple options.
So when you think about everyone else in the world - you have to think not what their needs are now, but what they might be inspired to do over the lifetime of their machine. And realise that perhaps if those people all spend money on machines that can only do what they need, but frankly not at a significant cost savings, that there might be some long term economic consequences.
Braid is an Xbox Live Arcade game, not an Xbox Live Indie game. There's a difference.
Yes it's not as convenient. The point is, it's possible. And frankly, it's pretty easy to grab only the images out of something, or only the movies, or whatever. It's not like these filetypes aren't clearly identified by their extensions.
With facebook, you can do that too! https://www.facebook.com/download/
England still acted like the US was part of England. Hence the WAR OF INDEPENDANCE. Which had to be fought, to establish independance. That war ended with a treaty, which was frankly recognized by the Brits before the Americans, which ended the war of independance. Had there been no treaty, there would still have been a war. What's the likelyhood, do you think, of that having lasted for centuries... The success in the war of independance is what earned America it's independance, not the declaration. Had they made the declaration, and lost the war, America would not have been a country for the duration of the war, and then stopped being a country again. Perhaps it would be helpful to define what a country is. At least in my point of view, the term country in this case must refer to the more specific definition sovereign state. The definition of a sovereign state is "a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood to be a state which is neither dependent on nor subject to any other power or state." The decleration of independance did not embue the America with an independant federal government. It did not instantly provide the men who signed it the ability to excercise internal sovereignty within the territory they so claimed was independant. Though they were fighting to no longer be subject of the british crown, simply saying so was not enough to actually make that fact. In no way did America, as of the signing of the declaration of independance, actually fulfill the definition of a sovereign state. And until it was recognized by the treaty which ended the war, it certainly had problems entering into relations with other sovereign states. Therefore: Birth of a nation directly as a result of only the Declaration of Independance, absolutely not. Important date, absolutely. Of course, as important dates go, the decleration was signed on the 2nd, not the 4th.
You damn well can have both.
It's called "nuclear energy". The volume of fuel required is low, so you reduce mining damage. The energy output is nice and clean, and you can reuse waste in appropriately designed reactors. Don't put it on a major fault line near a gigantic body of water, and you're good to go.
I'm not saying "Don't celebrate it." There is of course reason to celebrate July 4. I'm just saying it's not America's birthday.
Just because you declare independance doesn't make you a country. Try again on April 9, when the treaty that ended the war of independance was ratified, and the former colonies became recognized as their own country. If anything, July 4 (or July 2, or August 2 depending on which historian you're reading and what your point of view is) is America's "Conception Day".
If only they could use some of the massive amounts of investment they get to develop the replacement products in the background while they get them up to speed, instead of pushing them on users when they are actually worse.
Oh no wait, that kind of "Don't force change on users until you're damn sure it's ready" mentality is essentially why people are avoiding RIM like the plague these days. So obviously it's absolutely an irrational business decision to make. Yes, of course, much better to see how much crap you can push on to consumers with your branding magic.
Gosh sometimes I hate capitalsim.