Samsung has sold hundreds of millions of phones with OLED screens in. Even their new entry level Galaxy J3 will have an OLED screen.
By the time the Galaxy S3 was released they had run out of OLED screens and went back to their horrific LED "Pentile" displays. So it's not like OLED worked out all that great for Samsung. Then to try to get production back up, they combined OLED with Pentile, taking a screen with lovely colors, and totally destroying it's color accuracy and eveness. Samsung has done a horrible job of keeping up with OLED demand. I'd rather take an accurate LED display, than a bright but inaccurate OLED.
To try to make up for the issue, Samsung has brought their device resolutions up to just ridiculous resolutions. 2560x1440 is ridiculous in a 5" phone, until you realize the reason they've pumped the resolution that high is to hide the issues in Pentile pixels by making them really small. But now of course you pay for that in GPU and CPU (because you have to push more pixels) and power (because you have to power the pixels and the CPU/GPU that pushes them.)
Every phone up until the S6 is still using Pentile OLEDs. That's a heck of a tradeoff to make. And Apple won't do Pentile when they do OLED displays. Samsung is throwing a lot under the bus to get OLED on their spec sheets.
At this point there's no reason not to do anything new in Objective-C, and port what you can when it makes sense.
Swift doesn't support interop with C++ code. Swift should not be used in third party closed source libraries due to linker conflicts (even according to Apple.)
We're not at the point where everything should be Swift yet.
TiVo can transcode and download to iOS and Android devices as well, and it supports Cablecard. It can even remote stream from your TiVo in case you forgot to download.
Why would I run windows on it? One of the main advantages of Windows is all the programs compiled for it, but those are all compiled for x86 windows, not Windows 10 on Arm. Apparently it won't even run office.
Note: I'm not trying to side with Microsoft here, as the name hints I'm an Apple guy, but I can see what direction Microsoft is trying to go in...
Microsoft is betting the future on the new "Universal" APIs that have.Net byte code, and run on Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Core, and Xbox. The course Microsoft is charting for themselves is architecture independent. As you've pointed out, they aren't there yet, but that's where they hope to go. Will they make it there? Will everyone transition to the new Universal APIs? I don't know, again, I'm an Apple guy, But at least where they think they are going, Windows 10 on a Raspberry Pi is not totally crazy. And I'm sure Office will make it to the Universal APIs too. Cheap $70 boxes that run Office might not even be a bad idea.
I don't think the comparison was about eating... More that a particle being harmless for one organism doesn't mean it's harmless in general. Plants liking CO2 has nothing to do with anything about how CO2 affects our atmosphere.
The primary reason as I see it for this is that the HW manufacturers want it - they want to sell you a new $200 device to get a security update.
The counter to this is hardware manufacturers generally hate this because anything they do is subject to FCC approval and approval times, even software updates.
Well the good news is all the history textbooks will have to probably be reprinted anyway due to something called THE ALWAYS MOVING FORWARD PROPERTIES OF GOD DAMN LINEAR TIME
He was 17, she was 15 when the sex occurred. He didn't rape her. She regretted it afterwards, and either cried rape or was forced to cry rape by her parents.
We've got a clairvoyant on our hands! Quick! Someone call James Randi!
So now I'm doing some research, and finding issues:
The Y50-70 is a Haswell. The Macbook Pro is a Broadwell. So you're complaining a last gen PC with a current gen Mac. Maybe not a huge performance difference, but if you at least want to be fair, go find a fire sale previous gen Mac to compare with the fire sale pervious gen PC, or compare with the Y50-80 which is actually Broadwell.
When I jump to the Y50-80 (with SSD) the normal US price is $1,799. They're running a sale at $1,499. The sale price is somewhat competitive with the 15" Macbook Pro. The non-sale price really isn't.
The SSD it uses is pretty cheap, not PCI-E, not that fast. So they're trimming price because the SSD is about 1/3 of the speed of what the Macbook Pro ships, possibly 1/4 of the performance, and cheap SSDs are cheap. The GPU is fast, but the 860m is very hot. The CPU is a little beefier. The screen is higher res. The battery life sucks balls compared to the Macbook Pro.
So yeah, it's cheaper. But it's not really comparable. You're definitely making tangible sacrifices. 5 hours of battery life vs. 10 hours is a big issue. An SSD 30% the speed is an issue (and you can't even configure it with a 1 TB SSD).
The Y50-80 is clearly designed to be a gaming machine. The Macbook Pro can play games, but it's designed to be a work machine. If you're into just gaming the Y50-80 looks like an ok choice. But as a work machine? Please. It blows giant chunks. The battery life and I/O are unacceptable for pros working in big applications. It's not a work machine. If you're looking for a bunch of slow components tied to a giant power sucking GPU, a Mac isn't going to be for you.
Uhhhh what? You're spec'ing a sub notebook against a 15" notebook. Of course the sub notebook is not going to be configurable into the same range, and is going to get very expensive.
If you're comparing against a 15" Lenovo, you want to compare against the 15" Macbook Pro, which is the equivalent.
"First, we aren't feeling the impact of climate change. For all the fear mongering, the oceans haven't risen, the weather is fine, and life has been carrying on."
Errrr, what? The oceans have definitely been measurably rising.
Just because Manhattan isn't underwater doesn't mean we don't measure and observe it.
"Second, we aren't the last generation who can do something about it. Depending on who you listen to, either we have already passed the point of no return, or we have a long time to worry about it."
We've definitely already passed the point of return for no changes. The question from here on out is how much damage we want to do in addition to what's already been done. There isn't an upper limit to the damage due to global warming. That's like saying "Oh gosh, I'm in debt. Whelp, guess I'll just spend whatever I want because I'm already in debt!" It's nonsensical double talk from someone who's claiming that global warming is both not a thing, and it's too late to do anything about it anyway.
Hate speech is only illegal if it's basically a physically threat. Even then, proving Reddit is liable would be a tougher case (and not the individual user.)
I haven't seen anyone suggest Reddit itself is under any sort of legal threat, besides paranoid Reddit users themselves. And there's nothing to indicate that's Reddit's strategy here. Rather it seems to be based around people like me who simply don't care about the site because it doesn't seem like a community I'm interested in. I'm not sitting here going "Gee, I really should sue Reddit to force them to be something I'd participate in." I'm just plain not interested.
(4) Be ready for lawsuits from people who do not accept the original principles, but want to be part of the community regardless.
I don't think it's legal problems but social problems that are the issue. If you have a site that is known for having a section where people say offensive things about fat people, you might eventually have problems attracting fat people to your site. Which might conflict with wanting to grow. There's nothing legal going on there, it's all business.
Reddit is not trying to be some gated community and people are trying to force the gates open. That much is becoming clear. Rather Reddit itself wants to attract a more diverse community. And as a company, that's their right. I don't have a Reddit account because some of the content hosted there makes it seem like a site I wouldn't be interested in, and they're trying to pull people like me back into the fold. I don't think it will work for me, but that's at least what they're trying.
The only thing I worry about in this case is if Microsoft goes one step further and ties a "use Microsoft products exclusively in the schools or no deal" string to that money/tax bump.
This is Washington. A lot of schools already exclusively use Microsoft products. But, to be fair, I don't think Microsoft is as bad as you think in this regard. When I was in school in Seattle (during the Dark Microsoft Times) I had a class where Microsoft had paid for a room full of iBooks.
All the Cider games just plain suck. Regardless of any existing OpenGL issues. They just all perform like garbage, while native games don't show the same issues.
I have a MacBook Retina which I use for development, it has a 2880x1800 screen, but to you need to go into 'Display' and set it to Scaled and 'More Space' in order for it to render like it has a 1920x1200 screen. So non retina applications the OS reports the resolution to be 1920x1200, then it upscales the application window to 3840x2400 and also does composition at 3840x2400, which is then downscaled to 2880x1800 and displayed. Performance gets even worse if you also have an external screen, because and it also does the same if you have an external 3840x2160 and downscales to 1920x1080. Basically you add an external 1080p screen and it will try to make the integrated graphics render graphics for basically two 4k screens.
When you run in scaled mode like that, ALL applications over-render. Both retina and non-retina. It's why I really suggest people avoid the scaled modes.
Non-scaled displays do not scale. I've verified that at work. So external displays do not over render unless you have a 4k display and you've put it in a scaled mode.
Games are actually one exception. A full screen OpenGL game gets to directly output properly to the screen. Full screen OpenGL doesn't get scaled or over rendered. I've verified this on multiple Apple platforms with OpenGL code of my own. It means on a device like the 6 Plus where scaled output is normal (the 6 Plus has a 1080p screen but has a much higher res frame buffer) OpenGL performance isn't degraded. I even have non-full screen OpenGL code that doesn't get over-rendered either.
My guess is that none of the original article has to do with scaling at all. It's likely they're using something like Cider that abstracts DirectX calls to OpenGL, and has always really sucked for performance. (EA did several ports with Cider and they all had severe performance issues as well.) OpenGL on the Mac also just has general issues.
Now, after two similarly sized Agile projects, all I can say is it seems to be an excuse for developers to skip QA/QC procedures "because we're already into the next scrum" and end up with a mess that doesn't come close to matching the original specification at the end blaming changing requirements and "developmental issues" during the scrum process. I just turned down a contract that explicitly required Agile coding because I don't have any confidence that the end user will be satisfied with the results.
It's important to note whatever it is you think you were practicing, that's not actually Agile.
In Agile a task can't be done until it's passed QA. You're not allowed to say "Whoops we're in the next sprint guess we can't do QA hur de hur hur." You have to bring the task into the next sprint, and it's considered a failure in estimation (which then should be dealt with by the group.) You then have to bump something out of the next sprint to fit the extra time to finish QA.
Most of the time people say that Agile sucks, I've found that it's usually because engineering or management is abusing faux-Agile practices to ignore all the safeguards. Here it sounds like engineering was ignoring a Agile safeguard (task wasn't done) to cut corners, possibly aided by management who didn't want to hear about any delays or wanted to make a certain date. The honest truth with process is that a process is as only good as everyone's willingness to follow it.
Agile should really be administered by a neutral party for a team for this reason, someone who's not a member of management for that team (common mistake) or an engineer on that team. That way you avoid engineers closing tasks while breaking the rules.
Most of the growth that lead to Seattle's infamous traffic was/is equally to the east of Seattle proper.
To be fair, most of Seattle's traffic problems were due to Microsoft being in Redmond, and a giant lake being between Redmond and Seattle, meaning you had few very routes from where people actually lived, to where people actually worked.
If Microsoft was in Seattle (as Amazon is) I doubt they would have affected traffic to the same degree. But, as Amazon is doing, it would have led to a lot of Seattle's residential neighborhoods, especially North Seattle, going through huge changes.
They won't be signed for Windows 7 and therefore won't load. Also I believe Apple uses ancient intel EFI not standard UEFI that is on modern boards. However, my information could be very outdated so someone can correct me if I am wrong as this was the case late last decade.
Newer Macs can definitely UEFI boot (older Macs notably can not UEFI boot Windows, although they will present it as an option.) Internally, I don't think it's standard UEFI internally. But it exposes UEFI 2.0 functionality to perform booting. I was trying to look up some more info, as I UEFI boot Windows 8 on my Macbook Pro, but no one seems to really keep track of the exact EFI standard Apple implements, if any. I know my 2009 Macbook Pro cannot EFI boot Windows, but my 2013 Macbook Pro can.
While it's possible the new trackpad could be an issue, even if Apple didn't sign the drivers for Windows 7, there really isn't anything stopping someone from booting Windows 7 on a new Macbook Pro. It's not like Apple offers a huge amount of support for Windows installs anyway.
"For work reasons though I'm stuck with windows... so I'd love to skip the whole bootcamp thing entirely... but still need the drivers.."
The EFI firmware on a Mac can either emulate BIOS (like any standard EFI firmware) or on more recent Macs, do a UEFI boot. That means any OS, including Windows, that can do a BIOS or EFI boot, can run natively on a Mac. I have a friend who runs Linux on his Mac. I also have friends who run Mac Pros running Windows only because at the time Apple was getting special deals on Xeons from Apple, and they were way under what an equivalent PC cost. So they just bought a Mac Pro, wiped it, and installed Windows.
All Boot Camp does is partition the disk, it doesn't do anything at all after the partitioning, given that the rest of the capabilities are built in to the firmware.
You can download the Windows drivers for the Mac hardware separately, but on a lot of machines most things will just work using the Windows and OEM drivers. On my Mac Pro everything basically just works, but I don't get some things like an HFS file system driver or the fancy keyboard volume controls until I install the Boot Camp drivers. Sometimes the mobility GPUs don't work with the standard drivers. But for the most part, a Mac is totally just a generic Intel PC that can also run Mac OS. When it's not running Mac OS it acts exactly like a generic Intel PC. I even just install the Windows AMD drivers directly from their site for my Apple branded desktop GPU.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty sure the poster meant the Celeron:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Samsung has sold hundreds of millions of phones with OLED screens in. Even their new entry level Galaxy J3 will have an OLED screen.
By the time the Galaxy S3 was released they had run out of OLED screens and went back to their horrific LED "Pentile" displays. So it's not like OLED worked out all that great for Samsung. Then to try to get production back up, they combined OLED with Pentile, taking a screen with lovely colors, and totally destroying it's color accuracy and eveness. Samsung has done a horrible job of keeping up with OLED demand. I'd rather take an accurate LED display, than a bright but inaccurate OLED.
To try to make up for the issue, Samsung has brought their device resolutions up to just ridiculous resolutions. 2560x1440 is ridiculous in a 5" phone, until you realize the reason they've pumped the resolution that high is to hide the issues in Pentile pixels by making them really small. But now of course you pay for that in GPU and CPU (because you have to push more pixels) and power (because you have to power the pixels and the CPU/GPU that pushes them.)
Every phone up until the S6 is still using Pentile OLEDs. That's a heck of a tradeoff to make. And Apple won't do Pentile when they do OLED displays. Samsung is throwing a lot under the bus to get OLED on their spec sheets.
At this point there's no reason not to do anything new in Objective-C, and port what you can when it makes sense.
Swift doesn't support interop with C++ code. Swift should not be used in third party closed source libraries due to linker conflicts (even according to Apple.)
We're not at the point where everything should be Swift yet.
TiVo can transcode and download to iOS and Android devices as well, and it supports Cablecard. It can even remote stream from your TiVo in case you forgot to download.
Why would I run windows on it? One of the main advantages of Windows is all the programs compiled for it, but those are all compiled for x86 windows, not Windows 10 on Arm. Apparently it won't even run office.
Note: I'm not trying to side with Microsoft here, as the name hints I'm an Apple guy, but I can see what direction Microsoft is trying to go in...
Microsoft is betting the future on the new "Universal" APIs that have .Net byte code, and run on Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Core, and Xbox. The course Microsoft is charting for themselves is architecture independent. As you've pointed out, they aren't there yet, but that's where they hope to go. Will they make it there? Will everyone transition to the new Universal APIs? I don't know, again, I'm an Apple guy, But at least where they think they are going, Windows 10 on a Raspberry Pi is not totally crazy. And I'm sure Office will make it to the Universal APIs too. Cheap $70 boxes that run Office might not even be a bad idea.
I don't think the comparison was about eating... More that a particle being harmless for one organism doesn't mean it's harmless in general. Plants liking CO2 has nothing to do with anything about how CO2 affects our atmosphere.
The primary reason as I see it for this is that the HW manufacturers want it - they want to sell you a new $200 device to get a security update.
The counter to this is hardware manufacturers generally hate this because anything they do is subject to FCC approval and approval times, even software updates.
This is why phone OS updates can take time.
You wouldn't technically ever need to reprint history textbooks. You could just go back and change what was actually written in them to begin with.
Well the good news is all the history textbooks will have to probably be reprinted anyway due to something called THE ALWAYS MOVING FORWARD PROPERTIES OF GOD DAMN LINEAR TIME
He was 17, she was 15 when the sex occurred. He didn't rape her. She regretted it afterwards, and either cried rape or was forced to cry rape by her parents.
We've got a clairvoyant on our hands! Quick! Someone call James Randi!
So now I'm doing some research, and finding issues:
The Y50-70 is a Haswell. The Macbook Pro is a Broadwell. So you're complaining a last gen PC with a current gen Mac. Maybe not a huge performance difference, but if you at least want to be fair, go find a fire sale previous gen Mac to compare with the fire sale pervious gen PC, or compare with the Y50-80 which is actually Broadwell.
When I jump to the Y50-80 (with SSD) the normal US price is $1,799. They're running a sale at $1,499. The sale price is somewhat competitive with the 15" Macbook Pro. The non-sale price really isn't.
The SSD it uses is pretty cheap, not PCI-E, not that fast. So they're trimming price because the SSD is about 1/3 of the speed of what the Macbook Pro ships, possibly 1/4 of the performance, and cheap SSDs are cheap. The GPU is fast, but the 860m is very hot. The CPU is a little beefier. The screen is higher res. The battery life sucks balls compared to the Macbook Pro.
So yeah, it's cheaper. But it's not really comparable. You're definitely making tangible sacrifices. 5 hours of battery life vs. 10 hours is a big issue. An SSD 30% the speed is an issue (and you can't even configure it with a 1 TB SSD).
The Y50-80 is clearly designed to be a gaming machine. The Macbook Pro can play games, but it's designed to be a work machine. If you're into just gaming the Y50-80 looks like an ok choice. But as a work machine? Please. It blows giant chunks. The battery life and I/O are unacceptable for pros working in big applications. It's not a work machine. If you're looking for a bunch of slow components tied to a giant power sucking GPU, a Mac isn't going to be for you.
At $1999? That's like a few hundred bucks. Not "way outside of the price range." That's $100 difference from the laptop spec'd above.
Uhhhh what? You're spec'ing a sub notebook against a 15" notebook. Of course the sub notebook is not going to be configurable into the same range, and is going to get very expensive.
If you're comparing against a 15" Lenovo, you want to compare against the 15" Macbook Pro, which is the equivalent.
Send my congrats to the Apple employee friend then. For a pre-alpha device, I've been getting plenty of good, stable use out of mine.
"First, we aren't feeling the impact of climate change. For all the fear mongering, the oceans haven't risen, the weather is fine, and life has been carrying on."
Errrr, what? The oceans have definitely been measurably rising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just because Manhattan isn't underwater doesn't mean we don't measure and observe it.
"Second, we aren't the last generation who can do something about it. Depending on who you listen to, either we have already passed the point of no return, or we have a long time to worry about it."
We've definitely already passed the point of return for no changes. The question from here on out is how much damage we want to do in addition to what's already been done. There isn't an upper limit to the damage due to global warming. That's like saying "Oh gosh, I'm in debt. Whelp, guess I'll just spend whatever I want because I'm already in debt!" It's nonsensical double talk from someone who's claiming that global warming is both not a thing, and it's too late to do anything about it anyway.
Hate speech is only illegal if it's basically a physically threat. Even then, proving Reddit is liable would be a tougher case (and not the individual user.)
I haven't seen anyone suggest Reddit itself is under any sort of legal threat, besides paranoid Reddit users themselves. And there's nothing to indicate that's Reddit's strategy here. Rather it seems to be based around people like me who simply don't care about the site because it doesn't seem like a community I'm interested in. I'm not sitting here going "Gee, I really should sue Reddit to force them to be something I'd participate in." I'm just plain not interested.
(4) Be ready for lawsuits from people who do not accept the original principles, but want to be part of the community regardless.
I don't think it's legal problems but social problems that are the issue. If you have a site that is known for having a section where people say offensive things about fat people, you might eventually have problems attracting fat people to your site. Which might conflict with wanting to grow. There's nothing legal going on there, it's all business.
Reddit is not trying to be some gated community and people are trying to force the gates open. That much is becoming clear. Rather Reddit itself wants to attract a more diverse community. And as a company, that's their right. I don't have a Reddit account because some of the content hosted there makes it seem like a site I wouldn't be interested in, and they're trying to pull people like me back into the fold. I don't think it will work for me, but that's at least what they're trying.
The only thing I worry about in this case is if Microsoft goes one step further and ties a "use Microsoft products exclusively in the schools or no deal" string to that money/tax bump.
This is Washington. A lot of schools already exclusively use Microsoft products. But, to be fair, I don't think Microsoft is as bad as you think in this regard. When I was in school in Seattle (during the Dark Microsoft Times) I had a class where Microsoft had paid for a room full of iBooks.
Oh hey look, they are using Cider:
https://www.transgaming.com/ne...
All the Cider games just plain suck. Regardless of any existing OpenGL issues. They just all perform like garbage, while native games don't show the same issues.
I have a MacBook Retina which I use for development, it has a 2880x1800 screen, but to you need to go into 'Display' and set it to Scaled and 'More Space' in order for it to render like it has a 1920x1200 screen. So non retina applications the OS reports the resolution to be 1920x1200, then it upscales the application window to 3840x2400 and also does composition at 3840x2400, which is then downscaled to 2880x1800 and displayed. Performance gets even worse if you also have an external screen, because and it also does the same if you have an external 3840x2160 and downscales to 1920x1080. Basically you add an external 1080p screen and it will try to make the integrated graphics render graphics for basically two 4k screens.
When you run in scaled mode like that, ALL applications over-render. Both retina and non-retina. It's why I really suggest people avoid the scaled modes.
Non-scaled displays do not scale. I've verified that at work. So external displays do not over render unless you have a 4k display and you've put it in a scaled mode.
Games are actually one exception. A full screen OpenGL game gets to directly output properly to the screen. Full screen OpenGL doesn't get scaled or over rendered. I've verified this on multiple Apple platforms with OpenGL code of my own. It means on a device like the 6 Plus where scaled output is normal (the 6 Plus has a 1080p screen but has a much higher res frame buffer) OpenGL performance isn't degraded. I even have non-full screen OpenGL code that doesn't get over-rendered either.
My guess is that none of the original article has to do with scaling at all. It's likely they're using something like Cider that abstracts DirectX calls to OpenGL, and has always really sucked for performance. (EA did several ports with Cider and they all had severe performance issues as well.) OpenGL on the Mac also just has general issues.
Now, after two similarly sized Agile projects, all I can say is it seems to be an excuse for developers to skip QA/QC procedures "because we're already into the next scrum" and end up with a mess that doesn't come close to matching the original specification at the end blaming changing requirements and "developmental issues" during the scrum process. I just turned down a contract that explicitly required Agile coding because I don't have any confidence that the end user will be satisfied with the results.
It's important to note whatever it is you think you were practicing, that's not actually Agile.
In Agile a task can't be done until it's passed QA. You're not allowed to say "Whoops we're in the next sprint guess we can't do QA hur de hur hur." You have to bring the task into the next sprint, and it's considered a failure in estimation (which then should be dealt with by the group.) You then have to bump something out of the next sprint to fit the extra time to finish QA.
Most of the time people say that Agile sucks, I've found that it's usually because engineering or management is abusing faux-Agile practices to ignore all the safeguards. Here it sounds like engineering was ignoring a Agile safeguard (task wasn't done) to cut corners, possibly aided by management who didn't want to hear about any delays or wanted to make a certain date. The honest truth with process is that a process is as only good as everyone's willingness to follow it.
Agile should really be administered by a neutral party for a team for this reason, someone who's not a member of management for that team (common mistake) or an engineer on that team. That way you avoid engineers closing tasks while breaking the rules.
Most of the growth that lead to Seattle's infamous traffic was/is equally to the east of Seattle proper.
To be fair, most of Seattle's traffic problems were due to Microsoft being in Redmond, and a giant lake being between Redmond and Seattle, meaning you had few very routes from where people actually lived, to where people actually worked.
If Microsoft was in Seattle (as Amazon is) I doubt they would have affected traffic to the same degree. But, as Amazon is doing, it would have led to a lot of Seattle's residential neighborhoods, especially North Seattle, going through huge changes.
Do I really need to re-word that simple shit to the point where the pre-school kid gets it? Anyone with a 4th grade education understands.
The lesson here is: Yes, yes you do.
The problem is the drivers.
They won't be signed for Windows 7 and therefore won't load. Also I believe Apple uses ancient intel EFI not standard UEFI that is on modern boards. However, my information could be very outdated so someone can correct me if I am wrong as this was the case late last decade.
Newer Macs can definitely UEFI boot (older Macs notably can not UEFI boot Windows, although they will present it as an option.) Internally, I don't think it's standard UEFI internally. But it exposes UEFI 2.0 functionality to perform booting. I was trying to look up some more info, as I UEFI boot Windows 8 on my Macbook Pro, but no one seems to really keep track of the exact EFI standard Apple implements, if any. I know my 2009 Macbook Pro cannot EFI boot Windows, but my 2013 Macbook Pro can.
While it's possible the new trackpad could be an issue, even if Apple didn't sign the drivers for Windows 7, there really isn't anything stopping someone from booting Windows 7 on a new Macbook Pro. It's not like Apple offers a huge amount of support for Windows installs anyway.
"For work reasons though I'm stuck with windows... so I'd love to skip the whole bootcamp thing entirely... but still need the drivers.."
The EFI firmware on a Mac can either emulate BIOS (like any standard EFI firmware) or on more recent Macs, do a UEFI boot. That means any OS, including Windows, that can do a BIOS or EFI boot, can run natively on a Mac. I have a friend who runs Linux on his Mac. I also have friends who run Mac Pros running Windows only because at the time Apple was getting special deals on Xeons from Apple, and they were way under what an equivalent PC cost. So they just bought a Mac Pro, wiped it, and installed Windows.
All Boot Camp does is partition the disk, it doesn't do anything at all after the partitioning, given that the rest of the capabilities are built in to the firmware.
You can download the Windows drivers for the Mac hardware separately, but on a lot of machines most things will just work using the Windows and OEM drivers. On my Mac Pro everything basically just works, but I don't get some things like an HFS file system driver or the fancy keyboard volume controls until I install the Boot Camp drivers. Sometimes the mobility GPUs don't work with the standard drivers. But for the most part, a Mac is totally just a generic Intel PC that can also run Mac OS. When it's not running Mac OS it acts exactly like a generic Intel PC. I even just install the Windows AMD drivers directly from their site for my Apple branded desktop GPU.