My 2007 laptop has a K8 based Turion64X2 CPU. It was competitive with the C2D on performance, and the nVidia Geforce Go 7200 graphics beat the Intel 945 series (for a laptop). Though like a lot of nVidia chips from the era, it has a tendency of delaminating from the motherboard, and HP released a BIOS update that runs the fan continuously, and the Wifi stopped working 5 years ago because of it.
I later bought an AMD K8 based Neo netbook with ATI/AMD x1200 graphics, which beat the Atom N270/N280 and GMA945.
Neither of these chips were great energy savers, but performance per dollar was hard to beat.
A year ago I set out to replace the Turion laptop with a desktop for daily usage. I'm not a gamer, though I wanted it to be capable of playing HD videos, encoding videos, running VMs, etc.
I wanted to justify AMD as the underdog, but in the end I couldn't deny the Haswell based i5-4690 beat the AMD offerings. For ordinary usage (eg even web browsing), single core performance is more important than many give it credit for (especially once you pass the 2-4 core boundary). Intel smokes AMD in single thread performance, and unless you regularly run heavy multithread loads, the i5 beats the i7 in cost. On video the Haswell isn't bad for desktop usage, and I can even run 3x 1080 screens (1x HDMI, 1x DVI, 1x VGA).
As my username may suggest I'm no Linux pundit, but I was always under the impression that Intel video had better Linux support compared to either nVidia or AMD.
Before they started bundling crap like "Hello", and changing the UI every 45 seconds to try and copy Chrome, while ignoring 11 year old bugs.
I feel 3.0 was peak Firefox. I remember the buzz and the huge counts of Downloads on release day. 3.6 was the last reasonable version before the whole project went off the rails.
I read the article, and they offer no proof. It's a baseless assertion. This quote from the article made me laugh:
This is a country... where big-name companies running 10-year-old software is the norm.
Better tell the author to never investigate America, he may discover that all his bank transactions go through software from the 70s.
Or pretty much any company. My company has software dating from the 70's/ 80's / 90's running all the production equipment (some on 80's / 90's hardware). Go into a car dealership and there's a terminal window connected to VMS or IBM/360 system. The other day I was at the customer service counter of Walmart. I could see into someone's office, and there was a green terminal window connected to a VMS or IBM/360 system. Look behind the counter when you're at the check-in, or at the gate of an airport and likewise the airlines are all running VMS or IBM/360.
I don't even blink if someone is running WindowsXP based anything.
I fiddled a bit with BASIC growing up, and I took 2 intro C++ courses in university, but I'm not a CS grad, or programmer by trade, but for the past 8 years I've been tinkering with AutoIt for almost all of my programming needs. For better or worse it has a BASIC like structure (though there is no GOTO), and it's purely interpreted, but they make input and output dead simple with MsgBox() and InputBox() commands.
You can scrape data out of, or put data into the clipboard with ease, and you can scrape data out of existing windows, or put data into existing windows. This makes it easy to make a small program that acts as "glue" to automate a real application do something useful. Little by little you can build something more and more complex. I've done TCP programming with it, I got it to scrape data out of a window and create a CSV log where the functionality didn't exist, you can even build real, more complicated GUI's with relative ease.
...might consider upgrading to something exotic, like AutoIt, someday, but I've been saying that for four years now...
I'm not a Programmer by trade. But for what I've done, it's almost exclusively been in AutoIT. It seems like an easy way to glue together applications. In addition to dozens of small home projects, I've even created applications for work which will audit open programs / files, their status, and SFTP them to a central server where the results from multiple computers are compiled.
People might balk at the Basic like syntax, but it's much better than the atrocious AutoHotKey syntax. The included help file is really detailed, Scite environment good, and forum help / UDFs real useful.
cygwin is a steaming pile of shit and should never be installed on anything you care about.
My biggest issue with Cygwin is bringing dependency hell to Windows.
Applications ported to Windows via Cygwin rely on cygwin1.dll (I'm thinking standalone applications, not the pure Cygwin Environment).
Only one instance of a DLL can be loaded in RAM, so if two Cygwin applications rely on different versions of cygwin1.dll, one will fail if loaded at the same time. Why can they not version the DLL or something (cygwin45.DLL)? Or not rely on Dynamic Linking? The DLL is always included with the application, and installed in the application folder, so it's not even like it's space savings by relying on a shared 3 MB file.
The dedicated ebook reader is for people who - you guessed it - read books.
Thats it. My wife is on her second kindle, and she was happy with the first one, I just couldn't think of another Christmas gift and figured she'd like the paperwhite.
The sales rate may be that the E-readers simply are very good products with a much longer use cycle. They don't get OS updates, or need new features. They do what they do, and do it well, and you can read books today perfectly fine on a first generation EReader.
Yup! The tech industry is very much about "ZOMG! Need new features *nomnom*", but e-books make very good appliances. Much like how my 10 year old slow cooker is just fine, my 7 year old car gets me to work just fine, and my 8 year old LCD TV is just fine (who needs a smart TV when I can just plug in a Chromecast), ebooks try to be as simple as their 500 year old predecessor "the book". They can store a digital file and display it on an easy to read, low power eink display. What is there to improve?
My mom loves her Kobo. When travelling she doesn't have to worry about carrying around books she finished reading, the e-ink screen is easy on the eyes, and she doesn't have to charge it during the whole trip (unlike her tablet or phone). While borrowing books from the library is great (don't take up any additional physical space, and don't have to dead head them to return), the requisite "Adobe Digital Editions" leaves a lot to be desired.
In the minds of the utility, by getting customers to shift usage off of peak demand times, or lower the total demand, they don't need to spend money to upgrade generating or transmission / distribution capacity, which is why their billing scheme encourages it.
Interesting. This supports the argument about Google car-accidents not being at fault, yet contributing due to driving like a slow confused grandma. Yes if you're rear ended you're not "at fault", but driving unpredictably slower than the flow of traffic is not safe, defensive driving.
I see a huge potential for assistance driving technology (collision avoidance, taking over if you fall asleep), but I still think the utopia of a network of unowned, automated Uber drivers is a long, long time off.
Detroit has been deteriorating since the 50's. It's unreasonable to expect buildings and water infrastructure that old to be retrofitted with new technology when the city is broke.
You're talking about a city that will let abandoned buildings burn because their fire service is broke.
Did you know that car makers push out a new version, only slightly different, annually? Companies who make golf clubs, also push out new versions at least annually. And companies who make TVs, they also do this.
For most models, the car is essentially identical for about 5 years before the platform is completely re-engineered. Usually it's just minor aesthetics, or features, and bug patches in the interim. And the car is usually fully supported for at least 10 years.
On the golf clubs, as a non-golfer (only golfed 4 times in my life) I find this hilarious. The 2015 models will be outrageously expensive compared to the 2014 models. As if golf club technology actually changed that much in a year, especially for someone non-pro. It's not even like a car where it will deteriorate just sitting there. And usually the golfers will go on about how great the weight of the club is, talk about non-nonsensical technique tips, and basically be not much better than I am with the crappy 20 year old rental clubs at the course.
On TV's, they are so generic I'm surprised they put any effort into minor model revisions.
"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this,"
Excel did the job just fine until the ribbon UI came and MS decided that all those useless icons are more worth than the cells in spreadsheet. And since the file-menu started opening the full-screen crap, it was time for me to move on to alternatives which actually are now better than the Excel itself. After ms-office started using only two shades of grey as its UI, many are really forced to move the alternatives, as the UI is really too uncomfortable to use for a day.
The ribbon in 2007/2010 occupies the same amount of space as the default toolbars in 2003. 2013 does increase the size a bit. However Double-click the tab names, or press Ctrl+F1 and they will collapse down.
I do think once getting over the initial learning curve, the ribbon is more intuitive than menus/toolbars.
The real question is would they make this available to regular 8.1 users who aren't entirely comfortable about jumping to Windows 10 right now?
Doubt it. Since they essentially abandoned RT users (no Windows 10), they are giving all 3 of them this as a consolation prize. If you haven't noticed by the update icon / nags, they really want Windows 7/8.1 users to upgrade to 10 so they can say "look at how many users are running 10! Fastest adopted OS in history!"
Classic shell can give Windows 8.1 a usable start menu.
I'm always surprised by sales. I know in theory a company can't make any money without sales and marketing to provide customers, but as a supplier and customer, most of the salesguys I meet are idiots.
As a supplier, I was on new hire training with a few sales guys from our company, and I was amazed at how clueless they were about our products. I don't even work hands on with finished products and I know more than them.
As a customer, when I reach out to a supplier for help at work I find: -Their "outside sales" guy is basically a fucking idiot. No clue about their product line, doesn't even wine and dine me. I don't even know why his position exists. -Their "Inside sales" guy is good if all I want is to give him exact manufacturer part numbers to quote, so that I can get a PO issued. He creates quotes, but also has no product knowledge. -Their "Product Specialists" generally have less of an idea than I do. It's pretty bad when you reach out to a "specialist" with questions and they know less than you. They also have no idea what it's like in the real world. No we're not going to spend $500,000 to replace a 5 year old piece of equipment with the "new and shiny" just because it's "new and shiny" with no functional differences.
The largest surface area of attack on Windows (and any OS) for a while has been through the web browser, not the base OS itself. While the OS isn't receiving updates: -Chrome is still updating and supporting XP till the end of the year -Firefox is continuing to support XP, I see no mention of a EOL for it -Adobe Flash is supporting XP (I hate Flash, but it's a major source of in the wild exploits) -For PDF I don't care what Adobe supports since it's a major source of in the Wild exploits, but PDF-Xchange viewer supports XP, and Sumatra PDF works if you want bare bones PDF capabilities. -Java is not supported, but thankfully not normally a critical must-have so it can generally be ignored. -Ad blockers will avoid a lot of malicious malware distributed through legitimate ad networks, as well as confusing ads on download sites that mislead users to download malicious software -MSE dropped XP, but I know Symantec at work still supports XP clients. AVG free still supports XP -Though not "legal" a simple registry edit will allow XP PCs to continue to get updates intended for XP embedded POS Ready systems until 2019.
I'm not encouraging anyone to run XP, just really on really crappy computers that can't run anything newer.
With the chromecast, you have to count the power use of the device to control it too.
A cellphone uses what? 2 Watts while active? Once you make you selection in Netflix, you can actually power down your phone as the Chromecast is talking direct to Netflix servers at that point.
Windows update wouldn't find any driver, which is why I manually loaded Windows 2000 drivers for the video card. The card is so old and hopeless that MS update assumed no one would use it in Windows 7.
One feature that XPDM video drivers has that WDDM drivers does not, is the ability to do fullscreen console windows. So XPDM drivers, loaded in Vista or 7 allow full screen console windows, while not allowing Aero. The same graphics card, if loaded with WDDM drivers, allow Aero, but not full screen console.
$5/mth is 0.056kW, or 56 Watts. That means the console is using an average of 56 watts over the month. This chart suggests an average of 80W between PS4 and XB1 when streaming 1080, and negligible when idle. That means the console is being used 17 hours per day, the console is faulty, or the poster is lying (or excluding the TV / stereo power usage).
I'm surprised these devices use so much power. I'm pretty sure my Chromecast uses less than 5W while streaming Netflix.
For me personally, XCode doesn't make a whole lot of sense on a touch screen device with limited screen real-estate. I'd prefer to use a Macbook.
I'll grant you the touchscreen part (though they are offering an overpriced keyboard lid), but not the "limited screen real-estate". They are offering a 12.9" screen. Macbooks have long been offered in a 13.3" size. The iPad will be in a 2732×2048 resolution. I've considered the 11.6" / 12" range to be the minimum for a laptop that could be usable as a real computer (as compared to 10" netbooks). Those 12" laptops would frequently have 1366x768 resolutions. 13"-14" computers are easily usable full time. The iPad Pro's screen is obviously not a limitation. The oversized cellphone apps on it may get in the way, but not the screen.
Slashdot Mirror
It means that you can't expect support for forever if you're using one of the minority Windows versions. Just upgrade already.
Any halfways sensible Windows poweruser would have upgraded to at least Windows 7 already. I know I did for my laptop that ran like crap under Vista.
Anyone left running Vista is an old Grandma that bought a laptop 7 years ago, and doesn't have any family that visits to notice the problem.
My 2007 laptop has a K8 based Turion64X2 CPU. It was competitive with the C2D on performance, and the nVidia Geforce Go 7200 graphics beat the Intel 945 series (for a laptop). Though like a lot of nVidia chips from the era, it has a tendency of delaminating from the motherboard, and HP released a BIOS update that runs the fan continuously, and the Wifi stopped working 5 years ago because of it.
I later bought an AMD K8 based Neo netbook with ATI/AMD x1200 graphics, which beat the Atom N270/N280 and GMA945.
Neither of these chips were great energy savers, but performance per dollar was hard to beat.
A year ago I set out to replace the Turion laptop with a desktop for daily usage. I'm not a gamer, though I wanted it to be capable of playing HD videos, encoding videos, running VMs, etc.
I wanted to justify AMD as the underdog, but in the end I couldn't deny the Haswell based i5-4690 beat the AMD offerings. For ordinary usage (eg even web browsing), single core performance is more important than many give it credit for (especially once you pass the 2-4 core boundary). Intel smokes AMD in single thread performance, and unless you regularly run heavy multithread loads, the i5 beats the i7 in cost. On video the Haswell isn't bad for desktop usage, and I can even run 3x 1080 screens (1x HDMI, 1x DVI, 1x VGA).
As my username may suggest I'm no Linux pundit, but I was always under the impression that Intel video had better Linux support compared to either nVidia or AMD.
Before they started bundling crap like "Hello", and changing the UI every 45 seconds to try and copy Chrome, while ignoring 11 year old bugs.
I feel 3.0 was peak Firefox. I remember the buzz and the huge counts of Downloads on release day. 3.6 was the last reasonable version before the whole project went off the rails.
I read the article, and they offer no proof. It's a baseless assertion. This quote from the article made me laugh:
This is a country ... where big-name companies running 10-year-old software is the norm.
Better tell the author to never investigate America, he may discover that all his bank transactions go through software from the 70s.
Or pretty much any company. My company has software dating from the 70's/ 80's / 90's running all the production equipment (some on 80's / 90's hardware). Go into a car dealership and there's a terminal window connected to VMS or IBM/360 system. The other day I was at the customer service counter of Walmart. I could see into someone's office, and there was a green terminal window connected to a VMS or IBM/360 system. Look behind the counter when you're at the check-in, or at the gate of an airport and likewise the airlines are all running VMS or IBM/360.
I don't even blink if someone is running WindowsXP based anything.
I fiddled a bit with BASIC growing up, and I took 2 intro C++ courses in university, but I'm not a CS grad, or programmer by trade, but for the past 8 years I've been tinkering with AutoIt for almost all of my programming needs. For better or worse it has a BASIC like structure (though there is no GOTO), and it's purely interpreted, but they make input and output dead simple with MsgBox() and InputBox() commands.
You can scrape data out of, or put data into the clipboard with ease, and you can scrape data out of existing windows, or put data into existing windows. This makes it easy to make a small program that acts as "glue" to automate a real application do something useful. Little by little you can build something more and more complex. I've done TCP programming with it, I got it to scrape data out of a window and create a CSV log where the functionality didn't exist, you can even build real, more complicated GUI's with relative ease.
...might consider upgrading to something exotic, like AutoIt, someday, but I've been saying that for four years now...
I'm not a Programmer by trade. But for what I've done, it's almost exclusively been in AutoIT. It seems like an easy way to glue together applications. In addition to dozens of small home projects, I've even created applications for work which will audit open programs / files, their status, and SFTP them to a central server where the results from multiple computers are compiled.
People might balk at the Basic like syntax, but it's much better than the atrocious AutoHotKey syntax. The included help file is really detailed, Scite environment good, and forum help / UDFs real useful.
cygwin is a steaming pile of shit and should never be installed on anything you care about.
My biggest issue with Cygwin is bringing dependency hell to Windows.
Applications ported to Windows via Cygwin rely on cygwin1.dll (I'm thinking standalone applications, not the pure Cygwin Environment).
Only one instance of a DLL can be loaded in RAM, so if two Cygwin applications rely on different versions of cygwin1.dll, one will fail if loaded at the same time. Why can they not version the DLL or something (cygwin45.DLL)? Or not rely on Dynamic Linking? The DLL is always included with the application, and installed in the application folder, so it's not even like it's space savings by relying on a shared 3 MB file.
You mean use?
Man! I wish I had a mod point to use this upward.
FTFY.
The dedicated ebook reader is for people who - you guessed it - read books.
Thats it. My wife is on her second kindle, and she was happy with the first one, I just couldn't think of another Christmas gift and figured she'd like the paperwhite.
The sales rate may be that the E-readers simply are very good products with a much longer use cycle. They don't get OS updates, or need new features. They do what they do, and do it well, and you can read books today perfectly fine on a first generation EReader.
Yup! The tech industry is very much about "ZOMG! Need new features *nomnom*", but e-books make very good appliances. Much like how my 10 year old slow cooker is just fine, my 7 year old car gets me to work just fine, and my 8 year old LCD TV is just fine (who needs a smart TV when I can just plug in a Chromecast), ebooks try to be as simple as their 500 year old predecessor "the book". They can store a digital file and display it on an easy to read, low power eink display. What is there to improve?
My mom loves her Kobo. When travelling she doesn't have to worry about carrying around books she finished reading, the e-ink screen is easy on the eyes, and she doesn't have to charge it during the whole trip (unlike her tablet or phone). While borrowing books from the library is great (don't take up any additional physical space, and don't have to dead head them to return), the requisite "Adobe Digital Editions" leaves a lot to be desired.
In the minds of the utility, by getting customers to shift usage off of peak demand times, or lower the total demand, they don't need to spend money to upgrade generating or transmission / distribution capacity, which is why their billing scheme encourages it.
Where else would I go to if I just wanted to aggregate tech news?
You don't have to answer that. I may find out myself if this gets too silly.
Soylentnews seems to have lots of tech articles, and less fluff.
Hacker News is another.
Interesting. This supports the argument about Google car-accidents not being at fault, yet contributing due to driving like a slow confused grandma. Yes if you're rear ended you're not "at fault", but driving unpredictably slower than the flow of traffic is not safe, defensive driving.
I see a huge potential for assistance driving technology (collision avoidance, taking over if you fall asleep), but I still think the utopia of a network of unowned, automated Uber drivers is a long, long time off.
Detroit has been deteriorating since the 50's. It's unreasonable to expect buildings and water infrastructure that old to be retrofitted with new technology when the city is broke.
You're talking about a city that will let abandoned buildings burn because their fire service is broke.
Did you know that car makers push out a new version, only slightly different, annually? Companies who make golf clubs, also push out new versions at least annually. And companies who make TVs, they also do this.
For most models, the car is essentially identical for about 5 years before the platform is completely re-engineered. Usually it's just minor aesthetics, or features, and bug patches in the interim. And the car is usually fully supported for at least 10 years.
On the golf clubs, as a non-golfer (only golfed 4 times in my life) I find this hilarious. The 2015 models will be outrageously expensive compared to the 2014 models. As if golf club technology actually changed that much in a year, especially for someone non-pro. It's not even like a car where it will deteriorate just sitting there. And usually the golfers will go on about how great the weight of the club is, talk about non-nonsensical technique tips, and basically be not much better than I am with the crappy 20 year old rental clubs at the course.
On TV's, they are so generic I'm surprised they put any effort into minor model revisions.
Hush! You'll get APK going about his hosts file.
What about Steve Jobs vs. Android?
"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this,"
Excel did the job just fine until the ribbon UI came and MS decided that all those useless icons are more worth than the cells in spreadsheet. And since the file-menu started opening the full-screen crap, it was time for me to move on to alternatives which actually are now better than the Excel itself. After ms-office started using only two shades of grey as its UI, many are really forced to move the alternatives, as the UI is really too uncomfortable to use for a day.
The ribbon in 2007/2010 occupies the same amount of space as the default toolbars in 2003. 2013 does increase the size a bit. However Double-click the tab names, or press Ctrl+F1 and they will collapse down.
I do think once getting over the initial learning curve, the ribbon is more intuitive than menus/toolbars.
Plus you have to put them somewhere, and it would be a less than ideal path to try to minimize noise having it spread out over 8 fuses.
The real question is would they make this available to regular 8.1 users who aren't entirely comfortable about jumping to Windows 10 right now?
Doubt it. Since they essentially abandoned RT users (no Windows 10), they are giving all 3 of them this as a consolation prize. If you haven't noticed by the update icon / nags, they really want Windows 7/8.1 users to upgrade to 10 so they can say "look at how many users are running 10! Fastest adopted OS in history!"
Classic shell can give Windows 8.1 a usable start menu.
I'm always surprised by sales. I know in theory a company can't make any money without sales and marketing to provide customers, but as a supplier and customer, most of the salesguys I meet are idiots.
As a supplier, I was on new hire training with a few sales guys from our company, and I was amazed at how clueless they were about our products. I don't even work hands on with finished products and I know more than them.
As a customer, when I reach out to a supplier for help at work I find:
-Their "outside sales" guy is basically a fucking idiot. No clue about their product line, doesn't even wine and dine me. I don't even know why his position exists.
-Their "Inside sales" guy is good if all I want is to give him exact manufacturer part numbers to quote, so that I can get a PO issued. He creates quotes, but also has no product knowledge.
-Their "Product Specialists" generally have less of an idea than I do. It's pretty bad when you reach out to a "specialist" with questions and they know less than you. They also have no idea what it's like in the real world. No we're not going to spend $500,000 to replace a 5 year old piece of equipment with the "new and shiny" just because it's "new and shiny" with no functional differences.
The largest surface area of attack on Windows (and any OS) for a while has been through the web browser, not the base OS itself. While the OS isn't receiving updates:
-Chrome is still updating and supporting XP till the end of the year
-Firefox is continuing to support XP, I see no mention of a EOL for it
-Adobe Flash is supporting XP (I hate Flash, but it's a major source of in the wild exploits)
-For PDF I don't care what Adobe supports since it's a major source of in the Wild exploits, but PDF-Xchange viewer supports XP, and Sumatra PDF works if you want bare bones PDF capabilities.
-Java is not supported, but thankfully not normally a critical must-have so it can generally be ignored.
-Ad blockers will avoid a lot of malicious malware distributed through legitimate ad networks, as well as confusing ads on download sites that mislead users to download malicious software
-MSE dropped XP, but I know Symantec at work still supports XP clients. AVG free still supports XP
-Though not "legal" a simple registry edit will allow XP PCs to continue to get updates intended for XP embedded POS Ready systems until 2019.
I'm not encouraging anyone to run XP, just really on really crappy computers that can't run anything newer.
With the chromecast, you have to count the power use of the device to control it too.
A cellphone uses what? 2 Watts while active? Once you make you selection in Netflix, you can actually power down your phone as the Chromecast is talking direct to Netflix servers at that point.
Windows update wouldn't find any driver, which is why I manually loaded Windows 2000 drivers for the video card. The card is so old and hopeless that MS update assumed no one would use it in Windows 7.
One feature that XPDM video drivers has that WDDM drivers does not, is the ability to do fullscreen console windows. So XPDM drivers, loaded in Vista or 7 allow full screen console windows, while not allowing Aero. The same graphics card, if loaded with WDDM drivers, allow Aero, but not full screen console.
The average US power rate is 12.22 cents/kWh. There are an average of 730 hours in a month, so an average cost of $89.21/kWMonth
$5/mth is 0.056kW, or 56 Watts. That means the console is using an average of 56 watts over the month. This chart suggests an average of 80W between PS4 and XB1 when streaming 1080, and negligible when idle. That means the console is being used 17 hours per day, the console is faulty, or the poster is lying (or excluding the TV / stereo power usage).
I'm surprised these devices use so much power. I'm pretty sure my Chromecast uses less than 5W while streaming Netflix.
For me personally, XCode doesn't make a whole lot of sense on a touch screen device with limited screen real-estate. I'd prefer to use a Macbook.
I'll grant you the touchscreen part (though they are offering an overpriced keyboard lid), but not the "limited screen real-estate". They are offering a 12.9" screen. Macbooks have long been offered in a 13.3" size. The iPad will be in a 2732×2048 resolution. I've considered the 11.6" / 12" range to be the minimum for a laptop that could be usable as a real computer (as compared to 10" netbooks). Those 12" laptops would frequently have 1366x768 resolutions. 13"-14" computers are easily usable full time. The iPad Pro's screen is obviously not a limitation. The oversized cellphone apps on it may get in the way, but not the screen.