The DRM module is a black box that can do anything with your computer
Why are you running your browser with privileges that allow it the scope to do anything with your computer? Yes back in the old Windows days everybody ran everything effectively with administrator privileges but
and is legally protected from reverse enginering attempts, so nobody is allowed to know what it does.
So - assuming you just have to view Hollywood's latest rehashed, "reimagined" crap - run it in a VM, sane people have already been doing that with the various existing DRM mechanisms for years. There is no change here.
Also browsers may just secretly sideload the DRM module for "usability" when it isn't explicitly installed. The Chrome devs were caught patching the open source Chromium repo so it would do just that.
Yes of course, because that's what the majority of people are going to want. For the minority who don't want this just fork the repo and remove that code. What good is open source if you're not going to bother actually doing anything with it?
"Trusted" in this case means "trusted by the movie companies to work against the users wishes"
I think you misunderstand what users want: By and large they just want to be able to watch the content. But that's still beside the point, you don't have to use EME or DRM at all if you don't want to.
Where is the right to privacy, absent. Where it the right to the truth, absent. Where is the right to freedom from censorship, absent.
Maybe you should ask yourself what you're doing about that. For all the conspiracy theories about how the established order can censor everybody and control everything the reality is the populist vote has been winning out more than ever, we have President Trump, we have Brexit, why didn't they use their powers of censorship to stop those disruptive forces?
But the thing you're worried about is the standardization of an interface to a module that attempts to enforce copyright (and of course many non-standard ways to do that already exist and have for a long time), if you really are concerned about privacy and just must have access to whatever rehashed, "reimagined" trash Hollywood is pumping out then run it in a sanitized VM, that's already a solved problem and has been for a long time. As for "truth" I don't think you'll get much of that from Hollywood, that's much more likely to come from what is published freely and often under open Creative Commons licensing.
thats the whole point.. a plugin architecture to provide binary only shit that does something you don't know and you need to pay for to be part of
Not sure where you're getting the "pay" idea from but are you unfamiliar with existing plugin architectures that exist in browsers to provide binary plugins? Because they've been around for a very long time.
Except I can fork any browser supporting N/PPAPI and expect Flash DRM to work. For EME, the DRM module providers only allow 'trusted' browsers to run their module. The two systems are worlds apart.
Yes but the point was to not use the EME standard and since EME is just an interface to a DRM module then if that DRM module isn't present then EME isn't going to work so whether the browser has it or not results in the same outcome.
I'm not sure what you're driving at here, you want DRM but without EME? Or you want EME and DRM but in a "non-trusted" browser?
That's until they get the bright idea that the DRM module being kept on the user's end at all is no longer acceptable, and now you're stuck waiting for whatever proprietary DRM nonsense they've cooked up to load and process inside of your browser.
Huh? What are you talking about? What does that have to do with EME?
To add insult to injury, I can just imagine some fuckups will implement a UI that will sit there and grind your machine until you enter in your credentials and payment info, with a nice fat chance of it crashing with some random error.
So use one of the many open source browsers and make it do what you want. You're being all doom-and-gloom about something completely different to EME that you made up that also has a problem that you also made up. The OP asked about EME, I gave an answer, it's not a generic answer that applies to anything you might invent.
Are there vendors, browsers or developers who have committed to not adopt this standard?
Does it matter? EME is just an interface to a DRM module, if you don't have a DRM module then the content won't play. Just like if you want to watch content that requires Adobe Flash to play and you don't have Flash installed the content won't play.
This gets trotted out during every new console pre-hype, and post-release is always shown to be false.
I explained quite clearly the reasons and they most certainly are not false. I get that you might not like the facts but your feelings do not change them.
At this point consoles are basically just x86 pc's.
So? Developers aren't writing for a general purpose PC, they're writing for a specific hardware target. Whether that is x86-based or not is irrelevant.
Even common pcs really dont have huge amounts of overhead
Of course they have huge amounts of overhead, they also have a myriad of bottlenecks that developers cannot know about so therefore they cannot optimize for GPU architecture, speed, number of cores, amount of memory, speed of memory or CPU architecture, speed, number of cores, amount of system memory, speed of system memory, speed of system bus, etc, etc... The suggestion that these things are incidental is just completely ignorant.
and in the end the people developing the games are still running through various apis to abstract the functionality anyway.
And that is precisely why PC games are less efficient at exploiting hardware, features have to be abstracted away which creates overhead and inefficiencies. The features of specific system configurations are most often not used.
Its always 'a console can dedicate 100% of its hardware to the game so it has to run better than a pc!'
Wrong. Obviously you weren't reading because I didn't say or imply that whatsoever, even if we assume the lightest possible OS configuration with no other unnecessary processes running the performance factors I pointed out still exist and contribute significantly to the inefficiencies of the platform.
yet every single time the console comes out and its performance is basically that of a standard gaming pc from 2 years earlier.
Except it isn't, a PC with that same hardware performs far worse because of the abstractions and the lack of optimization for the above mentioned factors. I explained that pretty clearly in my post here and you just coming out and saying "nuh-uh" without any attempt to refute what I said, any evidence or even any explanations does seem to demonstrate your limited understanding here.
Another practical example is the use of VR. You're not getting anywhere near the same experience on a PC with the equivalent Radeon HD 7850 that you get on the PS4 with respect to VR. Why? Well it's for exactly the reasons I outlined above.
If you think optimization can make a $500 game console do what a $2000 PC can't you are a credulous idiot.
I don't believe I made such a claim. Also I think the idea of comparing this at a monetary level is beyond stupid, we all know the common console model is to sell at a loss where PCs aren't but more to the point a PC has a much broader set of functionality than a console so it obviously costs more, indeed there are plenty of $2000+ computers that are far poorer performing in a gaming context than a modern console.
Currently even Nvidia's GTX1080Ti can barely run current games at 4k with high settings.
PCs have a huge amount of overhead and a myriad of potential system bottlenecks that developers cannot know of in advance and even more important than a high fps is a consistent fps and it is much easier to achieve that when you know precisely the system you are targeting. Then there is the fact that the vast majority of the target audience does not have a GTX1080Ti so the game is not optimized for that GPU, it is optimized for a generic set of functionality (an OpenGL or DirectX version) that is most broadly available to the target audience. There's no value in optimizing for say a Pascal GPU when only a comparatively tiny part of your market has them, instead you optimize for a much older set of generic functionality and the performance boost of having a newer GPU comes almost exclusively from improvements like a smaller process, faster clockspeeds and more/faster memory. Sure they might have an option in the settings to render the post-blurred buffers some screen-space effect at 4k instead of upscaled 1080p but when you're sitting 6 feet from your TV playing a fast-paced shooter do you really notice?
So console developers can optimize things like their rendering engine for a specific set of system functionality, they don't need to worry about scaling up or down or being portable because porting the game to a different system requires a renderer rewrite anyway. You can't just whack a GTX1080Ti in any system and expect it to perform the same and even if you manage to hit some sweet spot of hardware and software equilibrium with respect to bottlenecks is there any game that is going to effectively exploit that system design? Probably not.
Considering that that GPU alone is double the price of a current Xbox, I doubt MS are going to put similar tech out in a console any time soon.
As above, they don't need to. PC games won't effectively utilize the features of that GPU for a few years anyway.
That hasn't been true for at least 1, more likely 2, generations of consoles now.
What makes you think that?
With MS trying to achieve compatibility between XB and PC, and with more and more games being produced that have to run on very different platforms, from XB to PS to PC
That doesn't mean you're running the same code on all those platforms. Yes you can write UWP applications that can be run on PC and XBox but you think the AAA studios are writing their games as UWP to run on PC and XBox? XBox One hardware is not the baseline for these games, they run on older PC hardware too because they use different rendering engines and graphics APIs, just like how PC, XBox, PS and Nintendo's offerings are all different. There's a really rampant misconception that because we have cross platform games it's just all the same code so there's no optimization for any one platform, that is obviously false to anybody who knows anything about these platforms.
with 4k TVs that's going to be a thing of the past as well.
4k makes sense for gaming when you're sitting 3 feet from your display, ala PC gaming. Not so much when you're 8 feet away on the couch playing console games.
So what will be left is that game makers have to optimize for consoles to make it halfway playable on the ancient hardware, while being able to cut corners with the PC version where they can simply tell their customers that they need a better rig to play their latest and greatest.
They optimize for consoles and tell PC gamers to throw hardware at the problem because of the myriad of unknowns in the millions of PC hardware configurations, that's always been the case.
Platform specific optimization isn't the magic fix you seem to think it is. Console hardware is always underpowered, most games perform badly hitting 30fps at best.
Actually it is and the important thing is consistent framerate.
People complain about consoles being underpowered because guess what... they are underpowered.
But they just aren't, it's just not necessary to throw more powerful hardware at the games. It's certainly not as though we're seeing these great innovations in PC games vs consoles by virtue of the higher theoretical power, ultimately it ends up just being higher resolution and more AA. Which often is not noticable on consoles because you're sitting further from your TV than you are your PC display.
No matter how many configurations there are, they still spec the game based on a majority of systems, what everyone is expected to handle.
Right so instead of exploiting specific architectural features of the GPU for efficient processing it's usually just a generic implementation because you need to target millions of different configurations with various different capabilities. Whereas on the console since you only have 1 or 2 targets you get the results by optimizing a platform-specific solution rather than having your customers throw expensive hardware at a generic solution.
I don't understand how people can still be surprised by this, console hardware always has a theoretical performance deficit compared to PCs because on a console it is more effectively utilized. This has been the case for pretty much the entire history of consoles and every time a new one is announced we see the same surprised comments about how the processing power isn't cutting edge... it doesn't have to be.
It's already underpowered compared to last year's GPUs
But you're talking about GPUs that end up underutilized in PCs due to the need to support millions of configurations. For the price of a highend gaming GPU you could get and xbox and a playstation.
Rendering realistic graphics is always a compromise between quality and performance. The real question is when they do things like render post processing effects at lower resolution and then upscale them do you even notice? Probably not. The ability to optimize for a VERY small target of hardware configurations (3 maybe?) and capabilities rather than the millions you have on PCs means consoles don't need to have as much power as PCs to achieve the same performance and quality because it isn't wasted on higher overhead APIs and lack of optimization. You know how many CPUs you have, how fast they are and how much cache they have, you know what functionality is supported in your GPU, how many processors it has, how fast they are, how much memory it has and how fast that memory is, you know what the system bus speed is, how much system memory you have, how fast that system memory is, etc, etc... and thus you can optimize for it much more effectively.
No, Microsoft made it unprofitable to sell laptops running Linux.
Selling netbooks running Linux was naturally going to be unprofitable. Linux may be free of licensing cost but it isn't free of cost in general, companies can't afford to support Linux if they're not going to charge at least some cost for the privilege of running it or else monetize it somewhere else like what Google has done with Chromebooks.
This idea that the failure of Linux netbooks is down to a Microsoft conspiracy just doesn't hold water, we all know Microsoft's biggest OEM partners have shipped (and continue to ship) Linux-based systems for a long time (HP and Dell for example offer many laptops and desktops with Ubuntu and RedHat options) and also Linux-based systems in the form of Chromebooks (Samsung, Dell, HP, etc). Netbooks were crappy devices that were superseded by tablets and smartphones (and to an extent Chromebooks) that do a much better job.
Fully supported Linux computers should be more expensive as this is an investment in improving the operating system, if you're just taking it as a no-cost option then of course the experience is going to be crap and unprofitable going forward, you need to give something back.
Not sure how you come to that conclusion, I can't think of a place more obvious to look for such things than their website. And if you were to look at their website you would find there is plenty to choose from (yes in Australia). If the bar is set too high at the idea of hitting "customize" when buying a computer then there isn't much hope of Linux on the desktop in the consumer space.
Not having to pay the Redmont tax is an even bigger deal on a cheap laptop.
Well somebody has to do the development work to ensure compatibility, it's not just a matter of taking some hardware and whacking on the latest Ubuntu release. That's something anybody's been able to do for the better part of 2 decades.
The idea that people should choose Linux because it is cheaper is stupid, if anything they should be more expensive and used to fund quality development of the operating system.
But the selection of low end laptops seems to be rather a lot poorer then when I last bought one around 5 years ago. And so does the selection of laptops with Linux or without Windows, come to think of it.
On the low end you have laptops like Chromebooks and plenty of cheap Windows offerings (you can't just take away the Windows license cost by putting Ubuntu on, you just end up with a laptop where simple stuff like hibernate doesn't work properly). And there are more options now than ever in terms of laptops with Linux, Dell now offer Linux on systems across their range, HP offer it on many systems too and there are vendors like System76 that have a larger range than ever before.
Hence the reason it's good. Should they not have implemented it just because DOA platforms like webOS and Sailfish had it? Nobody is suggesting this is some never-before-seen innovative.
Not really. When you look at internationalized iOS for example the back button still ends up in the top left with an arrow going left. Same thing with swipe gestures on laptop touchpads, swipe gestures in browsers and browser back/forward buttons.
Moto's implementation sounds better to me. That said I'm not an Android user, I don't mind the way the iPhone does it but once they introduced the iPhone 7 I was hoping for some sort of back gesture support like this in the home button rather than the annoying tiny back "button" you get appearing in the top corner of the status bar. This seems like a much better solution assuming the gesture detection is reliable...seems like Google should have been on the ball with standardizing something like this.
My grand total of app expenditures for all of 2016 was ZERO.
I haven't even spent a dime on Pokemon Go and I play it daily.
Is that really something to be proud of, though? You spent $500+ on an iPhone, and then rejoice in not paying anything for the software you use daily?
Most of the software you use daily is included in that initial outlay for the phone (phone app, camera app, etc). As far as software like Pokemon Go what do you want him/her to do? It's free.
I'm supremely entertained by all the abuse MS heaps on those poor suckers who put up with said abuse by continuing to use MS products..
I use Windows 10 for some workstation tasks at work (simply because capable applications are not available on other platforms) and at home for gaming. I turn off the one-line start menu suggestion and turn off the typing/voice feedback in privacy settings and I'm curious: What is the specific "abuse" you're referring to?
I hear a lot of hyperbole but not a lot of evidence.
Wrong, what you stated was that you were asking a rhetorical question, something you clearly fail to understand:
"A common example is the question "Can't you do anything right?" This question, when posed, is intended not to ask about the listener's ability, but rather to insinuate the listener's lack of ability."
So when I say Do you really need to keep up this display of ignorance just because you like to buttfuck your mom? I'm obviously insinuating something in that rhetorical question right there just like you did with your rhetorical question.
Slashdot Mirror
The DRM module is a black box that can do anything with your computer
Why are you running your browser with privileges that allow it the scope to do anything with your computer? Yes back in the old Windows days everybody ran everything effectively with administrator privileges but
and is legally protected from reverse enginering attempts, so nobody is allowed to know what it does.
So - assuming you just have to view Hollywood's latest rehashed, "reimagined" crap - run it in a VM, sane people have already been doing that with the various existing DRM mechanisms for years. There is no change here.
Also browsers may just secretly sideload the DRM module for "usability" when it isn't explicitly installed. The Chrome devs were caught patching the open source Chromium repo so it would do just that.
Yes of course, because that's what the majority of people are going to want. For the minority who don't want this just fork the repo and remove that code. What good is open source if you're not going to bother actually doing anything with it?
"Trusted" in this case means "trusted by the movie companies to work against the users wishes"
I think you misunderstand what users want: By and large they just want to be able to watch the content. But that's still beside the point, you don't have to use EME or DRM at all if you don't want to.
Where is the right to privacy, absent. Where it the right to the truth, absent. Where is the right to freedom from censorship, absent.
Maybe you should ask yourself what you're doing about that. For all the conspiracy theories about how the established order can censor everybody and control everything the reality is the populist vote has been winning out more than ever, we have President Trump, we have Brexit, why didn't they use their powers of censorship to stop those disruptive forces?
But the thing you're worried about is the standardization of an interface to a module that attempts to enforce copyright (and of course many non-standard ways to do that already exist and have for a long time), if you really are concerned about privacy and just must have access to whatever rehashed, "reimagined" trash Hollywood is pumping out then run it in a sanitized VM, that's already a solved problem and has been for a long time. As for "truth" I don't think you'll get much of that from Hollywood, that's much more likely to come from what is published freely and often under open Creative Commons licensing.
well actually, he might have not known what he was talking about since.. ...since the EME IS EXACTLY THAT ALREADY.
It absolutely is not that at all. You're wrong on both counts, the DRM module is kept on the user's end and could you link me to the UI that will sit there and grind your machine until you enter in your credentials and payment info please?
thats the whole point.. a plugin architecture to provide binary only shit that does something you don't know and you need to pay for to be part of
Not sure where you're getting the "pay" idea from but are you unfamiliar with existing plugin architectures that exist in browsers to provide binary plugins? Because they've been around for a very long time.
Except I can fork any browser supporting N/PPAPI and expect Flash DRM to work. For EME, the DRM module providers only allow 'trusted' browsers to run their module. The two systems are worlds apart.
Yes but the point was to not use the EME standard and since EME is just an interface to a DRM module then if that DRM module isn't present then EME isn't going to work so whether the browser has it or not results in the same outcome.
I'm not sure what you're driving at here, you want DRM but without EME? Or you want EME and DRM but in a "non-trusted" browser?
That's until they get the bright idea that the DRM module being kept on the user's end at all is no longer acceptable, and now you're stuck waiting for whatever proprietary DRM nonsense they've cooked up to load and process inside of your browser.
Huh? What are you talking about? What does that have to do with EME?
To add insult to injury, I can just imagine some fuckups will implement a UI that will sit there and grind your machine until you enter in your credentials and payment info, with a nice fat chance of it crashing with some random error.
So use one of the many open source browsers and make it do what you want. You're being all doom-and-gloom about something completely different to EME that you made up that also has a problem that you also made up. The OP asked about EME, I gave an answer, it's not a generic answer that applies to anything you might invent.
Are there vendors, browsers or developers who have committed to not adopt this standard?
Does it matter? EME is just an interface to a DRM module, if you don't have a DRM module then the content won't play. Just like if you want to watch content that requires Adobe Flash to play and you don't have Flash installed the content won't play.
This gets trotted out during every new console pre-hype, and post-release is always shown to be false.
I explained quite clearly the reasons and they most certainly are not false. I get that you might not like the facts but your feelings do not change them.
At this point consoles are basically just x86 pc's.
So? Developers aren't writing for a general purpose PC, they're writing for a specific hardware target. Whether that is x86-based or not is irrelevant.
Even common pcs really dont have huge amounts of overhead
Of course they have huge amounts of overhead, they also have a myriad of bottlenecks that developers cannot know about so therefore they cannot optimize for GPU architecture, speed, number of cores, amount of memory, speed of memory or CPU architecture, speed, number of cores, amount of system memory, speed of system memory, speed of system bus, etc, etc... The suggestion that these things are incidental is just completely ignorant.
and in the end the people developing the games are still running through various apis to abstract the functionality anyway.
And that is precisely why PC games are less efficient at exploiting hardware, features have to be abstracted away which creates overhead and inefficiencies. The features of specific system configurations are most often not used.
Its always 'a console can dedicate 100% of its hardware to the game so it has to run better than a pc!'
Wrong. Obviously you weren't reading because I didn't say or imply that whatsoever, even if we assume the lightest possible OS configuration with no other unnecessary processes running the performance factors I pointed out still exist and contribute significantly to the inefficiencies of the platform.
yet every single time the console comes out and its performance is basically that of a standard gaming pc from 2 years earlier.
Except it isn't, a PC with that same hardware performs far worse because of the abstractions and the lack of optimization for the above mentioned factors. I explained that pretty clearly in my post here and you just coming out and saying "nuh-uh" without any attempt to refute what I said, any evidence or even any explanations does seem to demonstrate your limited understanding here.
Another practical example is the use of VR. You're not getting anywhere near the same experience on a PC with the equivalent Radeon HD 7850 that you get on the PS4 with respect to VR. Why? Well it's for exactly the reasons I outlined above.
If you think optimization can make a $500 game console do what a $2000 PC can't you are a credulous idiot.
I don't believe I made such a claim. Also I think the idea of comparing this at a monetary level is beyond stupid, we all know the common console model is to sell at a loss where PCs aren't but more to the point a PC has a much broader set of functionality than a console so it obviously costs more, indeed there are plenty of $2000+ computers that are far poorer performing in a gaming context than a modern console.
Currently even Nvidia's GTX1080Ti can barely run current games at 4k with high settings.
PCs have a huge amount of overhead and a myriad of potential system bottlenecks that developers cannot know of in advance and even more important than a high fps is a consistent fps and it is much easier to achieve that when you know precisely the system you are targeting. Then there is the fact that the vast majority of the target audience does not have a GTX1080Ti so the game is not optimized for that GPU, it is optimized for a generic set of functionality (an OpenGL or DirectX version) that is most broadly available to the target audience. There's no value in optimizing for say a Pascal GPU when only a comparatively tiny part of your market has them, instead you optimize for a much older set of generic functionality and the performance boost of having a newer GPU comes almost exclusively from improvements like a smaller process, faster clockspeeds and more/faster memory. Sure they might have an option in the settings to render the post-blurred buffers some screen-space effect at 4k instead of upscaled 1080p but when you're sitting 6 feet from your TV playing a fast-paced shooter do you really notice?
So console developers can optimize things like their rendering engine for a specific set of system functionality, they don't need to worry about scaling up or down or being portable because porting the game to a different system requires a renderer rewrite anyway. You can't just whack a GTX1080Ti in any system and expect it to perform the same and even if you manage to hit some sweet spot of hardware and software equilibrium with respect to bottlenecks is there any game that is going to effectively exploit that system design? Probably not.
Considering that that GPU alone is double the price of a current Xbox, I doubt MS are going to put similar tech out in a console any time soon.
As above, they don't need to. PC games won't effectively utilize the features of that GPU for a few years anyway.
That hasn't been true for at least 1, more likely 2, generations of consoles now.
What makes you think that?
With MS trying to achieve compatibility between XB and PC, and with more and more games being produced that have to run on very different platforms, from XB to PS to PC
That doesn't mean you're running the same code on all those platforms. Yes you can write UWP applications that can be run on PC and XBox but you think the AAA studios are writing their games as UWP to run on PC and XBox? XBox One hardware is not the baseline for these games, they run on older PC hardware too because they use different rendering engines and graphics APIs, just like how PC, XBox, PS and Nintendo's offerings are all different. There's a really rampant misconception that because we have cross platform games it's just all the same code so there's no optimization for any one platform, that is obviously false to anybody who knows anything about these platforms.
with 4k TVs that's going to be a thing of the past as well.
4k makes sense for gaming when you're sitting 3 feet from your display, ala PC gaming. Not so much when you're 8 feet away on the couch playing console games.
So what will be left is that game makers have to optimize for consoles to make it halfway playable on the ancient hardware, while being able to cut corners with the PC version where they can simply tell their customers that they need a better rig to play their latest and greatest.
They optimize for consoles and tell PC gamers to throw hardware at the problem because of the myriad of unknowns in the millions of PC hardware configurations, that's always been the case.
Platform specific optimization isn't the magic fix you seem to think it is. Console hardware is always underpowered, most games perform badly hitting 30fps at best.
Actually it is and the important thing is consistent framerate.
People complain about consoles being underpowered because guess what... they are underpowered.
But they just aren't, it's just not necessary to throw more powerful hardware at the games. It's certainly not as though we're seeing these great innovations in PC games vs consoles by virtue of the higher theoretical power, ultimately it ends up just being higher resolution and more AA. Which often is not noticable on consoles because you're sitting further from your TV than you are your PC display.
No matter how many configurations there are, they still spec the game based on a majority of systems, what everyone is expected to handle.
Right so instead of exploiting specific architectural features of the GPU for efficient processing it's usually just a generic implementation because you need to target millions of different configurations with various different capabilities. Whereas on the console since you only have 1 or 2 targets you get the results by optimizing a platform-specific solution rather than having your customers throw expensive hardware at a generic solution.
I don't understand how people can still be surprised by this, console hardware always has a theoretical performance deficit compared to PCs because on a console it is more effectively utilized. This has been the case for pretty much the entire history of consoles and every time a new one is announced we see the same surprised comments about how the processing power isn't cutting edge ... it doesn't have to be.
It's already underpowered compared to last year's GPUs
But you're talking about GPUs that end up underutilized in PCs due to the need to support millions of configurations. For the price of a highend gaming GPU you could get and xbox and a playstation.
Rendering realistic graphics is always a compromise between quality and performance. The real question is when they do things like render post processing effects at lower resolution and then upscale them do you even notice? Probably not. The ability to optimize for a VERY small target of hardware configurations (3 maybe?) and capabilities rather than the millions you have on PCs means consoles don't need to have as much power as PCs to achieve the same performance and quality because it isn't wasted on higher overhead APIs and lack of optimization. You know how many CPUs you have, how fast they are and how much cache they have, you know what functionality is supported in your GPU, how many processors it has, how fast they are, how much memory it has and how fast that memory is, you know what the system bus speed is, how much system memory you have, how fast that system memory is, etc, etc ... and thus you can optimize for it much more effectively.
I kind of feel that 2016 is a bit more bloated than 2012 R2 when you install it "with GUI"
What's the resource usage difference?
No, Microsoft made it unprofitable to sell laptops running Linux.
Selling netbooks running Linux was naturally going to be unprofitable. Linux may be free of licensing cost but it isn't free of cost in general, companies can't afford to support Linux if they're not going to charge at least some cost for the privilege of running it or else monetize it somewhere else like what Google has done with Chromebooks.
This idea that the failure of Linux netbooks is down to a Microsoft conspiracy just doesn't hold water, we all know Microsoft's biggest OEM partners have shipped (and continue to ship) Linux-based systems for a long time (HP and Dell for example offer many laptops and desktops with Ubuntu and RedHat options) and also Linux-based systems in the form of Chromebooks (Samsung, Dell, HP, etc). Netbooks were crappy devices that were superseded by tablets and smartphones (and to an extent Chromebooks) that do a much better job.
Fully supported Linux computers should be more expensive as this is an investment in improving the operating system, if you're just taking it as a no-cost option then of course the experience is going to be crap and unprofitable going forward, you need to give something back.
Not sure how you come to that conclusion, I can't think of a place more obvious to look for such things than their website. And if you were to look at their website you would find there is plenty to choose from (yes in Australia). If the bar is set too high at the idea of hitting "customize" when buying a computer then there isn't much hope of Linux on the desktop in the consumer space.
They offer it on desktops too.
Not having to pay the Redmont tax is an even bigger deal on a cheap laptop.
Well somebody has to do the development work to ensure compatibility, it's not just a matter of taking some hardware and whacking on the latest Ubuntu release. That's something anybody's been able to do for the better part of 2 decades.
The idea that people should choose Linux because it is cheaper is stupid, if anything they should be more expensive and used to fund quality development of the operating system.
But the selection of low end laptops seems to be rather a lot poorer then when I last bought one around 5 years ago. And so does the selection of laptops with Linux or without Windows, come to think of it.
On the low end you have laptops like Chromebooks and plenty of cheap Windows offerings (you can't just take away the Windows license cost by putting Ubuntu on, you just end up with a laptop where simple stuff like hibernate doesn't work properly). And there are more options now than ever in terms of laptops with Linux, Dell now offer Linux on systems across their range, HP offer it on many systems too and there are vendors like System76 that have a larger range than ever before.
Hence the reason it's good. Should they not have implemented it just because DOA platforms like webOS and Sailfish had it? Nobody is suggesting this is some never-before-seen innovative.
Not really. When you look at internationalized iOS for example the back button still ends up in the top left with an arrow going left. Same thing with swipe gestures on laptop touchpads, swipe gestures in browsers and browser back/forward buttons.
Moto's implementation sounds better to me. That said I'm not an Android user, I don't mind the way the iPhone does it but once they introduced the iPhone 7 I was hoping for some sort of back gesture support like this in the home button rather than the annoying tiny back "button" you get appearing in the top corner of the status bar. This seems like a much better solution assuming the gesture detection is reliable...seems like Google should have been on the ball with standardizing something like this.
Is that really something to be proud of, though? You spent $500+ on an iPhone, and then rejoice in not paying anything for the software you use daily?
Most of the software you use daily is included in that initial outlay for the phone (phone app, camera app, etc). As far as software like Pokemon Go what do you want him/her to do? It's free.
I'm supremely entertained by all the abuse MS heaps on those poor suckers who put up with said abuse by continuing to use MS products..
I use Windows 10 for some workstation tasks at work (simply because capable applications are not available on other platforms) and at home for gaming. I turn off the one-line start menu suggestion and turn off the typing/voice feedback in privacy settings and I'm curious: What is the specific "abuse" you're referring to?
I hear a lot of hyperbole but not a lot of evidence.
Wrong, what you stated was that you were asking a rhetorical question, something you clearly fail to understand:
"A common example is the question "Can't you do anything right?" This question, when posed, is intended not to ask about the listener's ability, but rather to insinuate the listener's lack of ability."
So when I say Do you really need to keep up this display of ignorance just because you like to buttfuck your mom? I'm obviously insinuating something in that rhetorical question right there just like you did with your rhetorical question.