This is a problem inherent to the streaming, or more generally "service" model. You don't "own" anything. Not even access to the files. If at any point company decides to not offer the service to you, they are free to do so and you will lose access to everything when that happens.
Ah, you're not talking about video ENCODING. You're talking about video CREATION. Specifically significant post-processing not dissimilar to what was mentioned much higher in the thread as one of the applications that require high amounts of memory - photoshop. Something you apparently failed to notice in your perverse crusade to label me as "primarily porn user".
You should consider getting your terminology straight if you want a discussion on slashdot. Especially since your issue was covered something around 10 or 12 posts ago by this "primarily porn user".
Video encoding is what you do when you format shift, or do the actual encoding pass on the video that has all the effects added in. Video rendering is indeed the process which can greatly benefit from a lot of memory, advanced caching functions and in some rare cases higher memory throughput as it's the process where initial passes add things like filters and effects to video which can be cached to be cycled over video.
I suggest you get your basic terminology straight before you come back to the discussion.
Steps for ignorant assholes that have a faint grasp on theory and zero on facts, yet like to insult others:
1. Download a popular encoder/decoder such as handbrake http://handbrake.fr/ 2. Download a popular hardware monitor that does real time monitoring of various parts of your system, such as openhardwaremonitor http://openhardwaremonitor.org/ 3. Download process explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx 4. Get any h.264 movie. You can rip one from youtube. 5. Re-encode the video into any other popular standard, ranging from h.264 to divx. Pay attention to usage. Use openhardwaremonitor for specific CPU/GPU load monitoring and process explorer for memory footprint. Optional if you have a decent system: 1. Go into your bios. Slow your memory/FSB down as much as you can. Overclock CPU to get same speed on the slower FSB. 2. Restart the system, try re-encoding with exact same settings. 3. Observe your own ignorance as your performance take little impact. Optional 2: Attempt to do the same in opposite direction, or even insert faster RAM into the system. Note how your performance tanks hard in direct relation to CPU in this case.
Do you know why? Because most encoder/decoder software is optimized properly and doesn't need a huge memory footprint. I like watching anime fluff on the go on my phone, so I routinely re-encode h.264 720p and 1080p video into 360p divx that my phone can run for a long while without killing the battery (it's old enough to lack proper h.264 support). As I have to re-encode routinely, I've done some actual research on how to make the process as speedy as possible. As a result, I ended up buying fastest i5 on the market that was available and essentially slowest memory it would take. Because the main things that need performance that I do are gaming and video encoding. And both are CPU and GPU bound and memory throughput is largely irrelevant as long as its "fast enough not to bottleneck the system" because of it. Criteria which the slowest available memory at the point of buying the CPU met with plenty to spare.
As for your hilarious claims in relation to the original topic of OS "memory optimizations", issue is that data portion that needs high throughput of memory when decoding/encoding is direct and largely uncacheable, meaning that OS optimizations have little to no impact and is mainly dependent on hardware. That's because it contains the actual video. And in most cases, unless you're encoding in fast GPU hardware while using slow system RAM, you'll be bottlenecked by computing power rather then by memory throughput - which is essentially always true on modern PC architechture. And even if you were limited by memory throughput, there is little to nothing that OS optimizations can do to alleviate the problem, as video encoding is largely not cacheable. It needs actual brutal throughput. Memory management in such tasks is typically best left to the application doing the decode/encode anyway as it will handle the specialized stuff much better then generalist optimizations done by the OS.
Now if you excuse me, I need to go back to "surfing for porn". Your remark reminded me that I haven't surfed for porn in years, a revelation that I found surprisingly disturbing.
Cheap android tablets do NOT come with fast NAND flash that is featured in many SSDs.
They come with cheap off the shelf mini-SD or micro-SD built in, or memory from those. We're looking at class 6-class 10 products if we're lucky, class-4 if we're not.
That's about ten times SLOWER then your average desktop HDD.
The reason why they tend to seem "fast" is a combination of lack of hardware sounds/light that people learned to associate with slowness combined with smallness of actual applications and a lot less of OS overhead meaning less things needed to be read and written from permanent storage.
This is indeed correct for bunkers. However the problem is not bunkers. It's artillery in firing positions in the open.
Conventional explosives are far weaker then nuclear weapons at striking against open positions due to much smaller shockwave caused. They can sometimes match a general purpose tactical nuclear weapon when it comes to bunker busting due to using a specially shaped penetrator warhead. It again cannot match a nuke designed for penetration.
Essentially nuclear weapons are significantly better then conventional weapons at causing destruction through explosive expansion simply due to laws of physics.
Incorrect. The "memory intensiveness" of video encoding is low enough that even the lowest and slowest memory on the market is unlikely to meaningfully impact it. It's essentially either CPU or GPU bound at this point.
As a result the factors that impact it are first and foremost software optimization for CPU/GPU, followed by raw power of these units.
You'd need to get some really slow random access memory and a really fast GPU linked to it to get hit by memory bus constraints.
Regardless, my "religious conviction" about speed improvements appears to be largely matched by software industry. There is no lowering of system requirements for 8 over 7, and software generally requires X GB of RAM for XP and X+1GB for 7.
I don't agree with this. UI as is configured in "display options" isn't a part of default configuration that is asked to be reverted to in most cases. I've personally seen a lot of UI changes from default on many corporate machines, ranging from color changes to font changes, to theme changes. These are as easy as selecting display options and selecting a different theme. All of this has been built into windows since 95, so a lot of people use it.
If you actually got a 15% speed improvement on video encoding with same software and drivers on the same machine just on different OS, it's time to either reinstall 7 or start looking for the serious problem in OS causing it to lose that much efficiency at the task that doesn't really benefit from any OS improvements and is pretty much dependent on software used to encode and what it does.
For the record, I know of at least one recorded case where a young guy driving a bike got killed by hitting a wire stretched between two trees across the road at high speed. He basically broke his wind pipe.
The wire was hanged by local festival organizers to block the road, and apparently they didn't mark it clearly enough for someone traveling at high speed in the dark to see. There have also been some cases of local young kids' stupid fad being stretching a rope across walkways where bicycle travel often happens. Though that is usually low enough not to hit driver's neck.
Regardless, I can see that kind of helmet being actually useful. It may not be comfortable enough though, especially at high speeds with significant downforce it would likely create.
Call me back when real life game and applications actually follow the path of benchmarks. Considering the under the hood optimizations and benchmark detection in modern software, I don't think I'll be getting that call any time soon though.
But they cannot inflict significant DAMAGE needed to disable enough artillery before it levels Soul. Which is the problem.
Also, you can call bullshit all you want. Fact is, NATO maintains a significant nuclear deterrent worldwide. Most of it is US, with some being in the hands of UK and France. And another fact is that the current NK trouble started after drills where B-52s were flown near the border, and escalated after B-2 were flown there.
UI isn't really what you'd call bloat if it can be turned off. Classic theme was present in 7 and removed all the "windows transparency and shit" in 7. Natively.
You may not have noticed, but corporations and governments are suffering from a significant credit crunch issues still, as they have been for a while. EU crisis is trucking along, Chinese keep pushing western corporations out of the key markets, US isn't really growing that much, Japan is still messed up from both the decade long stagnation and more recent huge tsunami and so on.
I would suggest that ultimately these factors are far more dangerous to microsoft's bottom line then one release of OS tanking hard. Because people just buy the license for the previous version with their new computer and MS loses exactly nothing. Whereas global economy squeezing its main customers hard actually does cause reduced revenues and profits.
These are pretty much the same kind of PR bullshit claims that were made with most windows releases.
Reality: every version of windows also brought enough new bloat to make it slower then predecessor after accounting for all the "wonderful new features that make it faster".
Essentially you're that idiot that looks at the paper to see plus six minus eight, someone tells him "but hey, this six consists of this wonderful one, amazing two and innovative three. They make the end result completely end up as a net positive!". The fact that eight is still bigger then six and end result is minus two is lost in the ignorance. It's just like the bullshit we got fed about 7 having such wonderful memory management in comparison to XP. Only to find out that every single game that came out for both asked for one extra gigabyte of RAM for 7 in comparison to XP. Because after all the improvements, 7 was still so bloated that it ended up in a net negative. Same goes for eight.
So please, stop quoting marketing bullshit and understand that in the end it's all that it is - marketing bullshit. It's designed to obfuscate reality in pretty image it wants to sell you. And buying this image does in fact make you a stupid person. Because everyone who used windows has stepped on this rake before. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...
Nothing in this world is perfectly secure. Such a thing does not exist. There is merely "secure enough for the task" and "not secure enough for the task". Unpatched XP machine can be made secure enough for most home users with just a few simple steps. These steps will secure the machine even if users goes to warez and porn sites in a regular fashion.
And as has been pointed out before, "going to warez and porn sites" doesn't get you infected if your XP isn't patched. It gets you infected if your browser, or modules used for browsing such as java VM is unsecure. Status of your OS updates is largely irrelevant for such infection vectors. Please understand the difference. You're bait and switching or simply ignorant of the basics here.
In all of your examples, there is no difference between infecting a vanilla XP with zero updates and infecting XP SP3. All software involved (web browser, java VM, adobe reader) are completely independent of ANY software updates microsoft provides. Microsoft ceasing to provide updates will have no impact whatsoever on any of these infection vectors.
The fact that you got modded "informative" instead of "offtopic" says a lot about how current slashdot moderation works. We were talking about (lack of) importance of windows updates, you bait and switch into 3rd party software, and voila - folks who bought the scaremongering without ever thinking how the things REALLY work under the hood mod you informative.
You went WAY off tangent. The original argument was that piracy is somehow more difficult then watching DRM'd services behind paywalls nowadays as to back up the argument that "piracy is about convenience" to be false. The point of the examples was to show that this is in fact not the case - piracy is still extremely simple and convenient, far more then netflix. Yet people still use netflix specifically because the original argument is wrong, and people are in fact willing to jump through hoops to get their stuff legitimately.
Difference obviously being that you still need to do some additional things with netflix, do things like log into it and set up payment and so on. Netflix isn't free, and additional hoops that you will have to jump through to pay and ID yourself are still there.
Things that are an order of magnitude more complex then "start a torrent, pick a file and click stream".
So the original argument doesn't really hold water. The process is perhaps marginally more complex after the set up with torrents if even that.
A lot of modern clients have allowed this for a while. Utorrent allowed this since 3.1.x or so.
Doing this basically starts download sequentially for that file, prioritizes that file over rest of the files in torrent, and once enough of the file is buffered (you can configure how much) it will open it as video stream in the media player that is configured to be default player for streaming on the system.
I don't think it can get any easier then modern torrenting. You search for a show on piratebay, hit download, then go to files in the torrent software, pick the episode you want to watch and click "stream".
In most case, XP can be easily secured for a home machine (and even corporate machine) without any MS updates. I've done this for vanilla XP on a machine where any update attempts to SP1 failed.
It ran until I wiped the system and installed SP3 on it. Not a single infection. You just need a sane 3rd party firewall, sane antivirus for incoming files, users that don't run every exe they get in email and sane ad blocker/flash blocker that will axe browser as infection vector.
4GB is fine 100% of the time when you're not doing things mentioned above. "Targeting performance" in games and applications that are not specifically memory dependent, of which there is barely a handful and few if any of which are used on home machines (none on mine) causes irrelevantly low improvements in performance. We're looking at occasional overall 1% or so improvement in FPS in games. It's noise.
As a result:
1. Actively hurts rather then helps on 4GB systems due to higher system overhead on 7. Negative. 2. Somewhat more useful then icon used for the same thing in XP. Slightly positive. 3. More compatibility issues by FAR especially in old games with 7 when compared to XP. Extreme negative. 4. Driver support: Currently still worse then XP for older hardware. Example: I'm still using SB Audigy 2 on this machine. 7's drivers had to be hacked to work properly and it still doesn't offer all options that XP did due to burial of DirectSound in 7's WDDM.
Last two are frankly novice's nightmare, and I say this as someone who had to fuck with new driver model and sound blaster's drivers a LOT to get them to work properly and I still can't get 100% out of the card that I could get out in XP. Support for old games, especially some of the really fun stuff like old fan translated JRPGs requires significant fucking with the system, and even then is likely to not work. Some of those oldies still simply do not start on 7 no matter what you do because the company that made them went down or decided that patch to get the game to work in 7 was simply not worth releasing.
So I'm not sure why you think that your list somehow shows that 7 is superior. The only marginal improvement is the pinning function, which is a bit more convenient then the old pinning system. Everything else you mentioned is a clear black mark on 7 in comparison to XP.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a problem inherent to the streaming, or more generally "service" model. You don't "own" anything. Not even access to the files. If at any point company decides to not offer the service to you, they are free to do so and you will lose access to everything when that happens.
Ah, you're not talking about video ENCODING. You're talking about video CREATION. Specifically significant post-processing not dissimilar to what was mentioned much higher in the thread as one of the applications that require high amounts of memory - photoshop. Something you apparently failed to notice in your perverse crusade to label me as "primarily porn user".
You should consider getting your terminology straight if you want a discussion on slashdot. Especially since your issue was covered something around 10 or 12 posts ago by this "primarily porn user".
Video encoding is what you do when you format shift, or do the actual encoding pass on the video that has all the effects added in. Video rendering is indeed the process which can greatly benefit from a lot of memory, advanced caching functions and in some rare cases higher memory throughput as it's the process where initial passes add things like filters and effects to video which can be cached to be cycled over video.
I suggest you get your basic terminology straight before you come back to the discussion.
Steps for ignorant assholes that have a faint grasp on theory and zero on facts, yet like to insult others:
1. Download a popular encoder/decoder such as handbrake http://handbrake.fr/
2. Download a popular hardware monitor that does real time monitoring of various parts of your system, such as openhardwaremonitor http://openhardwaremonitor.org/
3. Download process explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
4. Get any h.264 movie. You can rip one from youtube.
5. Re-encode the video into any other popular standard, ranging from h.264 to divx. Pay attention to usage. Use openhardwaremonitor for specific CPU/GPU load monitoring and process explorer for memory footprint.
Optional if you have a decent system:
1. Go into your bios. Slow your memory/FSB down as much as you can. Overclock CPU to get same speed on the slower FSB.
2. Restart the system, try re-encoding with exact same settings.
3. Observe your own ignorance as your performance take little impact.
Optional 2: Attempt to do the same in opposite direction, or even insert faster RAM into the system. Note how your performance tanks hard in direct relation to CPU in this case.
Do you know why? Because most encoder/decoder software is optimized properly and doesn't need a huge memory footprint. I like watching anime fluff on the go on my phone, so I routinely re-encode h.264 720p and 1080p video into 360p divx that my phone can run for a long while without killing the battery (it's old enough to lack proper h.264 support). As I have to re-encode routinely, I've done some actual research on how to make the process as speedy as possible. As a result, I ended up buying fastest i5 on the market that was available and essentially slowest memory it would take. Because the main things that need performance that I do are gaming and video encoding. And both are CPU and GPU bound and memory throughput is largely irrelevant as long as its "fast enough not to bottleneck the system" because of it. Criteria which the slowest available memory at the point of buying the CPU met with plenty to spare.
As for your hilarious claims in relation to the original topic of OS "memory optimizations", issue is that data portion that needs high throughput of memory when decoding/encoding is direct and largely uncacheable, meaning that OS optimizations have little to no impact and is mainly dependent on hardware. That's because it contains the actual video. And in most cases, unless you're encoding in fast GPU hardware while using slow system RAM, you'll be bottlenecked by computing power rather then by memory throughput - which is essentially always true on modern PC architechture. And even if you were limited by memory throughput, there is little to nothing that OS optimizations can do to alleviate the problem, as video encoding is largely not cacheable. It needs actual brutal throughput. Memory management in such tasks is typically best left to the application doing the decode/encode anyway as it will handle the specialized stuff much better then generalist optimizations done by the OS.
Now if you excuse me, I need to go back to "surfing for porn". Your remark reminded me that I haven't surfed for porn in years, a revelation that I found surprisingly disturbing.
Cheap android tablets do NOT come with fast NAND flash that is featured in many SSDs.
They come with cheap off the shelf mini-SD or micro-SD built in, or memory from those. We're looking at class 6-class 10 products if we're lucky, class-4 if we're not.
That's about ten times SLOWER then your average desktop HDD.
The reason why they tend to seem "fast" is a combination of lack of hardware sounds/light that people learned to associate with slowness combined with smallness of actual applications and a lot less of OS overhead meaning less things needed to be read and written from permanent storage.
This is indeed correct for bunkers. However the problem is not bunkers. It's artillery in firing positions in the open.
Conventional explosives are far weaker then nuclear weapons at striking against open positions due to much smaller shockwave caused. They can sometimes match a general purpose tactical nuclear weapon when it comes to bunker busting due to using a specially shaped penetrator warhead. It again cannot match a nuke designed for penetration.
Essentially nuclear weapons are significantly better then conventional weapons at causing destruction through explosive expansion simply due to laws of physics.
Incorrect. The "memory intensiveness" of video encoding is low enough that even the lowest and slowest memory on the market is unlikely to meaningfully impact it. It's essentially either CPU or GPU bound at this point.
As a result the factors that impact it are first and foremost software optimization for CPU/GPU, followed by raw power of these units.
You'd need to get some really slow random access memory and a really fast GPU linked to it to get hit by memory bus constraints.
Regardless, my "religious conviction" about speed improvements appears to be largely matched by software industry. There is no lowering of system requirements for 8 over 7, and software generally requires X GB of RAM for XP and X+1GB for 7.
So it would appear to be a giant conspiracy!
Or you may be wrong.
I don't agree with this. UI as is configured in "display options" isn't a part of default configuration that is asked to be reverted to in most cases. I've personally seen a lot of UI changes from default on many corporate machines, ranging from color changes to font changes, to theme changes. These are as easy as selecting display options and selecting a different theme. All of this has been built into windows since 95, so a lot of people use it.
If you actually got a 15% speed improvement on video encoding with same software and drivers on the same machine just on different OS, it's time to either reinstall 7 or start looking for the serious problem in OS causing it to lose that much efficiency at the task that doesn't really benefit from any OS improvements and is pretty much dependent on software used to encode and what it does.
For the record, I know of at least one recorded case where a young guy driving a bike got killed by hitting a wire stretched between two trees across the road at high speed. He basically broke his wind pipe.
The wire was hanged by local festival organizers to block the road, and apparently they didn't mark it clearly enough for someone traveling at high speed in the dark to see. There have also been some cases of local young kids' stupid fad being stretching a rope across walkways where bicycle travel often happens. Though that is usually low enough not to hit driver's neck.
Regardless, I can see that kind of helmet being actually useful. It may not be comfortable enough though, especially at high speeds with significant downforce it would likely create.
Considering that if what she said is true, all she needed was to present the court with relevant bank statements, I'm failing to see the risk.
Call me back when real life game and applications actually follow the path of benchmarks. Considering the under the hood optimizations and benchmark detection in modern software, I don't think I'll be getting that call any time soon though.
But they cannot inflict significant DAMAGE needed to disable enough artillery before it levels Soul. Which is the problem.
Also, you can call bullshit all you want. Fact is, NATO maintains a significant nuclear deterrent worldwide. Most of it is US, with some being in the hands of UK and France. And another fact is that the current NK trouble started after drills where B-52s were flown near the border, and escalated after B-2 were flown there.
UI isn't really what you'd call bloat if it can be turned off. Classic theme was present in 7 and removed all the "windows transparency and shit" in 7. Natively.
You may not have noticed, but corporations and governments are suffering from a significant credit crunch issues still, as they have been for a while. EU crisis is trucking along, Chinese keep pushing western corporations out of the key markets, US isn't really growing that much, Japan is still messed up from both the decade long stagnation and more recent huge tsunami and so on.
I would suggest that ultimately these factors are far more dangerous to microsoft's bottom line then one release of OS tanking hard. Because people just buy the license for the previous version with their new computer and MS loses exactly nothing.
Whereas global economy squeezing its main customers hard actually does cause reduced revenues and profits.
Another "this is the decade of linux on desktop"?
I have a feeling we've been here before. A lot.
These are pretty much the same kind of PR bullshit claims that were made with most windows releases.
Reality: every version of windows also brought enough new bloat to make it slower then predecessor after accounting for all the "wonderful new features that make it faster".
Essentially you're that idiot that looks at the paper to see plus six minus eight, someone tells him "but hey, this six consists of this wonderful one, amazing two and innovative three. They make the end result completely end up as a net positive!".
The fact that eight is still bigger then six and end result is minus two is lost in the ignorance. It's just like the bullshit we got fed about 7 having such wonderful memory management in comparison to XP. Only to find out that every single game that came out for both asked for one extra gigabyte of RAM for 7 in comparison to XP. Because after all the improvements, 7 was still so bloated that it ended up in a net negative. Same goes for eight.
So please, stop quoting marketing bullshit and understand that in the end it's all that it is - marketing bullshit. It's designed to obfuscate reality in pretty image it wants to sell you. And buying this image does in fact make you a stupid person. Because everyone who used windows has stepped on this rake before. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...
Nothing in this world is perfectly secure. Such a thing does not exist. There is merely "secure enough for the task" and "not secure enough for the task". Unpatched XP machine can be made secure enough for most home users with just a few simple steps. These steps will secure the machine even if users goes to warez and porn sites in a regular fashion.
And as has been pointed out before, "going to warez and porn sites" doesn't get you infected if your XP isn't patched. It gets you infected if your browser, or modules used for browsing such as java VM is unsecure. Status of your OS updates is largely irrelevant for such infection vectors. Please understand the difference. You're bait and switching or simply ignorant of the basics here.
In all of your examples, there is no difference between infecting a vanilla XP with zero updates and infecting XP SP3. All software involved (web browser, java VM, adobe reader) are completely independent of ANY software updates microsoft provides. Microsoft ceasing to provide updates will have no impact whatsoever on any of these infection vectors.
The fact that you got modded "informative" instead of "offtopic" says a lot about how current slashdot moderation works. We were talking about (lack of) importance of windows updates, you bait and switch into 3rd party software, and voila - folks who bought the scaremongering without ever thinking how the things REALLY work under the hood mod you informative.
Sad.
You went WAY off tangent. The original argument was that piracy is somehow more difficult then watching DRM'd services behind paywalls nowadays as to back up the argument that "piracy is about convenience" to be false. The point of the examples was to show that this is in fact not the case - piracy is still extremely simple and convenient, far more then netflix. Yet people still use netflix specifically because the original argument is wrong, and people are in fact willing to jump through hoops to get their stuff legitimately.
Difference obviously being that you still need to do some additional things with netflix, do things like log into it and set up payment and so on. Netflix isn't free, and additional hoops that you will have to jump through to pay and ID yourself are still there.
Things that are an order of magnitude more complex then "start a torrent, pick a file and click stream".
So the original argument doesn't really hold water. The process is perhaps marginally more complex after the set up with torrents if even that.
A lot of modern clients have allowed this for a while. Utorrent allowed this since 3.1.x or so.
Doing this basically starts download sequentially for that file, prioritizes that file over rest of the files in torrent, and once enough of the file is buffered (you can configure how much) it will open it as video stream in the media player that is configured to be default player for streaming on the system.
Bandwidth issues do not exist in torrents of popular shows. It will download at maximum speed that your connection will take most of the time.
Obscure stuff, yeah. That's a different story.
I don't think it can get any easier then modern torrenting. You search for a show on piratebay, hit download, then go to files in the torrent software, pick the episode you want to watch and click "stream".
That's it.
In most case, XP can be easily secured for a home machine (and even corporate machine) without any MS updates. I've done this for vanilla XP on a machine where any update attempts to SP1 failed.
It ran until I wiped the system and installed SP3 on it. Not a single infection. You just need a sane 3rd party firewall, sane antivirus for incoming files, users that don't run every exe they get in email and sane ad blocker/flash blocker that will axe browser as infection vector.
4GB is fine 100% of the time when you're not doing things mentioned above. "Targeting performance" in games and applications that are not specifically memory dependent, of which there is barely a handful and few if any of which are used on home machines (none on mine) causes irrelevantly low improvements in performance. We're looking at occasional overall 1% or so improvement in FPS in games. It's noise.
As a result:
1. Actively hurts rather then helps on 4GB systems due to higher system overhead on 7. Negative.
2. Somewhat more useful then icon used for the same thing in XP. Slightly positive.
3. More compatibility issues by FAR especially in old games with 7 when compared to XP. Extreme negative.
4. Driver support: Currently still worse then XP for older hardware. Example: I'm still using SB Audigy 2 on this machine. 7's drivers had to be hacked to work properly and it still doesn't offer all options that XP did due to burial of DirectSound in 7's WDDM.
Last two are frankly novice's nightmare, and I say this as someone who had to fuck with new driver model and sound blaster's drivers a LOT to get them to work properly and I still can't get 100% out of the card that I could get out in XP. Support for old games, especially some of the really fun stuff like old fan translated JRPGs requires significant fucking with the system, and even then is likely to not work. Some of those oldies still simply do not start on 7 no matter what you do because the company that made them went down or decided that patch to get the game to work in 7 was simply not worth releasing.
So I'm not sure why you think that your list somehow shows that 7 is superior. The only marginal improvement is the pinning function, which is a bit more convenient then the old pinning system. Everything else you mentioned is a clear black mark on 7 in comparison to XP.