But then again how often do you really use the start menu? I run windows 7 on my general desktop and between pinning apps to the taskbar and using fences for some groups of icons on my desktop, I really have no need for a start menu.
Workflows differ. I use the Start menu all the time, and don't use taskbar pinning at all (in fact, I disable it in local group policy). I do set up the traditional Quick Launch bar on Win7, but only populate it with one shortcut, Firefox. I won't pin any items to the taskbar because I really dislike the "dock" design which intermingles shortcuts with indicators for programs already running. I prefer to set the taskbar to "never combine" so it looks and works like it did in XP.
I really don't understand why MS insists on locking down the themes. The engine is fully capable of using whatever theme the user wants, but for unknown reasons this is restricted to the one included theme digitally signed by Microsoft. There is no good reason for that. Why should we have to hack a DLL to get a feature that the OS already supports?
A lot of the issues with Win8 would go away if theming was permitted. (For instance, the one thing I find most annoying about Win8 is the centered title bar text – this breaks the way I've read window titles since Win95.)
"The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options that can break applications."
The writer could have stopped at the first half of that sentence, and it would have been more concise and accurate.
"The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options."
This isn't really new. UI design "experts" have been saying for years that delegating choices to the users is bad. The programmer should make a decision and stick by it.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. What they're actually saying is a bit more subtle and nuanced. For example, this article by Joel Spolsky discusses when you should and should not offer the user a choice. Basically, it boils down to whether the users of the software will care. He cites the silly Help database dialog from Win95 (where you had to tell the OS what kind of database optimization you wanted it to do on the Help file before you could search for a term!) as an example of the kind of choice that shouldn't be presented to the user. In contrast, if something is related to the task at hand, then the user probably wants fine-grained control over it: "If it's a graphics program, they probably want to be able to control every pixel to the finest level of detail. If it's a tool to build a web site, you can bet that they are obsessive about getting the web site to look exactly the way they want it to look."
The problem is that, like so many other good ideas over the years, this principle of UI design was bastardized and dumbed down by the corporate equivalent of a game of telephone. These days it's been reduced to "Choices are bad. Don't give the user a choice." And, of course, users hate it. This is the design philosophy behind Windows 8.
I would be with you 100% if I felt that the Internet at large could be trusted. It can not.
The question isn't whether the Internet can be trusted (we know it can't). The question is whether your JavaScript interpreter can be trusted to sandbox properly. Since it was always understood that it would be executing untrusted remote code, JavaScript was actually designed with pretty decent security from the ground up, and not many exploits these days use it. These days, when malware writers want to steal people's financial information or add them to a botnet, they use exploits for Oracle Java or Adobe Flash. Maybe Adobe Reader as well. But JavaScript is actually pretty far down the list of serious Web security risks.
It's telling you are speaking outside your area of expertise, there's a rather large optimization gap between Apple's in-house iOS vs Samsung's use of Android.
Agreed. I liked what I've heard about the Galaxy Note II, so I took a look at one that was on display at a local electronics store. Oh, the hardware looks really nice, but the user interface is nasty and cluttered compared to iOS, and animations were jerky and dropped frames. To some extent this may have been due to all the crapware AT&T loaded onto the phone, but that in itself is a problem for Samsung: they haven't been nearly as effective at playing hardball with the carriers as Apple has been. They need to be able to put their unblemished product out there rather than let those parasites shit it up.
retina Display has become synonymous with Low DPI as 1080P becomes the new normal for Android
That's true on smartphones, but on the tablet side, Apple still has better DPI than any Android device except the Nexus 10. Samsung's flagship Galaxy Note 10.1 still has a mediocre 1280x800 display, which is worse than some newer smartphones. And I haven't seen a replacement with a high-DPI display announced yet.
Samsung does seem to be making some efforts to bring high-DPI displays to Windows laptops. They have an upcoming product with a 3200x1800 screen, which is definitely nice to see. Other vendors have announced the same thing, so hopefully software companies like Adobe will get off their ass and start to make their software play nice with DPI scaling. (Photoshop currently ignores the Windows scaling factor completely, since it draws its own widgets rather than relying on the system to do so. This means really, really tiny controls on a high-DPI screen.)
"TSMC plans to start mass-producing the chips early next year using advanced '20-nanometer' technology, which makes the chips potentially smaller and more energy-efficient."
I'll believe this when I see it. TSMC has a chronic problem with moving to smaller process nodes; they've got a long history of over-promising and under-delivering. Oh, they eventually get it right, but early customers are basically paying for the privilege of being their beta testers, and Apple is going to find this out if they try to move away from Samsung too quickly. NVIDIA's infamous "bumpgate" fiasco was due, at least in part, to problems with an immature TSMC manufacturing process.
Ethernet cards, chipsets, and other AMD hardware require ATI catalyst drivers to function properly as they are bundled with it.
Virtually every AMD motherboard I've seen in the past couple of years has had a Realtek NIC (usually 8111E). Likewise, the onboard sound is usually one of the Realtek HD codec chips. All of these drivers are available from Realtek's website, including for XP.
You do need "text mode" AHCI drivers to get past the install screen on XP, unless you switch the SATA ports to legacy mode in the BIOS. (And these have to be either slipstreamed into the CD or loaded from a *floppy* at install time – no thumb drive allowed. Ugh!) But these can be found with a bit of digging, and aren't part of the main Catalyst distribution as far as I know.
It's not going to be pushed back. It's already been pushed back once as it should have ended in 2011 (10 years after release date) and it's less then 12 months till April 2014 so yes, less then year.
I think it will be pushed back again. Microsoft doesn't want to, but a *lot* of large corporations (and, perhaps more importantly, governments) are still on XP and are going to shit a brick if support is ever dropped. Many of these organizations are still mired in IE6, due to applications that were written for that outdated browser by long-gone consultants and contain business logic that no one remembers. (Yes, they could use Win7 Pro's XP Mode for that, but that requires additional training, which they don't want to pay for. Just teaching employees to use different browsers for intranet and Internet can be a pain.) I believe that Microsoft will receive some not-so-veiled pressure: corporations will threaten to switch to BYOD/"cloud"/Linux or whatever they think sounds good (even if that's only a bluff) and governments will point out that, you know, they could always re-open an antitrust case or something if they don't like what MS is doing.
XP gives rise to a situation I think is almost without precedent: a piece of proprietary software of vital importance to the world economy is about to be discontinued by the vendor, and the potential economic effects are in the multiple billions of dollars. Yes, we've seen disruption before (such as when VB6 was dropped), but not on this scale. The smart thing to do would be for the federal government to seize XP using eminent domain, and transition it to public domain, open-source status for free use by third parties. I don't think that particular solution is going to be used, but I do think *something* has to give.
XP service Pack 3(XP was awful pre service pack 2 and delayed Vista for years) only had replaced by Vista Jan30 2007 and only then was not a viable replacement (XP continued to be sold on Netbooks)
And how many netbooks have ATi/AMD graphics chips? Didn't they almost all have crappy Atom CPUs with equally crappy Intel graphics processors on the northbridge/PCH? (Most of them didn't even support hardware decoding of H.264 and other common video formats; Atom was the last PC platform to not include this feature.)
But... windows is meant to be easy to use, only linux users have to jump through hoops to optimize the boot process and and....
If you're installing Windows from scratch, you probably don't have to do anything to optimize the boot process. Sure, there are a couple tweaks you can use to minimize memory usage by shutting off unneeded processes, but none of that is actually necessary.
On OEM systems, you do sometimes have to get rid of a bunch of pre-installed crap to get things to boot in a reasonable amount of time, especially since most of these systems don't have SSDs. But this isn't really a fault of Windows per se – if Linux were the standard, OEMs would load it down with a bunch of crap, too (since they get paid by the crapware vendors to do this). There are programs designed specifically to remove all of this junk from a new OEM system without having to manually wade through it all. You certainly don't have to go to the command line to do it.
While as a Windows OS users for' 20 years I don't LOVE 8, I do see where they are trying to head. No Windows 8 is not perfect, but it is the first OS that is trying to bridge the tablet/laptop gap.
The problem is that for desktop users, and even for most laptop users who don't have touchscreens and basically use their systems as a lightweight desktop, "trying to bridge the tablet/laptop gap" is completely meaningless, and only gets in the way of things and breaks our workflow.
If Microsoft wants to add these things as an option, fine. I don't even care if they want to make them default. But don't break the things we rely on. Just add a setting to make things look and work the way it did in Windows 7 on the desktop while keeping the underlying kernel improvements.
Javascript isn't really a very good programming language (its lack of strong typing and lack of pointers are two things that often frustrate experienced coders). The only reason it's so popular is that it is a universal standard for client-side scripting in the browser. If you want to run code on the user's web browser, you have to use Javascript.
On servers, that doesn't apply. There are much better languages, no matter which platform you prefer. And MongoDB isn't particularly impressive, either; it's basically a database for people too stupid to understand SQL.
99% of database users have no need at all to give money to One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
Yes, there are a tiny handful of applications where Oracle outshines the alternatives. Yours probably isn't one of them. If you're running a small website, MySQL/MariaDB will almost certainly work just fine. (Or the free version of MS SQL Server, if you're developing in ASP.NET.) For larger applications, PostgreSQL can do the vast majority of what Oracle can do at no cost. If you're not working with absolutely massive datasets, and don't need the specific enterprise features the system offers, Oracle is probably a waste of your money.
Too many companies throw their money away just because it's "standard", even though it really isn't – other databases are more widely used as well as being cheaper and easier to administer. Anyone who wants to buy Oracle should have to justify with clear and specific reasons (not just marketing buzzwords) why they need it and how the massive expense is going to benefit the company compared to the alternatives.
No, they aren't. Really. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid. I *wish* that what you were saying is true, but it isn't.
As long as the FOSS movement keeps lying to itself by pretending that GIMP is as good as Photoshop and LibreOffice is as good as MS Office, we won't get applications that really are competitive. And as long as the Linux desktop movement is dominated by CLI-loving misanthropes and X11 "network transparency" obsessives, Linux on the desktop will continue to be a joke.
GIMP is not even close to being competitive with Photoshop and it probably never will be. A decent Photoshop competitor would have to be written from scratch; there's nothing in GIMP worth saving. LibreOffice isn't as good as MS Office, if only because it can't run the collections of hacked-together VBA scripts that 90% of the workplaces in America depend upon. And no Linux desktop has font rendering worth a damn.
I've heard lots of good things about Start8. As for WindowBlinds, support for Windows 8 was only added quite recently. What I'd like to know is if it lets you left-justify the window title (as was the case by default in all other versions of Windows going back to Win95). I can live without Aero if I have to, but the centered window titles completely mess me up.
The context menu for the Start button now has shutdown options.
High-DPI support is supposed to be better now (though third-party developers will still figure out ways to break this).
The bad:
The real start menu still isn't back, and the Metro start screen is nowhere near as good – it's more obtrusive and less functional.
The window titlebar text is still centered, with no supported way to put it back to left-justified. For those of us who have been using Windows for years, this is a very annoying change since it breaks the muscle memory of our eyes. When I've tried Windows 8, I always find myself looking at the wrong place to see a window title.
There's still no supported way to get back the Aero theme. I understand why people with tablets or low-powered laptops might want an interface that doesn't stress the GPU as much, but why should desktop users have to suffer through something that looks like it's straight out of 1995? The Windows 8 theme is the UI equivalent of brutalism – those ugly bare concrete buildings that architects were putting up in the 1970s.
The ugly:
Metro. Or, as I call it, the Knots Landing user interface. Seriously, you shouldn't be looking to the theme songs of 1980s soap operas as your inspiration for UI design...
Plus, you can disable the "also search Bing" nonsense, thankfully.
Good, I was concerned this would be a gaping privacy hole. On the original Windows 8.1 post on the Windows Blog, I asked the Microsoft rep several times whether this would be optional and he said he didn't know yet and that an answer would be forthcoming. (Not usually an encouraging sign.) Having *local* searches automatically send a http request to Bing (and, presumably, the NSA) isn't something that I think most Windows users want.
I can't help but wonder if this is related to AMD's recent console design wins, especially PS4. Up until now, there hasn't really been a strong business case for putting a lot of effort into Unix-based video drivers. But since PS4 runs on FreeBSD and uses OpenGL as its API layer, a lot of the effort that AMD put into the drivers there can probably be ported over to the Linux drivers without much trouble. The PS4 and Xbone GPUs both use AMD's standard Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
and if they do, ARM is the much more logical choice. Better energy profile...
This assumes you care only about battery life and not performance. x86 platforms have always outperformed ARM platforms on a clock-for-clock basis, and probably always will, since the CISC instruction set allows more work to be done per cycle. And on a modern CPU, the decoder that converts x86 instructions to internal micro-ops is a tiny portion of the die space, even on portable devices.
Meanwhile, Intel still fakes efficiency figures by putting the power-hungry parts of the Atom into its north-bridge. And people still fall for it, despite the shitty battery life.
Your information is years out of date. The first Atom CPUs were paired with an old i945 chipset, which did indeed use far more power than the CPU itself (the chipset had an absurd TDP of 22W, compared to 2W-4W for the processor itself). In 2009, however, Intel moved many of the functions into the CPU and stopped producing the chipset on such an outdated process, and this dramatically reduced TDP to low single digits. Yes, you still have to add the PCH+CPU to get total TDP; anyone who doesn't realize this shouldn't be trying to design an embedded system. The upcoming new generation of Atoms (Silvermont) will be full-fledged SoC designs with no need for a PCH. They are expected to have considerably better performance and lower power consumption. And the truth is that the existing Atom design is really bad, and was in part designed that way to avoid cannibalizing sales of Intel's more expensive desktop CPUs. But with the mobile device market being what it is now, Intel can't afford to hold back any more.
ARM will license out their cores to whoever pays. Intel and AMD (and Via, but no one cares about them) are apparently the only ones allowed to make x86 chips. But what type of "IP" is relevant here? What is the legal basis for the restrictions? If someone decided to make their own x86 clone, for instance, what would they be violating? It can't be trademarks, since that could be circumvented simply by changing the wording on the product and literature. I don't see how it could be copyrights, unless the implementers actually copied the original die mask or made a derivative work of it. So that leaves patents. Can you patent opcodes? Or is it only specific methods of implementing the opcodes that are covered by the patents?
The original Intel Pentium was released in March 1993. This means that the patents on it should either be expired or nearing expiration. Would there be any demand for an open implementation of a 20-year-old x86 CPU? In embedded systems, maybe. And as more time goes by, a greater and greater portion of the x86 ISA could be implemented.
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But then again how often do you really use the start menu? I run windows 7 on my general desktop and between pinning apps to the taskbar and using fences for some groups of icons on my desktop, I really have no need for a start menu.
Workflows differ. I use the Start menu all the time, and don't use taskbar pinning at all (in fact, I disable it in local group policy). I do set up the traditional Quick Launch bar on Win7, but only populate it with one shortcut, Firefox. I won't pin any items to the taskbar because I really dislike the "dock" design which intermingles shortcuts with indicators for programs already running. I prefer to set the taskbar to "never combine" so it looks and works like it did in XP.
I really don't understand why MS insists on locking down the themes. The engine is fully capable of using whatever theme the user wants, but for unknown reasons this is restricted to the one included theme digitally signed by Microsoft. There is no good reason for that. Why should we have to hack a DLL to get a feature that the OS already supports?
A lot of the issues with Win8 would go away if theming was permitted. (For instance, the one thing I find most annoying about Win8 is the centered title bar text – this breaks the way I've read window titles since Win95.)
"The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options that can break applications."
The writer could have stopped at the first half of that sentence, and it would have been more concise and accurate.
"The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options."
This isn't really new. UI design "experts" have been saying for years that delegating choices to the users is bad. The programmer should make a decision and stick by it.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. What they're actually saying is a bit more subtle and nuanced. For example, this article by Joel Spolsky discusses when you should and should not offer the user a choice. Basically, it boils down to whether the users of the software will care. He cites the silly Help database dialog from Win95 (where you had to tell the OS what kind of database optimization you wanted it to do on the Help file before you could search for a term!) as an example of the kind of choice that shouldn't be presented to the user. In contrast, if something is related to the task at hand, then the user probably wants fine-grained control over it: "If it's a graphics program, they probably want to be able to control every pixel to the finest level of detail. If it's a tool to build a web site, you can bet that they are obsessive about getting the web site to look exactly the way they want it to look."
The problem is that, like so many other good ideas over the years, this principle of UI design was bastardized and dumbed down by the corporate equivalent of a game of telephone. These days it's been reduced to "Choices are bad. Don't give the user a choice." And, of course, users hate it. This is the design philosophy behind Windows 8.
I would be with you 100% if I felt that the Internet at large could be trusted. It can not.
The question isn't whether the Internet can be trusted (we know it can't). The question is whether your JavaScript interpreter can be trusted to sandbox properly. Since it was always understood that it would be executing untrusted remote code, JavaScript was actually designed with pretty decent security from the ground up, and not many exploits these days use it. These days, when malware writers want to steal people's financial information or add them to a botnet, they use exploits for Oracle Java or Adobe Flash. Maybe Adobe Reader as well. But JavaScript is actually pretty far down the list of serious Web security risks.
It's telling you are speaking outside your area of expertise, there's a rather large optimization gap between Apple's in-house iOS vs Samsung's use of Android.
Agreed. I liked what I've heard about the Galaxy Note II, so I took a look at one that was on display at a local electronics store. Oh, the hardware looks really nice, but the user interface is nasty and cluttered compared to iOS, and animations were jerky and dropped frames. To some extent this may have been due to all the crapware AT&T loaded onto the phone, but that in itself is a problem for Samsung: they haven't been nearly as effective at playing hardball with the carriers as Apple has been. They need to be able to put their unblemished product out there rather than let those parasites shit it up.
retina Display has become synonymous with Low DPI as 1080P becomes the new normal for Android
That's true on smartphones, but on the tablet side, Apple still has better DPI than any Android device except the Nexus 10. Samsung's flagship Galaxy Note 10.1 still has a mediocre 1280x800 display, which is worse than some newer smartphones. And I haven't seen a replacement with a high-DPI display announced yet.
Samsung does seem to be making some efforts to bring high-DPI displays to Windows laptops. They have an upcoming product with a 3200x1800 screen, which is definitely nice to see. Other vendors have announced the same thing, so hopefully software companies like Adobe will get off their ass and start to make their software play nice with DPI scaling. (Photoshop currently ignores the Windows scaling factor completely, since it draws its own widgets rather than relying on the system to do so. This means really, really tiny controls on a high-DPI screen.)
"TSMC plans to start mass-producing the chips early next year using advanced '20-nanometer' technology, which makes the chips potentially smaller and more energy-efficient."
I'll believe this when I see it. TSMC has a chronic problem with moving to smaller process nodes; they've got a long history of over-promising and under-delivering. Oh, they eventually get it right, but early customers are basically paying for the privilege of being their beta testers, and Apple is going to find this out if they try to move away from Samsung too quickly. NVIDIA's infamous "bumpgate" fiasco was due, at least in part, to problems with an immature TSMC manufacturing process.
Ethernet cards, chipsets, and other AMD hardware require ATI catalyst drivers to function properly as they are bundled with it.
Virtually every AMD motherboard I've seen in the past couple of years has had a Realtek NIC (usually 8111E). Likewise, the onboard sound is usually one of the Realtek HD codec chips. All of these drivers are available from Realtek's website, including for XP.
You do need "text mode" AHCI drivers to get past the install screen on XP, unless you switch the SATA ports to legacy mode in the BIOS. (And these have to be either slipstreamed into the CD or loaded from a *floppy* at install time – no thumb drive allowed. Ugh!) But these can be found with a bit of digging, and aren't part of the main Catalyst distribution as far as I know.
It's not going to be pushed back. It's already been pushed back once as it should have ended in 2011 (10 years after release date) and it's less then 12 months till April 2014 so yes, less then year.
I think it will be pushed back again. Microsoft doesn't want to, but a *lot* of large corporations (and, perhaps more importantly, governments) are still on XP and are going to shit a brick if support is ever dropped. Many of these organizations are still mired in IE6, due to applications that were written for that outdated browser by long-gone consultants and contain business logic that no one remembers. (Yes, they could use Win7 Pro's XP Mode for that, but that requires additional training, which they don't want to pay for. Just teaching employees to use different browsers for intranet and Internet can be a pain.) I believe that Microsoft will receive some not-so-veiled pressure: corporations will threaten to switch to BYOD/"cloud"/Linux or whatever they think sounds good (even if that's only a bluff) and governments will point out that, you know, they could always re-open an antitrust case or something if they don't like what MS is doing.
XP gives rise to a situation I think is almost without precedent: a piece of proprietary software of vital importance to the world economy is about to be discontinued by the vendor, and the potential economic effects are in the multiple billions of dollars. Yes, we've seen disruption before (such as when VB6 was dropped), but not on this scale. The smart thing to do would be for the federal government to seize XP using eminent domain, and transition it to public domain, open-source status for free use by third parties. I don't think that particular solution is going to be used, but I do think *something* has to give.
XP service Pack 3(XP was awful pre service pack 2 and delayed Vista for years) only had replaced by Vista Jan30 2007 and only then was not a viable replacement (XP continued to be sold on Netbooks)
And how many netbooks have ATi/AMD graphics chips? Didn't they almost all have crappy Atom CPUs with equally crappy Intel graphics processors on the northbridge/PCH? (Most of them didn't even support hardware decoding of H.264 and other common video formats; Atom was the last PC platform to not include this feature.)
But... windows is meant to be easy to use, only linux users have to jump through hoops to optimize the boot process and and....
If you're installing Windows from scratch, you probably don't have to do anything to optimize the boot process. Sure, there are a couple tweaks you can use to minimize memory usage by shutting off unneeded processes, but none of that is actually necessary.
On OEM systems, you do sometimes have to get rid of a bunch of pre-installed crap to get things to boot in a reasonable amount of time, especially since most of these systems don't have SSDs. But this isn't really a fault of Windows per se – if Linux were the standard, OEMs would load it down with a bunch of crap, too (since they get paid by the crapware vendors to do this). There are programs designed specifically to remove all of this junk from a new OEM system without having to manually wade through it all. You certainly don't have to go to the command line to do it.
While as a Windows OS users for' 20 years I don't LOVE 8, I do see where they are trying to head. No Windows 8 is not perfect, but it is the first OS that is trying to bridge the tablet/laptop gap.
The problem is that for desktop users, and even for most laptop users who don't have touchscreens and basically use their systems as a lightweight desktop, "trying to bridge the tablet/laptop gap" is completely meaningless, and only gets in the way of things and breaks our workflow.
If Microsoft wants to add these things as an option, fine. I don't even care if they want to make them default. But don't break the things we rely on. Just add a setting to make things look and work the way it did in Windows 7 on the desktop while keeping the underlying kernel improvements.
So there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after all!
Javascript isn't really a very good programming language (its lack of strong typing and lack of pointers are two things that often frustrate experienced coders). The only reason it's so popular is that it is a universal standard for client-side scripting in the browser. If you want to run code on the user's web browser, you have to use Javascript.
On servers, that doesn't apply. There are much better languages, no matter which platform you prefer. And MongoDB isn't particularly impressive, either; it's basically a database for people too stupid to understand SQL.
99% of database users have no need at all to give money to One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
Yes, there are a tiny handful of applications where Oracle outshines the alternatives. Yours probably isn't one of them. If you're running a small website, MySQL/MariaDB will almost certainly work just fine. (Or the free version of MS SQL Server, if you're developing in ASP.NET.) For larger applications, PostgreSQL can do the vast majority of what Oracle can do at no cost. If you're not working with absolutely massive datasets, and don't need the specific enterprise features the system offers, Oracle is probably a waste of your money.
Too many companies throw their money away just because it's "standard", even though it really isn't – other databases are more widely used as well as being cheaper and easier to administer. Anyone who wants to buy Oracle should have to justify with clear and specific reasons (not just marketing buzzwords) why they need it and how the massive expense is going to benefit the company compared to the alternatives.
Luckily Windows 7 EOL isn't until 2015.
Windows 7 extended support (i.e. security patches) continues until Jan. 14, 2020. (source)
Better open source tools are available.
No, they aren't. Really. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid. I *wish* that what you were saying is true, but it isn't.
As long as the FOSS movement keeps lying to itself by pretending that GIMP is as good as Photoshop and LibreOffice is as good as MS Office, we won't get applications that really are competitive. And as long as the Linux desktop movement is dominated by CLI-loving misanthropes and X11 "network transparency" obsessives, Linux on the desktop will continue to be a joke.
GIMP is not even close to being competitive with Photoshop and it probably never will be. A decent Photoshop competitor would have to be written from scratch; there's nothing in GIMP worth saving. LibreOffice isn't as good as MS Office, if only because it can't run the collections of hacked-together VBA scripts that 90% of the workplaces in America depend upon. And no Linux desktop has font rendering worth a damn.
I've heard lots of good things about Start8. As for WindowBlinds, support for Windows 8 was only added quite recently. What I'd like to know is if it lets you left-justify the window title (as was the case by default in all other versions of Windows going back to Win95). I can live without Aero if I have to, but the centered window titles completely mess me up.
Interestingly, apparently Canonical thinks it's something that most Ubuntu users want.
And most of us on Slashdot thought it was a bad idea there, as well.
The good:
The bad:
The ugly:
Plus, you can disable the "also search Bing" nonsense, thankfully.
Good, I was concerned this would be a gaping privacy hole. On the original Windows 8.1 post on the Windows Blog, I asked the Microsoft rep several times whether this would be optional and he said he didn't know yet and that an answer would be forthcoming. (Not usually an encouraging sign.) Having *local* searches automatically send a http request to Bing (and, presumably, the NSA) isn't something that I think most Windows users want.
I can't help but wonder if this is related to AMD's recent console design wins, especially PS4. Up until now, there hasn't really been a strong business case for putting a lot of effort into Unix-based video drivers. But since PS4 runs on FreeBSD and uses OpenGL as its API layer, a lot of the effort that AMD put into the drivers there can probably be ported over to the Linux drivers without much trouble. The PS4 and Xbone GPUs both use AMD's standard Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
and if they do, ARM is the much more logical choice. Better energy profile...
This assumes you care only about battery life and not performance. x86 platforms have always outperformed ARM platforms on a clock-for-clock basis, and probably always will, since the CISC instruction set allows more work to be done per cycle. And on a modern CPU, the decoder that converts x86 instructions to internal micro-ops is a tiny portion of the die space, even on portable devices.
Meanwhile, Intel still fakes efficiency figures by putting the power-hungry parts of the Atom into its north-bridge. And people still fall for it, despite the shitty battery life.
Your information is years out of date. The first Atom CPUs were paired with an old i945 chipset, which did indeed use far more power than the CPU itself (the chipset had an absurd TDP of 22W, compared to 2W-4W for the processor itself). In 2009, however, Intel moved many of the functions into the CPU and stopped producing the chipset on such an outdated process, and this dramatically reduced TDP to low single digits. Yes, you still have to add the PCH+CPU to get total TDP; anyone who doesn't realize this shouldn't be trying to design an embedded system. The upcoming new generation of Atoms (Silvermont) will be full-fledged SoC designs with no need for a PCH. They are expected to have considerably better performance and lower power consumption. And the truth is that the existing Atom design is really bad, and was in part designed that way to avoid cannibalizing sales of Intel's more expensive desktop CPUs. But with the mobile device market being what it is now, Intel can't afford to hold back any more.
ARM will license out their cores to whoever pays. Intel and AMD (and Via, but no one cares about them) are apparently the only ones allowed to make x86 chips. But what type of "IP" is relevant here? What is the legal basis for the restrictions? If someone decided to make their own x86 clone, for instance, what would they be violating? It can't be trademarks, since that could be circumvented simply by changing the wording on the product and literature. I don't see how it could be copyrights, unless the implementers actually copied the original die mask or made a derivative work of it. So that leaves patents. Can you patent opcodes? Or is it only specific methods of implementing the opcodes that are covered by the patents?
The original Intel Pentium was released in March 1993. This means that the patents on it should either be expired or nearing expiration. Would there be any demand for an open implementation of a 20-year-old x86 CPU? In embedded systems, maybe. And as more time goes by, a greater and greater portion of the x86 ISA could be implemented.
You actually miss Cyrix?