Sony might not, but if AMD has done more driver development for *nix as a result of the PS4 design, then that will probably help improve the Linux and FreeBSD drivers as well.
You're a bit out of date. The video drivers were pretty crappy when AMD inherited them from ATi, but they've gotten steadily better since then. Neither AMD nor NVIDIA has perfect drivers, but they are now roughly on par with each other.
The exception is CrossFire, which is still inferior in several ways to SLI. But both CrossFire and SLI are dumb hacks (and aren't being used on any consoles), so it doesn't really matter.
You seem to believe the banking industry is over-regulated.
Banking regulations aren't all the same thing. Regulations that try to prevent insider self-dealing or offloading costs on taxpayers are a good thing. Regulations that basically make banking privacy for individuals illegal are a bad thing.
I would be very surprised if it didn't run on Windows 7. Even with many OEM systems which officially don't have Win7 support, that just means you can't download the Win7 drivers straight from their website. And why would you want OEM drivers (which are usually outdated and/or bundled with crap) anyway? Download the Intel chipset drivers from Intel, the Realtek sound/NIC drivers from Realtek's website, and so forth. It's not like these companies are actually making their chips in house. (Well, Samsung might make some of them, but even there, most of their stuff is going to be from the usual vendors.)
Screens are supposed to report their physical size as well as their resolution, so the system can work out the DPI and scale things accordingly. Unfortunately many things just use bitmap graphics which look crap when scaled, instead of vector artwork which would just look more detailed.
Unfortunately, the standard Win32 API has no support for vector-based icons. What you're supposed to do is create an.ico file which has about two dozen different bitmap images, all the way from 16x16 with 16 colors up to 256x256 32-bit. (This latter resolution was added in Vista; before that, icons maxed out at 48x48 if I'm not mistaken.) The OS will then scale one of the bitmaps to fit the size needed.
There are good reasons for having a hand-drawn bitmap for 16x16 (scaling vectors or larger bitmaps down this low usually means subpar results, for the same reason that non-hinted fonts look bad at low point sizes). But most of the intermediate sizes are really only there for legacy reasons. The Windows icon file format is a sloppy and outdated mess.
You can see this for yourself by going into Display settings and increasing DPI from Smaller (100%) to Medium or Larger (125/150%). Windows doesn't "zoom" the content, but more or less forces changes in positioning and sizing of elements and font sizes.
That is no longer true for sizes above 125% (which, by default, still uses "XP style DPI scaling"). On larger scaling factors, Windows Vista and 7 will render the app window to an off-screen buffer, then have the compositor upscale it by the selected factor. This results in blurrier text and graphics, but avoids the situation you describe where icons or text are repositioned or broken. An application can declare itself DPI-aware in the manifest, in which case it will be exempted from the automatic scaling methods. The problem comes with badly-behaved applications that claim to be DPI-aware but really aren't.
Adobe is one of the biggest laggards here. Lightroom is DPI-aware, but Photoshop and Acrobat aren't.
But they are attempting to use their monopoly on the desktop to leverage themselves into a better position in the mobile market (via Metro). Using a monopoly to leverage yourself into a different market is one of the things traditionally prohibited by antitrust law.
If I went via my manager about it he would have immediately raised it with the guy in questions line manager (he worked in sales) who probably would have gone ape shit and fired him.
Was he a good salesman? If so, then I seriously doubt they would have fired him, or done anything at all. Sales can get away with murder as long as they produce.
We have an old printer in the office, and it consumes about 400 pages a week. We'd like to replace it, but the IT policy, enacted without our consultation or representation, is to not supply printers, as the photocopiers in the hallway (contracted to an outside company) can do that, at the price of 10 cents a page (a percentage going to IT), with, of course, locked feed trays and sporadic maintenance.
Sounds like the problem isn't bad sysadmins, the problem is a screwed-up "internal accounting" system that creates incentives for departments to basically wage financial war with one another.
I've seen my share of BOFH and not just in IT. Seems to happen most with people working in relative isolation (having few or no professional peers around) and under a high work load... like sysadmins in a small organisation, but also accountants or paralegals. And if they are the only one in that position, it'll be that much harder to replace them.
I think this hits the nail on the head. Overworked, underpaid, isolated, and indispensible is practically a sure-fire recipe for trouble.
To take things a step further, IT works behind a door that only IT badges can open, and their only (public) phone number is just a human who will create a ticket for you (if for example, your problem is that your PC won't boot, so you can't create a ticket yourself).
You do realize that you've set up your department to be outsourced? If you have no real connection to the rest of the business except through trouble tickets, then there's no real benefit to your department being in-house at all.
IT should be actively engaged with the rest of the business, trying to find ways to make things work better for everyone. That's our job: to make other people's jobs more efficient (and easier).
I don't mind a broad scope of support – as long as it comes with appropriate staffing levels. It's when you ask a single person to be the sysadmin, helpdesk, and facilities manager that you start to run into problems. If you hire 3 generalists who can share all these duties (even though some might be better in some areas than others), then that's fine. But trying to put half the business on the shoulders of one underpaid (and probably understandably disgruntled) employee is a recipe for trouble.
Watch when we spend six hours fixing a machine somebody botched horribly because we told them to push button A then button B then button C, but they pushed button B then button A then button C. For the third time.
That's not the fault of the end user, but of whoever designed the system (which I realize may not be you). Don't design a software or hardware package that's so easy to inadvertently break!
Until and unless they change "Windows" RT so that it lets non-Microsoft applications run on the desktop, no one cares. People aren't writing applications for Metro and aren't going to start. If they opened up the desktop, then at least many existing programs would work with just a recompile.
Why are the EU antitrust authorities letting them get away with this, anyway? (I'd ask the same about the US, but for all intents and purposes we don't *have* antitrust authorities.)
Whether they are "substandard" or not, depends on what the children do with them. I.e. whether they work within the (assumed) confines of the technology, or are inspired to set and achieve their own limits.
RT tablets are specifically designed so you can't "set and achieve [your] own limits". You can only run software officially provided by Microsoft or through the Microsoft Store, and even then, only MS can create apps that use the desktop. And you can't wipe the OS and install something else, either, since Secure Boot policy for RT tablets specifically prohibits any manufacturer from offering this option.
If there must be a next-generation video codec, I'd prefer to see VP9 than H.265, due to the fact that VP9 isn't patent-encumbered (or rather, if it is, Google managed to hand-wave it away by shelling out some cash).
But I don't see why we need that at all. What is wrong with H.264? We got major, substantial improvements moving from MPEG-2 to H.264, but going up from there to H.265 is going to give far less performance gains and require far more processing power in return – at a time when portable and low-power computing is increasing in popularity.
I'd like to see the industry stay on H.264 forever. The patents will run out in another decade or two, and after that, it can be a fully open standard. There is precedent for this; we have much more efficient methods of audio encoding than MP3, and much more efficient methods of still photographic image encoding than JPEG, but those standards are still what everyone uses because of legacy software lock-in.
While people are complaining about hardware support and how slow this thing will be... who really cares?
My aging dual core laptop[...]
That's nice, but the recent trends for casual users are to do browsing on smartphones and tablets, which have a fraction of the processing power of your "aging dual core laptop" (I'm assuming it is a C2D or something similar).
You speak of something you know nothing about. It's more complicated than that. Users who record home videos, publish them to Youtube, end up getting screwed because with huge financial burdens because once the number of views gets high enough there sent a HUGE destructive bill. You have to get a professional camera or be screwed if you publish ANYTHING. You can't just convert to another format either. Your still liable.
Most people posting here weren't at E3. I was, and I'm here to tell you that the XBOne is by far the best of the next-gen console as it stands now. The games do look next-gen, are well-thought out, and impressive.
No wonder, considering that the demos you saw at the show were run on a massively beefed up Windows 7 PC with a GTX 770 graphics card. What you're going to get on the real hardware will be nowhere near as impressive, since the real Xbone's GPU will have shader performance roughly equivalent to a Radeon HD 7790, but with much worse memory bandwidth due to using DDR3 instead of GDDR5.
At this point, the question is not whether Steve Ballmer should be fired as Microsoft CEO, but whether it's time to actually commit him to a mental institution.
>autorun.inf
The most dangerous thing to ever come out of a computer company. That this feature made it past review demonstrates the utter disregard for the most basic security at all, especially since boot sector worms had been around for years in DOS and Win3.1 before Win95 ever graced us with its presence. Since Windows 95, it's been trivial to write auto executing code because Microsoft deliberately yanks down the pants and underwear of the end user and says "Go to it!"
You're indulging in some 20/20 hindsight here. At the time Windows 95 was released, the only media that supported autorun.inf on insertion was CD-ROMs. (Floppy disks didn't do this, if only because the OS could not reliably detect when a disk was inserted in the drive.) Remember, at that time, CD-R drives were not mainstream computing devices; they were still very expensive and rare. (According to Wikipedia, the first CD-R drive under $1000 was not released until September 1995.) When Windows 95 was released, the idea was that only pressed CDs would autorun, and presumably MS thought that the vendors could be trusted not to ship malware. (The Sony rootkit scandal proved that was a mistake, but no one anticipated something like it at the time.) And let's be honest, in 1995, IT security wasn't really on the radar for home users.
The real problem came with Windows XP. By this time, recordable CDs (and, later, DVDs) were commonplace. But Microsoft's biggest mistake was reusing their autorun code for other forms of removable media – such as thumb drives. Again, when thumb drives were first released, they were pretty expensive (I remember paying $100 for a 1GB thumb drive about a decade ago), so the best explanation is that Microsoft didn't think it likely someone would put malicious software onto a thumb drive and just leave it laying around or give it away – at the time, that would have been a rather costly strategy.
Over time, as thumb drives became dirt-cheap, it was clear that allowing INF-based autorun on rewritable removable media was a bad idea. It probably shouldn't have taken Microsoft until 2009 to get rid of this. But the decisions made earlier in the process were not as clear-cut as you're making them out to be.
Yes. Whenever windows sees new data from any source, it immediately executes it... for security reasons ya know.
Not really. That security hole was patched over four years ago. What does happen is that when removable media is installed, the user is prompted for what to do; this can include opening the folder to view the files, or running a setup file if one is present. Yes, if someone *chooses* to run the setup.exe file and it's infected, then they can get a virus or trojan. But that's part of the cost of having an open platform without executable signing. The only way to eliminate this risk would be to force the user into a walled garden. That may be feasible on smartphones and tablets, but it's not acceptable on workstations.
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Sony might not, but if AMD has done more driver development for *nix as a result of the PS4 design, then that will probably help improve the Linux and FreeBSD drivers as well.
You're a bit out of date. The video drivers were pretty crappy when AMD inherited them from ATi, but they've gotten steadily better since then. Neither AMD nor NVIDIA has perfect drivers, but they are now roughly on par with each other.
The exception is CrossFire, which is still inferior in several ways to SLI. But both CrossFire and SLI are dumb hacks (and aren't being used on any consoles), so it doesn't really matter.
You seem to believe the banking industry is over-regulated.
Banking regulations aren't all the same thing. Regulations that try to prevent insider self-dealing or offloading costs on taxpayers are a good thing. Regulations that basically make banking privacy for individuals illegal are a bad thing.
I would be very surprised if it didn't run on Windows 7. Even with many OEM systems which officially don't have Win7 support, that just means you can't download the Win7 drivers straight from their website. And why would you want OEM drivers (which are usually outdated and/or bundled with crap) anyway? Download the Intel chipset drivers from Intel, the Realtek sound/NIC drivers from Realtek's website, and so forth. It's not like these companies are actually making their chips in house. (Well, Samsung might make some of them, but even there, most of their stuff is going to be from the usual vendors.)
Screens are supposed to report their physical size as well as their resolution, so the system can work out the DPI and scale things accordingly. Unfortunately many things just use bitmap graphics which look crap when scaled, instead of vector artwork which would just look more detailed.
Unfortunately, the standard Win32 API has no support for vector-based icons. What you're supposed to do is create an .ico file which has about two dozen different bitmap images, all the way from 16x16 with 16 colors up to 256x256 32-bit. (This latter resolution was added in Vista; before that, icons maxed out at 48x48 if I'm not mistaken.) The OS will then scale one of the bitmaps to fit the size needed.
There are good reasons for having a hand-drawn bitmap for 16x16 (scaling vectors or larger bitmaps down this low usually means subpar results, for the same reason that non-hinted fonts look bad at low point sizes). But most of the intermediate sizes are really only there for legacy reasons. The Windows icon file format is a sloppy and outdated mess.
You can see this for yourself by going into Display settings and increasing DPI from Smaller (100%) to Medium or Larger (125/150%). Windows doesn't "zoom" the content, but more or less forces changes in positioning and sizing of elements and font sizes.
That is no longer true for sizes above 125% (which, by default, still uses "XP style DPI scaling"). On larger scaling factors, Windows Vista and 7 will render the app window to an off-screen buffer, then have the compositor upscale it by the selected factor. This results in blurrier text and graphics, but avoids the situation you describe where icons or text are repositioned or broken. An application can declare itself DPI-aware in the manifest, in which case it will be exempted from the automatic scaling methods. The problem comes with badly-behaved applications that claim to be DPI-aware but really aren't.
Adobe is one of the biggest laggards here. Lightroom is DPI-aware, but Photoshop and Acrobat aren't.
Java is great and pays my bills you insensitive clod.
All the hackers in Russia are happy, because Java pays their bills too...
Do you have any Idea how old Java 6 is?
Doesn't matter. There are a *lot* of applications that not only require Java 6, but a specific point release of Java 6.
"Write once, run anywhere" my ass.
But they are attempting to use their monopoly on the desktop to leverage themselves into a better position in the mobile market (via Metro). Using a monopoly to leverage yourself into a different market is one of the things traditionally prohibited by antitrust law.
If I went via my manager about it he would have immediately raised it with the guy in questions line manager (he worked in sales) who probably would have gone ape shit and fired him.
Was he a good salesman? If so, then I seriously doubt they would have fired him, or done anything at all. Sales can get away with murder as long as they produce.
We have an old printer in the office, and it consumes about 400 pages a week. We'd like to replace it, but the IT policy, enacted without our consultation or representation, is to not supply printers, as the photocopiers in the hallway (contracted to an outside company) can do that, at the price of 10 cents a page (a percentage going to IT), with, of course, locked feed trays and sporadic maintenance.
Sounds like the problem isn't bad sysadmins, the problem is a screwed-up "internal accounting" system that creates incentives for departments to basically wage financial war with one another.
I've seen my share of BOFH and not just in IT. Seems to happen most with people working in relative isolation (having few or no professional peers around) and under a high work load... like sysadmins in a small organisation, but also accountants or paralegals. And if they are the only one in that position, it'll be that much harder to replace them.
I think this hits the nail on the head. Overworked, underpaid, isolated, and indispensible is practically a sure-fire recipe for trouble.
To take things a step further, IT works behind a door that only IT badges can open, and their only (public) phone number is just a human who will create a ticket for you (if for example, your problem is that your PC won't boot, so you can't create a ticket yourself).
You do realize that you've set up your department to be outsourced? If you have no real connection to the rest of the business except through trouble tickets, then there's no real benefit to your department being in-house at all.
IT should be actively engaged with the rest of the business, trying to find ways to make things work better for everyone. That's our job: to make other people's jobs more efficient (and easier).
I don't mind a broad scope of support – as long as it comes with appropriate staffing levels. It's when you ask a single person to be the sysadmin, helpdesk, and facilities manager that you start to run into problems. If you hire 3 generalists who can share all these duties (even though some might be better in some areas than others), then that's fine. But trying to put half the business on the shoulders of one underpaid (and probably understandably disgruntled) employee is a recipe for trouble.
Watch when we spend six hours fixing a machine somebody botched horribly because we told them to push button A then button B then button C, but they pushed button B then button A then button C. For the third time.
That's not the fault of the end user, but of whoever designed the system (which I realize may not be you). Don't design a software or hardware package that's so easy to inadvertently break!
Until and unless they change "Windows" RT so that it lets non-Microsoft applications run on the desktop, no one cares. People aren't writing applications for Metro and aren't going to start. If they opened up the desktop, then at least many existing programs would work with just a recompile.
Why are the EU antitrust authorities letting them get away with this, anyway? (I'd ask the same about the US, but for all intents and purposes we don't *have* antitrust authorities.)
That's great. Can we have the Start Menu back now on Windows? (And no, a button going to the same crappy Metro screen as before doesn't count.)
Whether they are "substandard" or not, depends on what the children do with them. I.e. whether they work within the (assumed) confines of the technology, or are inspired to set and achieve their own limits.
RT tablets are specifically designed so you can't "set and achieve [your] own limits". You can only run software officially provided by Microsoft or through the Microsoft Store, and even then, only MS can create apps that use the desktop. And you can't wipe the OS and install something else, either, since Secure Boot policy for RT tablets specifically prohibits any manufacturer from offering this option.
If there must be a next-generation video codec, I'd prefer to see VP9 than H.265, due to the fact that VP9 isn't patent-encumbered (or rather, if it is, Google managed to hand-wave it away by shelling out some cash).
But I don't see why we need that at all. What is wrong with H.264? We got major, substantial improvements moving from MPEG-2 to H.264, but going up from there to H.265 is going to give far less performance gains and require far more processing power in return – at a time when portable and low-power computing is increasing in popularity.
I'd like to see the industry stay on H.264 forever. The patents will run out in another decade or two, and after that, it can be a fully open standard. There is precedent for this; we have much more efficient methods of audio encoding than MP3, and much more efficient methods of still photographic image encoding than JPEG, but those standards are still what everyone uses because of legacy software lock-in.
While people are complaining about hardware support and how slow this thing will be... who really cares? My aging dual core laptop[...]
That's nice, but the recent trends for casual users are to do browsing on smartphones and tablets, which have a fraction of the processing power of your "aging dual core laptop" (I'm assuming it is a C2D or something similar).
You speak of something you know nothing about. It's more complicated than that. Users who record home videos, publish them to Youtube, end up getting screwed because with huge financial burdens because once the number of views gets high enough there sent a HUGE destructive bill. You have to get a professional camera or be screwed if you publish ANYTHING. You can't just convert to another format either. Your still liable.
Citation for any of this?
Most people posting here weren't at E3. I was, and I'm here to tell you that the XBOne is by far the best of the next-gen console as it stands now. The games do look next-gen, are well-thought out, and impressive.
No wonder, considering that the demos you saw at the show were run on a massively beefed up Windows 7 PC with a GTX 770 graphics card. What you're going to get on the real hardware will be nowhere near as impressive, since the real Xbone's GPU will have shader performance roughly equivalent to a Radeon HD 7790, but with much worse memory bandwidth due to using DDR3 instead of GDDR5.
At this point, the question is not whether Steve Ballmer should be fired as Microsoft CEO, but whether it's time to actually commit him to a mental institution.
>autorun.inf
The most dangerous thing to ever come out of a computer company. That this feature made it past review demonstrates the utter disregard for the most basic security at all, especially since boot sector worms had been around for years in DOS and Win3.1 before Win95 ever graced us with its presence. Since Windows 95, it's been trivial to write auto executing code because Microsoft deliberately yanks down the pants and underwear of the end user and says "Go to it!"
You're indulging in some 20/20 hindsight here. At the time Windows 95 was released, the only media that supported autorun.inf on insertion was CD-ROMs. (Floppy disks didn't do this, if only because the OS could not reliably detect when a disk was inserted in the drive.) Remember, at that time, CD-R drives were not mainstream computing devices; they were still very expensive and rare. (According to Wikipedia, the first CD-R drive under $1000 was not released until September 1995.) When Windows 95 was released, the idea was that only pressed CDs would autorun, and presumably MS thought that the vendors could be trusted not to ship malware. (The Sony rootkit scandal proved that was a mistake, but no one anticipated something like it at the time.) And let's be honest, in 1995, IT security wasn't really on the radar for home users.
The real problem came with Windows XP. By this time, recordable CDs (and, later, DVDs) were commonplace. But Microsoft's biggest mistake was reusing their autorun code for other forms of removable media – such as thumb drives. Again, when thumb drives were first released, they were pretty expensive (I remember paying $100 for a 1GB thumb drive about a decade ago), so the best explanation is that Microsoft didn't think it likely someone would put malicious software onto a thumb drive and just leave it laying around or give it away – at the time, that would have been a rather costly strategy.
Over time, as thumb drives became dirt-cheap, it was clear that allowing INF-based autorun on rewritable removable media was a bad idea. It probably shouldn't have taken Microsoft until 2009 to get rid of this. But the decisions made earlier in the process were not as clear-cut as you're making them out to be.
Yes. Whenever windows sees new data from any source, it immediately executes it... for security reasons ya know.
Not really. That security hole was patched over four years ago. What does happen is that when removable media is installed, the user is prompted for what to do; this can include opening the folder to view the files, or running a setup file if one is present. Yes, if someone *chooses* to run the setup.exe file and it's infected, then they can get a virus or trojan. But that's part of the cost of having an open platform without executable signing. The only way to eliminate this risk would be to force the user into a walled garden. That may be feasible on smartphones and tablets, but it's not acceptable on workstations.