So it is your assertion that Microsoft can require the vendor to sell a copy of Windows with every single computer they sell, but are powerless to insist that the system be shipped with the OS as is, sans crapware?
Indeed, that is the case. Microsoft wants to keep crapware off OEM PCs, but it would be an antitrust violation if they tried to force the OEMs to stop bundling it. Remember that the original MS antitrust case involved (among other things) OEMs who wanted to put Netscape as the default browser on their PCs.
Show me someone who can build a 1.37-inch-thick 27" touchscreen all-in-one PC "in an afternoon" and I'll show you someone who works for Acer.
Why would you need or even want a touchscreen on a PC? The only systems where these have any real utility is in special-purpose embedded applications like POS terminals, self-check units, and ATMs (yes, some of these are Windows PCs).
Let me help you out. A "gaming machine" is going to be packed with the latest / top of the line in hardware. That means if you are not rocking at least a ATI Radeon 7970, a 7990, or last year's 6990 (or whatever it was called), or whatever Nvidia is offering in its top ranks, it is not a gaming machine. If you are not rocking a processor from the top tier of whatever Intel or AMD is currently offering, or was offering as top tier a year ago, again, it is not a gaming machine. If the mouse / keyboard doesn't have waaaaay too many buttons, many of whose functions you have never actually discovered, it is not a gaming machine. If you do not have a discrete sound card (yes, that still matters), it is not a gaming machine. The hard drives would normally be mandated as SSD of some unthinkable size, but since Steam has (only recently) supposedly gotten their acts together with the whole 'storing games on a different hard drive,' I think we can give it a pass (for now) with having a 7200 RPM hard drive (again, only for now, as even the 10,000 RPM HDs don't have enough space for a full Steam collection...which is quietly eating one of my 3TB drives). Unless I am forgetting anything, I think we can establish that as a reasonable baseline for a 'gaming PC,' since it has been the baseline for over a decade.
What nonsense. The overwhelming majority of gamers don't need any of that crap. Think about it – if games couldn't run well on reasonably inexpensive hardware, no one would bother developing them, because the sales figures wouldn't be worth it.
For the vast majority of gamers, a $200-$250 video card (Geforce GTX660 or Radeon 7850/7870) will be more than enough. Discrete sound cards are a waste of money; they offer nothing that the built-in units don't. At best you might get slightly higher quality on the analog output, but if you really care that much about sound quality, you'd pipe the SPDIF or HDMI digital output to a real receiver and run quality speakers off of that.
Let's be honest, most people who buy massively overspecced gaming rigs do so just to show off how much money they have and/or how technically savvy they are.
My guess is that they will probably still offer a socket for servers and high-end enthusiast PCs, etc, but that means that it will be only specific enthusiast PCs that will support upgrades (e.g, you will not be able to upgrade a commodity desktop PC). So instead of outright killing the enthusiast PCs, I'm guessing Intel is simply going to make dabbling in enthusiast PCs a very expensive hobby (like it was in the old days).
I doubt it will get that much more expensive. Pretty much no one but enthusiasts is buying K-series CPUs or high-end ATX motherboards like the Asus Sabertooth series, but these parts don't really break the bank for most users.
There is quite a bit of overlap between the high end of enthusiast desktop hardware and the low end of workstation/server hardware. The Xeon E3-1230v2 at $244.99 (Newegg) isn't that much costlier than the Core i5-3570K at $219.99. Both CPUs are quad core and roughly the same speed (the 3570K is 0.1GHz faster, which most people would never notice). The K-series allows overclocking; the Xeon allows the use of ECC RAM, which may be more important if you care about peace of mind. (What do most power users plan to run that a 3.3GHz, quad core Ivy Bridge can't handle at stock clock speeds?) On the motherboard side, Asus has several LGA1155 workstation boards for under $200 (P8B-X and P8B-WS) while the Sabertooth Z77 enthusiast board is $224.99 (and that's on sale).
If you're an enthusiast, you will still be able to get what you need, even if it's officially labeled workstation or professional hardware. If you're building a cheap system for Grandma, then the boards with soldered low-mid/range CPUs will work fine.M
I have an inkling that Microsoft/OEMs will make the process more onerous going forward but I believe its worth the pain.
Microsoft has no stake in crapware. In fact, they made a big stink about it around the time of Vista's release. They know that when someone runs a Windows system that is full of crap from the factory, they are likely to blame Windows rather than the vendor for the poor performance.
Stopping technically oriented users from downloading Windows from MSDN has never been on Microsoft's agenda. Why would it be?
I think Intel is just rubbing their hands, thinking about integrating their CPUs so tightly with Intel chipsets that no other chipsets will even be an option anymore.
That ship sailed long ago, for both AMD and Intel. And good riddance. Systems from both of these manufacturers are much more stable now that they don't run off of northbridges from crappy third-party vendors. I, for one, do not at all miss the days of VIA and SiS.
It's quite possible that Intel may want to move to BGA-soldered chips for OEM crap. That stuff already has minimal upgrade options and most users never even crack the case. But a moment's thought makes it clear that this is not going to be a viable option for Intel to implement across the board. For starters, what about the immensely profitable Xeon line? Does anyone really think that this kind of marketing strategy is going to work in the data center?
What seems more likely to me is that Intel is going to consolidate the "enthusiast" and "server" sections of its market. OEM systems will have a relatively small number of motherboard configurations with BGA-soldered processors. Enthusiast-class (K-series) CPUs will be moved to the same chipset as Xeons, and the same motherboards will support both. High-end users can continue to get what they want, while the manufacturers who produce cheap computers to sell at Best Buy will be able to shave a few cents per board off of their production costs.
Incidentally, I would be very skeptical about taking anything that Charlie Demerjian says at face value. It's not that he is never right, but he's so in the tank for AMD that it's not funny.
If Jeremy Hammond actually did commit the crimes of which he is accused (and remember he is legally entitled to the presumption of innocence), then he deserves to be punished. But it's very difficult to think of any situation where life in prison would be appropriate for what is basically a small-scale hack of the type that happens dozens if not hundreds of times every day. Stratfor is a company with 70 employees. The local library where I work has more employees than that, and probably more patrons than Stratfor has customers. If someone hacked our databases, do you think the authorities would investigate the complaint as seriously, much less try to sentence the hacker to life in prison? If someone hacked into the poorly-secured credit card data from a small restaurant and did the same amount of damage, would the authorities be treating him or her as Public Enemy No. 1? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Hammond is being pursued with such vigor not because he broke the law, but because he committed offenses against politically powerful people, the clientele of Stratfor. (According to Wikipedia, "the company's publicity list includes Fortune 500 companies and international government agencies.") While this may not be surprising, it's a clear violation of the Constitution and needs to be fought against.
Why the hell would you want to code in asp in the first place?
I don't get why people would want to code in ASP, what does it have that Perl or PHP don't? I mean, besides expensive licenses, platform restrictions, and huge security issues.
"Classic" ASP sucks ass. It's basically Visual Basic for Servers.
ASP.NET, however, is actually a pretty good platform, since it lets you write your server-side code in C#. While PHP does give you the advantage of a free (in both senses) platform, it isn't nearly as well-designed or as elegant as ASP.NET. It's fine for small projects and it can, with difficulty, be scaled up for large ones (there are real-world examples aplenty), but if you are designing a big project from the ground up, ASP.NET might be a reasonable choice.
Last night I was at a sports bar and one one of the TVs there were literally three Windows 8 commercials in a row. Technically, one of them was for Lenovo, but it was Metro-focused and had the Windows branding at the end, so Microsoft no doubt paid for some of this as well. It's insane – I've never seen Microsoft acting so desperate to push a product before.
So they fired Sinsosky and that is a good thing. Sad, as he did a great job for Windows 7 but they did not do any QA or UI usability testing with METRO. Just get it out FAST!! and it was was rushed. Customers hate change and Windows 7 works just fine thank you very much.
After numbers come it the problem will only get worse. Lets hope they do not something really stupid like get rid of the desktop entirely and just be a tablet company now.
I think they will backpedal, either with a Service Pack or with Windows 9, allowing desktop users to opt-out of the Metro crap and boot straight to the desktop with a real start menu. They might have been able to withstand pushback from the power users alone, but corporations don't like retraining, and they are probably receiving feedback from multiple large companies saying that they are going to stay on Windows 7 to avoid retraining costs. It's easy to ignore individual consumers, but when 10,000-seat organizations say "what is this crap, go back to the way it was before" then Microsoft really has no choice but to listen.
I agree 100%. But I also find it bizarre that the exact opposite seems to be the pervasive mindset among Apple customers. For the life of me, I have no idea why it's worth bothering to upgrade my phone from iPhone 4G to (whatever the current one is, I don't keep track). Siri? Cloud-based storage? So what? How are these the monumental upgrades that people seem to think they are?
When you buy a new smartphone or tablet from Apple, you're buying a package consisting of both hardware and software. While iOS is fairly mature on the software side (with the exception of the new, inadequately tested Maps), smartphone and tablet hardware is still in its rapid development phase. In contrast, PC hardware mostly reached maturity in the 2006-2008 period (with the exception of displays, which still suck). If you upgrade from the iPad 2 to the iPad 4, you're not primarily paying for a new OS; you're paying for 4x the pixels and a much faster GPU.
Apparently Jacob Nielson is an idiot. My windows8 has three windows open right now.
Yes, the desktop works the same way it did before, except that they killed the Start button and force users to go through Metro instead. But users are no longer brought to the desktop upon logging in. Instead they are dumped directly into Metro, which does indeed have the limitations outlined by Jakob Nielsen. And it's not made obvious to new users how to get back to the desktop from there.
The bottom line is that with Windows 8, Microsoft deliberately sacrificed usability on the desktop for marketing reasons (pushing Metro into people's faces to bring more visibility to their tablet/phone products).
My impression is that developers are one of the target audiences for 'Metro'. After all, who else will produce the apps to go in the Microsoft Store, and ensure that the future is made of starkly colored squares? Letting them off the hook would just make it easier to keep shipping completely normal looking software that is Win7 compatible. Then were will progress be?
Well, no doubt that's what MS wants, but as the sales figures and negative reviews from power users indicate, it's not working. So what will happen is that most developers and power users will stay on Win7, and developers will keep writing their software for the traditional Windows API.
Honestly, isn't not just for graphics - it's for the whole fantastic class of problems that can be solved via GLSL shaders - GPU accelerated calculations in JS - this is simply so amazingly powerful, IE 10 is essentially worthless without it.
WebGL poses serious issues with security, because it allows untrusted code to basically talk directly to the graphics card. Most graphics drivers are barely stable, much less secure; they are written with performance in mind (gotta eke out that edge in Anandtech's FPS charts!) and security isn't even an afterthought. I don't want stuff from the WWW to be able to talk to bare-metal hardware.
As people start doing high performance computing and solving wildly complex problems in the browser with GPU accelerated JS, the browser will continue to emerge as the platform of choice for a wonderfully wide range of applications.
The browser is a crappy computing platform. For just about anything beyond simple games and basic calculations, you're better off writing in a real language instead of JavaScript.
who the hell uses IE as a web standard?
industry uses W3C... if you don't know that you likely won't even get a job as a web dev nowadays
No, the point is that it has to work on IE, whether or not IE is obeying W3C standards, because IE is what comes by default to low-information users, and IE is what is almost always used by businesses for Group Policy reasons. Thankfully, most businesses don't demand that IE6 be supported any more (though a few still do), but in many instances a website must at least display properly on IE8, even though that browser is absurdly outdated compared to everything else on the market. Remember, a lot of companies are still on Windows XP, and that can't even use IE9.
Adobe's level of public irresponsibility is crazy. Every week new vulnerabilities are found in Flash and Reader – more often, and more serious security holes, than in Windows, even though Windows is a whole OS and these programs should be much easier to keep bug-free in comparison. And now we find that they can't even keep their own internal databases safe. Preventing SQL injection really isn't that difficult; there are plenty of websites that tell you what you need to do. Just using parameterized queries will weed out most of the common SQL exploits. How much of Adobe's programming is being conducted now by people who just don't have any fucking idea what they're doing?
There really needs to be a good alternative to Photoshop (no, GIMP doesn't count). Flash needs to be phased out as quickly as possible, and people need to stop using Adobe Reader if at all possible, and try to move away from any Reader-specific PDF "features". Most people who use the full version of Acrobat are wasting their money (it's amazing how many people have it installed just so they can print to PDF, when there are free programs that do the exact same thing just as well).
No ARM system can be truly "open", because no one who produces these SoCs is releasing full specifications. The GPUs are a particular problem, since almost all of them rely upon binary blobs. With more and more functionality being moved to GPU hardware, this is an area where Open Source is really falling behind.
Having Linux or Android running on a cheap ARM board is nice, but if all you get is non-accelerated 2D graphics, you won't be able to be competitive with closed commercial products.
We can be pretty sure that Google isn't charging everyone else 2.25%. Google only holds a couple of significant 802.11 patents while organizations like CSIRO hold a larger number of more important patents. If 2.25% was the base rate for just Google's share, you'd be losing 10%+ of your revenue just to 802.11 patent holders.
Almost everyone else cross-licenses to get a lower rate (or no royalties at all, if their portfolio is big enough). MS and Apple don't have any FRAND patents of their own to cross-license, so they are obligated to pay full freight (2.25% per device).
That's a stupid justification. If you're going to claim something is wrong if the side you dislike does it, then it is equally wrong if the side you like does it. Otherwise you're nothing but a hypocritical fanboi.
If someone walks up to you and punches you, that's assault. If you hit him back while he's attacking you, that's self-defense.
Apple and Microsoft have been using their patent portfolios aggressively. Google has been using its in self-defense and defense of its allies (Samsung). That's a substantial difference.
The monopoly is per brand. If Ford owned every Ford dealership you would pay the same no matter where you went. The monopoly isn't about cars in general, but make and model pricing.
Why is this a problem? A certain personality type is drawn to haggle-based pricing, but most people hate it. Almost all other goods are sold retail with a take-it-or-leave-it price. As far as I can tell, it's only because of the legislatively enforced dealership model that cars are different.
Nope. Well, this may be true for windows, but windows is not the only OS around.
Even on Windows, this is not true. Windows 7 is faster and less bloated than Vista, and on par with XP. Supposedly Windows 8 is smaller still, though even on a diet, Windows can't compete with purpose-built portable OSes like Android and iOS when it comes to efficiency.
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So it is your assertion that Microsoft can require the vendor to sell a copy of Windows with every single computer they sell, but are powerless to insist that the system be shipped with the OS as is, sans crapware?
Indeed, that is the case. Microsoft wants to keep crapware off OEM PCs, but it would be an antitrust violation if they tried to force the OEMs to stop bundling it. Remember that the original MS antitrust case involved (among other things) OEMs who wanted to put Netscape as the default browser on their PCs.
Show me someone who can build a 1.37-inch-thick 27" touchscreen all-in-one PC "in an afternoon" and I'll show you someone who works for Acer.
Why would you need or even want a touchscreen on a PC? The only systems where these have any real utility is in special-purpose embedded applications like POS terminals, self-check units, and ATMs (yes, some of these are Windows PCs).
Let me help you out. A "gaming machine" is going to be packed with the latest / top of the line in hardware. That means if you are not rocking at least a ATI Radeon 7970, a 7990, or last year's 6990 (or whatever it was called), or whatever Nvidia is offering in its top ranks, it is not a gaming machine. If you are not rocking a processor from the top tier of whatever Intel or AMD is currently offering, or was offering as top tier a year ago, again, it is not a gaming machine. If the mouse / keyboard doesn't have waaaaay too many buttons, many of whose functions you have never actually discovered, it is not a gaming machine. If you do not have a discrete sound card (yes, that still matters), it is not a gaming machine. The hard drives would normally be mandated as SSD of some unthinkable size, but since Steam has (only recently) supposedly gotten their acts together with the whole 'storing games on a different hard drive,' I think we can give it a pass (for now) with having a 7200 RPM hard drive (again, only for now, as even the 10,000 RPM HDs don't have enough space for a full Steam collection...which is quietly eating one of my 3TB drives). Unless I am forgetting anything, I think we can establish that as a reasonable baseline for a 'gaming PC,' since it has been the baseline for over a decade.
What nonsense. The overwhelming majority of gamers don't need any of that crap. Think about it – if games couldn't run well on reasonably inexpensive hardware, no one would bother developing them, because the sales figures wouldn't be worth it.
For the vast majority of gamers, a $200-$250 video card (Geforce GTX660 or Radeon 7850/7870) will be more than enough. Discrete sound cards are a waste of money; they offer nothing that the built-in units don't. At best you might get slightly higher quality on the analog output, but if you really care that much about sound quality, you'd pipe the SPDIF or HDMI digital output to a real receiver and run quality speakers off of that.
Let's be honest, most people who buy massively overspecced gaming rigs do so just to show off how much money they have and/or how technically savvy they are.
My guess is that they will probably still offer a socket for servers and high-end enthusiast PCs, etc, but that means that it will be only specific enthusiast PCs that will support upgrades (e.g, you will not be able to upgrade a commodity desktop PC). So instead of outright killing the enthusiast PCs, I'm guessing Intel is simply going to make dabbling in enthusiast PCs a very expensive hobby (like it was in the old days).
I doubt it will get that much more expensive. Pretty much no one but enthusiasts is buying K-series CPUs or high-end ATX motherboards like the Asus Sabertooth series, but these parts don't really break the bank for most users.
There is quite a bit of overlap between the high end of enthusiast desktop hardware and the low end of workstation/server hardware. The Xeon E3-1230v2 at $244.99 (Newegg) isn't that much costlier than the Core i5-3570K at $219.99. Both CPUs are quad core and roughly the same speed (the 3570K is 0.1GHz faster, which most people would never notice). The K-series allows overclocking; the Xeon allows the use of ECC RAM, which may be more important if you care about peace of mind. (What do most power users plan to run that a 3.3GHz, quad core Ivy Bridge can't handle at stock clock speeds?) On the motherboard side, Asus has several LGA1155 workstation boards for under $200 (P8B-X and P8B-WS) while the Sabertooth Z77 enthusiast board is $224.99 (and that's on sale).
If you're an enthusiast, you will still be able to get what you need, even if it's officially labeled workstation or professional hardware. If you're building a cheap system for Grandma, then the boards with soldered low-mid/range CPUs will work fine.M
I have an inkling that Microsoft/OEMs will make the process more onerous going forward but I believe its worth the pain.
Microsoft has no stake in crapware. In fact, they made a big stink about it around the time of Vista's release. They know that when someone runs a Windows system that is full of crap from the factory, they are likely to blame Windows rather than the vendor for the poor performance.
Stopping technically oriented users from downloading Windows from MSDN has never been on Microsoft's agenda. Why would it be?
I think Intel is just rubbing their hands, thinking about integrating their CPUs so tightly with Intel chipsets that no other chipsets will even be an option anymore.
That ship sailed long ago, for both AMD and Intel. And good riddance. Systems from both of these manufacturers are much more stable now that they don't run off of northbridges from crappy third-party vendors. I, for one, do not at all miss the days of VIA and SiS.
What you mean is, "you can't go closed source Intel apps".
In other words, pretty much everything the average user does on their PC with the possible exception of the web browser.
Why would you need to run x86 apps? Just recompile and go.
Please tell me where I can obtain the source for Photoshop and MS Office so that I can recompile them.
It's quite possible that Intel may want to move to BGA-soldered chips for OEM crap. That stuff already has minimal upgrade options and most users never even crack the case. But a moment's thought makes it clear that this is not going to be a viable option for Intel to implement across the board. For starters, what about the immensely profitable Xeon line? Does anyone really think that this kind of marketing strategy is going to work in the data center?
What seems more likely to me is that Intel is going to consolidate the "enthusiast" and "server" sections of its market. OEM systems will have a relatively small number of motherboard configurations with BGA-soldered processors. Enthusiast-class (K-series) CPUs will be moved to the same chipset as Xeons, and the same motherboards will support both. High-end users can continue to get what they want, while the manufacturers who produce cheap computers to sell at Best Buy will be able to shave a few cents per board off of their production costs.
Incidentally, I would be very skeptical about taking anything that Charlie Demerjian says at face value. It's not that he is never right, but he's so in the tank for AMD that it's not funny.
If Jeremy Hammond actually did commit the crimes of which he is accused (and remember he is legally entitled to the presumption of innocence), then he deserves to be punished. But it's very difficult to think of any situation where life in prison would be appropriate for what is basically a small-scale hack of the type that happens dozens if not hundreds of times every day. Stratfor is a company with 70 employees. The local library where I work has more employees than that, and probably more patrons than Stratfor has customers. If someone hacked our databases, do you think the authorities would investigate the complaint as seriously, much less try to sentence the hacker to life in prison? If someone hacked into the poorly-secured credit card data from a small restaurant and did the same amount of damage, would the authorities be treating him or her as Public Enemy No. 1? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Hammond is being pursued with such vigor not because he broke the law, but because he committed offenses against politically powerful people, the clientele of Stratfor. (According to Wikipedia, "the company's publicity list includes Fortune 500 companies and international government agencies.") While this may not be surprising, it's a clear violation of the Constitution and needs to be fought against.
Why the hell would you want to code in asp in the first place?
I don't get why people would want to code in ASP, what does it have that Perl or PHP don't? I mean, besides expensive licenses, platform restrictions, and huge security issues.
"Classic" ASP sucks ass. It's basically Visual Basic for Servers.
ASP.NET, however, is actually a pretty good platform, since it lets you write your server-side code in C#. While PHP does give you the advantage of a free (in both senses) platform, it isn't nearly as well-designed or as elegant as ASP.NET. It's fine for small projects and it can, with difficulty, be scaled up for large ones (there are real-world examples aplenty), but if you are designing a big project from the ground up, ASP.NET might be a reasonable choice.
Using windows to provide an internet facing service was the first mistake.
What would you suggest if someone wants to run ASP.NET code on their website?
Last night I was at a sports bar and one one of the TVs there were literally three Windows 8 commercials in a row. Technically, one of them was for Lenovo, but it was Metro-focused and had the Windows branding at the end, so Microsoft no doubt paid for some of this as well. It's insane – I've never seen Microsoft acting so desperate to push a product before.
So they fired Sinsosky and that is a good thing. Sad, as he did a great job for Windows 7 but they did not do any QA or UI usability testing with METRO. Just get it out FAST!! and it was was rushed. Customers hate change and Windows 7 works just fine thank you very much. After numbers come it the problem will only get worse. Lets hope they do not something really stupid like get rid of the desktop entirely and just be a tablet company now.
I think they will backpedal, either with a Service Pack or with Windows 9, allowing desktop users to opt-out of the Metro crap and boot straight to the desktop with a real start menu. They might have been able to withstand pushback from the power users alone, but corporations don't like retraining, and they are probably receiving feedback from multiple large companies saying that they are going to stay on Windows 7 to avoid retraining costs. It's easy to ignore individual consumers, but when 10,000-seat organizations say "what is this crap, go back to the way it was before" then Microsoft really has no choice but to listen.
I agree 100%. But I also find it bizarre that the exact opposite seems to be the pervasive mindset among Apple customers. For the life of me, I have no idea why it's worth bothering to upgrade my phone from iPhone 4G to (whatever the current one is, I don't keep track). Siri? Cloud-based storage? So what? How are these the monumental upgrades that people seem to think they are?
When you buy a new smartphone or tablet from Apple, you're buying a package consisting of both hardware and software. While iOS is fairly mature on the software side (with the exception of the new, inadequately tested Maps), smartphone and tablet hardware is still in its rapid development phase. In contrast, PC hardware mostly reached maturity in the 2006-2008 period (with the exception of displays, which still suck). If you upgrade from the iPad 2 to the iPad 4, you're not primarily paying for a new OS; you're paying for 4x the pixels and a much faster GPU.
Apparently Jacob Nielson is an idiot. My windows8 has three windows open right now.
Yes, the desktop works the same way it did before, except that they killed the Start button and force users to go through Metro instead. But users are no longer brought to the desktop upon logging in. Instead they are dumped directly into Metro, which does indeed have the limitations outlined by Jakob Nielsen. And it's not made obvious to new users how to get back to the desktop from there.
The bottom line is that with Windows 8, Microsoft deliberately sacrificed usability on the desktop for marketing reasons (pushing Metro into people's faces to bring more visibility to their tablet/phone products).
My impression is that developers are one of the target audiences for 'Metro'. After all, who else will produce the apps to go in the Microsoft Store, and ensure that the future is made of starkly colored squares? Letting them off the hook would just make it easier to keep shipping completely normal looking software that is Win7 compatible. Then were will progress be?
Well, no doubt that's what MS wants, but as the sales figures and negative reviews from power users indicate, it's not working. So what will happen is that most developers and power users will stay on Win7, and developers will keep writing their software for the traditional Windows API.
Honestly, isn't not just for graphics - it's for the whole fantastic class of problems that can be solved via GLSL shaders - GPU accelerated calculations in JS - this is simply so amazingly powerful, IE 10 is essentially worthless without it.
WebGL poses serious issues with security, because it allows untrusted code to basically talk directly to the graphics card. Most graphics drivers are barely stable, much less secure; they are written with performance in mind (gotta eke out that edge in Anandtech's FPS charts!) and security isn't even an afterthought. I don't want stuff from the WWW to be able to talk to bare-metal hardware.
As people start doing high performance computing and solving wildly complex problems in the browser with GPU accelerated JS, the browser will continue to emerge as the platform of choice for a wonderfully wide range of applications.
The browser is a crappy computing platform. For just about anything beyond simple games and basic calculations, you're better off writing in a real language instead of JavaScript.
who the hell uses IE as a web standard? industry uses W3C... if you don't know that you likely won't even get a job as a web dev nowadays
No, the point is that it has to work on IE, whether or not IE is obeying W3C standards, because IE is what comes by default to low-information users, and IE is what is almost always used by businesses for Group Policy reasons. Thankfully, most businesses don't demand that IE6 be supported any more (though a few still do), but in many instances a website must at least display properly on IE8, even though that browser is absurdly outdated compared to everything else on the market. Remember, a lot of companies are still on Windows XP, and that can't even use IE9.
Adobe's level of public irresponsibility is crazy. Every week new vulnerabilities are found in Flash and Reader – more often, and more serious security holes, than in Windows, even though Windows is a whole OS and these programs should be much easier to keep bug-free in comparison. And now we find that they can't even keep their own internal databases safe. Preventing SQL injection really isn't that difficult; there are plenty of websites that tell you what you need to do. Just using parameterized queries will weed out most of the common SQL exploits. How much of Adobe's programming is being conducted now by people who just don't have any fucking idea what they're doing?
There really needs to be a good alternative to Photoshop (no, GIMP doesn't count). Flash needs to be phased out as quickly as possible, and people need to stop using Adobe Reader if at all possible, and try to move away from any Reader-specific PDF "features". Most people who use the full version of Acrobat are wasting their money (it's amazing how many people have it installed just so they can print to PDF, when there are free programs that do the exact same thing just as well).
No ARM system can be truly "open", because no one who produces these SoCs is releasing full specifications. The GPUs are a particular problem, since almost all of them rely upon binary blobs. With more and more functionality being moved to GPU hardware, this is an area where Open Source is really falling behind.
Having Linux or Android running on a cheap ARM board is nice, but if all you get is non-accelerated 2D graphics, you won't be able to be competitive with closed commercial products.
We can be pretty sure that Google isn't charging everyone else 2.25%. Google only holds a couple of significant 802.11 patents while organizations like CSIRO hold a larger number of more important patents. If 2.25% was the base rate for just Google's share, you'd be losing 10%+ of your revenue just to 802.11 patent holders.
Almost everyone else cross-licenses to get a lower rate (or no royalties at all, if their portfolio is big enough). MS and Apple don't have any FRAND patents of their own to cross-license, so they are obligated to pay full freight (2.25% per device).
That's a stupid justification. If you're going to claim something is wrong if the side you dislike does it, then it is equally wrong if the side you like does it. Otherwise you're nothing but a hypocritical fanboi.
If someone walks up to you and punches you, that's assault. If you hit him back while he's attacking you, that's self-defense.
Apple and Microsoft have been using their patent portfolios aggressively. Google has been using its in self-defense and defense of its allies (Samsung). That's a substantial difference.
The monopoly is per brand. If Ford owned every Ford dealership you would pay the same no matter where you went. The monopoly isn't about cars in general, but make and model pricing.
Why is this a problem? A certain personality type is drawn to haggle-based pricing, but most people hate it. Almost all other goods are sold retail with a take-it-or-leave-it price. As far as I can tell, it's only because of the legislatively enforced dealership model that cars are different.
Nope. Well, this may be true for windows, but windows is not the only OS around.
Even on Windows, this is not true. Windows 7 is faster and less bloated than Vista, and on par with XP. Supposedly Windows 8 is smaller still, though even on a diet, Windows can't compete with purpose-built portable OSes like Android and iOS when it comes to efficiency.