It hasn't been a cake-walk converting Zoom Player (http://zoomplayer.com) to the AppX model.
The 'Desktop Bridge' conversion tool breaks the Executable/AppData folder model introduced in Windows Vista and is completely incompatible with the Windows XP admin access model.
By this I mean that the app can't write any file to the installation folder. And any files installed to the local AppData folder by the Win32 installer are non-accessible after the conversion to AppX (they are installed in a read-only folder where no API can be used to find the folder's path). The work-around is to install everything to a single folder and then copy the required files to the local AppData folder on the initial run.
There are other issues dealing with the App's icon in various places, it seems they changed the model and it's impossible (as far as I can tell and as far as my questions get non-answers on the microsoft UWP forum) to present the same icon as a desktop app on the start menu, task bar and elsewhere.
I also found that some 3rd party components (DirectShow filters) don't always work in the virtualized environment, but it's something I'm trying to resolve with the authors.
And finally, there is no clear process to get a store listing for the App. We filled in the form, got no reply that it was even received, later follow-ups on the MS forum resulting in this: https://social.msdn.microsoft....
If Microsoft is really serious about this, they should actively approach developers and send them SDK kits. I wouldn't mind having access to the tech and SDK for Zoom Player without having to jump through too many hoops.
That's what I do on my android phone. I have DroidWall installed and I simply block unwanted "services" from internet access. There's other alternatives on android, such-as "freezing" services.
What they're doing is reducing the image quality to make it easier to locate objects by blurring everything so the fine image detail wont confuse their object recognition engine. Once an object outline is set, they ""increase"" the quality by using the original (full quality) image.
This works nice for small things (notice the minimum level of panning in the video), but the only way it can be done that isn't easy to detect is if you had a powerful AI that would recognize all the objects and surfaces in the scene and recreate the missing data using a pre-existing visual database.
Once powerful AI systems go online, you would be able to generate any visuals you want that would be hard (maybe even impossible) to distinguish from reality.
We've been using Delphi to develop our project (see sig) for years and we find it very intuitive and friendly to design user-interface based Win32 applications. I personally feel that Pascal's syntax is much clearer than most languages and yet flexible and powerful enough to develop major projects, making it ideal for teaching client-side programming to newcomers.
The only sad thing about Delphi (which I hope will be rectified) is: 1. No 64bit compiler. 2. No mobile platform support (except maybe.NET for WinCE devices, but those are dying out due to iPhone/BB/Android and even WinMo7 which is turning into an even more simplified iPhoneish design).
This tech, if ever made viable on a larger scale would be the perfect way to transfer solar energy to the ground, much more efficient than the currently proposed lasers.
I haven't run an active Anti-Virus software once in all my years of computing (over 20) and the only virus I have ever contracted on Windows was the Blaster worm that relied on a publicly unknown (at the time) bug in one of Microsoft's DLL.
How did I do this for so long? Awareness, Patching and Prudence.
On the other hand, I know plenty of people running active commercial anti-virus software that's been plagued with virii.
The reason? 1. No Awareness. 2. No Patching. 3. No Prudence.
Worm/Virus are spread so fast these days, the AV software just can't catch up in time to prevent the infection and in quite a few cases, the Worm/Virus disables the AV software, making it more difficult (in some cases impossible) to remove the infection without booting to another OS (Live OS from a CD/USB Drive).
When dealing with 3D content, you'll have new encoding techniques (since the 2D images are not too dissimilar, you can improve compression a bit using specific algorithms designed for this case).
And in any case, the rise in internet bandwidth will far out pace the size of the media.
On a 5mbit connection, getting ideal download speeds, you can download about 2gb/hour.
You can encode a 2560x720 (3D 720p image) content using existing H264 tech at 2gb for 45-60 minutes in high quality (not blu-ray, but much better than DVD). That's practically streaming 3D 720p Video at only 5mbit.
When you're dealing with 20mbit or higher connections, you can stream channels of 1080p 3D content without saturating your network connection.
I doubt anyone will ever need those 93tb 4K lossless compressed source material for home viewing.
I have a lot of experience in this field, and here are the reason why physical media is doomed, probably even sooner than many expect.
Here's why: 1. BluRay licensing makes it very difficult (expensive) to enable mass-adoption. 2. Bandwidth is getting cheaper while high-speed internet is becoming more accessible. 3. DRM is slowly dying.
This will lead to Downloadable HD content which you could stream/burn/transcode to any format you want within the next 2-5 years (on a mass-market scale as we're already seeing this in some fringe markets).
And if the establishment wont move in this direction, piracy will only grow as people want things to be easy and will take the path of least resistance (if DRM is more complicated/unreliable than Piracy, we'll see more content pirates).
The original question was about Windows, not mac/linux, so here's my windows answer:
1. Partition the hard disk into two parts, drive-C: should be about 20gb and the rest goes to drive-D: 2. Do a clean install. 3. Install a VNC app (or enable remote desktop). 4. Setup an application based firewall and pre-approve all applications the end-user may need. 5. Setup icons on the desktop for the most important apps (and shortcuts to important folders such as my documents/my pictures/etc...) 6. This is probably the most important, after everything is working correctly, create an image of partition-C:. Once you have an image of the OS parition if the OS starts to degrade, you always have a solid starting point that doesn't require 4 hours to install (takes about 30min to restore a 20gb image on even slower machines)
Use VNC to help remotely so that you won't have to visit for every little fix.
There are other things you can do, but this is the crux of it.
The biggest issue with vista compatibility is that with User Account Control, you can't write into the "Program Files" directory, even as administrator.
Microsoft now requires that all data written by a software be stored in the "AppData" directory. So how do developers react?
The good developers split their program files between the static files (which go into the "Program Files" directory) and dynamic files (files that need to be written to which go in the "AppData" directory). What do the lazy programmers do? Put their entire program into the "AppData" directory and avoid any hassle altogether.
So now, the "AppData" directory essentially becomes the new "Program Files" directory, but... The users are 99% unaware of this and the "AppData" directory (which there are several of) gets contaminated with more junk which is harder to find.
Since I'm a software designer and must support the latest standard, I upgraded to Vista so I can make sure that my programs are compatible.
Its been nothing but pain.
I'm very fanatic about keeping my system clean and functioning well, I don't install superfluous applications and am very careful about what I do install.
The problem is, VISTA seems to slowly degrade in stability over time with blue-screens appearing quite often after a few months of regular day to day use. Once it gets to more than 2-3 blue screens a day, I restore the OS from a clean image and then it works well for a while longer until the blue screens appear again.
The funny thing is, the blue screens seem to be from different system components (usbhost.sys, tcpip.sys, memory faults, etc...). If you may think this has something to do with hardware failure (which was my initial guess seeing references to USB and other hardware drivers crashing), you'd be wrong as a clean install or running XP gets rid of all these problems. And I'm not using any weird USB devices either, only Flash Drives and the occasional SD card reader.
As a developer, I was forced to upgrade my work environment to vista in order to support users.
During pretty much from when vista shipped till about a month ago, Vista would BSOD at least once or twice a day, very frustrating.
Since I don't play games and the 3D hardware's only use was to display video (certain video rendering modes in windows use the 3D hardware) it was quite frustrating. However, after several updates from both NVIDIA and Microsoft, Vista has been very stable for me over the last month.
However!
NVIDIA's Vista driver are no where near complete compared to their XP drivers. There's a lot of missing functionality, especially when dealing with analog (S-Video) output. Considering vista was released over a year ago, this is very frustrating.
As a software developer for windows, I've encountered several incompatibilities with VISTA.
The most serious of which (the ones that break compatibility with older versions of windows) in my situation are File Association and the inability to write to the software's own directory when using a limited account.
File Association: The problem here is that for the 5th time, microsoft changed how different file extensions are executed. This time, you have to use a new API (instead of just writing a few registry entries). This basically breaks file association for every application out there that isn't tailor made for VISTA. It would also cause severe compatibility issues with programs that rely on associating their own file formats.
Limited Access: When using a non-admin account, an application can no longer write files into the directory it resides in. It must write all work-files to a special user-based directory. Again, this breaks backward compatibility for a lot of existing programs.
And another reason why VISTA isn't really all that ready is display drivers. There are a lot of glitches in the new display drivers from both NVIDIA and ATI. Heck, due to the new driver model in VISTA, even the Windows XP drivers have been restructured, introducing new bugs (NVIDIA 9x.xx series for example), which are not being fixed for months.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what happens when control overtakes security as a priority.
Yes, MadVR isn't working.
I contacted the author, so hopefully it will eventually work.
Converted desktop apps are not limited to one window.
It hasn't been a cake-walk converting Zoom Player (http://zoomplayer.com) to the AppX model.
The 'Desktop Bridge' conversion tool breaks the Executable/AppData folder model introduced in Windows Vista and is completely incompatible with the Windows XP admin access model.
By this I mean that the app can't write any file to the installation folder.
And any files installed to the local AppData folder by the Win32 installer are non-accessible after the conversion to AppX (they are installed in a read-only folder where no API can be used to find the folder's path).
The work-around is to install everything to a single folder and then copy the required files to the local AppData folder on the initial run.
There are other issues dealing with the App's icon in various places, it seems they changed the model and it's impossible (as far as I can tell and as far as my questions get non-answers on the microsoft UWP forum) to present the same icon as a desktop app on the start menu, task bar and elsewhere.
I also found that some 3rd party components (DirectShow filters) don't always work in the virtualized environment, but it's something I'm trying to resolve with the authors.
And finally, there is no clear process to get a store listing for the App.
We filled in the form, got no reply that it was even received, later follow-ups on the MS forum resulting in this:
https://social.msdn.microsoft....
Hopefully they will streamline the process soon.
If Microsoft is really serious about this, they should actively approach developers and send them SDK kits.
I wouldn't mind having access to the tech and SDK for Zoom Player without having to jump through too many hoops.
That's what I do on my android phone.
I have DroidWall installed and I simply block unwanted "services" from internet access.
There's other alternatives on android, such-as "freezing" services.
That wouldn't be cool.
They aren't actually increasing image quality.
What they're doing is reducing the image quality to make it easier to locate objects by blurring everything so the fine image detail wont confuse their object recognition engine. Once an object outline is set, they ""increase"" the quality by using the original (full quality) image.
This works nice for small things (notice the minimum level of panning in the video), but the only way it can be done that isn't easy to detect is if you had a powerful AI that would recognize all the objects and surfaces in the scene and recreate the missing data using a pre-existing visual database.
Once powerful AI systems go online, you would be able to generate any visuals you want that would be hard (maybe even impossible) to distinguish from reality.
We've been using Delphi to develop our project (see sig) for years and we find it very intuitive and friendly to design user-interface based Win32 applications. I personally feel that Pascal's syntax is much clearer than most languages and yet flexible and powerful enough to develop major projects, making it ideal for teaching client-side programming to newcomers.
The only sad thing about Delphi (which I hope will be rectified) is: .NET for WinCE devices, but those are dying out due to iPhone/BB/Android and even WinMo7 which is turning into an even more simplified iPhoneish design).
1. No 64bit compiler.
2. No mobile platform support (except maybe
Nice upscale for M86's filtering tech, designed to nanny kids, scaled up to nanny the whole country.
This tech, if ever made viable on a larger scale would be the perfect way to transfer solar energy to the ground, much more efficient than the currently proposed lasers.
Not only the U.K.,
Windows 7 is already on sale in Israel.
For me on the same machine 3.5 is much faster.
It's possible it might be taking more ram and on your old hardware with less ram it's using swapped memory, which is very very slow.
I haven't run an active Anti-Virus software once in all my years of computing (over 20) and the only virus I have ever contracted on Windows was the Blaster worm that relied on a publicly unknown (at the time) bug in one of Microsoft's DLL.
How did I do this for so long? Awareness, Patching and Prudence.
On the other hand, I know plenty of people running active commercial anti-virus software that's been plagued with virii.
The reason?
1. No Awareness.
2. No Patching.
3. No Prudence.
Worm/Virus are spread so fast these days, the AV software just can't catch up in time to prevent the infection and in quite a few cases, the Worm/Virus disables the AV software, making it more difficult (in some cases impossible) to remove the infection without booting to another OS (Live OS from a CD/USB Drive).
That's why I use ClamWin for occasional scanning.
I call BS.
When dealing with 3D content, you'll have new encoding techniques (since the 2D images are not too dissimilar, you can improve compression a bit using specific algorithms designed for this case).
And in any case, the rise in internet bandwidth will far out pace the size of the media.
On a 5mbit connection, getting ideal download speeds, you can download about 2gb/hour.
You can encode a 2560x720 (3D 720p image) content using existing H264 tech at 2gb for 45-60 minutes in high quality (not blu-ray, but much better than DVD). That's practically streaming 3D 720p Video at only 5mbit.
When you're dealing with 20mbit or higher connections, you can stream channels of 1080p 3D content without saturating your network connection.
I doubt anyone will ever need those 93tb 4K lossless compressed source material for home viewing.
I have a lot of experience in this field, and here are the reason why physical media is doomed, probably even sooner than many expect.
Here's why:
1. BluRay licensing makes it very difficult (expensive) to enable mass-adoption.
2. Bandwidth is getting cheaper while high-speed internet is becoming more accessible.
3. DRM is slowly dying.
This will lead to Downloadable HD content which you could stream/burn/transcode to any format you want within the next 2-5 years (on a mass-market scale as we're already seeing this in some fringe markets).
And if the establishment wont move in this direction, piracy will only grow as people want things to be easy and will take the path of least resistance (if DRM is more complicated/unreliable than Piracy, we'll see more content pirates).
The original question was about Windows, not mac/linux, so here's my windows answer:
1. Partition the hard disk into two parts, drive-C: should be about 20gb and the rest goes to drive-D:
2. Do a clean install.
3. Install a VNC app (or enable remote desktop).
4. Setup an application based firewall and pre-approve all applications the end-user may need.
5. Setup icons on the desktop for the most important apps (and shortcuts to important folders such as my documents/my pictures/etc...)
6. This is probably the most important, after everything is working correctly, create an image of partition-C:. Once you have an image of the OS parition if the OS starts to degrade, you always have a solid starting point that doesn't require 4 hours to install (takes about 30min to restore a 20gb image on even slower machines)
Use VNC to help remotely so that you won't have to visit for every little fix.
There are other things you can do, but this is the crux of it.
It's not the hard drive or ram, both were tested quite heavily.
Didn't I say I was very careful?, I don't have auto-run enabled on any drive, so no sneaky flash drive virii for me.
With regards to vista compatibility issues.
The biggest issue with vista compatibility is that with User Account Control, you can't write into the "Program Files" directory, even as administrator.
Microsoft now requires that all data written by a software be stored in the "AppData" directory.
So how do developers react?
The good developers split their program files between the static files (which go into the "Program Files" directory) and dynamic files (files that need to be written to which go in the "AppData" directory).
What do the lazy programmers do? Put their entire program into the "AppData" directory and avoid any hassle altogether.
So now, the "AppData" directory essentially becomes the new "Program Files" directory, but... The users are 99% unaware of this and the "AppData" directory (which there are several of) gets contaminated with more junk which is harder to find.
Since I'm a software designer and must support the latest standard, I upgraded to Vista so I can make sure that my programs are compatible.
Its been nothing but pain.
I'm very fanatic about keeping my system clean and functioning well, I don't install superfluous applications and am very careful about what I do install.
The problem is, VISTA seems to slowly degrade in stability over time with blue-screens appearing quite often after a few months of regular day to day use. Once it gets to more than 2-3 blue screens a day, I restore the OS from a clean image and then it works well for a while longer until the blue screens appear again.
The funny thing is, the blue screens seem to be from different system components (usbhost.sys, tcpip.sys, memory faults, etc...). If you may think this has something to do with hardware failure (which was my initial guess seeing references to USB and other hardware drivers crashing), you'd be wrong as a clean install or running XP gets rid of all these problems. And I'm not using any weird USB devices either, only Flash Drives and the occasional SD card reader.
As a developer, I was forced to upgrade my work environment to vista in order to support users. During pretty much from when vista shipped till about a month ago, Vista would BSOD at least once or twice a day, very frustrating. Since I don't play games and the 3D hardware's only use was to display video (certain video rendering modes in windows use the 3D hardware) it was quite frustrating. However, after several updates from both NVIDIA and Microsoft, Vista has been very stable for me over the last month. However! NVIDIA's Vista driver are no where near complete compared to their XP drivers. There's a lot of missing functionality, especially when dealing with analog (S-Video) output. Considering vista was released over a year ago, this is very frustrating.
Still no cure for cancer. Good to know research money is well spent.
As a software developer for windows, I've encountered several incompatibilities with VISTA.
The most serious of which (the ones that break compatibility with older versions of windows) in my situation are File Association and the inability to write to the software's own directory when using a limited account.
File Association:
The problem here is that for the 5th time, microsoft changed how different file extensions are executed. This time, you have to use a new API (instead of just writing a few registry entries). This basically breaks file association for every application out there that isn't tailor made for VISTA. It would also cause severe compatibility issues with programs that rely on associating their own file formats.
Limited Access:
When using a non-admin account, an application can no longer write files into the directory it resides in. It must write all work-files to a special user-based directory. Again, this breaks backward compatibility for a lot of existing programs.
And another reason why VISTA isn't really all that ready is display drivers. There are a lot of glitches in the new display drivers from both NVIDIA and ATI. Heck, due to the new driver model in VISTA, even the Windows XP drivers have been restructured, introducing new bugs (NVIDIA 9x.xx series for example), which are not being fixed for months.
That was a south park reference.