Free software sometimes carries limitations: the program might not be as featureful as a proprietary counterpart. The proprietary software might give me more freedom in the sense of getting my actual task done in the best way possible. Maybe it has better toolset to allow expressing myself artistically more freely, or maybe it has better hardware support so I have more freedom to choose among various hardware devices. Have you thought about freedom from this perspective?
The Half-Life wiki has a good article called Future of the Half-Life series where you can follow the latest developments.
On March 19, Gabe Newell, when asked about Half-Life 3, replied: "The only reason we'd go back and do like a super classic kind of product is if a whole bunch of people just internally at Valve said they wanted to do it and had a reasonable explanation for why [they did]." This, like all of Valve's other statements regarding Half-Life 3, neither confirms nor denies the possibility that the game will eventually be made.
Meeh. It's not necessarily him. sexconker said that he threw some cow comments in the mix just for the laughs. The original spammer is probably some other person. sexconker seems like a sane person to me.
Hey, at least the weird BSD spam seems to be gone for good (the one with random words and the word "BSD" there somewhere).
There really isn't any noticeable performance penalty of having all effects turned on in Windows. If your GPU driver supports DWM compositing in the first place, you're golden. Even GMA950 is just fine.
They are rectangular/square, just like the taskbar icons in Windows 7 that everyone I know loves.
Take a closer look.
The taskbar icons in Windows 7 have glass effect, nice diagonal gradient and rounded corners. Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor, and the color of that effect matches the application icon. Also the icon of the active application has brighter background than others.
These kind of small touches are missing in the Windows 10 UI.
Even 386 has multithreading. The Pentium 4 just takes it a step further with HyperThreading which lowers the context switching (push/pop) overhead. The extra fake core shown to the OS is just an abstraction to help the OS perform better with this technology.
Microsoft has released both IE and Office on Mac. I'm sure they could consider releasing more Linux software as well, if Linux wasn't such an unpredictable trash platform on the desktop.
Anyway, the main reason Id never recommend anyone use a microsoft browser is they are always tied to closely to the OS and just an easy gateway for malware.
In which way tied? In Windows 98, Explorer depended on the IE engine, but that's about it.
These days both IE and Edge run content in a hardened sandbox anyway, which malware will have hard time escaping.
Re:Being Pro-GPL Is For Cows
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Generally the application knows what kind of frames it has drawn successfully and can calculate its own frame rate based on that. But I guess you could cheat an external recording software. In the driver, just output 30 fps content with doubled frames and you get fake 60 fps.
Should driver developers re-evaluate their optimization practices for Linux?
Not necessarily. For example, replacing game shaders with optimized platform-specific ones can offer great performance increase with no tradeoffs. The GPU makers know their chip architecture inside out, but game developers usually target a higher level concept such as some shader language. Unless you develop for fixed hardware such as consoles, of course.
There's really two ways how you can relate to these kind of optimizations: "Hey, you're cheating!" or "Cool, thanks for help!". I personally are fine with them, but I would like to clearly know when specific optimizations are in use, and can turn them off when needed. Maybe after application startup the driver could render some popup in the frame buffer such as "AMD Catalyst(R) optimizations in use" which would fade out after a few seconds.
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That was exactly my point. There is many kinds of freedom.
Free software sometimes carries limitations: the program might not be as featureful as a proprietary counterpart. The proprietary software might give me more freedom in the sense of getting my actual task done in the best way possible. Maybe it has better toolset to allow expressing myself artistically more freely, or maybe it has better hardware support so I have more freedom to choose among various hardware devices. Have you thought about freedom from this perspective?
The Half-Life wiki has a good article called Future of the Half-Life series where you can follow the latest developments.
On March 19, Gabe Newell, when asked about Half-Life 3, replied: "The only reason we'd go back and do like a super classic kind of product is if a whole bunch of people just internally at Valve said they wanted to do it and had a reasonable explanation for why [they did]." This, like all of Valve's other statements regarding Half-Life 3, neither confirms nor denies the possibility that the game will eventually be made.
I meant that even with fully parallized tasks the improvement is usually around 10x.
OneNote is freeware already if that's what you meant. Or do you actually need the source code?
Why not?
Then it's kinda useless because typical business spreadsheets do not use calculations any more complex than even a 386 could calculate in an eyeblink.
500x faster than a normal processor is well within a reasonable speedup range.
Not really. The improvement is usually around 10x.
Meeh. It's not necessarily him. sexconker said that he threw some cow comments in the mix just for the laughs. The original spammer is probably some other person. sexconker seems like a sane person to me.
Hey, at least the weird BSD spam seems to be gone for good (the one with random words and the word "BSD" there somewhere).
Wow, you really got worked up over the lamp effect. :D
In practice I haven't noticed any performance degradation even if I have all of the checkboxes ticked in that dialog.
There really isn't any noticeable performance penalty of having all effects turned on in Windows. If your GPU driver supports DWM compositing in the first place, you're golden. Even GMA950 is just fine.
They are rectangular/square, just like the taskbar icons in Windows 7 that everyone I know loves.
Take a closer look.
The taskbar icons in Windows 7 have glass effect, nice diagonal gradient and rounded corners. Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor, and the color of that effect matches the application icon. Also the icon of the active application has brighter background than others.
These kind of small touches are missing in the Windows 10 UI.
Ah, thanks for the info. I was indeed wondering what precisely is the need to show up as two cores.
There is no UEFI SecureBoot requirement in Windows 8 or 10. At least I have been able to install to any kinds of machines just fine.
Even 386 has multithreading. The Pentium 4 just takes it a step further with HyperThreading which lowers the context switching (push/pop) overhead. The extra fake core shown to the OS is just an abstraction to help the OS perform better with this technology.
Why would they want to destroy something that they support?
Cock-nugget. :D
Haven't heard that one before.
Microsoft has released both IE and Office on Mac. I'm sure they could consider releasing more Linux software as well, if Linux wasn't such an unpredictable trash platform on the desktop.
Anyway, the main reason Id never recommend anyone use a microsoft browser is they are always tied to closely to the OS and just an easy gateway for malware.
In which way tied? In Windows 98, Explorer depended on the IE engine, but that's about it.
These days both IE and Edge run content in a hardened sandbox anyway, which malware will have hard time escaping.
Well, we found the cow-man.
Are you joking? Modern web is extremely clunky to use if you browse it with scripts turned off by default.
If we look at the table from late last year, C++11 support seems quite well-rounded. If there's a bug, file a report.
Generally the application knows what kind of frames it has drawn successfully and can calculate its own frame rate based on that. But I guess you could cheat an external recording software. In the driver, just output 30 fps content with doubled frames and you get fake 60 fps.
Should driver developers re-evaluate their optimization practices for Linux?
Not necessarily. For example, replacing game shaders with optimized platform-specific ones can offer great performance increase with no tradeoffs. The GPU makers know their chip architecture inside out, but game developers usually target a higher level concept such as some shader language. Unless you develop for fixed hardware such as consoles, of course.
There's really two ways how you can relate to these kind of optimizations: "Hey, you're cheating!" or "Cool, thanks for help!". I personally are fine with them, but I would like to clearly know when specific optimizations are in use, and can turn them off when needed. Maybe after application startup the driver could render some popup in the frame buffer such as "AMD Catalyst(R) optimizations in use" which would fade out after a few seconds.