Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 18th Feb 2009 23:28 UTC
Does Windows 7 contain more DRM than Windows Vista? Does Windows 7 limit you from running cracked applications, and will it open the firewall specifically for applications that want to check if they're cracked or not? Does it limit the audio recording capabilities? According to a skimp and badly written post on Slashdot, it does. The Slashdot crowd tore the front page item apart - and rightfully so.
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RE: Microsoft bashing as an olympic sport
by lemur2 on Thu 19th Feb 2009 01:59
in reply to "Microsoft bashing as an olympic sport"
Member since:2007-02-17
Vista had poor performance because there were alot of changes and insufficient time to optimise these changes; they aren't going to optimise it in the service packs because of the risk associated with breaking things not only in Windows but also out in the 'real world'.
Ran out of time? How long exactly was it between the release of XP and the release of Vista?
Windows 7 has been optimised and improved,
Well, yes, that is the claim, and there is no reason to suspect why it wouldn't be so. In fact, given Vista's poor performance, it is hard to see how Windows 7 could fail to be a significant improvement.
and amazing, the so-called 'performance sucking' DRM still lives and Windows 7 still out performs Windows Vista.
Yes. This is in fact what "optimization" is all about.
If there were some truth in the 'performance sucking' of DRM then the performance different should be negiable.
Doesn't follow. Obviously you are not wholly familiar with optimistaion. A fair approach is to ignore almost everything else and concentrate very hard on the "inner loop", the most-often repeated pieces of code. DRM polling is a fair candidate ...
I've got my Acer Aspire One (they ran out of eee pc 901's when I went down to pick one up) and am looking forward to seeing Windows 7 being released. If it means that one can run the latest version of Windows in a constrained environment, I can't work out what the complaints are about. Then again, I guess its 'cool' to hate Microsoft.
Criticising Vista's poor performance is relevant to this rant ... how exactly?
RE[2]: Microsoft bashing as an olympic sport
by kaiwai on Thu 19th Feb 2009 02:12
in reply to "RE: Microsoft bashing as an olympic sport"
Member since:2005-07-06
Ran out of time? How long exactly was it between the release of XP and the release of Vista?
Abusing me by way of message achieves what?
Windows Vista was restarted and based on Windows 2003 SP1 rather than Windows XP. There was a penalty that was paid because of it, but management at that time believed the penalty was worth it.
Considering that when the change was made - Netbooks and other resource constrained devices weren't on the radar, they were making decisions based on what one could reasonably expect in the future based on present conditions.
Well, yes, that is the claim, and there is no reason to suspect why it wouldn't be so. In fact, given Vista's poor performance, it is hard to see how Windows 7 could fail to be a significant improvement.
If it were DRM as the primary cause of performance issues, and given that the DRM has been retained, then going by the detractors logic, there should have been no significant improvement.
Criticising Vista's poor performance is relevant to this rant ... how exactly?
Thank you for ignoring the kernel of this post; it was a counter to DRM phobia and the black helicopter nonsense regarding it and the apparent 'performance sucking' of DRM by virtue of it just existing in Windows.
The two are interlinked, but hey, you chose to ignore it in favour of attacking me personally.
RE: Microsoft bashing as an olympic sport
by spiderman on Thu 19th Feb 2009 06:46
in reply to "Microsoft bashing as an olympic sport"
Member since:2008-10-23
What's wrong with North Korea?
Everyone is subject to propaganda, be it from Microsoft, from the government or from FOSS.
If I ask most of the people in the west what they think about North Korea, they will spit many senseless words and yet they don't know the first thing about North Korea. The same goes for Microsoft. If you are on the other side of the propaganda, you don't have to know Microsoft to hate it.
RE: Microsoft bashing as an olympic sport
by vitae on Mon 23rd Feb 2009 19:27
in reply to "Microsoft bashing as an olympic sport"
Member since:2006-02-20
Then again, I guess its 'cool' to hate Microsoft.
Interesting how often comments like this come up, and yet no one likes to discuss the reasons people do hate Microsoft. On the other hand, we've just had an article on how Windows 7 beta testers are unhappy with Microsoft. Let's be perfectly honest here. There's lots of reasons to not be happy with Microsoft. Some of it's not their fault, but on the other hand they have generated a lot of ill will by their own actions.
And when it comes to FUD, Microsoft salesmen telling potential customers that open source is less secure because it's open source is also FUD, only we call it salesmanship.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
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Member since:
2005-07-06
I truly am amazed when I see the lengths some people will goto to justify their hatred of a given organisation - as if Microsoft were worse than some North Korean police state.
Vista had poor performance because there were alot of changes and insufficient time to optimise these changes; they aren't going to optimise it in the service packs because of the risk associated with breaking things not only in Windows but also out in the 'real world'.
Windows 7 has been optimised and improved, and amazing, the so-called 'performance sucking' DRM still lives and Windows 7 still out performs Windows Vista. If there were some truth in the 'performance sucking' of DRM then the performance different should be negiable.
I've got my Acer Aspire One (they ran out of eee pc 901's when I went down to pick one up) and am looking forward to seeing Windows 7 being released. If it means that one can run the latest version of Windows in a constrained environment, I can't work out what the complaints are about.
Then again, I guess its 'cool' to hate Microsoft.