And in fact, for large classes of interesting applications, installer and installed size is overwhelmingly data, not code. Games are going to be 95%+ data (check out how small the actual app is sometimes; often less than 1% the size of the data files). Microsoft Office has far, far more space allocated to fonts, clip art, all those multilingual spelling dictionaries, and templates than the actual *.exe files.
And even the self-contained
Having behavior driven largely by data, not good is a good thing, of course. Data is a whole lot easier to debug than code, and bugs in data are generally much less catastrophic assuming the code itself does good validation.
This test was only using a single socket system. Perf differences from XP are going to be greater on a NUMA multisocket systems like Barcelona or Nehalem. XP predates NUMA on the PC architecture, while Vista and Win 7 got a lot of tuning for it.
This can be a big help for video encoding and other highly multithreaded tasks.
With a sample size of 16, "one third" ISN'T statistically different from 50/50.
On Windows, the most common one is DirectShow. (or whatever they've renamed it in Vista/Win7)
DirectShow is alive and well on Vista and Windows 7. There is a new media API called MediaFoundation, which is used by default in WMP for Win 7. It's quite different and improved in many ways over DirectShow, but can interoperate with existing DirectShow decoders.
The MPEG-LA license only protects you against the MPEG-LA members. In no way does it provide any sort of guarantee that someone who isn't in MPEG-LA won't start suing at any point in time. The argument against Theora in this regard can really be made against any codec.
Well, the members of the MPEG-LA patent pools hold pretty much all the known-critical patents for video compression, so that's actually a pretty good real-world protection.
I made a few samples using the latest versions of x264, VC-1, and Theora, testing both offline VBR and real-time CBR encoding.
http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/Theora%5E_1.1
Theora is defintely improved, but I see a lot of basis pattern throughout these samples. Theora would be well-served by a postprocessing filter. Theora's 1-pass CBR encoding definitely needs a LOT of tuning before it'd be viable for real-world content; I don't think we'll see it used effectively for live encoding this version.
Coming from the digital video world, I'm entirely opposed to standardizing on using GB instead of GiB in any context. Because lots of other industries, like telecommunications and digital media, have long used the correct ^10 numbers. Come to think of it, Apple was the last company to use KB/sec for compression bitrates, and even they dropped it as of QuickTime 6 back in 2003.
When you get provisioned bandwith, you're getting ^10 numbers. And when you compress video, you're using ^10 values (so, 20 Mbps is really 20,000,000 bits per second, not 20,971,520)
It's a big pain to have to always convert between the real values and the erroneous ^2 values when figuring out how much video we can put on a disc/drive.
It will be a horrible thing to have GB mean different things in different contexts and to have to know when to do or not do the conversions.
You won't get a FormatLikeWord95 tag if you're not using Word 95, of course
It's important for lots of users that they can maintain functional compatibility and bidirectional conversion with older Office documents, so that was a core design goal of the
You may not need that yourself, but a lot of people do, and the new formats give them that in a much more interoperable, searchable, and efficient XML-with-.zip structure.
It seems like 90% of the compliants about the new formats don't even acknowledge the design goal, which makes any discussion of how good it is pretty irrelevant.
A clean-room new office file format would have had much worse interoperability and hence much less adoption, for only aesthetic gains at best.
If OpenOffice doesn't have Normal/Draft, it's dead to me. I don't want to see page breaks when I'm still writing the darn text! That's bugged me about other tools for getting on 20 years now.
That killed Pages 1.0 for me as well.
Well, yes, of course you'd use PDF if you want to get the exact fonts and layout on the other end.
But nor are you going to write an article in Acrobat. Note that the Office apps now have an excellent "Save as PDF" mode that's much faster than Distiller.
But "a bargain" when other free office suites, text editors, and numerous word processors are available? I'm also just not sure what "sophisticated features" it has that a "professional writer" needs. If, by "professional writer," you mean someone actually producing text, the main needs are a good text editor, which can be found many places. You might want spell check and a thesaurus, things like find and replace, etc., which can be found in many text editors. Word's support for text substitution and advanced text editing features is rather limited, unless you write macros (which I personally think are easier in something like LaTeX). If you have need for footnotes, citations, cross references, etc., I would say that (a) Word's bibliographic support is pretty bad by itself, though when used with other software and plugins, it becomes useful, and (b) the support for cross references, etc. is minimal compared to the options given in some other software. If you collaborate, you need to track changes, but any good word processor does that today. What else does someone just producing text need?
ValueCost.
What does the Student/Home version of Word cost? $80? If you use it for 10 hours a week for a year, that works out to $0.08 an hour. Total rounding error for anyone who makes money writing, and pays for itself many times over even if it only boosts productivity 5%.
As for Word, I'd say its deep strengths are in easy, productive composition of structured prose, plus great revision and collaboration features. And it's not just about feature-to-feature checklist, but about how all the features work together and are preseted. I've never seen anything that can easily defork two different revisions of the same document like Word, comparing and letting you pick change-by change with all the variants on screen at once.
While it's no layout powerhouse, it works very well for making structured documents if style sheets are used correctly, which can them be enhanced in LaTeX, InDesign or whatever.
Yes, that's correct, if you're running Aero Glass. That was true for Vista as well, to a lesser degree, but Win 7 expands GPU support to GDI+ compositing, improves memory management, adds concurrency for multiple applications, etcetera.
An easy test is to open Task Manager and watch the CPU meters as you shake a decent sized window around the screen quickly. WIthout Aero Glass on you can get near to saturating one core, while with Aero Glass on it won't have much CPU impact at all.
Here's some other detailed information:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx
A Netbook is a system with a very low powered single-core CPU. Everything you can do to move things off the CPU makes everything else faster. Windows 7 can offload GDI, window compositing, and many other effects to the GPU (even one as relatively weak as in Netbooks), saving a ton of CPU performance. And thus making everything else faster, even if it's just looking at a web page that's running some Javascript or Flash.
I just upgraded my kids' Dell Mini 9 (1 GB RAM) to Win 7 RTM from its OEM XP config, and it's remarkably snappier even just doing web browsing, even with a GMA 945.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7#Desktop_Window_Manager
The next person to mention spaghetti stacks to me is going to have his head knocked off. -- Bill Conrad