Re: Microsoft to force new Outlook on Windows 10 PCs

On Wed, 1/15/2025 7:51 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-01-14 00:10, CrudeSausage wrote:

MacOS machines have a shelf life of about seven years before Apple decides that your machine is no longer worth supporting with updates. As we've seen, Windows machines get about seven, so it's a fair amount of time. However, Linux has them both beat with unlimited support no matter how pathetic the machine you're running it on is.

 
Hum. That is not completely true, either. Some distributions stopped supporting 32 bit machines.
 
Each year you need more ram to run the same apps.
 
Proprietary drivers like NVidia stop publishing drivers for what they think is old hardware, and the open source version doesn't have the full feature set.
 
Modern videos use codecs that can not keep running fast enough on pathetic machines.

As long as the videos are coded in something that VAAPI or NVENC/NVDEC has,
the movie can be decoded for "almost free". For example, Intel Quicksync
has sufficient horsepower, to decode five video streams at the same time,
on the early instances of that hardware block.

Old machines and their older video cards without NVidia driver support, might no
longer have access to the built-in encoder/decoder hardware on the video card,
in which case the fallback software method would be used instead.

Another contributor to "pathetic", is the video decoding process can use a
"scaler" which changes a 720x576 decoded video, to whatever box size the
browser presents at the time (the wrapper frame). Doing a pixmap scaler
in software, used at least 30% of a P4 core. Whereas the hardware scaler
(driver support), could do a scaling operation "for free".

And finally, insisting on compositing as a system-wide way of doing things,
if the video card compositing is not working and the OS has to use fallback
code for that, that could take buckets of horsepower to do.

An old machine really needs the support. It isn't so much "pathetic" as it is
everything working against it. "All the items are leaning the wrong way."

The code path has had IDCT removed, so when an old machine has been
stripped of all its goodness, the code doesn't even use the IDCT
(Inverse Discrete Cosine transform for macroblocks). That is a method of
providing a slight acceleration, when forced to do video decode in software.
The older software used to use that, as it helped a bit with the decoding
process.

    Paul