There is a reason why Wacom dominated its niche for so long, even in the face of inexpensive asian knock-offs. (1) They had this stuff right. (2) Hackers who are perceptive enough that they don't underestimate the difficulty of getting this stuff right are a very small minority.
Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
21–30 of 256 posts
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#22Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#23Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#24Great to see Microsoft listening to issues with the Surface and attempting to fix them. Hopefully they can polish it up into a machine that can be competitive in the market.
At the last startup I worked at, Microsoft sent designers and engineers that worked on Windows Server to better understand why we deployed on CentOS. They flew in from Redmond and spent a couple hours with us. We were forthright with them and they seemed to take the feedback to heart (differences in automation being the biggest solid need we could offer, since "running a Windows shop is just different" isn't really t…
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#25It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next roun…
It's the classic QA paradox. The typical hacker world view doesn't prioritize such feel issues enough. Even in today's UX focused world, stylus specific issues aren't widely understood. Combine the dynamics of the Asch conformity experiment, and it makes perfect sense.
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#26The one thing that nobody seems to appreciate when it comes to pushing forward towards retina displays is just how many more pixels, how much more memory, and how much slower everything is on the same hardware. Yet, anyone who has ever been a gamer knows that changing your resolution has a huge impact on your FPS. It is foolish to think that Microsoft can make the screen much higher resolution, have a similar chip, a…
As someone who is not a gamer, I am curious -- why is it not the GPU that is the most critical when talking about the FPS and refresh rate for things like pen input? Is the issue that the CPU is "in the loop"? Is this a matter of the built in graphics on the Haswell chips not being quite good enough for this application, or is it actually the CPU? I mostly wonder because I've found the improvements to the GPU in the…
1) The OS doesn't give the pen interrupt high enough priority
2) The bandwidth between the CPU and touch screen digitizer is too small
3) Too many background processes that cause CPU to be overwhelmed (not likely though)
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who is not a gamer, I am curious -- why is it not the GPU that is the most critical when talking about the FPS and refresh rate for things like pen input? Is the issue that the CPU is "in the loop"? Is this a matter of the built in graphics on the Haswell chips not being quite good enough for this application, or is it actually the CPU? I mostly wonder because I've found the improvements to the GPU in the…
It's really a question of faster motherboards .
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really a question of faster motherboards .
Wait, really? What is the bottleneck on the motherboard?
In this particular case, a "faster motherboard" might have helped with pushing updates to the GPU faster, though my guess is that graphics memory becomes the concern with double the resolution (which in turn needs to have updates pushed by the CPU, so it could help anyway)
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#29OP, surprised that MS (as with any large company) didn't require you to sign an NDA to not discuss unannounced features during development. Bold (and encouraging) move on their part if they didn't.
Mike Krahulik has been a fan of Surface Pro from the beginning,[1] has been very vocal about what he likes and dislikes, and has a very large audience.[2] It seems likely they were counting on him blogging his experiences as soon as possible after his last Surface Pro post,[3] which had some fairly negative points that made using the new Surface Pro difficult (if not impossible) for him.
[1]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-surf...
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Arcade
[3]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/05/23/surface-pro...
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#30OP, surprised that MS (as with any large company) didn't require you to sign an NDA to not discuss unannounced features during development. Bold (and encouraging) move on their part if they didn't.
> OP, surprised that MS (as with any large company) didn't require you to sign an NDA to not discuss unannounced features during development Mike Krahulik has been a fan of Surface Pro from the beginning,[1] has been very vocal about what he likes and dislikes, and has a very large audience.[2] It seems likely they were counting on him blogging his experiences as soon as possible after his last Surface Pro post,[3] w…