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More Insight On Longhorn's Avalon And Aero Design
Lispy writes "While monitoring the Xorg mailinglist I came across this set of WinHEC PPT-presentations (work fine in OOorg) that cover some interesting details on the underlying architecture of Aero, Aero Glass and future font rendering in Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn OS. What does the Slashdot crowd think about the overall design and its downsides, such as power consumption on notebooks?" (KPresenter works fine, too, btw.)
It probably won't help much. The current MS tactice seems to be to patent everything, so odds are they'll patent anything interesting here too.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
This is /. and you're asking about how they will like a Microsoft technology? Of course, they'll hate it. Microsoft could come out with something that that's the coolest thing since Linux and /. will still hate it.
Icons with reflection and depth
While I have to admit it sounds cool, I can't really think of a real need for this.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
He was implying that nobody buys Windows. Which is true... one of my friends said this to me "Linux is nice, but Windows is free too. If I had to buy it I'd use Linux..."
I'm the only person I know that has a legal copy (and I have NEVER had a Windows partition in my life... I used MacOS before I switched to Linux) because M$ sent me some brainwashing kit for UNIX developers or something to that effect.
My other car is first.
Try running XP with 1600x1200 with 20.1" diagonal (my flat panel) or 1400x1050 with 14.1" diagonal (my laptop). Anything smaller than the "huge" icons is quite tiny.
"Which is true... one of my friends said this to me "Linux is nice, but Windows is free too. If I had to buy it I'd use Linux..."
Are you sure he means free as in "I can dl it" vs. free as in "it comes with every computer"? In the latter case, people are buying Windows.
"Derp de derp."
Fitt's Law: "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target." asktog.com
This means that big icons and buttons are faster. I sometimes really don't understand why Power Users want small icons -- its actually faster to work with bigger icons!!on my system, running:
x11perf -caa10text
gives 110000 chars/sec.
i'm running xfree 4.3.0.1 with an NVidia quadro 4 board and the NV binariy drivers. this is AA text but NOT subpixel rendered. so it looks like longhorn will render text at least 10 times faster, with a DX10 video card (probably a lot faster than that if you turn cleartype off and just want standard AA glyphs)
Except the difference with Avalon is it uses hardware to render the individual windows to their own textures, and then uses hardware again to composite the textures on the desktop. Everything that can be done in hardware will be, vectors, gradient fills, antialiased text, etc. with software fallback available only for features the hardware doesn't support.
You can use hardware to render a texture too you know.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
I know that foghorn is going to have a high wow-factor, but do we really want to be gaping with awe and amazement at every little tip of the veil of a system that won't be out till at least 2006?
My take is that our time is much better spent improving our prefered (open!) system, exploiting the great features that Hans Reiser has given us (which I personally find much more interesting than all the eye candy that serves to addict, distract and slow down my friends and their computers).
Extended attributes are here today. So is OpenGL. Where are the applications that exploit them? Where are the BeOS-like filesystem queries on Linux? Where are the Baldur's Gate clones? And, most of all, where is the stuff that, once and for all, asserts the superiority of the open source community, the proof that we can invent, rather than wait for the corporations to do it for us?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
In the immortal words of Colonel Kurtz, "You must make a FRIEND of the horror".
.Net secret sauce coming with Longhorn, will no longer use Remoting "over the wire". Everything is going to be SOAP and web services. Sounds wonderful, right? I think so too. BUT, many consultants are busy writing all your company's apps using remoting between servers! Guess what THAT means?
What horror, you ask? A major Microsoft upgrade. We cal look forward to the following exciting experiences in the coming Longhorn apocalypse ("I love the smell of burning CPU in the morning... It smells like... Job Security!"):
1. Indigo, the new
2. All your computers are going to be landfill fodder, because Longhorn's hardware requirements are going to SMOKE 'em. Ah, well, we didn't need those 20,000 PCs anyway. And, the budget looks so much better cratered. It's like a big empty swimming pool. Makes me think of summer.
3. Performance? The users are asking about performance? Um... HUSH! Look at the pretty screens, children! Ooh, transparency!
4. Filesystem? We don't need no stinkin' filesystem. Let's put everything in a DATABASE!!!
Ok, they might not get this into Longhorn, but it's coming. All your apps that touch the filesystem? Kiss 'em goodbye.
5. More DRM. What's that? the users didn't ask for it? Let's surprise 'em; they'll be so happy!
6. A new, different and strange iteration of IE to worry about. Sigh; better set up resources for the recoding of all your web pages, just in case.
Ah, well. It should be exciting! And, who knows? Maybe the Indians will find it all just too ugly to work with and offshore all the work back here ("Oh, this is just too UGLY, you may take it back, please... No, really. No, I must insist. Oh, you are too kind, sir, but NO, I REALLY must insist... Oh you are making me very ANGRY sir, do not make me go medaeval on your unruly buttocks in the manner of Marcellus!").
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I believe this should, mind you, SHOULD raise the heat under the open source movement.
Do your OS of choice under the following:
Make it so it runs on anything from legacy hardware through current hardware.
Don't engineer it specifically as how YOU would want it done, engineer it as how you think Joe Sixpack would like it to be done. Do you know how MS keeps its market share? By making adaptive shifts to their new setups as small and painless as possible. Stop assuming everyone who wants to try Linux already knows every manual and howto available.
Screw the DMCA, reverse engineer everything (do it the old fashioned way, get 50 coders to examine 1/50th a part of the driver code, then compile accordingly, that's how it was done with IBM). That way everything can be supported.
If you want to be mainstream, start acting like you ARE mainstream. This "Lookit me, I'm a rebel!" illusion is just that. That's how Apple did it, that's how Microsoft did it. And look at them now. The rebel theme is only good as long as you expect to lose money.
I'm a MS user myself, but the DRM crap and all makes me WANT to go Linux, but the fact that not every Linux dev doesn't support EVERYTHING I want to do or use, means I'm stuck with MS until they realize this.
It's like wanting to escape from prison, while everyone else is debating the best kind of file, and what kind of cake to bake it in.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Windows's idea of eye candy was that menus (and submenus) would all slowly fade in. The process of navigating deep into hierarchical menus was maddeningly slow--at least until everyone turned it off.
In osx, menus appear immediately, and then fade out after you select something. This is not only pretty, but functional: it gives you visual confirmation that you've selected a menu item, which can be helpful if whatever you've asked for doesn't produce obvious or instant results.
Microsoft's cargo cult design process often leads them to such mistakes. They manage to take the wrong lessons from other people's work, and conclude that what people want is snazzy looking things which tax hardware. The real lesson is that people want visual continuity and feedback in order to speed up their use. But Microsoft never seems to get as far as understanding the point of anyone else's design, just the appearance.
The text rendering technology impressed me. The new APIs did not.
When will Microsoft learn...developers don't want great big heaps of their grand designs. There's just too much of an investment to learn their way of doing things, there are too many cages around the good bits, and everything breaks when you go off the beaten path.
Example: few 'real' apps use MFC - and certainly none of Microsoft's. They expose 'Fisher Price' versions of their tools which they hand code in good old SDK.
I mean, does anyone *really* use DCOM? I guess COM has held on bascially because there isn't that much that is 'Microsoft' about it and it basically works. But what happened to ATL? DDE? ActiveX? In fact, the only useful Microsoft software tends to be the stuff they acquire (Visio, SQL Server)
Now I have not used one iota of Avalon, but I remain unconvinced it will be anything other than their typical developer traps with a bit of 'hello world' cute app as bait.
Meanwhile, Linux hacks change the world with Perl scripts. Go figure.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Er, that's like saying IPv6 is the present because a few people are using it.
I mean, I know this is Slashdot, and I know bashing Microsoft is mandatory, but you can do better than that.
Microsoft is very clever. They are upgrading their technology to the point that applications written in native APIs would be much better (at least visually) than applications written with a cross-platform library. Some presentation says that "GDI apps will be software-rendered off to a texture, then use the 3d hardware to map this texture to the display. It will be slower but acceptable due to related performance of CPUs".
Avalon would give a significant advantage to Microsoft, and at the same time spell an end to really successful cross-platform libraries like Qt and WxWindows. Well, not really an end, but it will seem that Qt or WxWindows or GTK developed-apps will be a product of the stone ages when comparing them with Avalon apps. The Microsoft APIs will be totally managed, which means "goodbye C++": either use the managed APIs, develop on Windows only, be fast and smooth, or develop with a cross-platform library, but be slow, and be ugly.
I think that if the Unix world does not move fast and embrace the new technologies quickly, make a new X-Windows system or something similar, Linux has even less chances of getting a respectable share of the desktop market.
The Microsoft model also shows that it has an advantage that the open source model does not have: the ability to follow technology quickly. This is partially because of the ties of Microsoft with hardware vendors, but also partially with technology being driven by economics rather than good willing of people.
Another thought: what will happen to Java ? Swing is already slow and ugly. Imagine putting an Avalon app side to side with a Swing app! the Java app will be like coming from the stone ages.
Does the world really need Avalon ? I think not...we already have good text support, good interfaces etc. But it will be one of those things that nobody thought it would make a difference, but when it comes out, everybody will like it, and everybody will "need" it.
And a final thought: Avalon will make remote desktop very easy to do, since computers on the network will exchange 3d data and not bitmaps. This particular capability may be the final nail in the X-Windows system coffin.