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Longhorn's Windows Graphics Foundation Examined
Matt J writes "Dave Salvator at ExtremeTech goes over some of the graphics designs for Longhorn. 'David Blythe of the DirectX development team gave a very interesting talk about the upcoming 3D graphics architecture in Longhorn, the next major revision of Windows. Called Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF), this new architecture will usher in some major changes to how 3D graphics operations get handled by Longhorn. These changes extend well beyond Longhorn's Avalon technology, which will render the Windows Desktop using a GPU's 3D graphics processing power rather than the traditional 2D blitter. WGF will instead define the core 3D operations themselves.'"
What's with the sickening new theme on here?
An intelligent GUI would be settable to any virtual resilution, with elements that are fully scalable, from icons to "system" fonts. This is an inevitable feature on the desktop, and I wonder if any proposals are in the works.
Looks good for your age..
Wow! This makes me jealous... I wish my Powerbook running OS X could do thi.... Oh.... wait....
One of the first orders of business is to "fix busted stuff," as Blythe put it. These items include no more blue-screens (hard crashes) caused by the graphics driver, and moving more processing into what's known as user mode.
They're calling this thing WGF (Windows Graphics Foundation). Perhaps instead of blue GPF's it can generate pretty pink Windows General Faults.
OS X seems to have no problem with it. Then again Longhorn's implementation could be completely whacked.
It's just like OSX's Aqua, rendering the GUI in the graphics card and all...?
Good innovation.
Is this like Keith's Getting X Off The Hardware plans, where he suggests that having your xserver running on top of openGL instead of having to talk to all this messy hardware stuff will make it nicer and faster?
Sounds like Microsoft is once again taking from Apple. Core Image uses the GPU to process data and not the CPU, watch the WWDC on apple.com
Copying or evolving? What the article talks about is a hell of a lot more than just a 3d shell.
"Derp de derp."
That sounds nice, but that one part stating crashes will happen is still unsettling. It's one thing to make a system that restarts instantly, another thing to make a system stable.
And if it does restart instantly (which I'm skeptical of) I hope I'm notified.
We have cairo.. same kind of thing, and people are modifying stuff to implement it everywhere.. Theres also many other technologies to make up everything that Microsofts new one will do (the difference is though that we are much closer to getting a stable version)
http://www.freedesktop.org/Cairo/Home
Just dont take all of Microsofts noise too seriously, just be aware that by 2006, linux will have completely equivilent technologies (in many cases we already do), and just cause we dont make much noise about it, dont think that they dont exist, or aren't planned for the near future.
Honestly, the stuff which I have seen for longhorn so far hasn't been mindblowingly amazing, and are really just things where they are trying to catch up to MAC OS X, or linux
This article makes it unclear if WGF 1.0 is basically DirectX 10.0 or a Longhorn-specific system. If it isn't available to users of older versions of Windows, there is little incentive to rewrite code specifically for it. I think the adoption of Longhorn will be slow as I haven't heard any really compelling reasons to shell out the money for the upgrade.
It irks me when Microsoft, KDE, Gnome, etc. build expansive GUI's that are lush with eye candy yet fail to provide an upgrade in functionality. I seriously do not understand the mindset of developers when they attempt to impose system requirements that include a GPU to complete day-to-day tasks. Thanks God for midnight commander/emacs/vi.
Even if this comes from Microsoft, this is pretty amazing stuff. The OS-level ability to use the 3D acceleration features of the card by more than one application at a time may prove to be as important to future computing as the ability to create 2D windows at the OS level. What *should* be more amazing is the response of the open-source community. I think we should all unite in an effort toward a new advanced graphics architecture. Maybe this is something IBM or SGI could reasonably invest in.
samrolken
Speaking of outdated and poorly designed, see my parent comment. This is what I get for reading Slashdot at freakin' one in the morning.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Oh, moving some stuff to user mode? Well, um, better late and half-baked than never and not at all?
Seriously, putting stuff in the kernel that should have been in user space is one of the more serious architectural botches in Windows. It has caused massive stability problems. Now it seems that Microsoft is recognizing this, and is starting to undo it. (What they need is to completely undo it, but they have to start somewhere. What they don't get to will continue to bite them until they do.)
I know I am! With the hype machine running flat-out this far before the launch date, Longhorn is starting to sound like Microsoft's version of Copland...
0 1 - just my two bits
Y-Windows. A replacement for X that is fully hardware-accelerated and can upgrade its own drivers without a restart.
If people want to beat Microsoft with this technology, Y is the place to go and help out.
Is this a new section? Or have I just never been here before?
Ah, well, better than the games section I spose.
If there were more people aware of what usability this would create for the end-user, and how much simpler it would be to design graphic interfaces for the coders, I think people would jump on board. And there are sooo many talented OS developers, so it doesn't seem impossible that GNU/Linux could leapfrog MS in a field that they are only matched (beaten?) by Apple's interface. All it takes is a rallying of the people.
Looks good for your age..
...if they would just let me move a window around while the application is loading.
The difference is that one is a "suggestion" while the other is a company actually getting off their asses and implementing it system-wide. Where is that happening in OSS right now?
I've been saying this since Longhorn's features were announced, Linux desktops will be severely behind if they don't hurry up and move into the modern age that Longhorn and future versions of OS X are competing in. But no, we're still stuck with deskop emulators hacked on top of an ancient X protocol server with no unified development API. Hell, not even a way to install and uninstall things, because it's not really a seamless desktop but a cludging-together of 20 different projects in order to emulate a desktop operating system instead of actually being one.
Aw man, now I'm going to have to finally spring for a 3D accelerator.
Just dont take all of Microsofts noise too seriously, just be aware that by 2006, linux will have completely equivilent technologies (in many cases we already do), and just cause we dont make much noise about it, dont think that they dont exist, or aren't planned for the near future.
Really? 2006 is just two years away. Where are these mysterious technologies you talk about? Yeah, I can name random projects like Cairo all day long. What desktops use them?
I'd sure love to see Linux having implemented all these technologies before Longhorn. Sadly, I know that will be far, far from the truth. Hell, we're still busy moving our distros over to an XFree86 fork. I'd love to see all this technology you speak of magically write itself in time for 2006. Linux has dozens upon dozens of never-completed projects, but Microsoft is actually getting these things done and in a unified manner. I don't find your reassurance very...reassuring. This is the community that still thinks a taskbar and start menu is a neat idea to rip off from Windows 95.
Because it's not just hard accelerated compositing. It's an entire revamp of the DirectX graphics architecture. Did you read anything about the Common Shader Core model or the GPU-sharing driver model? This article is about more than Avalon. In fact, it hardly mentions Avalon.
Windows Longhorn is far, far more than just vector-based drawing. Rattling off OS X and beta X.org releases because they use the GPU to blit 2D graphics doesn't invalidate what they're doing.
Didn't you get the memo? DOS is dead. No, really this time. Windows NT is not DOS. Windows 2000 is Windows NT. Windows XP is Windows NT. Windows 2003 is Windows NT. Longhorn as well will be Windows NT. None of those have anything to do with DOS. Do you perhaps mean that Microsoft is still using DOS's command.com-style batch scripting and console interface? (cmd.exe is not DOS, but it emulates the interface passingly well.) That's set to change. Unless you're still using Windows 98 or ME (both of which have been end-of-lifed), you are no longer using DOS when you use Windows.
1.) Typing "M$" doesn't make you clever or witty.
2.) NT isn't based on DOS at all. Nobody knows what you're talking about there.
3.) Select HTML format next time.
4.) This technology is not "unimpressive." Only to elitist Slashdot snobs who think XFCE is still a cool idea. The rest of the world wants to move to a modern, 3D-based compositing architecture. Where is that happening in Linux? 2006 is just a year and a half away. Well?
Remember the article about the projected system averages for a Longhorn PC? That takes care of the lag at least...
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
As an MS intern working in the Avalon (the presentation layer of Longhorn) group (with no particular love for MS), I just gotta say that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Not only is what we're doing incredibly powerful, the ease at which one can use the technology is just amazing. You can sit down and start writing your own Longhorn applications in literally 5 minutes. A hello world program with the "hello world" in gigantic text spinning and getting smaller and larger is a 5 line program.
It's really quite amazing.
I liken it to PDF's. Just a few years ago, PDF files were what Flash is now, the handy scapegoat. "OMG!!!1 PROPRIETARY FORMAT!!!11!! n000000!!!1" But now that there are about half a dozen programs that create and display PDF's in Linux, we love them! "Use PDF's, not .doc files! Join us in PDF land!"
I still fucking hate them.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
So dragging windows now would get ~5fps on my TNT2.
is it just me or is this a lot of Acronyms with a lot of theroy and ideas an no real proof its going to work or not. Longhorn is still in development and still a way off things tend to change and it may be good or bad. the way i see this article is a marksmen shooting at a target years away and truely its luck if he hits the bullseye or not.
Perhaps OOS folks should replace the G with a T in WGF...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Beh, I cannot believe I misspelled OSS! ...then again, maybe I meant Object Oriented Something...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
The last thing I want is another big Microsoft API. Let me know when the Windows API gets smaller, or when Windows implements the Single Unix Specification in any meaningful manner. I have better things to do than to waste my time trying to write programs against a cumbersome toy OS API.
glitz and Cairo, to name 2 related efforts.
I read the article. And many other like it. I also read the comments. And ran Longhorn 4072 for a while.
Everyone's getting excited about the compositing. Which will not be in production for ages, and doesn't do anything we've not seen before.
I don't know about cairo state, like waimea it seens stoped.
But The enlightenment team is doing a nice job with a lot of nice libs and the DR17 will be relased this year.
The #1 reason for the lag (via resizing) is a 2d operation that cannot be accelerated. Also ATSUI (the text system) is incredibly powerful and yet very, very slow.
That is the lagginess you are seeing. Nothing to do with the 3d stuff.
be-fan wrote:
"Open source will handle this challenge quite fine. It's not a unified effort, but all the pieces are falling into place:
1) OpenGL 2.0 should easily be a match for whatever the successor to Direct 3D is. A lot stuff mentioned in the article is also in OpenGL 2.0.
2) The freedesktop.org folks are working on building an X server that sits on top of OpenGL.
3) Some DRI folks are working on an OpenGL implementation that can operate without the X server, to support using the X server on top of it."
The OSS community has already been working on it. Now find some new FUD.
If you read (and fully understood) the article, you would realize that a fully hardware accelerated windowing system is not all that Microsoft promises with this new stuff.
The other stuff I see as being BIG are the changes to DirectX such as removing a lot of the fixed function pipeline features. They are pushing the GPU to be more generalized which is a good thing.
Microsoft is really hyping up Longhorn and none of the meat of Avalon has made it into the technical previews. Judging by the Ctrl+Alt+Del animations, the smooth color fades in Explorer, the few existing vector graphics, the other random programmer art in the technical previews, Avalon is going to be IMPRESSIVE.
Whether you like MS or not (which you don't, this is slashdot), they have the programming and graphical resources to pull this off in a very big way.
http://brandonbloom.name
Hopefully the x.org guys will do faster work than the XFree86 guys. I mean, the end result is pretty good, but it just moved way too slow.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
MS Research is an open research group much like Xerox PARC was (with some of the same people). They publish papers and have been working on stuff like this for years. So it isn't so easy to say who stole which idea from whom. All you can say is that Apple beat them to market with it.
1 &PostID=14275#14275
check out:
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PageIndex=
OK, after commenting, I went back and read the article. There's a couple major improvements over the current Windows:
+ It sounds like they are getting rid of the old single-threaded event model, which was brought over for Win3 compatibility. (No more GUI locks while Windows probes your CD-ROM, etc.)
+ The processing will be moved to user mode as much as possible (ie, no more "GUI in the Kernel")
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Longhorn and its graphics suck and so does this color scheme.
Keep in mind that the final Longhorn UI is under development. All the current UI and schemes are temporary.
You would think that offloading of the graphics work could have been done years ago. It's not like 3D accelerators are something new.
http://raplyrics.blogeasy.com
That's exactly the reason why they forked, so I would hope so too!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There has already been major progress in the Xorg. The next release - going to be released Aug 25 - just went to feature freeze and it will have some fancy stuff like real transparency. There has also been some serious discussion about moving X on top of OpenGL.
Does anybody notice that most of the computing industry would be redefined according to Longhorn?
Now I know they need to build something really different, but are all these differences really worth the hassle?
Maybe it's just me tired of hearing about software that won't be in use for another 3-5 years as if it's the best thing since sliced bread...
Blogging because I can...
"Open source will handle this challenge quite fine. It's not a unified effort, but all the pieces are falling into place:
1) OpenGL 2.0 should easily be a match for whatever the successor to Direct 3D is. A lot stuff mentioned in the article is also in OpenGL 2.0.
2) The freedesktop.org folks are working on building an X server that sits on top of OpenGL.
3) Some DRI folks are working on an OpenGL implementation that can operate without the X server, to support using the X server on top of it."
The OSS community has already been working on it. Now find some new FUD.
Tell ya what to do, convince some companies to donate large funds to Enlightenment and call back in a few years, cuz those are the only dudes who can code NEARLY well enough to get done what needs to get done.
Hell, MS is going to make their next desktop a behemoth, it needed to be a slim and trim version of what shipped with 2000/2003, with just a BIT of XP thrown in there (namely the fast user switching!).
OSS has yet to provide a decent performance fully featured integrated desktop, though from what I hear, newer releases of Gnome aren't QUITE so painfully slow, maybe I'll try it... again...
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
There have been widget libraries built on top of OpenGL for years. See GLOW, for example. It's straightforward to do, and works reasonably well. Works on any OS that will run OpenGL.
Microsoft patented the Apple?
With a GPU centric shell, any video driver or hardware problem (eg. from overclocking) would be a lot harder to solve - how would they display the error messages properly without resorting to a text-mode bluescreen?
Conceptually this is all good, just like the Windows NT security model. How they actually pull it off is another thing altogether.
Do you honestly think Microsoft wouldn't put preemptive multitasking in a new version of Windows? That would be feature (and usefulness) suicide.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
...which will render the Windows Desktop using a GPU's 3D graphics processing power...
Microsoft, finding new ways to waste processing power every day.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Sounds neato. Thanks for the info, I guess I should check the news on the official website more often.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
"One of the first orders of business is to "fix busted stuff," as Blythe put it. These items include no more blue-screens (hard crashes) caused by the graphics driver"
Yeah, that just pushed Longhorn's release back to around, oh, 2020.
Slashdot sucks
Quartz Extreme and Core Video?
Redmond, start your copiers!I completely agree with you! Putting focus on the GUI also makes scripting/automation/remote admin etc more complex.
Ever seen anyone make a comment next to a setting in a GUI? Thats why text based config-files in many cases are superior. And you can backup the configuration easily.
What annoys me is that all eye candy tend to make people beleive that "computers are so much better and powerful nowadays", when in fact, building real functionality is not easier at all. More layers and more dependencies add complexity that in the end damages stability and correctness.
You should not be moderated Troll!
A fundamentally 3d rendering system, based on the gpu not the cpu, would certainly have a deep effect on the way I work with vim. For instance...
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Do you know why this isn't funny anymore? Because this is the joke most people make who have not tried Windows beyond the 95 and 98SE1 days.
Do you REALLY want me to bring up how 'good' the Linux kernel was in it'x 1.x days?
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
well, you've really done your research..
For starters, MS didn't invent the start menu, it was Apple, all MS did was market it in a way that disillusioned people who didn't do much research thought that it Microsofts idea
Now.. where to start: http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/
Composite/Xdamage: One thing that has kept us behind Microsoft for a while graphics wise. These allow real transparencies. they are 1 month off..
Enlightenment 17: This has amazing graphics already (try entrance.. it works already), and blows away anything I have ever seen. The people who code enlightenment are also well known as technical geniuses and are excellent at optimisation, so they can do high quality graphics VERY fast, and very efficiently.
Dashboard: While Microsoft is bragging about their integrated search technologies, unknown to many, this is already available in linux too.. http://www.nat.org/dashboard . In fact, Microsoft stole the idea from that...
Full hardware accellerated window: The accelleration system is being changed now, and I'm guessing that within 2 Xorg releases, there will be nothing left that isn't accellerated.
"DirectX shading" Let me ruin your disillusions about the magical directx.. Its behind, its always been behind, and whatever it can do, opengl can do a lot easier.
XUL: Our new XAML like thing.. Its being developed for Mozilla. Do you even know what that is???
And about your comment about no desktops using the new features.. do more research!!! You'll notice that everyone has been migrating to SVG type graphics already and cairo is the most likely method that will be used to accellerate them. You obviously haven't noticed this though.. Because I bet you haven't touched CVS though, so have no idea whats really going on.
Now, heres the thing you prove you haven't done your research on.. What about stuff like SElinux that Linux has but Microsoft doesn't eh. Microsoft is bragging about the new stack smashing protection in SP2, but just about every Nix distro/type has had it for years.
And what about stuff like gdesklets and superkaramba?? I'm not sure exactly, but I think that we beat Microsoft on those things...
Come back after you've tried Entrance from E17.. http://xcomputerman.com/pages/entrance.html . Those kind of effects already I can honestly say beat longhorns by a long shot (at least what I've seen). After you tried that.. You'll get a taste for the future.
And about integration, you have no idea about dbus, shared-mime-info, etc obviously, because that stuff is already making a massive difference integration wise..
Cool thing is that theres already stuff that can use the new Xdamage and composite extensions too.. Mainly stuff like skippy-XD at the moment..
Um...who mentioned software? If I want to find the free disk space on 50 mail servers all I have to do is get out my little bash script and run it. Doing this in Windows with a batch file is a nightmare (trust me, I struggled with it for ages! NT4 has no way of getting the free space on a drive without all the other junk that dir outputs) yet using bash I did it in a few minutes.
Command lines are fantastic for repetitive little jobs that need doing regularly, just script it once and next time it's a 5 second job. Word processing from a command line is (IMO) an exercise in masochism but for admin related tasks it can be a godsend.
A number of benchmark tests have proven that, CPU cycle-for-cycle, a well configured UNIX or Linux server can outperform a Windows server in just about every server task there is.
Surely the base reason for this is that the UNIX pholosophy is not to waste valuable computing resource of GUIs and graphical processes when you don't need to. In other words, have your UNIX server running in a console mode, perhaps with a web server or X-Server running, and just do all your administration of that server either through the console or via a web interface or remote GUI session.
It's ridiculous the Microsoft still haven't released a non-GUI server variant of their OSes, especially when, in my experience, a large proportion of blue screens and crashes are as a result of something going wrong in the graphics sub-system somewhere.
The only logical conclusion I can come up with is that there is a conspiracy between Microsoft & hardware manufacturers for MS to constantly waste CPU cycles to ensure that everyone is forced to upgrade their hardware constantly.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm wondering what impact this would have on people who prefer to play their 3d games in a window instead of full screen. These games will probably take a hit to framerates due to the entire area is getting rendered unless MS puts in a way to halt rendering for inactive areas when playing games.
If that's a problem I'd expect a lot of gamers to stick with XP or maybe transition to Linux (esp the FPS crowd since many of those games are usually ported to Linux Doom/Quake.).
KEY: "summary of what it says (paraphrase, not an actual quote)" - what it means - what it means from a perhaps slightly biased POV
1. "Talk at Microsoft's Meltdown conference: DX Futures"
2. "Talked about Longhorn's 'Windows Graphics Foundation'" - quote from powerpoint: 'WGF is the "next Direct3D"' - a 3d architecture for both games and for the OS (and maybe for non-rendering tasks)
3. "Unifying vertex/pixel shaders; support multiplexing by multiple apps" - Microsoft is going to continue driving the process of specifying what next generation hardware's feature sets should be (only natural, since Talisman and Fahrenheit were such succesful designs ).
4. "remove fixed-function pipeline features; everything must be done by shaders" - Because obviously everyone wants to write shaders themselves for everything, even in the simple cases! Yes, please make me look up the Phong lighting formula every time I write a throwaway 3d app! Actually, the article doesn't make clear but the presentation above does that they're continuing to support the legacy DirectX interfaces, and improving support for OpenGL, so at least you can use those interfaces for fixed-function support. But the ppt above does seem to say that the hardware won't implement fixed-function stuff (which makes perfect sense--the drivers can supply an equivalent shader), and it states that a high-level shading language "will be the only methodology for Windows Graphics Foundation", with an example showing a shader iterating over multiple lights and computing the results itself.
5. "no more caps bits (capability bits)" - Hey, it's yet another of the things that OpenGL got right all along. Not sure what prevents someone from accessing a legacy D3D API and getting at the caps bits there, but at least there won't be any new ones.
6. "stability; if we're using 3d graphics hardware for basic desktop rendering, it's got to be super stable, and when it crashes, it needs to be able to reset trivially without the machine going down." - the ppt says the new architecture design is trying to reduce driver complexity. I am extremely doubtful about this.
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed how Microsoft R&D department have a tendency to use "grand" naming schemes for projects they work ok?
Everything is a "foundation class", or "xxxx foundation". It's sickening. Anyone remembers AFC? JFC? They didn't really survive, but MFC did. In any case, it's just some library, what's with the names? MFC should have been named BWL (Basic Windowing Library), or perhaps SWL (Shitty Windowing Library) would be more fitting.
Down with the ego crap!
It's also kinda funny how Microsoft copies technologies from Apple, and then gives it a name that sounds very "core" to their future business operating system...
Yours,
LSF (Linux Skaag Foundation)
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Now, I though old Billy the Gates came from New Mexico, not Texas. If so, then why is he allowing anything to be named "Longhorn?" It sounds a mighty bit like the Univ. of Texas Longhorns.
What's the advertising slogan going to be? "Hook'em Horn?!" Or, how about, "Using this product will prove to the greater IT community that you're a Longhorn, yourself." Well, the latter may be more fun, but not a good avert.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
(Intel) Quick do something! People are gonna start to realize they don't need 4 ghz for e-mail!
(Gates) Don't worry, we have something cooking. >8 )
Actually, it's Quartz Extreme that renders the GUI via the GPU. Core Image is more of an add-on to that, applying filters and transformations using the GPU as well. Quartz Extreme has been around since Jaguar, and Core Image will appear in Tiger.
e me /
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextr
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/core.html
why in the world are they re-inventing graphics to be 3D centric? the current 2D graphics look just fine. I don't want or need to upgrade my system, just so I can run an OS that needs a big expensive (read cheapass) graphics card. Only games need heavy 3D lifting, so let the game developers focus on that. the windows graphics system should just get out of the way and make it easier for game developers. I get the feeling, this is a huge mistake, because anything beyond the current look and feel is way over kill. Those who need color fidelity and better graphics use Mac, and you're not going to convince huge droves of graphic artists to switch. I'm not convinced of the value of WGF beyond marketing hype.
Unfortunately, MS Research has one of the worst efficiency records around (according to this week's issue of The Economist). Despite the vast funds pumped into it, their record of innovation is abysmal. So maybe we can make some assumptions here about who invented what first.
Yes, Linux is "behind". It will always be "not as shiny" as Windows. It represents the commodity option, and Microsoft will collapse under it's own weight because of it.
Please stop spouting this "competition" crap, it is annoying those who actually work to make OSS what it is.
The first thing I do when I get a new profile at a customer or standalone host is go to "System" and turn off all the "effects" and switch the view and taskbar to "classic", set the color pallette to its lowest gamut and turn the stupid gradiations in the title bars to solid colors. Next is mount my USB thumb drive and strip the MS messenger from the registry.
I haven't found out how to remove this type of "cuteness" from my iBook (it is a test platform, not a real workspace) and I noticed that KDE has started to adopt this distracting and useless animation trend on their mouse pointers. No telling where it will stop in the never ending quest to "be like the others".
Every install needs a "simple" button added to the "typical" and "custom" ones to disable the nonsense.
I was incensed when MS removed the ablity to define a 16 color VGA without squirrelly rituals and required q 256 minimum. Color cues are nice, but I do not need 16 million of them on my desktop and for the most part 256 is overkill.
"Stop the Madness"
(OT: Has she put all that weight back on, is that why we never see her any more?)
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
*cough* Quartz Extreme *cough*
For years I've wished linux had vector based desktop so I could have a 3d scroll wheel embedded in irix window frames. You make the wheel turn by dragging over it with the mouse, and all icons in a window grow or shrink smoothly. I also like the way icons would shoot animated rays out for a few seconds after clicking to indicate the program was loading.
Surely you realize that in order to render into 256 or 16 colors, the OS has to do an enormous amount of *extra* work to convert from the ordinary colorspace? Of course you do. You're trolling. Sigh.
The point is that 3-D card compositing is actually much faster than 2-D compositing on today's cards. The hardware is no longer super-optimized for 2-D... nobody cares about 2-D hardware anymore. The way Windows moves windows is insanely slow.
If I drag the window this browser is in on my 2.4 GHz machine with a Radeon 9800, I get tearing and it jumps around a bit. I have "display windows contents while dragging" on.
2-D on Windows is a fifteen year old setup, more or less. It's time for a new model, with less programmer complication.
If I run Quake III with vSync on, I get no tearing and I'm running at well past my monitors refresh rate... objects have apparent physical reality instead of this flitty flit windows nonsense.
Today if you turn off 32-bit colour for 8-bit color, you don't make your machine faster. It's slower because Windows stores internally as RGB. Turn to 256 color graphics and you have to set the palette all the time through BIOS calls. Yuck.
The same is true here... Windows is moving to a newer, faster graphics model. It's faster to have each application draw to its own framebuffer and let the 3-D card composite it. It's faster to not deal with actual blitting loops within applications that tie up the whole processor.
No more clipping calculations for the various windows, no more trouble with more than one video application trying to use the god-damned overlay mixer, no more trouble with overlays not working on the second monitor of a dual-monitor setup....
Don't think of it as 3-D bloat... that's inaccurate. Think of it as enabling the 3-D coprocessor that almost every computer will have at that time. You already know your P2-266 won't run Longhorn. 3-D doesn't make that more true.
But it's only recently that they're pretty much a) ubiquitous, and b) powerful enough in the lowest common denominator.
Hell, it's only Windows XP that dares to assume that your monitor can do 800 by 600; 2k and below still default to 640x480.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
"Vector processors" do not accelerate the same kind of vectors that are involved in "vector graphics."
Actually they do. I'm doing a lot of this work right now (still working on it damnit). Tons of matrix multiplication (multiplying the spline matrix by the geometry matrix, and then the parameter matrix), parameter modification (translating the sample values into the desired domain), etc. Vector processors are perfectly suited for vector graphics.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
You've got to walk before you can run. When Mac OS X 10.2 shipped in 2002, Quartz Extreme was introduced. This used OpenGL hardware to accelerate the assembly of the display from window buffers.
The most interesting thing here from a technical point of view wasn't the accelerated compositing, but something a bit more subtle. With the introduction of Quartz Extreme, the window buffers were being made visible to the GL hardware acceleration system, and could be directly addressed by the hardware DMA engine.
This opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities, which I'm sure you will be hearing more about in the near future.
Maybe that's because this is the first time someone has replied with it?
For the record, I have read that site and it was ridiculous. I understand that you're a Michael Moore fanboy, but he is so known for outright, flat-out lying, that he hurts the left.
John Kerry has made sure to distance himself from Michael Moore. Shouldn't that tell you something?
The article isn't about compositing. It's about the revamped DirectX and driver structure. GPU-sharing, snapback error recovery, and a unified shader model that removes the seperation between vertex and pixel shaders.
For the second time, Avalon is barely even mentioned. Why do you keep going on about the compositing? I don't see how you can say it's stuff we've seen before...where have we seen it for Linux? I'm talking a usable 1.0 release, not some 0.1 alpha project that has been sitting around for years.
The past several windows releases are named after ski areas in BC canada. Whistler is a ski slope, Longhorn is a saloon at its base. So is the forthcoming Blackcomb, a mountain.
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well, you've really done your research..
...while KDE stole the idea of start menus, taskbars, integrated filesystem/net browsers, and so on from Microsoft.
For starters, MS didn't invent the start menu
Did I say they did?
, it was Apple, all MS did was market it in a way that disillusioned people who didn't do much research thought that it Microsofts idea
Ah, yes. Because the Apple menu is so much like the Windows Start menu. So instead of ripping off Microsoft, we ripped off Apple?
Composite/Xdamage: One thing that has kept us behind Microsoft for a while graphics wise. These allow real transparencies. they are 1 month off..
Transparencies and alpha-blending have been a part of Windows since 2000.
Enlightenment 17: This has amazing graphics already (try entrance.. it works already), and blows away anything I have ever seen. The people who code enlightenment are also well known as technical geniuses and are excellent at optimisation, so they can do high quality graphics VERY fast, and very efficiently.
Okay, so somebody made some nice bitmap graphics. What does that have to do with this?
Dashboard: While Microsoft is bragging about their integrated search technologies, unknown to many, this is already available in linux too.. http://www.nat.org/dashboard . In fact, Microsoft stole the idea from that...
It amuses me that you think Microsoft stole the idea from this project, as though this project was the first to do it. Displaying things in that way isn't a new idea. The way Microsoft is doing it is, though, and I guarantee their unified development model will mean more people will be coding for it than for some random Linux version.
Full hardware accellerated window: The accelleration system is being changed now, and I'm guessing that within 2 Xorg releases, there will be nothing left that isn't accellerated.
Always more reference to the future. That was my point--where is this stuff now? 2 Xorg releases?? Do you realize how long it takes for new Xorg releases to even come out?
"DirectX shading" Let me ruin your disillusions about the magical directx.. Its behind, its always been behind, and whatever it can do, opengl can do a lot easier.
Wow, I sure can't argue with that kind of research. "OpenGL is better, because I said so! So there!"
Did you RTFA? Do you have GPU-sharing? Do you have a unified shader model? There's a reason Direct3D won the battle.
XUL: Our new XAML like thing.. Its being developed for Mozilla. Do you even know what that is???
When did I even mention XAML in this discussion? And where else is XUL majorly being used other than in Mozilla? Are you saying in the future that KDE and GNOME will integrate XUL into their desktops? How many years will that take?
And about your comment about no desktops using the new features.. do more research!!! You'll notice that everyone has been migrating to SVG type graphics already and cairo is the most likely method that will be used to accellerate them.
Wow, "everyone" has been migrating? Who? What distros out there fully run on Cairo now? Where is this technology being used?
Like I said, we can point to half-finished alpha projects all day, but Microsoft is the one actually finishing things.
You obviously haven't noticed this though.. Because I bet you haven't touched CVS though, so have no idea whats really going on.
You have me so figured out. Actually, I've known about all the projects you mentioned. Like I said, the fact that these half-finished things exist in CVS doesn't mean a thing.
Now, heres the thing you prove you haven't done your research on.. What about stuff like SElinux that Linux has but Microsoft doesn't eh. Microsoft is bragging about the new stack smashing protection in SP2, but just about every Nix distro/type has had it for years.
It's a moot point anymore to argue who "stole" what from whom. Lots of people come up with these ideas. I'm sure all of us at some point in time have thought, "It would be cool if my entire desktop was 3D accelerated," or "They should keep track of all my running applications using buttons or something" (taskbar).
The point is who implements the the best. I say this because OSS has little room to complain, considering most of use desktop emulators running taskbars, start menus, and even integrated filesystem/WWW browsers. KDE even got the ability to draw shadows beneath icon labels on the desktop. Though the effect is so ugly, I prefer XP's much more.
in second Netcraft tests? Hmmm. Cycle for cycle Windows beat the crap out of Apache/Linux.
The worst of Kopel's lies comes from Debbie Schussel's confusion between "Life for Relief and Development" and "Holy Land for Relief and Development."
LRD is in partnership with the US State Department in providing humaitarian assistance in Iraq.
"Holy Land for Relief and Development" was closed down as a money laundry for Hamas.
According to Kopel, LRD is a money laundry for Hamas. He offers Debbie Schussel as a source; she offers no source at all. It's obvious she got the names confused.
Kopel shouldn't rely on the cut-rate version of Ann Coulter for his "facts."
That's just the worst example. There are many many more.
There's room for comments directly below the posts (unlike Kopel's site), feel free to offer your counter-arguments, if any exist.
What kind of fuckhead accuses people who distribute wheelchairs of being terrorists with no proof or even evidence?
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
-d
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
1) How is the OSS stuff any more vaporware than Longhorn? It's "in progress" just like Longhorn is "in progress." Or do you have a release version of Longhorn that nobody else does?
2) The new graphics stuff isn't in the PDC beta. The new UI was shown only in Bill G's keynote --- it was stripped from the 4051 build given to attendees. The new OSS graphics stuff is actually available for download.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Could not believe I was typing it myself :)
Blogging because I can...
I wouldn't worry too much: if you can hold out for a few more years, all that hardware will basically be free :)
Both of those features are present in the command line on windows. To past text simply right-click, and if you drag and file or folder over a command window it will enter the full path and filename of that item.
At least it works that way on Windows XP.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
No they havn't forgotten about notebooks. The UI is designed to scale down its operations when running on battery power. There is also a lot of work going into inproving power management features.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
Again, the article does mention compositing, and does mention that its the thing everyone's hyping on about. Again, 95% of the comments here, to which I'm responding, are hyping up about compositing.
Which may not yet be finished on Linux but is, by everyone's measurements, further developed than Longhorn at the present point in time.
Just because you're on the internet doesn't mean you need to act like a fuckwit. If you voiced a similar reply to someone in real life, they'd probably slap you.
Well, I am not so sure about that. Win32 is not my primary OS, hasn't been for the last 4 years or so. (Mandrake is)
..... win32 for the moment, waiting for MCAD applications to make a shift.
Switch to Apple? Probably would, if I could get decent MCAD applications. Before you say there is plenty, consider I-deas, UGS NX, Pro Engineer, Solid Works, Solid Edge, etc... These drive most of the industry. Since that is a big part of what I do (consulting, training, implementation), Apple is out for now.
FS / OSS provides almost all of my basic computing solutions. If I am going to buy an OS, it's going to (sadly) be a win32 one because of the MCAD stuff.
I also use SGI IRIX quite a bit. SGI and Apple have a lot in common with regard to their hardware/software combination. It costs a bit more to do things this way, but the results are clearly worth it. Apple is doing all the right things, just like SGI used to do with IRIX. Believe me when I say I would likely switch, it's just not going to do me any good at the moment.
Linux, IRIX and
Blogging because I can...
Wouldn't you say there's something linguistically missing if you say their Puppy nature is why they're so suited? They're also suited for hushing babies.
Vector processors (big-V) are suited for dealing with vectors (little-v) because a Vector can contain the elements of a vector. Right. However, the elements of a Vector may not be a vector in any important sense, or worse, in a sense that twists the original meaning of the vector.
The Vector you deal with may be composed of a dozen scalars you want to multiply by another scalar really fast. You store them in a Vector, you perform what is technically a vector operation on them, but they are not in any important sense a little-v vector.
Say you're calculating the tax on a dozen shirts.... the vector containing the prices of all those shirts is not importantly a vector. If you let sV be a vector of shirt prices in the space of untaxed items, then you transform that into the vector space of taxed items... you're losing something important on the semantic front. The fact that you can view it this way is why it's called a vector processor, but it's naive. There isn't a thing in the world that isn't a vector when you're start talking that way, and the word loses its meaning.
More telling is the case in which, for reasons of limited cache and to avoid stall, you have a set of spatial vectors Vn, and you define a Vector xComponentsVector to contain all the x components of spatial vectors in your scene. The operation you perform on xComponent completely obliviates the concept of a direct mapping between Vectors and your vectors.
So all I'm pointing out is that there's a meaningful difference between a Vector and a vector, and that the reason Quartz and AltiVec are yummy to program for is that you can hand off vectors to the processor, yes... in the API. The Vectors that the processor calculates are very different indeed once the compiler has had its way, as with any data type.
If you're genuinely hand-coding assembly language AltiVec algorithms and the Vector you throw at the processor is always significantly a mathematical vector on a symbolic level, I'll eat my hat while we discuss the many optimization opportunities you're passing up.
So all I'm pointing out is that there's a meaningful difference between a Vector and a vector
That's besides the point isn't it? :P When you work with vectors (graphics), you have a stream of data arranged such that, xyzxyzxyzxyz... or argbargbargbargb.... Each element in the vector (stream) is independent of the other elements, but they can all be grouped in the same set of operations. And if you really want to have fun you can do permutes (fantastic for byteswapping large chunks of data, say if you're trying to mirror a pixmap), rotates (in the bitwise sense), and other funky stuff.
So yes, I understand the difference between the vector lingo. But they still compliment each other perfectly.
Or maybe you misunderstood when I said Quartz and Altivec. Quartz is implemented with Altivec, so when it draws bezier paths, text glyphs (ATSUI), and compositing (not screen-level compositing, which would be done in the GPU if available), it's implemented in AltiVec. My point was that there's no point of Apple using a GPU for vector processing/Quartz's implementation when the G5's vector processors are right there.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
No troll. The only reason it would be doing extra work is because programs are wastefully written to use these humongous colorspaces with useles eyecandy of gradiatians and similar crapola. When I was writing software (NT & OS/2 scanner driver & preview, mind you, which might have legitimately justified it) dialogs and other mundane UI stuff I stuck with a 16 color palette, the larger pallette spaces were created on they fly according to the current scan values. We are in desparate need of less cuteness and more functionality, I have had my fill of Clippy and animated mouse droppings^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpointers, thank you very much. How about they spend their time asking before overwriting my MBR, recognising ext2, ext3 and reiserfs partitions. How about creating a simple mechanism to allow the designation of drive letter/partition/volumeid at install time so I can keep consistancy across my test installs. The list of far more important deficiencies is extensive and far more deserving of attention than 3D Menus.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
a) The first geek actually does know the truth about the point the second is bringing up, but differences in mode of expression and the lack of handy paper obscure this for a while as the two belabor the obvious. Eventually the first geek realizes what ridiculous mistake the second believes the first to have made, and laughs mightily.
b) The first geek does not know the truth about the point the second is bringing up, but would require a course in linear algebra and another in data structures to catch it, so he can't be convinced anyway.
c) The two work together or are in school together, and so one has grasped a point earlier than the other and is teaching it.
Strange that, though option c is least common among geeks, it's the one we tend to assume applies. In this case, we're at a.
So yeah, there's nothing wrong with your original post that a good dose of clearer terminology wouldn't cure. As it stood, it looked like sphoistry that happened to come out with the right conclusion. Turns out it's the right conclusion based on the right logic, casually expressed.
On the topic of clear terminology, I like your use of vectors (algebra), vectors (streams), vectors (graphics), etc... very useful in the more imprecise field of Graphic Design where I'm now applying my mathematical training. *sigh*
On the other hand - Moore says there's no Porter Goss 800 number. Koppel says there is. Porter Goss says this is none. So who's "deceitful?"
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
"Keep in mind that XP already had transparency/dropshadow effects well before OS X arrived on the scene. I may be wrong - but I don't remember OS 9 having any of this stuff."
In fact, first Amiga had dropshadows, half brite mode. We even used it (still used) in TV applications like lo res subtitling etc.
I saw/used os 7.6, with a theme manager (Caleidescope?) it made amazing things BUT it was basically fancy bitmap graphics.
OS X uses a hybrid PDF/PS interface can do anything acrobat can. You should see it working.
Anyone here old enough to remember Microsoft's new operating system code named Cairo originally scheduled to be released in 1992?
Same story, same hype, new code name.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
That's the problem, it wasn't obvious the piece was an opinion piece. That's how the graphics deceives. It appears when Moore is narrating about how the Florida recount allegedly showed that Gore won the election. A large newspaper headline and article is put on screen from the Pantagraph claiming this. The intent is to make it appear that this newspaper was reporting hard news about this, to give it validity.
Why would Moore take some yahoo's random letter to the editor and use it as evidence for his claim? That's why he had it retyped and enlarged to appear as a frontpage headline, to lend validity to it and make it appear that this was a majorly reported issue in 2000.
You may have qualms of bias with this site, but the story was broken on Moorewatch, and you can find scans of the film version of the article compared to the original newspaper issue.
This is something you wouldn't be able to get away with in a simple university journalism class. You can't take someone's letter to the editor and doctor it up as a valid newspaper article and then cite it as evidence for your claim. I'm not even getting into the five independent journalists who recounted the votes and found that Bush won no matter how the votes were counted (conveniently not reported in the film). This is just basic deceit, and an odd one at that. Surely he could have found a real article on this? Instead, he took a letter to the editor in some random paper and made it into a large hard news headline to bolster his claim. That is deceitful, and I suspect if a conservative had done it, many of Moore's fans would be all over it.
It doesn't matter to me if you liked and agreed with the film. It just bothers me that people are unwilling or unable to see how things are twisted in the film. My opinion is, if your "documentary" can't live up to the standards of a basic college journalism class, it's not a valid political commentary and is basically nothing more than propaganda.
How is the OSS stuff any more vaporware than Longhorn? It's "in progress" just like Longhorn is "in progress." Or do you have a release version of Longhorn that nobody else does?
Vaporware is something that is promised but never relased. Longhorn has had several beta releases, including a major PDC build.
2) The new graphics stuff isn't in the PDC beta. The new UI was shown only in Bill G's keynote --- it was stripped from the 4051 build given to attendees. The new OSS graphics stuff is actually available for download.
Yes, it is. Avalon, Indigo, XMAL, and more are all in the PDC build. Enabling hardware acceleration in the beta is a simple matter of enabling a registry entry. What is not included in the build is the Aero Glass interface which will be replacing what is in the betas now.
The only reason it would be doing extra work is because programs are wastefully written to use these humongous colorspaces with useles eyecandy of gradiatians and similar crapola.
It's my belief that the vast majority of computer users do not feel this way. You're free to have this opinion, of course, but I think it makes sense in this case to write software with the assumption that most users are going to want to have access to 32-bit color -- if for no other reason than regularly view photos, video, and web sites. Those just don't work well in 16 color mode.
As far as performance goes, I think modern hardware is up to the task. Even mobile phones have 16-bit color (or more) nowadays.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Surely the base reason for this is that the UNIX pholosophy is not to waste valuable computing resource of GUIs and graphical processes when you don't need to.
I don't have details on the Windows stuff discussed here, but at least in the Mac OS X world, moving GUI stuff off of the main CPU and onto the GPU (using Quartz Extreme, starting in Jaguar/10.2) freed up the CPU to do more important things. The whole system was faster as a result.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Apple doesn't include a 3D card in its systems.
It uses 2D to simulate 3D
This is completely false.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Hmm, only took Microsoft 9 years to figure out that cap bits cause more problems then they solve.
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Original, Fun Palm games by the Lead Designer of Majesty!
http://www.arcanejourneys.com/
Core Image has nothing to do with a 3D shell.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yes, there is a wealth of mature critical apps for Linux, but there are a lot of things that just don't exist yet. And if an average open source project releases its first usable release today, it will probably be a year or two before that app is really ready for use by many. The real problem is there still isn't a truly user-friendly desktop that anyone can use. Perhaps a big part of this is no distro has tried hard enough to make this a reality, but I think a bigger issue is that we're just trying to do things right here. While it is a noble goal, it is also a slow and difficult one and that needs to be kept in mind. I have no doubt that there will be a Linux desktop that will be easier and more straightforward than Windows within the next several years, but don't claim it's here yet or just around the corner.
Please understand I am in no way discrediting what has already been done, as it is simply amazing, however it is still falling short in terms of consistency, simplicity, and overall coherence. I look forward to actually wanting to ditch OS X in favor of Linux on my Mac. When I feel that would actually be a smart idea for pretty much any reason, then I know that Linux is 99% ready for everyone.
I am feeling fat and sassy