Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Windows Graphic Technology
Ben writes 'Extremetech has an article discussing the future of Windows graphics technology. The article uses information from presentations at the recent WinHEC, and outlines the Windows Graphics Foundation and other technologies expected to make an appearance in Longhorn. Particularly interesting is the Longhorn Display Driver Model: 'With it, Microsoft is aiming for that ideal situation of 'graphics just works.' For example, if you upgrade a graphics driver today, you typically have to reboot the system. One example of the 'graphics just works' mantra is one of LDDM's goals of allowing installation of graphics drivers without needing to restart the system.'
Wow upgrading a driver without having to reboot? Amazing! This along with alpha transparency in IE7 and a full-fledged journaling file system should launch Microsoft into a new age of technology, the 90's.
no reboot? next youre gonna tellme billy boy is broke
Trolling here, seems like this is a requirement push from the linux community. Its nice to upgrade your production machines to more stable drivers w/o having to take your machine down to achieve greater stability.
That's whack.
Is the ability to update without rebooting a side-effect feature, or a full-effect feature? It seems like something only a consumer PC (i.e. not a server) would have to do, and infrequently. Is it really a demand that people have?
For example, if you upgrade a graphics driver today, you typically have to reboot the system. One example of the 'graphics just works' mantra is one of LDDM's goals of allowing installation of graphics drivers without needing to restart the system.
Didn't I hear the same "no rebooting" line with Win2k and with WinXP? Not that I wouldn't enjoy that, it's just that I've lost faith in these types of claims.
-Valiss
How often does the average user update the video drivers in Windows? Do they really care that it requires a reboot? I would guess that less than 0.1% of my Windows reboots are prompted by updating the video drivers.
It's nice that I won't have to reboot to upgrade my video driver. Now if they could fix the memory leaks that seem to be so rampant in Windows Server and its applications I might have an average uptime that is longer than 1 month.
I remember in my old Novell file server days that it was common to have Novell 3.12 servers with an uptime of 2 years or more. From what I understand, this is common among just about every operating system other than Windows Server (which is the primary operating system I deal with).
I'm a big tall mofo.
how often do you load a new grafics driver?
I am amazed at how many software packages still require a reboot. IMHO this is much more annoying.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Considering the thousands of stories related to Microsoft that slashdot has posted, and the fact that at least one Microsoft article appears daily, shouldn't they get their own section, ala Apple or Linux?
It's high time they get the honor and the icons should be replaced with more professional, actual depictions of Microsoft.
Which routine do we need to use to get half of our drop shadows going one way and half the other in an image?
Such advances in graphics surely signal more of the sort of innovation we've come to expect from them...
wake me when I can hot swap my video card.
At least you dont have to recompile the kernel.
I have to say, this is quite a promising technology. As someone who works with computer aided design (CAD) programs quite a bit, I know how important it is to be able to switch graphics drivers quickly and efficiently.
Personally, I always thought Linux's solution of recompiling and/or reloading/rebooting the kernel/modules when new ones are needed is an elegant solution that all but the most dimwitted users would have no trouble with. But this idea of Microsoft's almost makes that look silly. Of course, I don't expect any miracles from them, but it is exciting nonetheless.
-- Molly Lipton, Born Again Technologist.
Didn't BeOS do this? Don't a great deal of modern operating systems do this? I fail to see the innovation.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I'm a bit afraid if their approach to "it just works" begins at the graphics driver.
which is what made Muzak so horrifying.
Microsoft seems to be walking in the same direction.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
From: Bill
Subject: Re: Longhorn
Hey Steve,
Has the research team figured out why the *nix machines don't have to reboot all the time?
Bill
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
The only time that I reboot after installing something is if it forces me to. Never had any problems whatsoever. Even upgrading drivers. For some reason, "It just works".
Next, of course, is having multiple different graphics drivers running at once, and switching between them with, say, Ctrl-Alt-F7 and... Oh, wait...
-JAB
There are 2 big things coming over the horizon, once Longhorn lets us have advanced 3D graphics on our desktops.
The first is that this can probably be exploited by malware/spyware to make "invisible" interfaces that sit over top of existing applications, happily monitoring everything you're doing. Or, kind of like those one-pixel GIFs that show up on the odd phishing page. No fun.
But by far the worst is going to be the end-user customization. Want transparent yellow spinning windows that change opacity based on the phase of the moon? Bet you can do that! It'll be like the old programs that let you add sounds to all the Windows events. When the average user got a hold of that, it was only a matter of seconds before their machine became the Box Of Annoyance. Thank Jeebus people finally grew out of that (mostly). But watch and see - it's coming again, only this time it's got GRAPHICS.
Now, it may open up a whole new world of "desktop modification pranks." Hmm.
Keep your friends close.
Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
So when I update my display drivers for Duke Nukem Forever, I won't have to restart!
I have freaks! I did something right...
I've found that under Windows XP, even though a newly installed piece of software prompts you to "reboot to complete installation." You can just click 'cancel' and immediately launch into the program successfully without requiring one.
I'm not sure if the "Please Reboot" is a hold-over part of the installation process from back in the day when you actualy needed to do this, or if its because there is only one installer program, thus telling you to reboot in case you happen to be running an old version of Windows.
What I find particularly annoying is that my Windows machine prompts me to reboot after installing a critical update, and I'm reminded every few minutes that I need to reboot no matter how many times I click 'reboot later.'
How many times have we seen breathless articles all slack-jawed over some new technology that Microsoft is getting ready to unveil
Vaporware anyone?
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Funny, however, how the rendering scheme and virtualization of graphics card memmory sounds awfully like the new, and currently shipping, graphics engine in Apple's OS X. (Quartz and Quartz Extreme.)
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Win 2K and XP do seem to manage this on some (rare) occasions. The architecture seems to be there to support it, so I wouldn't be too surprised if Longhorn does what they say.
More importantly, though... it looks like Longhorn's graphics capabilities really are set to stand out from the Linux (and even OS X) crowd. It's a pity that Linux graphic teams haven't managed to unify and focus on getting an integrated "product" out. We have Xorg, and Cairo/SVG, and maybe GTK or Qt, but not a complete, end-to-end platform with established animation APIs etc. Hopefully we'll catch up before we start to look too old.
Wouldn't you need to turn off the computer either way to install the graphics card you are going to install a driver for? Usually the instructions say along the lines to install the driver first, shut down the computer, install the card. Or Windows would prompt you for the driver at startup, and load it without needing to restart. Then again, a majority of users already would have the drivers installed... so whats the point?
This brings a question to mind -- does anyone know exactly why Windows still requires reboots for these kinds of things? This makes my life positively MISERABLE.
A typical experience for me... I have all of my machines set up dual boot, all with some distro of linux, and either XP Home Edition, or XP Pro. I do most of (but not all) my work on the linux side, but when I do boot over to XP inevitably it's more than just one reboot, it's almost always at least 2, and many times it's 3! (not 3 factorial, just 3 exclamation). Typically this is a result of something in my XP environment updating itself, be it Windows itself, virus protection updates, or just the vendors download of updates. Invariably a download occurs (after granting permission), and then the update, and then the dreaded popup dialog box with some such message, "For the updates to take effect you must restart your computer. Restart now?"
And some of those dialog boxes offer no clickable option other than "OK" which means reboot and you have to jump through an extra cognitive hoop and remember to click the "X" in the corner of the dialog window (to defer the reboot).
On the other side... I don't remember the last time I've had to reboot my linux for any kind of updates, and I do get updates in linux on a pretty regular basis (as many as in Windows). What gives? I don't think the architecture for XP is so arcane it can't support recognizing and using updates without a reboot. Does anyone have solid commentary on this? (Not that my life's going to get any better around this anytime soon -- but it'd be nice to know if there's some bonified (sp?) reason for this step-into-the-twentieth-century XP behavior.)
... It will take around 15 years to actually arive. So just subtract from when they started on *this* particular peice of technology.
History: WinFS was supposed to debut in Cairo, which was around '94 (either started or release date) and now WinFS will be in Longhorn in beta form if at all and arrive at best in '08
And it has been journaled since early 90's. Which was before Linux developers even began thinking about journaled FSs.
There's GOLD in them thar hills.
This would be an appropriate time to let everybody know how eagerly I am waiting for the BRAND NEW GRAPHICS on Longhorn, greatest of the operating systems and a worthy successor to the mighty XP.
(hey: dyu think MS will mind if I use their money to buy a powerbook?)
Apple brought out 10.4 about 17 months after 10.3. I wonder if 10.5 will appear on a similar interval and be out in late 2006. I can see Steve Jobs raining on Bill's parade with another OS release.
I can certainly understand refusing to reboot a server that needs to be on 24/7. Fine. But why do people get their panties in a bunch over rebooting their own personal machines? I run Fedora Core 3, yes it takes minutes for it to boot up, but when I do I usually don't sit there staring at it. When I turn my computer on in the morning I do something else while booting up, like brush my teeth. This development manager friend of mine looked at me strangely when I kept rebooting my laptop to fix networking issues. Why do you reboot your machine so much? Because I don't know how to selectively start and restart processes. Because I don't know which ones to start and restart. With names like ntpd, how would one know? If I restart processes, don't others depend on them? Won't they get hosed? Etc. Etc. Or I can waste a whole five minutes of my life not worrying about those things and just reboot the damn thing. And chat with my friends in the meanwhile.
"Wow upgrading a driver without having to reboot?"
Wow! Upgrading a Nvidia driver without compilation against a kernel, editing xorg.conf, and rebooting Xorg?
Don't you realize that people like Ann Coulter judge their personnel worth by the number of google hits they get? Every time you write about her, it encourages her, even if you use the words "fucked up the ass" in the post.
Of course, people like Jeremiah Cornelius probably judge their own worth the same way, so there we go.
In some ways, I think microsoft goes out of their way to find the most cumbersome and assanine way of developing their drivers.
We have a computer at work running XP that constantly hoses its USB drivers and every time I plug in my flash drive, it says it found and installed new hardware *AND* I have to reboot! I have to reboot because it had to figure out a flash drive again since the last time I rebooted it?
Why is it also that when you plug in a USB device on one port, it loads the driver and if you unplug it and plug it onto a separate USB controller it needs to install another instance of the driver? They don't automatically go away either. If the one goes away and a new one in a different spot shows up, the first one should 'just get recycled' and claimed again, regardless of what USB port it's plugged into. I can see a second one show up if you plug a second one in while the first is still plugged in, but who has two identical printers simulataneously connected? I have a parallel printer so I don't know the full intricacies of USB printers, but doesn't it show up as a second printer to applications?
I think microsoft has a very long way to go to make their drivers actually useful. At least they finally figured out how to change network settings without always having to reboot.
"The NVIDIA kernel module has a kernel interface layer which must be compiled specifically for the configuration and version of the kernel you are running. "
For the win.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
The ability to change settings without rebooting? Gee, that was the tag line of the dynamic .vxd's in Windows 95. Again, we were told the same in Windows 98, and ultimately we were guarenteed a month of uptime in WindowsXP before the need to reboot. I've successfully reached the month of no-reboot time for XP, but only when I don't update anything, at all. I hope Longhorn finally delivers on the 10 year old promises given to us by the 'technology providers' of Microsoft.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
"This brings a question to mind -- does anyone know exactly why Windows still requires reboots for these kinds of things? This makes my life positively MISERABLE."
For a similiar reason to why you have to reboot after changing your Linux kernel.
As it is, there is no means to hot-plug an AGP video card that I'm aware of
Aren't some video cards available in PCI, and don't some mainboards support PCI hot-plugging? And aren't there "thin client" monitors that work over Ethernet using X11, VNC, or some proprietary protocol?
so down time is required just to install that upgrade.
Not if it's from say, version 32.23 of a driver for a given card to say, version 43.45 of a driver for the same card.
I don't see rebooting for a very occasional upgrade.
With the NVIDIA or ATI graphics driver updates, you typically have to uninstall your current driver, then restart in 640x480 pixels in 16 colors, then install the driver, then restart again. Some drivers need three or more restarts.
Truly revolutionary. See what you're missing Linux and BSD users? AND I'll just bet Microsoft will add their own antivirus app to Longhorn so you can conveniently just send all of your moeny to one place. Top that, OSS hippies!
This guy is way out there
Too bad I can already do that on Linux
"By the time Longhorn actually ships, almost every new PC should be able to support the user interface and Windows Graphics Foundation."
I take it your not on his freinds list then.
The future of graphics in the Windows world is easy to plot.
Step one: Break interface compatibility with the past.
Step two: Ensure interface lock-in with the future.
No problem. Profit, of course, will follow.
I can certainly understand refusing to reboot a server that needs to be on 24/7. Fine.
If you're trying to download a rawther big, rawther rare file off some P2P network, or you host a few web pages (small enough to remain under the radar of your ISP) on your computer, or you're participating in some distributed computing projects, then your computer is "a server that needs to be on 24/7."
... is that maybe, just maybe, since they are able to replace a critical file and feature at run-time without rebooting means that Longhorn will finally be able to replace a file even while it's in use, like Linux does.
That would actually be really neat. Wasn't Longhorn going to break some more compatibility will older apps in order to have tighter security. Maybe that's a restriction that will be gone.
And viola it installs the new drivers and on reboot removes the old ones.
If this is true, then NVIDIA and ATI must have changed the process since I last upgraded my video driver. You can probably tell that I'm not an avid FPS gamer.
rather dumb?
I can understand the need to be backwards-compatible with older software that assume the Windows Desktop to live at 96 DPI, but to emulate virtual pixels and not actually use vector graphic objects fails to take an important step forwards, whatever other progress the graphics systems make.
I think, however, that [this idiocy] is a good thing. Someone else is then in the position to create an open API for a vector-rendered desktop space which may earn hardware acceleration from graphics hardware vendors, if these features are needed and the F/OSS world tries to continue to support older hardware.
MS is risking quite a bit in hoping that all programs (nay, the entire OS) will want to pump 3D.
If I really want to swing my windows around...I'll try the inside of a sphere:
http://www.hamar.sk/sphere/screenshots.htm
With this, folks who'd like to maximize the use of their processor (and now main memory!?) for other tasks (think servers), MS should provide a simple CLI.
I also expect dozens of simple-minded newebs writing awful-look graphics programs, but now in 3D. Just like when we saw shareware games written in VB. Yeesh.
I think the Anonymous coward is right. Embrace the mod -1 friend. The revolution is coming.
Don't mod me up.
Desktop Window Manager
Quartz Compositor
Note this has been around since before Mac OS X 10.0 (March 2001), gaining hardware acceleration for compositing in Mac OS X 10.2 (August 2002) and most recently hardware acceleration of 2D primitives in Mac OS X 10.4 (currently available to developers only).
A very large number of parallels exist between Apple's Quartz, Quartz 2D, and Apple's OpenGL model/abstractions and stuff coming in Longhorn.
Of course I can't fault them for running with a good idea and one that is a generally logical extension of OpenGL concepts mixed with ideas from the 2D world (PDF, painters model... good old SGI guys).
You'll have to complete the side of the cube that has the appropriate icon.
http://www.crayola.com/products/display.cfm?produc t=47
Colour depth sucks, but the resolution is wicked. Stable as a rock, and no need to reboot ever! The refresh rate is alright, but my arm is getting tired.
You bust a nut when X gets "wobbly windows", but throw insults around when Windows gets real improvements.
Meanwhile, I am still waiting for Sarge to be released!
Holy shit! After I pressed Preview, I noticed a Debian story. Sure enough, Sarge has just been frozen and a release in late May has been announced. LOL.
"Is that a feature of Linux, or of NVidia?"
In the "This is the Year of Desktop Linux", do you really think it makes a difference?
I tend to not like to install the security updates simply because they require reboots. When will this be fixed?
Good luck with that.
you had me at #!
I love the new Microsoft mantra.
Today while repeating it to coworkers (while trying to install windows (aaargh), I spouted it out in a far more accurate form.
Microsoft: it just works sometimes
The most probably culprit I can think of are file locks.
In Windows, it is impossible to replace a file in use, so when an update touches a dll that is used by whatever else process, Windows has to reboot to get rid of the lock, replace the file on reboot, and continue.
Unix, however, lets you replace any file. The old version stays still on disk as long as an application has it open, so all running applications will continue to work just fine. They will use the new file as soon as they are restarted. This way, I can replace every library in the system without having to reboot.
The Windows approach has advantages too. I could do a security upgrade on my ssl-library, and if I dont restart sshd, sshd will still use the old, insecure library, and this, till it is restarted.
Personally, I prefere the Unix way. After all, other tools can restart applications after library updates, so this shouldn't be enforced by the OS.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Totally.
I don't know what they claimed, but here's what they did, off the top of my head:
--Network changes don't need rebooting. You can change IPs, or even go from DHCP to static, etc with no rebooting.
--Non-essential drivers, like NIC drivers doesn't require a reboot, at least if the company isn't stupid. Try it with an Intel NIC someday, they install and you go, no reboot.
--USB/Firewire devices just work and need no rebooting, unless the manufacturer makes some speical driver that requires it.
--Many software installs that used to need reboots no longer require them. Things like video decoders, services, and so on are installed on the fly and made available. Many older peices of software that claim needing a reboot don't in reality.
There may be more, I haven't used 9x in years so I can't remember all the things that made it reboot. However they made significant headway with 2k/XP. Reboots are generally limited to system updates, and core driver updates. If they can get it to the point where thigns like graphics and sound drivers don't need reboots, all the better.
Same scenario. Windows doesn't have a command line to drop to, it needs it's GUI. So, to upgrade the video system, you have to restart the video system which requires a reboot. Linux seperates it's video system, so you don't have to reboot your system, but you still have to stop X, and thus all apps running under it, and then start it back up. Now from the perspective of someone that uses X to run all their apps, which most end users do, it's the same thing, an interruption in work flow.
Just as long as these excellent new display drivers allow a crystal clear vision of the blue screen of death, I'll be a content man.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
With one ATI product, I ran into drivers that would not uninstall - period. I tried to remove them manually, but ATI's driver installer had integrated them into the WinXP driver.cab file, and registered all of the files with Windows built in system file protection mechanism.
.inf/sys/dll files manually, but windows system file protection would instantly recreate them from the driver.cab file. I also tried opening up the driver.cab file and removing them, but windows would detect this too and repopulate the cab file with the files in the system32 folder. By changing a few file permissions, (so the SYSTEM account couldn't touch the driver.cab) file, I managed to remove the files from the driver.cab file and delete the driver files from the Windows directory, but alas, Windows still insisted that it install that particular version of the driver! Obviously, I missed something, but I had had enough. I dumped my files and settings onto a second PC and reinstalled.
Uninstalling the driver from the device manager did no good, as the device would be automatically reinstalled using the same driver the next time windows scanned for new hardware. I tried deleting all of the
ATI can suck my balls.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Whatever they can copy from Apple, of course.
Wow upgrading a driver without having to reboot? Amazing! This along with alpha transparency in IE7 and a full-fledged journaling file system should launch Microsoft into a new age of technology, the 90's.
You linux Zealots all sing the same refrain with your vague posts:
a new age of technology, the 90's.
Try substantiating your comments with FACTS! Your post _should_ have read:
a new age of technology, the mid 90's.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
If I'm not mistaken, doesn't XP's setup still run at 640x480x 256 colors?
Considering that the minimum system requirements for XP were vastly superiour to that, I won't hold my breath with regard to Longhorn's "superiour" graphics.
I'll be impressed if the setup program runs at a decent bit-depth and resolution. That would be my first indicator that they have faith in the users that will be using their OS - considering that it requires a 2GHz processor; I'm hoping they don't dumb down the VGA setup routine to cartoon graphics.
Bill, take a lesson from Tiger, would ya?
He simply produces "hole in one"'s with consistency. Hell, if nothing else, take a lesson from Apple's new OS release.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Hell, it was already very stale in '99 ... and wrong, too. Unless you're doing something utterly retarded like trying to use an MS desktop OS for a server, or trying to run a server on NT 3.x or Win9x, then it's probably your apps or drivers not the OS that's broken.
... *gulp*). Security fixes aside, they're all of pretty much equal stability.
My NT4 box here gets WAY better uptimes than any of my Linux servers. I'm not rebooting the NT4 every few months for a kernel security fix (of course, that's because there *are* no security fixes for it anymore
It does eventually go kind of wacko and need rebooting, but it takes many months. It used to be much less stable, but I rebuilt it from bare metal without any garbage apps and it's been pretty solid ever since.
I've had both Linux servers go kind of wacko a couple of times too - it's not something reserved for NT4. I'm not too thrilled with 2.6 in this regard - I've had way more problems with it than 2.4.
I think the real problem with Windows servers is that they don't seem to handle badly behaved apps well - and I'm not just talking NT4 here. I'd actually be interested in Windows servers if the standard rule wasn't "one app or key service per server". Being told "well, that'll happen then" when you try to do multiple things on one server (*gasp*!) is just dumb, and I hear it way too much from Windows server admins.
As for the memory leak argument - you see the same thing from Linux users on the mailing lists. It gets tired in a hurry - "run `free' and read the +=buffers/cache line. If your OS isn't using most of your RAM it's broken, what you want to know is how much RAM is just used for cache and thus free for apps."
It's like those "memory freeing" utilitles you get on Windows - for people who just don't understand memory management in a modern OS like Linux or NT.
I work in Windows but have read what I could about Quartz2D and Java to try and keep current. My understanding of Quartz2D is that they try and keep the graphics context coordinate system not bound to screen pixels so you have a uniform graphics context whether you are printing, plotting to the screen, or plotting to a PDF file. I am told that Quartz2D is not really PDF as much as a graphics context that tries to be as compatible with PDF as it can. Under Windows, a displayable object has to have different rendering methods to deal with the quirks of how graphics context coordinates vary between printer, screen, and metafile, while my understanding is that under Quartz, they try to make everything uniform, adding a layer to do all the scaling, so you need only one rendering method.
I don't have any 3-D experience, but I heard the buzzwords about triangles, vertices, shaders, and graphics pipelines. If Longhorn is going 3-D, is this what we are going to work with? If so, it will be radically different than Quartz, which appears to be pretty much conventional fonts-lines-shades-images-pixmaps 2-D graphics only done more uniformly and perhaps elegantly than other 2-D graphics.
And if Longhorn is indeed going 3-D, what am I going to have to learn to work in that world?
"Virtualisation of graphics card memory" has been a feature of MacOS since the late 1980s, when Apple released its 2D graphics accelerator and added O/S support for using GPU RAM.
Likewise, they were first with desktop 3D acceleration (with device independent APIs) in the early 90s... etc, etc.
you had me at #!
Ah! you just said her name again
According to this article:
Well, there isn't much that Linux developers can do about the way that NVidia releasing its code, so if it were a feature of NVidia, there wouldn't be much that they could do.
Microsoft created the upgrade problem to churn the customer base. It's purely a Microsoft-created problem.
Let's try on mine. Fluxbox starts in less than five seconds anyway, including setting a desktop, after a fresh boot. It takes me less than two minutes to get Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim all up and running, not to mention half a dozen aterms.
Now, try that again, just restarting the server. Guess what? Everything's cached in RAM! It actually takes me 20-30 seconds, total, to get all my apps re-opened.
I'll take that over rebooting any day.
Of course, server migration is better, if you can do it. This is also probably one of the better places to support this -- after all, we've already pretty much done it with things like mice and network cards.
My worry is, if MS decides to keep going like this, we may eventually have to either do a microkernel or support swapping out the kernel on the fly -- like kexec, but saving all the apps. It wouldn't have too much practical value, and a microkernel done right is more elegant, but it would be very cool to show to Windows people.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Why does the setup program matter at all? The setup program should use the lowest common denominator of capabilities, such as the SVGA video adapter. Identifying, finding and loading the driver for your particular ATI board in order to show, WAIT FOR IT, a progress bar, is simply a waste of time a resources.
Fuck you dicktard!!!!!!1111eleven
Newsflash: Microsoft has future? :-O
I like losing arguments, it just means that I can take your point and make it my own.
Its obvious that what they mean is that the coordinate system used for graphics will not be raw pixels, but rather these 96dpi units. At high resolutions, textures will still occupy the same amount of screen space. Ugh. "Virtual pixel" is a stupid way to describe that.
Microsoft : No More Reboots! :D
Users : Really?! Tell us more!!
Microsoft : Yeah! Its this great new feature. Instead of the old "have to reboot" thing, we have patented an incredible new, "Ctrl+Alt+Delete" system to manage new drivers!
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
The readme file is several hundred lines long and includes a bevy of options. The X config file needs to be changed "as appropriate" (and what the hell does *that* mean). SuSE users are referred to another document to read first...
I admit that they do a good job of:
- distributing code but keeping IP
- Creating an installer thats relatively usable
But it still proves my point.My Windows XP Setup program has 4 colors I can think of. Blue, Gray, Red and Yellow. It looks like an old DOS setup program.
Last time I changed my video card without restarting, I destroyed the old one and the new one.
Then the only way I could read slashdot was with my Matrix neural connect.
I guess that makes sense, since I should have been using the Matrix connect all along.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Microsoft updates DirectX so much because game developers and game players demand it.
Unlike OpenGL, DirectX is NOT just graphics. I provides a consistant (well, fairly) API across all supported hardware, hardware that includes sound, input devices (joystks, and other game controllers), network services and yes video cards.
To keep up the the changing features of hardware they MUST update often to keep DirectX developers from having to code to *hardware specific* extensions that are often added by hardware vendors when the API does not keep up. (Ask Nvidia or ATI much they like spending time creating hardware specific OGL extensions for features that OGL does not support. Then ask some developers how much they like coding to specific hardware.)
Many developers would love to *just switch to OGL* but once they start looking into all the issues they would have to deal with on their own most (but yes, not all) are very happy to stick with DX.
Jorgie
Windows NT 4.0 dumped the security and stability of this arrangement for the dubious goal of faster graphics. Things haven't been the same since.
Perhaps this is a step back to stability? I sure would like to go back to the years of uptime I had when my main servers were NT 3.51, and the only down time was for hardware upgrades.
--Mike--
No I didn't say "Nee"!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I take it thats using the word 'just' to mean 'barely'. Eg, "I just made it to the bus on time", "graphics -just- works".
printf("Goodbye cruel world!\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
so long as you've got one of the many cards with good linux support you should be pleasantly suprised. nvidia's closed source driver is one of the best video drivers available, imho. also ensure you're using the right distro... go gentoo and you wont look back, otherwise debian... redhat is just a bunch of commercially cryogenically maintained legacy bullshit that should be ditched asap... ie SysV init vs gentoo's dependancy based rc system. which allows lovely things like fsck'ing multiple drives in parallel on boot (just a theoretical example, most people would be using journaling these days)
welcome to linux
I wish Microsoft would stop working on inane things like this and fix the bugs in their OS, or IE6, or you name it. This is just another example of parading out another version and not fixing the existing version.
Pranksters have loaded viruses into the heads of major corporations and made them take a pay cut.
The Interesting thing is that nobody cares.
I'm just curious how many lines of code they had their monkies pound out to put this feature into their crappy software architecture? Every line of code is another opportunity for a security hole/bug. Let's hear it for more and cheaper H-1b programmers -- Bill Gates' terminal addiction -- the last best hope of a world without Microsoft!
Seastead this.
The cleanest way to do it would probably to change X.org to support loadable driver modules.
That way you could switch the video driver in and out without shutting down X. The X server could hold drawing until the driver had been reloaded.
But like everyone here is saying it isn't really that important in the scheme of things, how often do you update your video driver? Better to work on a more useable config system, drivers, eyecandy and performance etc.
Sure transparent windows cannot "see" what is underneath.
However it's not unthinkable to imagine a 100% transparent window that simply overlays any window on the screen, and duplicates form fields found there (by traversing the window structure) - passing along anything typed in down to the overlaid screen and also recording at the same time.
So the transparent screen would act as a proxy, not as just a simple spy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
OpenGL 2 is an API, a protocol, ie, a piece of paper. The graphics driver, which is an implementation of that API, is a constant work-in-progress.
This thing is really bad and crappy. You know its WINDOWS!
There is nothing as bad as windows, although eye candy makes you see the blue screen WITH TRANSPARENCY!
You know its BLASHPHEMY to put a link for a microsoft promoting article in slashdot.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
The OpenGL spec, without any extensions, is stagnant. This is true. But new OGL extensions come out just as often as DX updates. Extensions really aren't that hard. Other than marketing, whats the difference between saying "you need DX version Y" and "you need OGL_extension_Z"? The OGL api, as the developer sees it (which is the spec + extensions) is just as vibrant as the DX api. And if ATI's "hardware specific" extension is really worth using, nvidia will implement it, and vice versa. The reason that stuff comes out for DX first is not because DX is some great unified model or anything. DX is for games on windows. OpenGL is for everything on anything. Its a harder problem to solve, so it takes longer.
Anyway, I don't see what your point is. Yeah the parent poster doesn't know what he's talking about, but you're not making any sense either.
the reason for this is because NVidia will not produce the specs to write an OSS driver. 2D info is out there and there is no need to go through those steps to install and/or setup the 2D nv driver.
So, than NVidia for making the configuration of computers so difficult. NOT the X or Linux developers.
Most of the posts on here skip over the entire article and just see "fewer reboots" and then mention the word innovation.
./ for the articles, but dude, get rid of the garbage community. The community here is really poor and it's only getting worse. It's like rednecks using the Internet.
Innovation isn't the key word here. They are improving their processes.
I really don't want to sound like a troll, but a lot of posters here are just really biased or dumb as a brick.
I know it's going to hurt you to be able to read about what Microsoft is doing without having to say xxx is better or we have been doing this for years.
I love
It's 800x600, and I'll take compatibility over prettiness any day. Until it knows your video card is capable of higher resolution (Apple can guarantee that because they control the hardware, MS can't, the system requirements are only recommendations) why risk it? How often do you install anyway?
I am trolling
Hey! I can live with driver reboots but that xp gonna BSOD because of the wrong, buggy, someting is wrong NIC driver.
Hope Longhorn will fix that problem
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
The Linux Zealots are getting pretty desperate to push a "No-Reboot" feature as an important consideration for a desktop/workstation: Really Desperate. Especially considering the fact that the latest/greatest video cards typically don't even have Linux Drivers!
Stoopid Fanboys!
After switching from NVidia to ATI hosed my windows install and was unrecoverable with restore or repair (even after putting back in the old card)...i think they need to work on the basics before getting fancy.
When windows can become corrupted and can't even be repaired from CD to the extent that VGA mode doesn't even work, there are serious design and QA issues. Spare me the fluff and fix the basic install and repair process or at least provide tools to easily recovery preferences and email from a dead windows install.
Is it me or is the Windows graphics architecture, expectedly, far more complicated than the Mac OSX graphics architecture?
The main trick that the new Windows graphic technology will pull in order to utilise the 3d part of a video card is to use a texture for each toplevel window. Then the desktop will be like a video game: each 60 frames per second, the textures will be rendered by the 3d hardware with various effects.
/. crowd has already pointed, restaring the X-Server is almost like rebooting: all desktop apps need to be interrupted.
This trick is essentially wrong: it requires vast amounts of graphics memory for no particular reason. Just as the article says, computers will require 512 MB, even 1 GB of graphics memory. This is plain silly! in order to have a few nice 3d fx (with questionable usability), there is gonna be tremendous memory requirements.
The same effects could be easily delivered to the user by not representing each window with a texture, but by vector graphics. The modern desktop consists of a few thousand lines/fills that can be easily handled by the 3d hardware. By using vector graphics only, there are huge benefits: a) the desktop is fully scalable, b) memory requirements are minimized, c) the screen can be rotated in a split second, d) the full range of effects is possible.
As for the feature of not rebooting while upgrading the graphics driver, it's a useless feature. It has only marketing value for Microsoft: since Unix is not rebooted to upgrade the graphics driver, Windows has to follow. But as the clever
From: Jim Allchin
Subject: Re:Re: Longhorn
Didn't mean to snoop on your conversation, guys, but Exchange delivered me all of your email this week.
Why don't we just *borrow* some BSD code again? We can strip off the license, patent it, and no one will be in a position to complain. Plus we have ammunition for future court appearances!
You will be assimilated,
-Jim
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Windows 2k had something like this. I could delete a file and still play it in winamp (no, winamp didn't load and free the file). XP disabled this behavior and made it 9x-like (unfortunately).
Why do I have to restart Firefox when i add an extension????
Why do I have to restart Firefox when I open a close and open a dial-up connection???
I.E. doesn't have these problems. Therefore, Firefox is shit, made by shit 'engineers'.
Gotta love Slashdot logic.
Spead of introducing new features into the API isn't of much importance.
Games are slow when adopting new graphic features because people don't buy new hardware so fast.
And even so, directX was lagging behind OGL extensions when shader model 2.0 and stuff surrounding R300 were introduced. (DX9 was beta, but OGL supported it fully)
I'll be impressed if the setup program runs at a decent bit-depth and resolution.
I'll be impressed if booting to safe mode with command line doesn't.
The first time I booted to safe mode in XP, to see it load the graphics and windowing systems just to display a windowed command prompt... That was depressing.
I guess they use a VESA mode in addition of your comment.
Also, Apple doesn't push GFX card too much while installing OS X too. Its just clever to "ask" monitor the modes it supports and go with a medium resolution. No reply? I guess it will down to 640*480
I still have no clue why I had to install Samsung Syncmaster driver on Win XP and on OS X it was detected along with its factory colour profile.
Its no "elite" thing to do, anything that carries VESA standards can handle it.
Adults are here considering hard questions about how we might be freed from Microsoft's long-standing monopolistic tyranny by the gift of diversity to the Longhorn OS.
Thanks.
Seastead this.
Some bioses are buggy and don't support random vesa modes they say they do. I've found mine will only do 960xsomething (I think, some odd mode anyway) with an AGP card, not a PCI card. This is, again, a problem apple doesn't have because they control the hardware. The monitor should be fine though, I have no idea why that would require a driver before it worked.
I am trolling
Oh, I didn't write completely. The monitor refresh etc was fetched OK while on XP too.
.icc profile (file) from Samsung to do it.
Just the interesting is, Apple also fetches its factory colour profile, XP needs a