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Windows Vista and the Future of Hardware
NSIM writes to mention an article on ExtremeTech looking at the impact that Windows Vista will have on the future of computer hardware. In addition to obvious elements like CPUs, GPUs, and display interfaces, the article also touches on things like DRM (which Vista heavily supports) and audio formats. From the article: "Currently, only a few shipping products actually support the crypto-ROM needed to ensure compliance with Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and CableCard. It's looking like next-generation cards will all implement the needed firmware. Continued... The impact on future displays is a bit more subtle, but we're starting to see the impact already. Widescreen displays offering very high resolutions, such as the Dell 2407WFP are starting to become more affordable. But a 1920x1200 resolution often creates legibility problems for some users resulting from the tiny size of the default Windows font."
At what point does the advancement of technology become either irrelevant, unnecessary to the casual user, too expensive, too complex, or some combination thereof? This has already happened in audio -- how many people out there really are vested in SACD? How many people do you know who even know what SACD is?
How many people are using 7.1, or THX sound? Or, if they have it, have it set up correctly? Or, if they have it, have any reasonable collection of media to make use of it?
And now there is evidence of death on the vine with new and improved video formats -- HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray. Other than mostly a slashdot type crowd, who really cares about the arguably incremental improvements for hefty investments?
At what point do consumers shrug their collective shoulders at any news around HDTV (hint, they're already starting to)? And when do all of the complexities of the combinitorials to lace all of this technology together push new consumers away?
It's possible Vista may be entering that twilight zone of indifferent consumerism. I'm totally technology driven, and have most of my life been a bleeding edge investor, but lately it's become less interesting. I can tell the difference between 1600x1200 resolution and WVGA, but I have to explain it to everyone else. They don't care, and they're not willing to spend any extra dollars to get the extra resolution kick.
All I'm seeing around Vista is toned-down expectations from their original promise, and ramped up requirements for hardware. That hardly lights a fire for me, and is a frigging wet towel for the lay-people considering new computers.
I don't know many in the technology world knocked out of their socks by the announced features (especially after all of the un-announced, and I don't know anyone outside of the technology elite circles who are interested, or care, and have any inklings of plans to move to Vista -- and if new rollouts of computers are significantly more expensive at all because of Vista, I know lots of people who are proactively not buying.
Maybe the world is reaching a point where people really don't need mini-Crays to read e-mail, manage photos, and surf the internet. And maybe the fork in the computing world can finally focus on useful applications and customer service rather than eye-candy translucent windowing graphics.
But a 1920x1200 resolution often creates legibility problems for some users resulting from the tiny size of the default Windows font."
Fonts and documents can be scaled, in browsers, word processing, Adobe Acrobat, etc. Even Flash objects can be scaled, if the page is set up properly (which they often aren't, so you get a postage stamp at hires)
The worst thing is images. I have a picture on a web page which was, back in 1999, a large image. Now it's tiny and I can hardly make out the detail. Some images can be stretched, but others, particularly those which include text can be rendered poorly if not scaled by even multipliers. Where is all this resolution going, anyway? It's nice for some things, like photo editing of large images, but redundant for most other applications.
your new computer consumes 200 watts on idle, requires a 64 bit processor, 2 GB RAM, and a phat video card, so you can do what? Work in MS Office and surf the web? Seems about as appropriate as requireing everyone in Manhattan to have a Hummer.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Given the projected surge in sales of higher resolution displays, how will it be until 800x600 fixed-width layouts finally die off?
Then the end-user does something stupid and makes the font legible and you lose desktop real estate again making 1920x1200 pretty small. While high resolution is nice and all, what we really need are 37" wide screen desktop monitors to come down in price. Or better yet, something that paints the image directly onto the rods and cones in our eyes. Of course at that point a screensaver will be mandatory if you don't want to be walking around with a Start button floating in view even when you're not on the system.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Lossless/procedural scaling allows detail to go up as resolution rises instead of apparent quality going down. I believe that Vector Icons and Fonts are a target for KDE4.
In any event DRM hardware that stops popular garbage being played without a license isn't really an issue - it'll push people who don't like the situation to make their own. In fact that's kind of the best thing that could happen to indie media, increasing the pool of contributors massivly.
The only kind of bad DRM hardware is the kind that stops users playing, modifying or distributing their _own_ stuff cheaply and easily*. That's the real issue.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
I see no indication that people will switch to vista, other than new hardware vendors preloading it. It really seems that no one is excited, or even INTERESTED in the features. Most corps I deal with will delay as long as possible for several reasons. I see Vista as the #1 opportunity for alternative operating systems to gain ground. Really, I see this as the begining of the end of MS reign, but that may be a tad premature.
I see this as a great opportunity for Linux. As MS Windows restricts what can and can't be done on their OS, Linux should get their crap together and work on hardware support and on making an user friendly distribution to get the average joe on board (it was painful and took MANY tries for me to learn linux from scratch and this was just a year ago). We generally won't get the older Mom and Pops to install Linux but the average Joe is all we need.
An operating system emulator to allow us to run our legacy unix / foss applications. User must demonstrate compelling need in order to get linux.exe authorized and activated.
Currently, only a few shipping products actually support the crypto-ROM needed to ensure compliance with Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and CableCard. It's looking like next-generation cards will all implement the needed firmware.
What does this have to do with Vista? On the software side it only relates to drivers, which can be written for any OS. I fail to see how selling Vista has anything to do with demand for this hardware.
Developers: We can use your help.
"At what point does the advancement of technology become either irrelevant, unnecessary to the casual user, too expensive, too complex, or some combination thereof?"
When we all change our names to yagu.
Ya see, I copy CDs of music recorded at a local church. This enables the choir to actually listen to themsevles, hear the choir director's version, and just help them do a better job.
My point is if DRM gets in my way of copying non-RIAA, non-MPAA, non-[Insert big corp here],... Someone's "Base" is going to be really pissed that they can't record their music because they can't produce CDs of their church's music that they performed.
BTW, the music itself is in the public domain - like just about all church hymes and other music.
Why can't Microsoft use its position in the software industry to leverage content providers away from DRM. What if Microsoft stopped supporting DRM... what would the Record/Movie Industry do? They'd be forced to adopt a universal standard, to ensure their music could be played (because we all know that someone would hack the encryption, convert to mp3, and find a way to distribute it anyways). I'd really hope that Microsoft, instead of buckling to DRM requests, refused and did something that helped the consumer.
Oh, and make a decent operating system which doesn't have a blue screen of death, require over 4GB of RAM to make worthwhile, and necessitate the latest graphics card to gain access to the "revolutionary" (*cough* Aqua-like *cough*) new graphical interface. That might be nice too...
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. - Aldous Huxley
I am not accepting yet more attempts from big business to control what I can do with movies / audio that I have purchased.
I am making a point of letting everyone I know aware of the corrupt interests behind this technology.
With the advent of LCDs that have only one native resolution, this is a big problem for Windows. Imagine that either (1) you're visually impaired enough to not be able to read small stuff, but don't need things like screen magnifiers, or (2) you're tired at the end of a long day and don't feel like squinting at tiny fonts. Windows does let you scale the fonts, but the problem with this is that the graphics widgets don't scale porportionately in XP. Also, some applications and web pages start looking really ugly with scaled fonts. Also, you need to reboot the computer for the font change to take effect, which doesn't make sense to me.
Scaling has to be something that all app vendors take into account in their code for it to work. I actually have my large LCD at a higher DPI right now, and several aopps don't resize their icons, etc.
When everyone was running 17" or 20" screens at 1280x1024 or so, this wasn't an issue. Now, look at monster displays like the Apple 30" widescreen display. Mac OS finally got around to letting you scale the cursor size...before, it was a fixed-size tiny speck on that huge monitor when you ran it at the native resolution. The old solution was to change your resolution...doing this now either doesn't work or makes LCDs look really ugly.
I suspect this will happen to a number of us who have been at this a while and even some casual home users will opt out of the MS patch cycle. I wonder if anyone at MS feels this way, or if they just assume their current dominance is pre-destined?
When your article can't even be quoted for a a paragraph without a page break slipping in there, you have
Continued...
officially crossed the line.
Why does a OS need to take all your hardware? Its called a OS for reason. Its not a video game, its a Operating System,something that allows you to give your computer commands for it can do your functions. A OS should never, EVER, take so much high system requirements.
Linux, because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
Umm, font sizes are measured in Picas, not pixels, and all new monitors let the operating system know their physical charasteristics. Pica corresponds to 1/96 inches (yeah, ridicilous unit, but it comes from typesetting background). If you select font size as 96, and type a few letters That uses the entire "box", something like Íg, the distance between the aposthrophe and g:s curve is one ince on the screen. For most characters, 72 means an inch (THESE LETTERS ARE ONE INCH HIGH WITH SIZE 72).
I know that Windows used to act rather weirdly if trying to set the DPI factor to anything other than the default - back in '95, but the situation cannot be the same anymore...can it?
Linux and X-servers support this too. I haven't seen any problems except with a few gtk+ 1.x apps - and sometimes some windows are sized improperly. You can even manually specify the monitors physical measurements if autodetect does not work, with DisplaySize option in xorg.conf.
Anyway, with 1900x1200 screen, you get the same physical font sizes as before, there are just more pixels to draw them with, so they look nicer.
But a 1920x1200 resolution often creates legibility problems for some users resulting from the tiny size of the default Windows font.
Only if font rendering are broken on such OS. Font size is configured in points, which are physical unit equaling about 0.35 mm (or 0.014 inch). Now matter what resolution is, ten point font will always be 3,5mm high. Higher resolution can help -- if resolution is bigger, there will be more pixels per those 3,5mm, so font will look better. That's why configuring display DPI is so important when it's not autodetected.
:wq
Surely the fact that the default font is unreadable on high resolution screens, is the fault of windows and not of the screen.
X11, and i`m sure OSX too, takes the DPI of the screen into account, and sizes the fonts accordingly, so they're still readable.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I can't wait to see all the millions of cheap PCs, most made in China, which carry cracked "crypto ROMs". When those PCs are untrustworthy to either user or publisher, will the entire "snitch PC" system collapse under its own weight?
--
make install -not war
Gnome, and I thought KDE support vector graphics already. SVG support has been a part of Gnome for quite a long time, for exactly the reason you're talking about.
(sigh) Zonk, what are we gonna do with you?
DRM is imposed on operating system vendors by Big Media. OS vendors' choices are limited to compliance, getting sued for lack of compliance, or lack of support altogether. So Microsoft complied with Big Media's demands for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray in Vista. Why do people keep acting like it's some stunning revelation, when Microsoft's stance has not changed between XP and Vista? Yes, that's rhetorical. Kinda like asking why Buffalo Sabres fans hate Brett Hull.
And yes, I know I'm beating a dead horse. But every time I turn a corner, there's a carcass and a convienently-placed blunt object...
This sig intentionally left blank.
But a 1920x1200 resolution often creates legibility problems for some users resulting from the tiny size of the default Windows font. - on my 15.4" laptop screen, the 1920x1200 is so useful. I can have more than one window opened on the screen without tabbing through them.
You can't handle the truth.
Seems there may come a time when we can no longer buy reasonably priced TCPA and DRM feature free hardware. Will we be able to file a suit against Microsoft for using their monopoly position to manipulate the hardware market in favor of DRM capable proprietry OS's?
High resolution displays should _not_ be making users squint. I believe Apple has the underlying technology to make OS X scalable (increases relative size of application elements, including fonts, as screen real estate increases) ... I should hope Vista has the same. In fact, I would hope that Vista enables a scalable environment by default to push OS X further down that path.
Anybody know more about this - I was a little unclear when I read the article's "12-point type will actually be 12-point on the screen." I think this means the scalability I referred to will be present.
For instance, say I have a web site with images on it. I could have some javascript detect how big the page is and the user's text size, then request appropriate resolution images. Server side there would presumably be something that resizes and caches a variety of different size images from the highest resolution original.
Hence the ever increasing bload of code required to render a page and hardware capability on your end. It seems we're a bunch of hamsters always running in wheels, but never getting anywhere.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Images are bad, but icons are worse!
... and coworkers still wonder why I prefer the command line instead of the nifty new tools.
My workplace issued new laptops with ~150 DPI (measured with a ruler). Basically twice what the old standard was. Twice what everyone designs their icons for, so those icons take up 1/4 the amount of screen real estate as they should.
I was able to get my applications to use reasonable fonts. It's NOT as simple as just setting the Windows display resolution to 150 DPI -- many apps merrily continue to insist on what they know you really meant and I still had to specify 24pt font to get what should be a 12pt font. But you can largely force the apps to behave.
But icons? WHERE ARE YE OLDE INSTRUMENTS OF TORTURE?!
I'm serious. Few applications support multiple icon sizes, so I have to take it at faith that the icons on this application actually mean something. E.g., I'm told that the subversion plug-in indicates if the file has been modified, if it's been modified on the server, locally, or both, and probably other nifty information. I can't tell since the icons force that information into about 6 pixes square.
Controls aren't quite as bad since they're not trying to cram the information into such as small space, but they're still so small that I have to remember that the icon for the local webserver is the grey box that's the second icon in the third group, not the little icon of a server.
I'm only in my 40s and only need reading glasses occasionally, but mild presbyopia and icons a fraction of their intended size is a bad combination.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Why did I go and get a Sony HDTV when it was new and shiny? Now I dont' have the wonderful HDMI port to supply DRM information through the data stream, and I won't be able to hook it up to Vista now too. What is it going to mean for the many of us who got HDTV's early without regard to the future implementation of DRM and PVR's running Windows Vista?
James Taylor
(No, I'm not related. However, I am on the no-fly list)
Actually, that would result in incredibly low resolution. The resolution of the human eye is somewhere around 512by512. The reason you can make out so much detail in what you see is because the eyes are constantly moving back and forth and integrating all the knowledge together. It requires the brain the know how the eyes are moving along with what it is seeing. There is also a huge amount of assumed knowledge that your brain uses to fill in the gaps.
From what I've seen yesterday (WWDC 2006 keynote video), Apple are gonna be the ones pushing the future of computer hardware. Microsoft simplies (tries to) follow them.
While I don't necesarily agree with the why, my next round of computers are going to be considered downgrades by many. In the next few months, I will be replacing many of my full blow machines with much slower VIA systems. My wife mostly does email and web browsing. She likes her computer to be in the bedroom. She hates waiting for it to boot, and hates the fan noise even more. I will replace her system with a fanless VIA. This way she can leave it on 24/7 and not be bothered by the noise. I will reinstall Windows (she is currently on linux) on her current machine, and she can boot it up on the rare occasion that she wants to play a game or two.
My son is in a similar boat. At two years old, he watches movies, plays music, and plays gComprise on his system. All of these can be handled on a fanless, low power VIA system. While his can boot his computer and load his software fine, he is not the best at turning everything off when he is done, so a no noise system would help.
My file server, email server, car PC, and camper PC don't need much power so those can go to fanless low power boards too. Heck, I figure that at the end of the day, I will only need one monster machine total. All the rest can be low power fanless systems.
I've got the 1920x1200 at 15.4" on my latitude and it's fantastic.
With the editor font in eclipse at 8pt, i can fit so much code on the screen. Probably about 80 lines vertically and enough columns to get two full size code views side by side.
It's an amazing productivity booster and for the first time I'm actually using a windows system like a unix box and not having everything maximized.
Vista 'shoves DRM down your throat like prison king-pin does, in return for 'protection'...
Vista, apparently, allows you to increase the actual resolution of your display, keeping the high native screen dimensions, but increasing the DPI, giving larger, clearer fonts on higher-dimension screens. So on the 1900x1200 screen, the fonts can be as physically large as on a 800x600 screen, but with much better definition.
Another post mentioned resolution independence in Avalon by Microsoft. Apple has also been thinking long and hard about the problem and already has a technology called Resolution Independent UI that is partially implemented in OS X 10.4 Tiger. You can access it with developer tools.
Using these technologies, higher resolution doesn't make the screen less legible, instead it shows you more detail (no jaggies). Just as it has been in print for decades, where it would never occur to you that printing a national magazine at 2400dpi might render all of the text and graphics infinitely small. No, the print world is already dealing with resolution intelligently and it's time for computer displays to catch up.
What is it with everyone saying that you need top-of-the-line hardware to run Vista? I have the Beta 2 release, running on this box: P IV 3.0Ghz (1 MB L2) 512 MB RAM ATI 9600 AIW Pro 2 x 80 GB Barracuda drives all plugged into a D865PERL mobo... with a 17" LCD display of course, your usual CD and DVD drives ;)
Vista is running just fine, with all of the 'fancy' effects turned on... does it use a lot of memory? Hell yeah... just sitting there it's using about 400 MBs... Is it slower than XP? Nothing noticable... (fresh XP vs. fresh Vista)
It is more stable than WinXP though...
I'm just wondering why everyone keeps saying hardware requirements are so high...
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
So what you're saying is that all their base will not belong to them?
AFAIK, Vista is to implement something original (for a change) regarding resolution woes mentioned in the article, namely Aero will always maintain the same size ratio among widget on the desktop no matter what is the desktop resolution. The widgets will be simply spread across more pixels. This, to the best of my knowledge has never been implemented before, yet is seems like the best logical next step that fosters cross-desktop standardization of look'n'feel and I am honestly surprised to see that OS X has not tackled this issue yet (needless to mention that in the light of this argument the "Redmond photocopying joke" from the recent WWDC looks somewhat overrated).
Vista has something known as "Protected Processes". These are user-mode processes that are protected against modification. The kernel continually hashes these processes' code sections and verifies that they have not changed. If they have changed, the system bugchecks (BSOD). Such processes run at ordinary user security levels - they are not privileged.
You might ask what these are for. The answer: DRM. Windows Media Player is such a process when playing protected media. If you try to mess with it, the system bugchecks.
DoS attack against Terminal Services machines, anyone?
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
You do realize BETA means DEBUG code, and the real thing will run faster?
I tried your suggestion, switched on ClearType, and used the MS ActiveX to tweak it. Yuck. Maybe it's because I'm so used to seeing each pixel, but it looks like ClearType blurs (softens?) the characters making it look like it's smeared. I like very crisp text to the point where I can even see the pixels. In fact, whenever I can choose an option, whether if it's a monitor or a video application, I always turn up the sharpness. BTW, I'm using the Samsung 213T (21.3") in 1600x1200 and DVI.
Sure, they might be able to draw vector graphics, just like any system, by rasterizing them and then sending them to the output (I am not too well versed in this stuff) or having the canvas rasterize it for X. I think Fresco would keep graphics as vector for a longer period, making resizing to different screens easier. However, it dosen't seem to be very active, as the status page is down, and the wiki was closed due to vandalism.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Now hold the paper out so that the two images are parallel to the floor and visible to you.
Close one eye and focus the open eye on the object closest to your nose.
Slowly bring the paper closer to your face. Don't move your open eye! Keep it focused on the image and be aware of the other image, but don't shift your eye to see it.
Shortly you should notice that the second image has disappeared from your vision.
Congratulations, you have found where your retina folds into your optic nerve! This is a natural blind spot in all humans. You can't see anything along the line from your optic nerve to the invisible, to you, image.
What the parent poster is saying is that to make up for the loss of resolution, and this blind spot your brain collects data and literally fills in the blanks!
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
DRM, trusted devices, no online without the 'right' software... This is why I hope that the future of hardware for people like me actually lies in equipment bought in bulk and stored by enterprising figures with deep pockets, back in what became known as the 'golden era' of computer hardware (2000-2020) - nowadays running free software perfectly adequately and hooked up to community Wi-Max networks permitting mass communication without having to connect to that dirty DRMed network where you're not allowed on without some trusted, signed, serial-number-bearing, completely pwned network stack, you know, that big network they used to call "Internet".
Any one remember that windowing system?
They used postscript as the screen rendering language.
Thus fully abstracting away the attrbibutes of the monitor.
This is back in the 80's.
(yes, I know that it's actually PPI, not DPI. But the "standard term" is DPI nonetheless).
1: you can adjust the DPI in windows if the font is hard to see. Most people don't.
.270mm where it is .264mm on a 17" 1280x1024. So fonts are actually bigger on the 24" high resolution LCD, than on a low res 17" LCD. This really makes the article summary somewhat pointless to downright incorrect. More resolution doesn't make fonts tiny and create legibility problems. This is the kind of argument made by people that just don't understand the process they are talking about.
2: Even if you don't adjust it, the dot pitch on a 24" 1920x1200 monitor is
Microsoft has. Developers of legacy vertical-market apps have not. Many such apps are poorly coded to specifically request things in pixel sizes, but the developers don't care because the apps have little or no competition. In addition, the standard Windows controls resize bitmaps with nearest neighbor by default, which looks horrible for anything that isn't an integer ratio.
Since you mention it, I have to ask: Why does my laptop have a 15.4" 1920x1200 screen when in order to get the same res on a desktop I would have to get a 24" screen? Obviously the tech exists to make the same 15.4" screen on a stand with a DVI plug in it, so why can't I buy it?
Centralization breaks the internet.
http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2005/07/27/h ow_microsoft_is_selling_out_the_public_to_please_h ollywood.php
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If you use your PC for something non mainstream, you're totally at the mercy of hardware vendors for your OS support, moreso even than Microsoft.
I was 'forced' to upgrade to XP recently for my music studio PC last week.. by 'forced' I mean that the new firewire mixer we want to use in our studio has drivers that work *only* on WinXP. [Thanks and f*ck you very much Alesis, by the way. Your mixer rocks but you should fire/discipline your driver team, or whoever chose to support XP only.]
Every device I've seen so far for Windows 2000/XP has a single driver that works fine on both. Why Alesis decided to write one that only works on XP is beyond me. Firewire external drives, Sony videocams and such all work fine with a single driver under Win2k.
I think hardware vendors with shoddy drivers will ultimately force people to upgrade, as they always have. Ticks me off to no end. There's no technical reason devices using mature buses such as USB and ieee1394 can't work on all Windows versions back to Win2k.
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
If you do research on ClearType, you find out that it's a sub-pixel anti-aliasing system designed to work on LCD monitors. IT works on them because the colors in these monitors are generated by three separate bars side by side, of fixed ratios in the geometry, forming one pixel. They play tricks with each bars' output to try to get sub-pixel anti-aliasing.
Needless to say, this would be a very stupid thing to do on a non-LCD monitor. If you try it and think it looks better, it's usually because it also makes the fonts bigger and rounder which has nothing to do with ClearType. Just make your fonts bigger and choose a better display font.
"DRM is imposed on operating system vendors by Big Media." TFA makes the same claim: "Vista will support an unprecedented level of DRM (digital rights management), but that's at the behest of the content providers rather than Microsoft itself." That's completely ridiculous.
Microsoft has over ninety percent of the market for desktop and laptop operating systems. That gives it ENORMOUS leverage to negotiate with Big Media. The simple fact is that within a year or two, almost every new Windows machine will be shipping with Windows Vista. Big Media would lose out if Vista couldn't play newfangled DVDs: of course, people using home DVD players might not care. But lots of people use computers to play back DVDs now. If the operating system with over 90 percent of the market can't play them back, DVD sales would fall. Travelers would stop by the airport newsstand for in-flight entertainment, rather than popping a DVD into the laptop.
Microsoft stands to gain a great deal from Vista's heavy incorporation of DRM. Services like Yahoo Music and Napster aren't using Microsoft DRM technologies for free--they're paying huge licensing fees for them. Meanwhile, every end-user who finds services like Yahoo Music and Napster to be indispensable is another user who won't switch to MacOS or Linux. Furthermore, heavy usage of DRM in next-generation DVDs would be yet another impediment to the adoption of free operating systems.
Microsoft is not some poor, two-bit player that's being forced to succumb to the power of Big Media. Microsoft is willingly employing and profiting from DRM, in furtherance of Microsoft's objectives.
Penny - plain text accounting
This is a nice discussion of *some* of the things that will gain more acceptance due to the release of Vista. It would be nice if the article went a little farther include discussion on things that should become phased out once and for all in favor of the future replacements.
On the phasing-out list:
ATX motherboard
AGP video card slots
PS2 keyboard and mouse connectors
3.5" floppy disks
Items not brought up in the article:
BTX motherboard
Mount Rainier capable burners
Multicast or IPv6 aware Wireless Access Points
Are you actually suggesting that users that don't know how to maintain their systems well enough in the first place to DISABLE their antivirus?!?! I don't know what anti-virus you're using, but please tell us so we can all avoid it. I worked on a system using McAffee, found over 100 viruses on it (that McAffee did not discover) and McAffee was still what was using over 50% of the CPU. Any other anti-virus has been fine. I run either Symantec/Norton or Grisoft AVG on every system I administer, and neither has any noticeable impact on performance.
Depending on the user (some friends that click everything) I also configure the system helpers found in the anti-virus programs.
Even computers bought several years ago, most users use an insignificant percent of available power. I run a computer more intensively than most 'consumers' that have huge virus and spyware problems, and I still run an Athlon XP 1800+ that I bought 6 years ago, and only use a tiny fraction of the available power except when gaming.
Seriously - of all the things that may be slowing a computer down, running anti-virus (aside from McAffee!) is NOT something to "cure"
"But a 1920x1200 resolution often creates legibility problems for some users resulting from the tiny size of the default Windows font."
a 1920x1200 resolution produces the same scale of images and text as a 1600x1200 resolution, you just gain extra space on the sides.
I haven't purchased from this store, but http://www.logicsupply.com/ carries pretty much the entire line of fanless x86 motherboards. I've been reading reviews for a while, and most of them recommend going with the actual VIA motherboard rather than third part brands with the VIA processor. If you already have a noisy envirionment, you can save a few dollars or get a few hundred extra mhz by getting a MB with a fan. The boards are still low power, but do require a fan that as far as i can tell is similar to what we had on 386s. This would be a reasonable option for a car PC where the car would produce more noise than the fan. They also sell car power supplies for the VIA motherboards. These will send a soft shutdown when the engine turns off. The will also do a hard power down if the sytstem hangs.
Well, we all know just how long Vista has been in development :-), so at least for once they can use this emarrasing fact to their advantage... IIRC, first mention of its inclusion was very early on when they demoed the power of the new Aero interface.
They should have gotten together with chipset manufacturers to support a new coprocessor socket solely for running mandatory realtime spyware/malware background tasks.
I really don't want to purchase additional CPUs that don't benefit my primary applications!
--
Background processes will expand to usurp the allotted space.
>But a 1920x1200 resolution often creates legibility problems for some users resulting from the tiny size of the default Windows font.
Wow. This has been my biggest gripe with Windows for years. You raise the font size to compensate, and it wrecks the widgets.
Look at websites too, a majority of them are written to 800x600 and a few are written to 640x480. That might be useful for laptops and portables, but the trend started way before laptops were popular and after 2Mb videocards were the norm.
Vista seriously isn't going to fix this problem? It was one thing when hobbyists were down-rezzing their 15" and 17" monitors, quite another when Joe Sixpack is down-rezzing his $5000 TV. And Joe ain't gonna like DRM when he finds out about it either.
So from now on we'll have to use Server OS to get decent performance with older hardware? I've used Windows Server here at home instead of XP's because of all that crap with everything just being done to be "cute" no matter what it is a resource hog (Ever heard/seen Windows Blinds, StyleXP or Talisman shell?). Would it be that hard to write an OS that doesn't look like Barbie's place? Now that 3D view of windows, how is that usefull? I thought there was a button to show the desktop so you could pick which window you want to look...
Regardless, you're still going to have another daemon/service running to wait for the call to start the program (in this case, Aero,) up again. At least with XP, it's just sitting there. But then again, the most serious gamers wouldn't have Aero running, much like how they disable the themeui, or whatever the service is.
AFAIK it works by treating the RGB elements of an LCD display as having independent positions. It only works if your LCD matches the layout it expects.
Y'know, 90% of what you just said EXACTLY matches my current position.
You're not alone.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.