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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.
This high resolution == legibility problems is one of my pet peeves.
High resolution improves the legibility of text. Just you a bigger font! Your average printed page is 5100x6600. Do you find that hard to read?
Pick the right font and you will not have a problem.
images are a different matter but even those can be re-sized.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
And by "web designers," I'm sure you mean "control-freak relics from print publishing who don't know how the fuck to use the new medium properly," right?
If you're going to do fixed width, you're already doing something wrong. How wide the page should be is the user's decision, not yours!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Vista's Avalon addresses the resolution issue in an elegant way [...]
display resolution and font size are NOT related. [...] in fact most sizes are defined as they will appear on the screen (e.g. cm, inches) and not as they are stored (pixels).
About time. This is hardly rocket science -- some of us have been doing that with apps since the late 1980s (sometime around the X10 to X11 transition). Yeah, the software needs to know how big a screen pixel is (the old DEC and Sun graphic monitors were about 0.35mm -- huge by today's standards) but that's easy enough. From there it's simple arithmetic to convert a font or feature size in screen inches (or cm) to pixels.
You could also do stuff like choosing to rescale or not when you zoom in or out, handy for maps. (The apps mentioned above were GIS and mapping software). And yes, we interpolated raster images too so you could specify the image display size without worrying about its stored pixel dimensions -- although obviously a 20x20 pixel image is going to be pretty blurry blown up to 10cm x 10cm.
Display Postscript could probably do this too, that's been around for about as long.
-- Alastair