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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."
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?
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 find that as I approach the end of the 18-35 year old male target group, I find myself caring less and less about the latest tech. All of a sudden I'm not rushing out to get an XBOX 360, I haven't pre-paid for a PS3, I keep waiting for the next i-pod only to say "meh. I can wait for the next one again", I won't be in line at midnight for Vista like I was for Windows 95. OMG I'M AGING! Come on advertisers, make me WANT STUFF!!
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
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?
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.
You're mostly correct until the industry cooks up a "must have" reason that makes a user *THINK* they need a new PC/OS/Gadget/what have you. The auto industry went through this with tail fins back in the 50s. Software is going through it with more and more eye-candy that requires a hefty investment, but doesn't actually produce much of value in the end. (Don't get me wrong, I'm usually the first on the block to get new eye candy as long as it's something that is worth it to me) But, think about the number of average people who go out and buy a new PC just because their old one (that's only a year and a half old) is "slow". They are convinced by sleazy salesholes that their PC is slow because it's "old". They don't realize that maybe they have a virus, or some kind of software problem. Run an anti-virus program on your system that monitors everything around the clock and you'll have a slow PC, for example. Or some new software comes out that the user MUST HAVE but it only runs on the latest OS which only runs on boxes no older than two years. There's the artificial drive to buy new crap even if they don't need it.
As far as the complexity, well... sadly it really is a case of "your brain is too small for this century" when it comes to most users. There is no way to provide the flexible and advanced functionality that a user may want and not add complexity. Take for example the concept of de-interlacing. It's a complex issue with video. I use Xine on Linux and the TV Time filter to take care of my DirecTV signal and make it look as nice as possible on my LCD HD monitor. (Heh... it actually looks better than connecting the DirecTV box right to the monitor's composite in) But, in order to actually take advantage of this with a simple click of an icon for my wife to use, I had to write a script that calls 'xine' with the appropriate options, and tunes the GeForce driver for optimal color overlay. It's once click for her and hours of work at the outset for me. Joe User will NEVER do this. The only way to offer it to him is to have the application make automatic (and stupid) assumptions about how things should work and then give him the lowest common denominator result. If Windows Media Player took care of this, you know it would make lame assumptions about how the de-interlacing should work and he'd wind up with a crap signal unless he had all his ducks in a row hardware-wise. And then you're back to complexity that he shouldn't have to deal with...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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
To me, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are a lot like SVHS compared to regular VHS. They don't offer any particular new features that your average person is going to notice (they don't have the right equipment), but they are more difficult to set up (very few TVs had S-V jacks when SVHS was still big), far more expensive, and seemingly aimed at the high end videophlies. In the end S-V decks were just a niche market while plain old crappy VHS kept on chugging. It took a major technological overhaul to get people to switch (much like what it took to get people to switch from Cassette tapes to CDs).
The industry certainly isn't helping the problem by coming up with new and inventive DRM obsticles that they'll force the consumer to hurdle. Nor will they win a lot of friends by burning early adopters.
Ultimately if we get to the point where the DRM doesn't matter and the HD-DVD/Blu Ray decks are only slightly more expensive than regular DVD decks, and the cost for premanufactured discs is the same either way, then it will be adopted (but nowhere near as fast as DVDs were adopted), but if the costs are higher or there is some onerous DRM to contend with, then the technology is going to be stillborn like SVHS.
I read the internet for the articles.
The majority of Linux users plain doesn't care about converting the world over. They mostly want to Get Things Done(tm) and the tool they like best happens to be a *nix. Please do not mistake the small vocal minority for the reasonable majority.
Global warming is a cube.
I'm actually just into the 18-35 male target group, and the only things I'm caring about lately is HD size and portability in technology. However, I just haven't figured out why I just really don't want a PSP, or Nintendo DS. I just feel like it wouldn't be worth my money in the long run (besides Pictochat on DS). I've gone through 2 PS2's (and MAYBE will buy another), back when I had a PS2 I would only use it to play like 5 games out of the 30 or so that I had. PC games are seriously uninteresting today. I tried to get into WoW and got bored to hell, made it to level 3 which was tiring.
Recently I bought a new laptop, and now I don't ever want to buy a desktop again. This laptop has 100GB, my desktop has a 400GB HD and a 500GB HD (will buy external enclosure soon). None are close to full but it's very useful. I really no longer care about video cards as my laptop can handle most games, and most games aren't worth the time anyway (I want a fun game, not graphics!). It's nice to have eye candy, but not at the expense of a good game. The PS2 has plenty of games with mediocre graphics that you can really have fun with, beats the hell out of the Xbox 360 (I don't plan on buying a PS3 or Xbox 360). If I really care, I'll buy a Wii. Due to price and non-rediculous information surrounding it, it seems everyone around me is getting a Wii, so I can play with them.
I could really care less about Vista now. It's the most pointless thing, and I have even beta tested. The last time I customized it and installed most of the software I use on my Windows XP partition, but every 2 seconds the screen would fade to warn me about system changes. I know exactly where Microsoft gets this from, most Linux GUI's do it now, and Mac OS X does it too. But it only happens on seriously important stuff (Synaptics for Ubuntu, applying update on Mac OS X). I couldn't find the option to disable it entirely or disable it to a certain extent (which I would prefer). If Windows Vista is just going to be me clicking Yes to warnings every 2 seconds, then forget about it. I'll stick with XP and Ubuntu, and I'm going to switch to Ubuntu entirely soon enough.
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 automatically turns off (or you can do so manually) all the advanced GUI features that take up RAM, CPU and GPU time when you run fullscreen applications like videogames.
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
This is the reason that most linux desktop environments are switching to SVG for their icons. SVG is fairly compact and scales perfectly (as long as some goofball doesn't link a raster image into a native SVG doc), and is fairly good about compressing (svgz). Take a 4MB file, which is 7200x7200 (or rather, I am printing @ 300 dpi for 24 inches), and exports to a BMP at 150MB, but compresses down to a mere 800KB. This is how it should be. Even more importantly, I could run a white space removal tool on the file and probably get it down to 500KB after zipping.
SVG is the best way to go for icons. Another vector format would be just as good, I think, but why bother? SVG does everything that an icon should do (and can, from what I understand, support rollover and such).
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Now opens the problem for MS: It's in the best interest of game designers to have their games perform well on as many systems as possible, and the more resources winblows consumes, the worse these games will perform. What happens when they figure out that performance under linux/ogl is better because of the reduced overhead? Perhaps then we'll see a bigger shift to the open source desktop yet again, and maybe get some decent support this time. We're already seeing institutions which use speed-critical applications beginning to use open-source more often (seismic visualization), how soon before Adobe starts publishing their imaging and real-time editing applications for the *nix-ish menace?
Either that or most consumers with half a brain will just say "well, fuck that, I'm sticking with XP."
+5, Truth
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.
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
"What happens when they figure out that performance under linux/ogl is better because of the reduced overhead" They'll still make the games for Windoze, and up the system requirements, because it's easier and there's enough of a gamer market willing to throw cash at upgrading their rig. Chicken and egg. Games aren't going hardcore over to other OS's until the market is bigger. They aren't driving that bus, either.
It would be nice if they had 50% bigger pixels at home, and I bet retirees with the money would readily spend the $$$
If your windowing environment did proper font scaling (i.e. it renders a font at a specific _physical_ size rather than a number of pixels, and allows you to configure the top-level scaling so you can make everything larger/smaller) then you would be best off running in the highest screen resolution they can get.
If you've got bad eyesight you get large-type books - not super-pixelated books.
Personally I'm waiting for 300+ DPI displays to appear because then we could stop caring about the resolution. Although I hesitate to consider the bandwidth requirements for a reasonable size display running in that resolution - a 500x280mm screen at 300dpi would be about 20 megapixels. Refresh that at 50Hz and you've got 24 Gigabits per second of data (24 bits per pixel).
http://blog.nexusuk.org