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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 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.
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?
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
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
(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...
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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
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'...
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.
That, my friend is the devil in the details. Although I don't know anyone who is excited about getting Vista, Dell and Gateway are going to preload it onto all of their new machines. App vendors are going to start developing for Vista's features and XP support is going to fade away and the rest of us are going to be forced to upgrade.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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
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
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