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What's Different About Vista's GUI?
jcatcw writes "Paul McFedries, author of Windows Vista Unveiled, thinks that an operating system should be thought of as more than just its user interface, but then again that interface should work well for the user. He thinks the Vista interface rates 'pretty darned good.' The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) results in positive changes for both developers and users. Developers can do 2-D, 3-D, animation, imaging, video, audio, special effects and text rendering using a single API. The use of vector graphics and offloading work to the GPU result in better animations, improved scaling, transparency, and smooth motion."
I hope they have a nice animation for when the machine is infected with a virus, like clippy catching fire and then running around in circles screaming. At least then the users will be prepared for what will happen to him/her when they bring their laptop in to have me work on it and I find out they have been surfing porn sites with their virus scanner disabled.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I couldn't give a fuck. When the scrollwheel on the desktop changes workspaces, THEN I'll be interested!
We sure as hell don't want GNOME or KDE to be innovative or anything.
Somebody wake me up when these two projects stop playing perpetual 2nd place, and start trying out new GUI ideas.
Not to troll, and its nice that Windows users are getting these features, but how come no one ever calls MS out on the fact that Vista is basically still playing catch up to OS X, doesn't do it as well, and is probably going to be left in the dust when Leopard comes out?
9 339834706
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=267479179
Here's hoping MS uses the competition to better Windows. The more secure it gets and the easier it gets to use, the better for everyone, even those of us who don't use Windows.
"an operating system should be thought of as more than just its user interface, but then again that interface should work well for the user."
Vista can apparently be represented in a significant way by either Mac OS X, or XP with modifications. It's mostly a vehicle for DRM, including PVP, which will require you to buy a PVP compliant digital monitor. Vista's enhancements won't even work on many powerful systems you are buying these days - if they have "Vista Capable" stickers. In an age where we should be looking for energy savings, what's the benefit of making a system more complicated than XP, and requires more horsepower than a rather darn good OS Microsoft released in 2000?
Oh You POS
Cough... yeah, right. I've lost so much faith in MS's ability to develop anything really new and interesting, I'm actually wondering if I had faith in the first place. Well, ok, maybe once in 1985.
Though I'm not looking forward to buying a Quadro FX just to minimize a window. Tad sarcastic.
-"I ate what?"
Then why are the CPU requirements for Aero so high?
In vista, does the file system explorer and UI stuff that comes with the OS take advantage of directX 10?
Anyone know?
The article says:
"So how does Vista's interface rate? As you'll see in this chapter, the answer has to be "pretty darned good," although with a few reservations."
The introduction to the story says:
"He thinks the Vista interface rates 'pretty darned good.'"
"has to be "pretty darned good," although with a few reservations" is not in the same ballpark as "rates 'pretty darned good.'"
My question is, who is being quoted as saying "pretty darned good"? Never mind the "has to be part", we know who is saying that.
When HAVN'T Microsoft tried prettying up their GUI's to make people go "Oooh, purdy windows! get windows!". Lets face it, it works. really all thats happening is that they're just cranking up the "lets make it purdyer!" factor. The sad thing is, it works O_O
I know it doesn't make sense, but the Object Management Group should extend the API just so we'd have the OMGWPFAPI.
In January of this year, maybe a little later, our contracted supplier of PC's will probably start the push towards shipping new PC's with Vista, instead of XP Profesional. In my environment, a major medical center/school, I don't think the GUI will be immediately useful, in fact, it might hurt productivity initially, since our users will need to learn how to navigate Vista to accomplish everyday tasks like file copying, etc. Games are not big in a medical center, or most large enviroments, for that matter.
Unless Vista's underlying GUI can better render high-resolution images of cells, and most imaging in the research labs is done on Macs, it probably will not have a tremendous impact on corporate buying decisions.
The OS choice will be determined when our PC supplier starts to charge more for a PC with XP Professional than the same system with Vista. Research dollars are hard to come by, and unless Vista totally breaks standard Office suite PC/applications, it's just a matter of time before it will replace XP.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
Having recently observed the Vista interface in action, I can say that they've done a nice job of ripping off the OSX look and feel.
They have dashboard widgets.
They've pared down the start menu and it looks more like the dock on a Mac.
The way things load looks more like a Mac.
Just my 2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
Why bother buying and using an over-rated, over-priced, years-late operating system update? Linux works fine. Windows XP works fine. (Well, except for a few security issues.) But the world does not need another huge Windows release. To paraphrase what someone once said in a commercial: "The Internet is the Computer"
...is vector-based uber-scaling. I want a desktop that looks basically the same when I switch resolutions, with icons and fonts scaled appropriately. Vista has the necessary scaling and vector capabilities in place, but I'm guessing it doesn't support this. Or does it?
There's the Windows Internet Explorer UI, the Windows Media Player UI, the Windows Mail UI... they're all different.
Enough said.
What the heck? I'd love to understand look and feel better, but it would seem to be a more effective review if the pictures were in color.
I'm sure Vista would be easier for anyone who has never used a computer, but just to find something as simple as the Run may aggrivate or at least make the seasoned Windows vetern go on a safari hunt or a quick Google groups search to see how to turn the new interface off for a clasic mode.
The problem people have spent time learning where things are, but when you change them it causes aggrivation of having to relearn it all over again.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
just after they'd changed the name from the awful "Avalon" to the much more memorable "Windows Presentation Foundation," I saw a demo of this stuff from a MS evangelist. The demo application was awful. Gratuitous use of 3D, buttons that were unrecognizable as such and which would flip up into the 'air' playing a movie when you pressed them.
I understand that it was just a demo and these things weren't really 'gratuitous' because they existed simply to show off the capabilities. But the bottom line is that it's so super-easy to make these awful UI abortions that we're gonna see metric asstons of it coming down the pipe from programmers and their bosses who are unable to resist cramming every last widget behavior into their software. Feh.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
The author seems rather confused about what "GUI" means. The GUI is the graphical user interface - what the user sees and interacts with. The article mentioned almost nothing about the actual user interface of Vista - only the developer-targeted APIs. Nearly all of the apps that ship with Vista do not use WPF and therefore the actual GUI will not be like what the author describes.
And the author is simply wrong when he says that "With WPF, everything is drawn with vectors, so you can scale windows and icons as big (or as small) as you want, and the objects will display with no loss in quality." In fact, icons in Vista are generally 256x256 bitmap images. Artists normally prefer bitmaps because it gives them more control over the artwork.
Paul McFedries, author of Windows Vista Unveiled, thinks that an operating system should be thought of as more than just its user interface
Correct. Why can't Microsoft understand this? They spend so much time with the user interface, that the actually OS stuff (stable runtime environment, security, "revolutionary file system" gets put on the backburner. I think it would be in MS's best interest to focus 100% on the core internals of the OS and leave the shell to either open source or some third party. Heck, even a totally seperate division of microsoft. This whole "API for everything" and having so much interface stuff integrated with the internal running of the system is just a recipe for disaster, as can be seen on every other windows release before vista.
I got nothin'
Maybe I'm just cantankerous today, but the idea of having a GUI do more happy bouncy shit to pander to the least educated user really bugs me. Perhaps it's just me, but I hate little "helpful" pop-up tips and goofy animations asking if they can assist me in writing a letter. No user interface, other than the nipple if you're a mammal, is intuative and no amount of pop-uppery will fix that. Simplification and consistancy is probably the best way to make sure that all the rules of the interface can fit inside people's head, which is maybe what they're groping toward by copying OSX. (Which is by no means the Best Interface Ever, as some people content. Me? I like the command line.)
Blegh. Why has this pissed me off so much? I've not used a Microsoft product in years, and I'm far more likely to do this[*] before touching Vista. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but does this piss anyone else off?
[*] DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK (unless you're familiar with modblog, aren't squemish and aren't at work).
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
This guy is smoking some serious crack in a couple of places, he talks about how difficult it is to do transparency? Hello I wrote a little piece of code to make transparent windows back with turbo pascal on a 386.. If my 386 could do it i'm sure you don't need a GPU... Just because transparency wasn't in the basic GDI (which is even older) doesn't mean it was hard or even that slow.
Figures 3.8 through 3.11 prove the best reason to upgrade. Clippy has been upgraded: now he's a dog!
and ever worse license terms for the poor victim that this stuff gets foisted off on. But let's be realistic, the MS PR machine has to get people to gush over Vista, and every other new release even if, for the most part, it is just a bug fix release. There just isn't any compelling reason to move from XP to Vista, even less reason to go from Linux or MacOS to Vista, so the Microsoft PR machine has to invent some. For this release, since everything else pretty much got dropped, they need to hype the whizzy, but mostly pointless use of 3D effects. Big whoop.
You know what bothers me about this? They've taken nearly every proposed feature out of Vista that we wanted or that was going to useful...or even new...leaving us forced to debate whether or not there's actually anything new in the only really new thing about it, Avalon.
And when we do have people talking about it they don't have any idea what they're talking about, discussing cutesy shit you can do with their uber-advanced API and not improvements that Microsoft has made to the ACTUAL GUI that will help me complete complex tasks easier, find that which I need faster, and just make my user experience more pleasant and efficient overall.
Features, you say? They're not features, they're bugs. Much in the way that spam is email, these bullshit "improvements" are actually just annoying eye-candy and a stop-gap measure to one-up the actually useful features that exist in other operating systems such as OSX and Linux. And no, I'm actually not a *nix fanboy despite my heavy use of it; I've been a Windows admin for a few years now. And I've been a user long enough to know that dancing icons and spinning buttons do nothing more than impress grandma for a few seconds and piss advanced users off.
Where's the real innovation? Where's the Microsoft that made Windows 3.11 and Windows 2000 (which, despite it's faults, was one hell of an OS)?
Dead, I say, choked by the left hand of greed and the right hand of stupidity.
If all my base are belong to you and I attempt to retrieve my base, does that mean I'm freebasing?
It really baffles me why they haven't added virtual desktop support yet. This is something that X has had since swm, which Mr. LaStrange released in 1990!
Even the Sun workstation I used in the mid-1990s, running Solaris 2.5 and CDE, offered virtual desktops. For the love of fuck, Microsoft needs to add virtual desktop support.
WindowsRG ? (ReallyGood Edition)
I like microcars
Would you really consider the vista, xp, 2k, or Nt desktop interfaces if you could have somthing similar to XFCE, KDE or GNOME?
Yes, I know, there is litestep,xoblite,sharpe, and blackbox. But I still would prefer one of the Linux desktops.
Yes, OS X does the minimize to dock (close enough to taskbar) thing quite well. Kudos to them. Of course, XP could sort of do it too. The idea isn't new, it's the method. OS X does a pretty animation, Vista turns the window transparent and shrinks it down to the bar. I prefer Vista's version purely because I'm opposed to eye candy; indeed I ran Vista without Aero for months before trying it and realizing how helpful it was. OS X's animations feel very eye candy-ish.
So, on to the other things mentioned in the article, or even not mentioned:
- I'm guessing OS X does vector-based graphics for everything, based on the zoom quality. Seriously, it should...
- I've never heard that OS X does its rendering via 3D, hardware-accelerated objects. If it does, please educate me and provide a reference. Even on programs not designed around WPF, it's impressively good at improving performance.
- I'll grant you Macs handle virtual desktops nicely. I only learned about the capability to use that feature in XP after I'd switched to Vista, and the XP PowerToy won't install on Vista, so I have yet to see what they will look like in Vista. The feature is supported, however; UAC prompts, for example, appear on a different desktop. I'll keep a close eye on this one, and I've already spoken to the Vista shell guys about it. I'd like to remind you though that until Leopard comes out, virtual desktops ("Spaces") aren't really part of OS X (any more than they are of XP... or, at this point, Vista. *Sigh*)
So, in conclusion, Windows and Mac shells are always playing catch-up with each other. OS X had XP beat on many levels when it came out, and has it beat on most now... but XP was well ahead of OS 9 in many ways too. I consider Vista ahead of Tiger, and for my usage style (keyboard-centric, function over looks, etc.) even ahead of Leopard, though integrating virtual desktops very nearly tips the balance there.- Little things like no more desktop tearing and no more left-behind sprites (a menu that didn't vanish because something interrupted its overdraw, for example) are nice.
- The ability to smoothly play video or quickly render graphics (in the Photoshop sense) even during high CPU usage (without too much effect on the rest of the system) is very nice.
- Things like the ability to see the status of your other windows by mousing over their taskbar icons (without shrinking your current window) is extremely nice; I use it on a daily basis and get annoyed in XP when I can't. Expose was a great idea, but I'm a very keyboard-oriented person; I like using Flip-3D using only 2 or 3 keys to very quickly look at all my windows (or alt-tab, since that now shows thumbnails. The main time I use the mouse (as described above) is when I want tomonitor something in a thumbnail window (for example, a background file download) while working in a different foreground (and often maximized) app.
Oh, and yes, WFP can really improve render times on both image and video by using hardware acceleration. Figures I've heard are in the 3x to 5x rander speed range (the system doing the benchmarks has a powerful video card, an Intel GMA won't give you that kind of boost of course). Everybody talks about how great Macs are for image/video editing, but can they achieve those kinds of acceleration or does it all still go through the CPU?There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
> Developers can do 2-D, 3-D, animation, imaging,
> video, audio, special effects and text rendering
> using a single API.
And when exactly they will learn that UI design it is not about what YOU CAN DO? It is what YOU CAN'T DO. You can take any program and DO WITH IT WHATEVER, give it nice animations, nice 3D effects, symphonic sounds, add to it few agents, fifteen toolbars, make it do your coffee etc.
It is not what you CAN do. It so about how to make it the most simple as you can. KISS - for Keep It Simple.
Reffered in the article OSX is a quite complicated operating system but still it manages to deliver a platform on which (at least in my opinion, and I am not biased since my main workstation is running Linux) you can make SIMPLE and USEFULL applications.
My point is that the platform should allow users to get consistant and simple interface. Not that what Windows is offering - now you get it even more complex - you get all Windows Legacy stuff working (dating back to 95) and also a BRAND NEW SHINY 2D 3D WHATEVER interface. So it is in fact worse not better. Since it includes more ways to screw the applications to become UNNEEDLY COMPLEX.
Trying to navigate that site with 20 fucking auto add clicks per page is really annoying.
Hyperom.com
...turn on the run box in the start menu options, or use the classic start menu.
Whoever or whatever you were going to kill owes me one.
Yeah well, every Linux geek always has a huge flock of Windoze sheep to take care of. That is why we honestly wish that MS would really improve Windoze, so that we don't have to deal with so much crap.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
...how will this benefit me? This is nothing but eye-candy. To truly achieve all of those nice features, I'll need to go out and buy a super-duper computer with a very fast GPU card. All of my computers that are more than 2 years old (maybe even 1 year old) will fail to do any of those fancy, graphical "acrobatics". People who are computer illiterate (and God knows there are a lot of them) and really want Vista but not a new computer are going to be in for a surprise: BSOD's and frozen screens. Nope. I'll stick with WinXp, Linux, and Mac O/S-X, but mostly Linux :-)
"Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance." -- Hendrik Willem Van Loon
You missed the humor, obviosuly.
Let me spell it out: +1 Funny. Right now. From at least 3 or 4 of you.
Let's not waste all of our MP's on downgrading ideas that we don't like and try promoting the ones that we do.
Seriously, it's funny.
heh
Commercial UNIXes were unable to compete with Windows on a price perspective and Microsoft capitalised, very well I might add, on that price difference and on a sales pitch that basically said any tool needing to be configured, run and managed from the command line would always be more complex than one administered from within a GUI environment. (Playing "devil's advocate here, I don't personally believe that, I'm looking at it from their perspective).
However, a tactical mistake they made was not to keep the GUI separate from the core OS from the outset - I guess greed played a big part in that because making the GUI much heavier and inseperable from the core kernel forced MS customers into hardware upgrades, which in turn meant more Windows sales.
Had Linux and the BSDs not come on the scene, Microsoft would be in the same situation with security and bugs that they are today but with less dissatisfaction from their customer base because there would be nothing to compare Windows to.
However, I'm sure that any intelligent Windows user now would have to agree that when it comes to tailoring a server for very specific uses, nothing beats the modularity and configurability of a UNIX-like OS.
The problem Microsoft are now faced with is that to change Windows such that the GUI became a modular, selectable part of the OS would be so vast a change that it would render a huge proportion of existing applications incompatible and take away one of the major reasons stopping a lot of their customer base putting in Linux or BSD servers in certain parts of the corporate enterprise. Add to that the fact that migration plans in enterprises are phased over lengthy periods of time, and MS have to maintain compatibility layers to give time for older applications to catch up - this adds to the bloat and the requirement for more raw processing power.
I wouldn't say that Linux or BSD have the power (or intention) of fully displacing Windows, but I do believe they have unintentionally forced Microsoft down a single track of having to make their OSes bigger and bloatier with each release, and this will get to the point where their OSes become unmanageable from a security and patching perspective.
I think it's inevitable that at some point in the near future, if MS stay in the OS game, then they will need to modularize Windows a lot more to make it manageable - that will have to lead to a lot of applications breaking, customers getting more angry and, perhaps, Linux and BSD becoming real viable alternatives in core enterprises where the likes of Exchange and MSSQL currently dominate.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
- UAC: Vista can raise (and presumably lower) program permissions while running. This is seriously a good thing; aside from running sans-admin priveleges for the most part (and the abiliy to gain admin privs in things like Defender without needing to re-start the program from the menu via RunAs) the IE7 Protected Mode sandbox is, quite literally, the way all browsers should run. Super-low permissions, until it need to do something like load an outside pogram or save a file to disc. Then it asks for permission. Explorer works fairly similarly, elevating permsissions only when doing things that require admin privs (modifying Windows files or other users' directories, for example). Neither OS X nor XP (nor Linux) are this good at permissions control.
- Address Space Layout Randomization: together with the no-execute (NX) protection provided by essentially all modern OSes, this provides excellent protection against buffer overflow exploits. (NX is completely ineffective against overwriting the return address to some linked library, for example, the classic return-to-libc exploit.)Neither XP nor OS X support ASLR natively. I think it's part of SELinux, which is included with a few distros.
- DirectX 10. I don't think this is going to be backported, and if MS is even 25% correct in their claims of increased performance (up to 70% improvement), it will make a big splash in the gaming world. OpenGL is awesome, but it doesn't have this level of performance. Oh, and anybody who says OpenGL is unsupported in Vista is ignorant/full of it; I've run OpenGL apps without any problem at all.
- Volume Shadow Copies: SO useful! I've used it for everything from reverting files I'd thought overwritten and gone to restoring damaged system files (via System Restore, which in Vista makes XP's version look like a joke). It's in Server 2003, but not (really) in XP (only for system folders, and not well impemented). Leopard's "Time Machine" may be the same capability (with excessive eye candy) but I'm dubious of their implementation too... daily screenshots? Not based on major modifications? I hope they at least don't store the VSCs in some easily located portion of the filesystem; I realize there's very little malware for Macs, but most XP malware goes after the system restore copies as soon as it can. In any case, Leopard isn't out yet and won't be for a while yet.
- BitLocker Drive Encryption: NTFS encrypting filesystem is nice, and there are of course 3rd-party software solutions, but using a dedicated hardware chip to do the encryption on your entire drive just makes all kinds of sense. I wish my system had one... I'd move GRUB out of the MBR and chainload it instead; then even dual-booting with BitLocker would work (yes, it does).
- Resizing hard disk partitions, including the system volume, while they are mounted. I didn't even know this was possible! As somebody who does a lot of messing with partitions, doesn't want to shell out for Partition Magic (I get MS software for free via my school) and doesn't entirely trust QtParted and NTFSresize (I have about a 75% success rate, which isn't high enough for those kinds of operations. No major data loss... yet... but still not good enough).
There's so much more... but I'm tired of repeating this post for the quadrillionth time. Oh, and as for power savings, I get much better battery life in Vista (due to various things including dynamic processor scaling that allow me to set my clock rate as low as 5% of its normal speed while the CPU is idle) than I do in XP. Linux is similarly good, but ACPI support in Linux is still lagging. I don't have OS X installed on my laptop.There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The current GUI in XP is more than valid and works well doing everything you would expect it to do. The GUI in Vista is all that is has to offer. Well, some exceptione, are the DRM infection, the restrictive EULA, and the built-in spyware.
What troubles me is that somehow so many industry pundits are pushing this thing as something special and worthy of the billions spent to develop it. Most of these must be looking at a picture of increased sales of hardware, more magazine articles (thus advertisers), etc. I personally think alot of these guys have been paid off by Microsoft.
Just looking at the OS for a few days can clearly demonstrate that alot of what is being said just isn't true. One guy I read that got alot of press professed massive hardware support while my experience with it has been very common and found little hardware support overall. One would not expect neglect of IDE drivers, modems, etc., but would would expect that great effort to make wireless as trouble free as possible is much a minimum.
Microsoft touts their sleep mode features, but in reality their implementations of these features have been severely lacking and extremely problemmatic over the years with little to instill any sense of confidence in me toward that feature and thus Microsoft. I think if the average person was going to save $50-$75 a year we should all jump up in the air and wave our hands in joy. Frankly we'd save more money if we'd just turn the buggers off at night.
Guess what? We all thrashed Microsoft in the area of Genuine Advantage Notification and yet they have implemented this feature in spades under Vista. Anyone buying it will have to accept that up front. That means they are going to be spying on you and your use of Windows. Not only that they seem to think they are entitled to this. They seem to think they can interfere with the use of our computers.
I have 15+ legit copies of XP and I have good solid hardware that runs it. My small business does just fine. What exactly is Vista going to give me? Anyone using XP currently has to ask that one question and be serious about it. I know many will find reasons to upgrade but from a productivity stand point, from a usage stand point, from a feature stand point, there's really nothing that complells anyone to upgrade. You like the latest greatest then fine do it for that but not because Vista is giving you anything special because it isn't. One must also ask themselves if it is worth giving up your privacy to the spying the Microsoft will be implementing. Not only that are you willing to give that up to a monopoly that has been convicted of crimes? Are you going to give that up to the company that stole the technology to do on-line activation of Windows and Office? Are you willing to give that up to a company that then used gorilla tactics in court to bury the court and the plaintiff in paper work in an effort to hide the evidence proving the plantinff's case?
Microsoft has alot of power to influence and they get more free marketing than any other company on the planet, now and throughout history. But to be honest with you it only takes a concerted effort by people such as you and I to tell others how what has been happening and what they are doing with Vista to bring things back to reality.
Why does Microsoft think they are the only ones that can produce a spying program that can disable even legitimate licenses? Who is Microsoft to tell us that after we pay upwards of $400.00 that we are not entitled to install this on any given machine we so choose? Do they not think that the average person who purchased Windows Vista is going to put up with "sorry, you have to buy a new Vista because your motherboard went out and you need it replaced"? What do you think will happen to system upgrades?
That sort of license restriction caters to the likes of the big companies selling computers such as HP, Dell, etc. It doesn't help the average guy who is trying to make computers cheaper and better than HP or Dell.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Project Looking Glass was 'way ahead of the Vista 3D presentation, and still offers some cool effects that aren't available on Vista yet. I predict that soon after Vista comes out the OS community revives Looking Glass, couples it with Croquet and humiliates Micrososft by doing it on half the power at a fraction of the development cost.
http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/
http://www.opencroquet.org/
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Vista require most people to upgrade their video cards to use all the new features? That seems to be a detriment to MS. Unless the user wanted to play games, XP could work with onboard video when they bought a new computer. Now when new computers are bought and the OEMs push Vista, most users will balk at paying extra for a video card or for an OS that doesn't seem that much different from XP (if they choose to go with onboard video).
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
nt.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Ok, I agree, the Linux people are major ripoff artists. That being said, when most things _are_ ripped off (which, being great artists, happens rather fast), new features do appear. The window manager Beryl (which is a fork of Compiz) has gone above and beyond in imitating the new graphical bling of Vista. And a lot of the bling from OSX too. I dare say that a lot of this bling comes at a smaller price (hardware wise) than what you get from Vista.
When I first saw screenshots of Vista I was impressed. Impressed with what could be done. Sadly, I haven't really seen them move any further with the bling since the first screenshot was released, and now that I have Beryl up and running I really couldn't care less.
If you look at the forum for Beryl you'll see a LOT of input from users, requesting (granted, a lot of stuff seen elsewhere, but also) new and innovative features and bling, that might actually prove useful when working (and naturally a lot that's pure bling).
What I'm basically looking for is what makes Vista stand out from something like Beryl, except for the fact that you can actually run (some) windows programs on it. Why are people getting so excited over this, when you can have Beryl running on your computer today? Or Compiz? Or Metacity?
------- I fumbled my registration and I now must suffer
Yep, icons are raster. So are bitmap files. So are rendered jpegs, in most programs. So are sprites in most programs. The point you're missing is that Vista ships these bitmaps off to the GPU to be rendered using vectors (not sure if the raster->vector conversion happens in software or hardware or both, but what comes out is vectors) so you get the advantages of vectors on the display end (they are fast to render using hardware acceleration, too) and the advantages of bitmaps when manipulating your images. Some benchmarks I saw on a machine with a good graphics card had 3x-5x render speed improvements in programs like Photoshop due to the hardware accel.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
When dear Lord will MS finally understand that we don't want to operate our computers. We want them to operate themselves. I want fewer controls, fewer buttons. I want the software to figure out what's the right way to do something, the right app to start, the right place to put an object. I don't want to be an AUDITOR for my system anymore. I'm sick of it. I don't really care about this years trendy glassy stylistic trend which will be as old as dirt in about 3 years anyway. I don't want rearranged controls that map out everything I could possibly do. I want all of that transparent to my use. I want for instance to be able to simply start typing on the desktop and have it popup the last 4 choices of applications, have me quickly pick one, and load what I just typed into the appropriate area. And if the input is unique enough, I want the software to know what the application is supposed to be and take appropriate action. I want a blank canvas. I don't want to start Adobe to read a PDF. I want a window to open up with the PDF and keep the application absolutely in the background. I don't care what it is. And I don't want to hear about codecs, plugins or patches. Just make it work or let me know how long it will be before you, the system is ready to do that. I want you remember all the little tweaky settings. Print still means print even if the last time I printed it went to email instead, just do that unless and until I tell you otherwise.
Then I want it run faster and quieter with fewer interruptions to update, fix and patch. The system can do that but it has to be completely quiet and unobtrusive about it. I want virtual reboots that allow me to keep working even when the system has to be restarted. I don't want to do storage management, that's your job.
I don't want to hear from firewalls, spyware blockers, AV or malware tools. Please do have them but if they are worth anything at all they will do 99% of their job with ZERO human intervention or notification of any kind.
And then what I want you to do is precreate a large array of batch scheduled housekeeping procs to run off hours, again, w/o me knowing about them to do the little things they need to do: update, defrag, clean off garbage, memory cleanup, patches etc etc etc etc. Take a few hours if you like, take more, do it at night or whichever schedule I give you and bring the system back to WHATEVER state or condition it was in before including all open applications and objects.
Guh~, I only saw this post after I replied in this thread. Stupid stupid stupid, mod parent up!! Beryl owns OSX and Vista so hard it's not even funny. And it's still is very beta.
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
Just because we don't want to use it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Perhaps "y'all" should stick to LJ.
ASM
Meesa tinkin youssum invitin da veeeery bad jokes...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
For example, new Windows users are often surprised at the abrupt disappearance of a window when they click the Minimize button.
Elsewhere, General Motors has embarked on a major overhaul of it's cars' dashboard designs, meant to alleviate drivers' shock at the cars stopping when the brakes are applied.
Come on. Is this for real? Somebody actually wrote that? Tell you what, they could do better by using a prompt on minimize events:
Are you sure you want to minmize this window? Ok here goes. It's going to be in the bottom left of the screen.
| Yes | | No!! | | I need further assistance |
Basically my opinion is it's shiny without being annoying. The problem I find with many shiny UIs or UI addons is that in the pursuit of being shiny and cool they sacrifice usability. They put looking cool first. For example I agree with Tog (http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.h tml) about the dock. It's not that it's a horrible way of doing things, it's that it's a tech demo. Apple had better ways of doing things but the primary concern of the dock was making it look cool, working well came second.
I feel with Vista's UI that while you don't gain anything from it other than shininess, it does so without harming usability. Also a few of the new options (like having a window preview when you hover on the task bar) are nice. In general though I'm just please that it seems to satisfy some people's need for a shiny UI without making things harder then they ought to be.
That I am going to keep it brief:
o ws_Vista
Shut up and read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Wind
Yes, there actually is a whole lot new with Vista. That the only think you've paid attention to is the UI is your own fault.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Meesa tinkin youssum be writin' a letta.
Wooja be laikin' help?
"The speaker is actually the very same sideways speaker with three sound waves coming out the right, increasing and decreasing with volume. What a strange thing to clone directly from OS X."
Careful with that plank that it doesn't hit you in the eye.
X11 has inferior font rendering and quality to Windows hands down. XP had ClearType and many well designed typefaces when it came out 5 years ago, and Vista introduces more good fonts. It's the rare thing that Microsoft got right (the other being marketing). ClearType is even arguably better than Apple's technology, though OS X overall font support is excellent.
I can't understand IT professionals overlooking the practical importance of typography. We all spend hours reading text on computer screens, so it's not just about font literate designer types that suffer seeing subjectively ugly things, it's about everyone that uses a screen.
Deus est fatalis
SALES man, SALES. Surely the thought must've crossed yer mind that Intel and ms could or might be colluding to drive up the sales of NEWER CPUs and GPUs? I mean, if people see this crap and have wet dreams over it, Inte's CPU sales could go through the roof, nevermind the utility bills. One good thing, tho, is you can probably use the computer as a space heater. Especially if the screensavers are overly-taxing on the CPU or the GPU fans.
BUT, has anyone got any benchmarks on power consumption when comparing vista to the latest 3D desktops? We need to have someone make a detailed chart of what and when a visual effect hit the streets, by whom, and the merits or usefulness of it. If something is obvious, mark it. If it is a blatant ripoff (say ms has no oompf and is so vapid and dull as to lift straight from Apple and Linux GUIs/graphics) and not a by-product of collaboration (say, Apple and KDE/Gnome work together, it's not a ripoff but co-shared stuff), then flag it. A nice folding insert with the Linux User & Developer or Linux Format or Linux Magazine would be REALLY cool so people can hang them in their work cubicles and offices. Give points for originality and rotten bananas for dullard work. Please compare apples-to-apples and don't shortchange the readers' intelligence.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The real Windows Vista (parody video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QdGt3ix2CQ
"The current GUI in XP is more than valid and works well doing everything you would expect it to do. The GUI in Vista is all that is has to offer. Well, some exceptione, are the DRM infection, the restrictive EULA, and the built-in spyware."
Slashdot, thy name is vain. The majority of the comments to this story is about LOOKS, which are superficial. And not about the underlying technology, which is what you all should be worrying about.
I've some questions, not direcly AT you, nor ripping you. These just came to mind, inspired by your and other's comments... So please understand I am trying to find my way to reasonable/insightful (and maybe even inciteful) questions (I don't have vista, and surely will not plunk down my OWN money for exhorbitant vista "features" KDE and Gnome give me right now):
Can vista users stretch the desktop icons and folder icons? Do they scale well?
Can vista users with bad dexterity or shaking hands left-alt-right-mouse-drag a dialog box or window to resize it? Can a vist user double-click the title bar and scroll up, shade-up or resize a window besides just maximize/plunk-back-to-previous size?
Can a vista user left-alt-left-mouse to drag an in-the-way window out to the side?
Can a vista user bring to focus on mouse-over any window the user wants? Without a hassle? With user-selected responsiveness?
Can a vista user switch to different desktops as efficiently as KDE and Gnome users can? Can vista users roll the scroll wheel over the taskbar or Kicker-wannabe and switch different virtual desktops AND to a select application? Does the vista desktop icon update in realtime like KDE's Kasbar thumbnails reflect the desktop contents?
Can a vista user split a virtual desktop's apps off from the Main Taskbar/kicker to an auxiliary task bar for more refined self-organization?
Can a vista user use glassy effects on a GPU or graphics card that is sufficient for KDE and Gnome?
Does vista have a wealth of Superkaramba-like widgets that are USEFUL and not dullard ripoffs of OSX or ripoffs of lesser KDE/Gnome widgets reinterpreded from OSX?
Most of the things I am asking about existed in KDE or Gnome for YEARS. Hell, ms couldn't even slipstream this stuff into incremental updates to windows. Despite all those huge FUCKING patches they slog down on everybody.
Or, is vista just a hugely-rewritten PATCH to XP in disguise? Put these responses on a wall chart, too. So we can post them on the Tux poster for the cubicles.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
God, I can't tell you how much I fucking hate articles that give you two whole paragraphs and make you click Next through 5 or 6 busy, ad-riddled screens. Fuck.
I think it's bloated and irritating. I don't want a shit ton of animation in my gui...I want things to appears quickly so I can get more done!
Derek Greene
an interface to user-satisfaction. If ms did as you and I and umpteen millions of other users would like, there would be a precipitious drop in sales of:
- hard drives
- memory
- video cards
- larger LCDs
- DVD for off-line storage
- anti-virus software
- dev kits and subscriptions to needlessly complex spaghetti code
- cracker-jack, moving-target, dime-a-dozen certs that start to look the same when 588,992 colleagues have the same or similar certs of different versions...
and many other things that keep IT alive and well. Yep, ms is a true pyramid scheme on steriods, so-to-speak. Maybe the base will be so huge the whole thing will collapse with a whimpering thud but which still rumbles ominously around the planet...
Or, I suppose. All this shit is just gimmickry to chew up your storage space. I think. But, the proof could be in finding out how compressed the graphics and bells and whistles are. Or, to find out whether most of this stuff can be removed from the drive without crippling the system.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You state all of those things as if they've already been proven with rock-solid stability.
Remember that to this day, MS does not have a consumer-level OS that can defrag itself in the background, or index its filesystem for quick searches. Priviledge escalation, proper stand-by management, and security are but a distant dream on billions of user desktops.
If there's one thing I've learned about MS is that they overpromise and underdeliver. So I'd hold the judgement on drive encryption, and HD repartitioning until we see how reliable they are a few years from now.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
What does Vista do for the application developer? What are the methods of a Vista graphics context object? If it has vector graphics (grr, all graphics context objects have a DrawLine() method where you can specify line thickness and anti-aliasing even -- did you think we were going to roll our own Bresenham algorithm and flip pixels in a frame buffer?), how does rendering to a screen/meta file/printer GC differ or stay the same? Can you render to the screen using SVG/Display PDF/Display Postscript primitives or is everything Vista-specific? What does it take to render to EPS/PDF/SVG file formats or is that still a third-party add-on?
Does the application developer have access to cool effects, or is that hard to do and it will be a long way before we see them in applications?
What ever became of "Developers, developers, developers, developers!" Back in the day, Windows was regarded as too clunky by the DOS/VGA frame buffer game developer crowd, and Microsoft responded with WinG (enhancements such as ScrollWindowEx() and CreateDIBSection() to get hardware accelerated scrolling and fast pixel access to a framebuffer, all rolled into the regular Windows API) followed by DirectX. Criticize these efforts if you will, but they put capability of very interesting effects in the hands of the application developer. What is Vista offering in terms of application graphics?
From what I have heard, Microsoft sold Xenix to the original SCO, i.e. the Santa Cruz Organization. In 1995, SCO acquired the AT&T Unix source code from Novell. Then, in 2001, SCO sold the AT&T source code to Caldera Systems (a Linux distribution company) and renamed itself Tarantella; Tarantella is later purchased by Sun Microsystems. After acquiring the AT&T source code, Caldera renamed themselves to the SCO Group and started to sue IBM. My what a tangled web they weave . . .
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Operating System" and "User Interface" should be entirely seperate concepts, parts of completely seperate software sets. a GUI should not be hardcoded as part of an OS.
if you didn't know you could resize hard disk partitions, you really need to get out more. It was awsome when Linux was doing it back several years ago. Aside from volume shadow copies (cool tech, I agree), all of the above are available today in Linux (admittedly Direct3D 10 is OpenGL, but still).
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
That FUCKING "Aero Ribbon".
I hate that goddamn thing.
It's so useless. Why in the bloody world does Aero (the UI theme) need its own bloody logo? Did Luna in XP get its own logo? It's not even well designed: It looks like curtains blowing in the wind. Can't the Windows logo suffice as an umbrella logo for everything?
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Here is the problem with Vista:
You two broad user groups:
1. Users who don't know how to find the information they want when they want it
2. Users who know how to find the info they want when they want it; and they don't want it otherwise
Vista caters to the first group (the larger percentage out there - which is a smart move), but they do it to such a point that they have completely alienated the advanced users, and are starting to get on the nerves of the intermediate ones. You know, the ones who no longer tell anyone they have a computer and can hack the world with it.
IMO MS should come with 2 modes: "advanced computer user" and "average stupid fuck"
Advanced should start off with showing file extensions, window's classic mode, never hiding system files, and Window's useless software firewall turned off (this last one because all of these folks have hardware firewalls and load virus protection before connecting to the internet).
ASF mode should start off with everything hidden but IE, Office, and MSN IM. The firewall should be a firewall beast that shits incoming port scans/requests to the depths of hell. To entertain these users, you could even have an animated popup gif anytime he protects the innocent plebe user of the beast performing said action.
Development notes at http://devscribbles.blogspot.com
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
More importantly, "scale *any* image bigger and smaller without any loss in image quality" is pretty much means they are NOT using vector graphics. "Image" generally means bitmapped image. If they said "scale the new icons bigger and smaller without any loss in image quality" I would say that is vector graphics.
It is sounding like the fact that this is done by hardware that is given a rectangle to texturemap and the edges of the rectangle are vectors is making these people call what everybody else would call raster graphics "vector". This is really sad.
Neither this or OS/X are really using vector graphics. Sure the API supports vectors, but it is not actively used. For real vector graphics, take a look at the large scalable shapes in Flash. Also the IRIX desktop in 1990 or so did it, in that the icons were vector images (not that they looked like anything acceptable today).
Anyone else notice this?
Other systems have had these features for quite some time. Evidently, it's not the quality of the user interface that matters, but the brand name and marketing power behind it. Microsoft could be shipping the Windows 95 interface with a new theme again and people would buy it.
Honestly, I can understand not RTFA'ing, but read the goddamn comment you're replying to, jeez.
He said he didn't know it could be resized while mounted; it's also pretty fun (read: dangerous) to resize NTFS using Linux (which I use alongside WinXP) in the best of cases.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I'll start off by saying I do use KDE and XP and let me tell you, the deskman power toy is just that a damn toy. Sure you can quickly switch between different desktops but you know what, unless you have it configured for individual desktops instead of shared, there's absolutely no difference between the multiple-shared and the one. In the case of the unshared (seems to be closer to a true multi-desktop) you can't move a window to another desktop or even see taskbar indications and all of this is because MS still doesn't have a clue in regards to a true mutli-tasking environment.
Regarding the battery life claim -
For the CPUs I'm familiar with, it is not possible to set the clock rate to 5% of its normal speed.
For example, a Pentium-M 1.6 GHz can only scale back to 600 MHz.
All common OSes support such scaling, usually basing the frequency on CPU temperature and status of the battery, so I'm not sure what's new in Vista about this.
I haven't spent a lot of time scrutinising the Vista interface, although other people in my group at work have. But assuming this is true, it sounds as if the market droids got a-hold of the UI design (again), given that the things most likely to be selling points are pushed to the front at the expense of actual usability.
That said, how easy is it to disable all the quirky goo and have a better interface? Once we get around to rolling it out to our users in about 18 months, we'll probably be pre-configuring the defaults for everyone, and it's likely to be configured to whatever will help things run most efficiently.
UAC: This doesn't work that well. I found it to be the second most annoying thing in Vista, beaten only by the terrible Aero theme. It's a very nice idea, it's been available on any UNIX based system for many years, and MS still didn't make it work right. The video mode switching alone is just silly to no end.
Address space rand: Increasing security is always good.
DX10: If it isn't getting backported then it isn't very useful. Besides, of course it's going to seem fast, you have to upgrade your CPU and video card to use Vista properly. I personally so absolutely no speed improvement in graphics out of Vista/DX10. I did see my system run slower, though.
Shadow copies: This is LVM. I've had this for a decade. If you want a better version than VSC in Vista, go buy a Net.App.
Bitlocker: I do not want any partition/file system/disc encrypted at home, and I certainly don't want it at work. People forget passwords, systems need repairing, etc, etc. It has a niche use, though.
Resizing: I don't resize my system partitions, and very few other people do. Most people don't even know what a partition is. It's nifty, and ties right in with LVM.
Power management: Just as everyone else said, you can't get the gains that you claim. You can't slow the CPU down under its base clock. That means 600-800MHz on most Intel chips. Throw battery gains out the window if you're using the GPU hungry Aero theme... I only get slightly better battery from my Pentium-M system under Ubuntu than I do under WinXP, and that's mostly because there are fewer things trying to run in the background.
You might repeat your post over and over, but that doesn't make anything you mention earth shattering. Nearly all of these "huge improvements" in Vista are either incremental over XP or have been available on other platforms for years, and then there is the pile of mis-features that nobody actually wants.
Anyone that does some research on Vista would know that this is the first NT based OS that Microsoft shipped that offered no real user improvements. It doesn't even put into place that last piece of Cairo, which would have been WinFS. All of the features that people were excited about, MS has ripped out. However, as the GP pointed out, MS sure had enough devs and time to throw in all of the total bullshit DRM that none of their customers actually wants to pay for.
Hell, the MS DRM, especially mandatory driver signing, means that I *can't* even use Vista. I have too many pieces of software and too many devices that I would have to purchase a new product, retest, redeploy, and retrain to get away from what already works with XP. For all these wonderful "features" that Vista offers, it gives us three that range from simply useless to outright malicious to the end user.
Anyone who writes or talks about the vista GUI should use a Mac for a few weeks before doing so. I'm serious. I switched to OSX a few months ago. By now I don't understand why I ever put up with the abomination that is windos. If you think the windos UI is "fairly good", then you've never used a Mac, end of story. Consistency and functional beauty (instead of useless eye-candy) is what makes or breaks a UI. Or more specifically: What breaks windos and makes OSX.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
So they've been working on this new windos version for what? 5 years? And all they have to show for it is a shiney, flash-like GUI?
The only sad thing about it is that due to the OEM lock-ins and general stupidity of people it'll still sell.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
+4 Cluebat: The majority of slashdot users run windows.
Oh, and familiarity breeds contempt.
It doesn't matter what YOU want. As long as you can convince a large enough block of lemmings that they should buy it thought
.. it will not matter a bean what you personally want. Not at all.
/WILL/ eventually get through to decision makers.
- "me too" marketing (the never failing 'other lemmings us it' approach)
- promises you don't keep (we will make it cheaper for education)
- coercion (buy us and we'll invite you to our shop somewhere exotic)
- threat (we will no longer support it and your data will vanish in a tidal wave of spam, virus infections and trojans)
Oh, and don't forget that perfection prevents the sale of any updates. So never expect a perfect product because that would be suicide for their current business model.
I remember the days I used W98 because it was quicker to get going on a PC than anything else. That rule has been taken over by almost any Linux distro, with Ubuntu far up front.
And if I want a pre-install I can also buy a Mac - we've arrived at a point where MS products really are at the bottom end of the market except for price. It
Give it another decade or so.
= Ch =
Insert
...could you be any more of a whiny bitch?
UAC: Vista can raise (and presumably lower) program permissions while running.
This isn't such a good thing. From what I've read UAC asks for permission quite often. If we take a look at history, people will end up automatically clicking on allow, just to not have to think about it. A well-designed system takes into account the human factor so that it does not ask to change permissions (roadblock-style security, which leads to automatic response by the human user), but instead allows to user to change permissions levels by explicitly requesting it (fork in the road security, which requires the user to explicitly leave the main road).
Firefox never asks for permissions, because it was designed in such a way as to inform you of how you can give additional permissions to the sites that need it, and generally operates just fine without elevated permissions. OS X rarely has to ask for permissions, because when you want to change a system-wide setting you first have to explicitly unlock the system preferences dialog.
I agree that UAC will reduce the amount of malware. But I haven't read anything about it that made me think it was any better (or even the equal of) OS X's security mechanisms when it comes to actual daily use.
>>we use Windows as a platform to run software for r
which is exactly why Vista will be a major annoyance for anyone trying to do serious work on it. I'm completely in agreeance with the parent - the flying in windows and transparency this, blar blar that are all fine and dandy for the first 5 seconds you are using Vista - it DOES look 'new-ish' and psuedo-fancy...but then try to actually get anything serious done on the OS - the way that windows 'fade' into each other is really counter-productive. When a window pops up that is an actual user-prompt, you don't want it to fade in gently so that you won't notice it (and believe me there will be many a time when you don't notice when a window has changed because of this), you want the window to pop up and say 'hey there - mr computer here, i need your input on something'
the way Vista is currently is very counter-productive to the whole production side of using a computer, period.
i'm fairly near-sighted, but with XP i can click through and navigate through most of the standard windows prompts literally without reading what they are actually saying - because the fact that i can tell when a window has changed and a dialog has popped up. with Vista, you have to focus - not only on the window that you might be working on at that particular moment, but on the entire screen at all times because you never know when another window or prompt might 'slide up' into view without you knowing...
it's a serious issue that i think is going to cause alot more eyestrain and general confusion overall.
as it stands now, basic computer users barely notice when a dialog pops up for them to do something - with vista, things won't pop at all, suddenly you'll find a window locked up because some sneaky dialog prompt has come up and stolen the focus from you. particularly for modal windows, this will be very annoying, very fast.
another major annoyance with vista are the 'security popups' - they pop up randomly but don't seem to have much point at all. how hard would it be for virus writers to spawn random mouse clicks to bypass these things? i've seen driver installers from large-scale hardware companies (yes Brother I'm looking at you) that have automated mouse-clicking in their driver installations that bypass the 'unsigned driver' prompt in XP - a major no no as far as i'm concerned...having a virus or whatever doing the same thing for these security popups won't be too hard either i'm sure.
Gekido's Lair
So how well does this "offload the work to the GPU" thing works on thin clients and terminal services or Citrix again?
Seems their number one target is the clueless home user now, not the enterprise environment.
Fine with me, dudes. You can have them. ;-)
Just like having two monitors plugged in, its two workspaces, works well, perhaps one or two apps are made by poor loosers that cannot
afford >1 monitor but all we need is 10000s of emails and blogs making them sound like loosers for them to fix it. Because if they dont
they wont get the next job if their employer googles their name and finds 100s of websites saying how crap their product is because
of Product manager Bob McFly.
So cannot we just have 10 virtual monitors of the same res as the main one, and cycle between which one is the primary?
Code can already ask the OS how many monitors there are and each of their coordinates, just gota fake it.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
http://www.netez.com/2xExplorer
This explorer is better, has cooler features, double pane, is faster , built in viewer , text editor, no need for
crappy notepad.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
... but it's just another ploy by Microsoft to force programmers to use something which they themselves not use.
.NET. It's used sparingly in their flagship products (windows, office).
...) to a 100% WPF and .NET implementation.
See for example
The same goes for WPF. I'll only start taking it seriously if MS ported all of their office products (Word, Excel, Powerpoint,
Because if you ask me Office still uses "USER32 or Windows Forms".
Y
On Linux, address space randomisation is done by various kernel patches which aren't selinux related. Red Hat uses execshield (which went mainline around 2.6.11) but there have been patches from PaX which also implemented it. See RH Mag on Execshield and Wikipedia's address space layout randomisation article.
Online hard disk resizing. This has only recently (last two years) been possible on Linux and is filesystem dependent (on ext3 you need to have made your partitions within LVM, I think reiser3 can online grow even with regular partitions) I've not been aware of an NTFS online resizer until now though. I will also point out that your school (and probably you) are at some point paying for all that "free" MS software though.
As for ACPI under Linux - there can be a whole stack of issues, some which are related to various BIOSes only looking for XP (and now Vista) and enabling/disabling various features depending on what they find. It is true that putting devices into low power mode doesn't tend to happen by default on Linux though. Power consumption will also be helped when the tickless/dyntick kernel patches arrive.
However, the point probably was that there actuall ARE many reasons to look at Vista for possible good reasons to upgrade.
Hey, it it means I'll finally get my vector desktop, so I can just turn the DPI up or down for big happy controls or tiny intricate controls, I'll be happy. Nearly everything's still bitmap-based; it's so 1990s. And whatever happened to dynamic themes for GTK?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Still been able to do it for years. I don't know if it's every filesystem, but certainly some.
I've not had a problem with it thus far, but given how much Microsoft has told the Linux developers (namely nothing), it shouldn't suprise you if it has bugs to be worked out, as every change must be painstakingly tracked.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
I suspect that the improvements to DirectX performance will ultimately put it on par with OpenGL, since both APIs will now be capable of talking directly to the hardware without passing through kernel tomfoolery first... And when OpenGL gains the capabilities exposed in DirectX 10, it will (once again) be a non-issue, particularly after the OpenGL SDK is released. I'm waiting to see on the rest, but Vista's DRM infestation doesn't exactly make me hungry to try it all out.
As you can see in Figure 3.2, the desktop also comes with updated icons for the Recycle Bin, Computer (formerly My Computer) and Network (formerly My Network Places), as well as a new desktop icon for the Control Panel.
I KNEW Vista would be worth it!
On Par with OpenGL? DirectX has been miles ahead of OpenGL since DirectX 8. It outperforms and is many times faster for development than openGL and has been for 3 or 4 years now. Only the most anti MS bigots now disagree with this.
In the eleven years since Windows 95, the Windows GUI has not changed. What I hate most about Windows is what makes it, well, identifiable as Windows:
Desktop: It makes no sense to put all your important, frequently accessed items behind your open windows. When you want to get to them, you have to resize/move/minimize your open windows.
Taskbar: Started out as a good enough idea, I guess. Computers are powerful enough to have many open applications now, so I find myself often needing to increase the size of the taskbar to keep the buttons at their default size. Microsoft seems to have realized this, which is why they introduced taskbar grouping. I don't like this, as it creates an extra step for me to get back to the window I want, so I disable it and enlarge my taskbar. When I shrink it back down, window positions (such as Winamp, which I keep docked in the lower right), gets messed up. Icon alignment also seems to not snap back. I'm left with open space at the bottom of the desktop.
Systray: There is NO reason for this to exist.
Start menu: I'd like it a lot more if it were like Fluxbox/Blackbox/etc. Make the menu pop up wherever my cursor happens to be. Even then it's not really necessary; I usually just type the name of what I want to run. If you can't remember the name of the applications installed on your system, you aren't using them.
But the biggest thing I dislike about Windows (and actually, this is not just Windows behavior) is the window management. I don't exactly know what I'm looking for in this department, but I don't like applications opening on top of other open windows. Visualization: my Firefox window is using about 2/3 of my horizontal real estate and is using 100% vertical. It's aligned to the left. Everything to the right is empty. If I were to open my TV tuner software to listen to the news while typing this comment, the window would surely not get sucked into the empty space to the right of this window. It would open right over top of Firefox, as would anything else I choose to run.
I use MSN and AIM to contact various people and recently they've decided that, no they don't want to stay in the system tray and I need to see their little control stripes every time I start up. And MSN Messenger insists on displaying all the contacts I added with Hotmail whether I IM them or not. I figure if I delete them in Messenger, they get deleted in Hotmail as well, as I didn't import them.
I remember our sysadmin showing me an earlier beta of Vista, and how one Explorer window rated his database backup files "5 stars" ...
It would be great if they designed UIs that can significantly enhance the abilities of experienced users, rather than designed UIs that just assume that all users will have learning difficulties and will never figure it out.
Look at Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demo, and you'll see we haven't really made significant progress.
A good UI should be easily learnt by a naive/new user, but still greatly augment an experienced user.
The starcraft game UI appears to allow experienced/skilled users the ability to sustain and perform 300 actions per minute (300 APM).
I don't think the starcraft UI is the best possible UI. Far from it.
UAC does ask permissions a lot when you are new to the OS. You're digging around and looking at things, installing lots of new apps all once, etc.. so yeah, UAC seems to pop up a lot. After you've been using it for a few months, it's far less common.
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Can vista users stretch the desktop icons and folder icons? Do they scale well?
Yes, you can set them to any size you like and they look good even at small and large sizes.
Can vista users with bad dexterity or shaking hands left-alt-right-mouse-drag a dialog box or window to resize it? Can a vist user double-click the title bar and scroll up, shade-up or resize a window besides just maximize/plunk-back-to-previous size?
This is an example of faulty logic. You should be asking if Vista has certain functionality, not if certain functionality can be achieved by specific actions. You also seem to be mixing accessibility features with non-accessibility features in the same question. Maybe you should think more about this and rephrase your point.
Vista has a number of new accessibility features,
can a vista user left-alt-left-mouse to drag an in-the-way window out to the side?
Again, you're asking a question about a specific way of doing things, rather than if those things can be accomplished.
What I think you're getting at is using alternative ways to adjust windows. If that's the case, then the answer is No, but there are a number of third party tools to do these.
Can a vista user bring to focus on mouse-over any window the user wants? Without a hassle? With user-selected responsiveness?
If you mean focus follows mouse, then yes. That's in XP too, by the way, but you have to turn it on using TweakUI.
Can a vista user switch to different desktops as efficiently as KDE and Gnome users can? Can vista users roll the scroll wheel over the taskbar or Kicker-wannabe and switch different virtual desktops AND to a select application? Does the vista desktop icon update in realtime like KDE's Kasbar thumbnails reflect the desktop contents?
This assumes that different desktops are required. Or that a majority of end users would even want them, or use them them. There are a lot of third party virtual desktop apps, including some that do what you want. Even nVidia's driver set includes a virtual desktop manager.
Can a vista user split a virtual desktop's apps off from the Main Taskbar/kicker to an auxiliary task bar for more refined self-organization?
I use Oscar's Multi-Monitor taskbar for a similar feature.
Can a vista user use glassy effects on a GPU or graphics card that is sufficient for KDE and Gnome?
Now you're just getting silly. You're basically saying "Can a BMW driver go 150 mph while only burning the amount of gas that a Prius would"?
Does vista have a wealth of Superkaramba-like widgets that are USEFUL and not dullard ripoffs of OSX or ripoffs of lesser KDE/Gnome widgets reinterpreded from OSX?
Vista is still new, and not yet final. No, it doesn't have the wealth of widgets that a 2 year-old OS does, but give it a year and check back.
Your questions are phrased in a "Do you still beat your wife" manner, which means they aren't intended to ask real questions, but are instead saying "Does Vista act exactly, without any difference, like the OS I use". The answer is, of course, no. It's different.
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At home I run Linux with XFCE4, at work I have to run Microsoft Windows.
With LiteStep, Windows has Virtual Desktops, and a Shortcut system that is very fast. (As well as several other items I use frequently.)
So hopefully Litestep will work on Vista.
Scott Carr
"This is an example of faulty logic."
I felt you were trying to subtley cast in in a negative light.
Obviously, we (well, many of us) know about tweak-ui, and yet, if these features are so nice to have, then why aren't they given top-level discussion.
Obviously, we (well, many of us) know that I wasn't asking for windows to act/enable features *exactly* as done in KDE/Gnome, but rather asking if the end result is achievable.
"Your questions are phrased in a "Do you still beat your wife" manner,"...
That was below the belt, and wasn't really called for.
But, thanks
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Somebody please mark this A/C 5 Funny. Really, I think it's funny. I'm not sure if s/he's meaning to be funny or is just bitter and resentful, but it kinda made my day!
Especially, with the Slash image word being: "healthy"...
Mod up!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I hate to tell you this, but you're just another ignorant anti-MS fanboy.
All of what you said is so wrong, I don't know where to begin.
It's pure FUD, and you're doing nothing but regurgitating it from slashdot group-think.
PUNK!
This is partially outdated, and partially FUD. Try it. I mess with my system a LOT, and I need elevated permissions in Vista less often than I do in Linux... and even that much doesn't bother me. Earlier versions weren't very good about when to swtich to admin mode and when not to, so Defender, for example, required admin mode when you opened Software Explorer (to prevent a startup app, or some such). Now, it only prompts UAC if you click the "Show options for all users" button, complete with UAC icon, at the bottom of the window. Which you only do if the program you're trying to modify isn't one that installed under user permissions... Other things are similar. Yes, installing most software requires admin priveleges, but not ALL software... in fact, the lastest builds only prompt when the installer actually begins the install, and then only if you selected "Install for everybody" as opposed to "Install for this user only" (most modern installers provide such options). In normal use I don't see it at all.
I like your "fork in the road" analogy, but while I use it (I also read the UAC and Protecte Mode prompts, so maybe I'm unusual) I know a lot of people who won't run except as an Administrator, and/or who run OS X with Root or nearly Root priveleges. These people can do an astonishing amount without even needing your "fork in the road" and while UAC *can* be disabled, the kind of user who simply ignores the prompts and always clicks Continue is also likely to be the kind who doesn't go find the option to disable it (it's in the system configuration, not hard if you're a power user but many people don't really know what "Explorer" is, they think it's called "My Computer"). In any case, I doubt you can deny that a random prompt appearing while somebody browses the web or tries to watch a movie is going to make them slightly more cautious. Also, since the default button for UAC is Cancel (not Continue) the user does actually need to conciously move the mouse to the Continue button, not just hit Enter.
Firefox has security holes, including occasionally very, very serious ones. Most of the time these are found and patched quickly, for Windows at least (some Linux distros distribute the update faster than others). This is good, because Firefox in Windows often assumes admin priveleges. Trying to use it without tends to be a pain, and in Vista it causes more UAC prompts than most programs I know of (most programs cause none at all). Also, if it is taken over, there's absolutely nothing to prevent it from, for example, uploading all my personal files and then deleting them off my hard drive. Using Protected Mode, this would prompt serious warnings. Incidentally, there's nothing to prevent such behavior in OS X either.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
If you thought Luna was hilariously bad (I still don't get how Windows fans defend that theme), wait until you come across the puke-worthy blue and seagreen EVERYWHERE in the Vista interface, complete with a 1980s-style animated ribbon swoosh in the corners of the windows.
e r.pngn gd _unchanged.pngd _nastyness.png
I still don't get how people can't love the non-glossy and "toyful" blue task bar and green start button. The roundness and matte bluish is very calm and whenever I see a PC with that theme I feel home. Call it toy-ish but I love working with that theme after I've turned off window animation, common tasks in folders, smooth-scroll listboxes, slide-open combo boxes, slide taskbar buttons and everything else that is non-productive.
Ubuntu is also very nice and soft, Suse/KDE I don't have much liking for.
http://jooh.no/prog_ubuntu.html
But I agree Vista UI is a disaster. It's slow even on a 3GHz Core 2, the black and glass-glossy theme of Vista is cold and un-inviting and applications columns have many small details and hard edges. With the new toolbar system applications get another line that has a different color and looks out of place making the UI even more messy.
If you try and make it less white by changing window color in classic controls very few windows actually get changed. Very inconsistent, hopefully theres a workaround as white is hard on my eyes and I don't wanto increase the gamma in games and movies then they look washed out.
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/vista_task_manag
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_on_black.p
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_brackgroun
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/window_backgroun
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
More importantly will this happen instantly in hardware accellerated heaven on the 3d accellerator? Think zero CPU usage free antialiasing, bilinear filtering and buffering and alphablending and super responsive resizing of windows.
Thats what I'm dreaming about.
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
All this talk about all the glitz and glamor that is Aero Glass, and not one word said about why someone would actually bother!
I'm still waiting for an answer to the question I've asked here and elsewhere at least half a dozen times: Why would I (as a user or sysadmin, not a developer) bother upgrading from XP to Vista?
(Disclosure: I'm a programmer and I use both XP and Linux. I'm just trying to understand WHY anyone would get Vista.)
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
This is where GUI/WM's should be going. Rather than bundling in every bell and whistle, then tucking it away and claiming to be a 'clean' interface. GUI/WM's should come basic and let you build in what you need as you need it.
I built my CTWM from scratch, and it was my on first *nix (FreeBSD 6.1), so dont give me the 'ease of use' song and dance. The point of dumping winblows was because I love screen realestate, almost, as much as I love resources. Neither of these things are treated with respect by ANY of the popular WMs be it XP, OSX, KDE or Gnome.
I love these wars, all the linux fanboys creaming over their win clones, and the macfiles loving the fact that aqua hogs all the resources that an other wise great system provides.
Point is, GUI/WM's need to start tracking back to 'necessity' rather than 'kitchen sink'.
axis discrepancy indicates hexagons beyond control anomaly