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Windows 8 and Screen Resolution: WXGA Still Most Popular
jones_supa writes "The Building Windows 8 blog comes up with a detailed post explaining the improved support of Windows 8 regarding different screen sizes, resolutions and pixel densities. Early on, the Windows team explored an inch-based scaling system, but found out that bitmaps would look blurry when scaled to unpredictable sizes. They ended up choosing three predefined scale percentages: 100%/140%/180%. The article goes on pondering the best solutions to make each app look good on different screens. Also shown: the distribution of resolutions being used today with Windows 7, 1366x768 having a huge lead at 42%."
Also known as the cheap laptop screen.
I hate this resolution. I seems to me that screen resolutions have gone backwards, it's nigh on impossible to do any development with this shitty resolution. My old 5 year old Dell laptop supports 1600x1200 compared to my more modern Acer laptop despite the Acer having a far more powerful graphics card. It's not even a native HD resolution so your graphics card has to scale the 720p image up to display it on fullscreen... which totally defeats the purpose of 720p as the scaling hardware is probably crap. It seems to me that laptop manufacturers are shooting themselves in the foot with this crap.
Please stop it with these 16:9 ratio displays. I can't stand having a two foot wide desktop with 6 inches of vertical height.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Microsoft had another option which they have completely ignored. SVG is a standard graphics format which is vector based. The code to support it has already been written over and over again. MSIE already supports the format from MSIE 8 and above. SVG does not have to mean the rendering is slow in the least and can easily mean bitmaps are rendered from SVG sources before displaying and only has to be updated if the screen resolution changes.
Of course, they could also have used WMF but... yeah... just no.
They could have selected any resolution after basing icons and other graphical bits on SVG and it would ALWAYS look as sharp as it needs to look.
1080p is a thousand times more descriptive than UXWVGA or what have you, because it tells you both the vertical resolution and the fact that it's progressive scan (the 'p') as opposed to interlaced. TVs only come in a small number of aspect ratios (4:3 and 16:9), so the horizontal resolution is implied by the vertical.
And to boot, the "GA" part, which has alternately stood for "graphics adaptor" (eg. CGA == Color Graphics Adaptor) and "graphics array" (VGA == "Video Graphics Array"), is just stupid. That video card names somehow became a handle for resolutions is just silly, since originally, all these cards were capable of multiple resolutions. (Ok, the MDA wasn't, but then the MDA didn't end in 'GA' now did it?)
I guess this all happened around the time of the second wave of "SuperVGA" cards. The first wave did 800x600, and the newer ones could do 1024x768, and needed some way to distinguish themselves. Once XGA came along, the alphabet soup resolution plague was here to stay.
Program Intellivision!
Oh for god's sake. Are you trolling?
VGA = 640x480 ...
SVGA = 800x600
XGA = 1024x768
Go look it up for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_display_resolutions
It's not a marketing term as much as it is a name for a numeric expression indicating a rectangular range of pixels. Those terms have been around longer than 1080p (which just means 1080 progressive scan lines).
And to the commenter above mine "I wish all TV manufacturers would..." Why? While 1080p TVs normally mean 1920x1080p, the ONLY thing they are really guaranteeing is 1080 progressive scan lines. From the days of analog TV, the contents of each line has effectively been analog variations in signal. In the days before color, it was merely an analog variable signal indicating brightness. So there was no effective pixel width as you understand it today. The density of phosphor was as close as you could get early on and actual pixel count could only be approximated in early color displays. Only Sony's Trinitron display tubes could really claim a true horizontal pixel count in CRTs as the arrangement of color bits were more hexagonal (or triangular depending on how you looked at it) in nature. Of course today's digital TV sources do account for horizontal pixel count as well as vertical, but the habit of referring only to the vertical count comes from the analog scaling of the horizontal scan line which still exists in today's TVs and signals. Technically, if someone were to make a 1280x1080 display and made the horizontal pixels wide enough to create a 16x9 aspect ratio, they might still be able to call it "1080p" even though most assert that it should mean 1920x1080.
We're still living with some legacy standards in our "modern age."
Because they didn't break. Throwing-away a still working piece of equipment is what is filling-up landfills and damaging the environment. In addition to the 4:3 CRT and LCD screens, I also still use a TV set from the 70s, a second set from the 90s, a Pentium 4 computer, a Pentium 3 laptop, a Dolby 5.1 surround stereo, and 1987 and 97 cars..... rather than toss them in the trash, I just keep using them until they die. THEN I will upgrade.
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Boxen is stupid enough, corporateboxen is truly something a douchenbaggen would say.
Windows has flawless high DPI support since Vista. It scales everything properly vector based to any level you like. You can try it on a system if you want, crank up the scaling and watch it go.
All MS apps do it as well. IE, Notepad, the calculator, all the things that come with windows properly listen to the size requests for them OS. Even thing like images, IE will upscale images properly. They don't gain resolution, of course, but they are the right size and the resampling algorithm is quite good.
The problem is apps. Some flat out don't listen, Steam is one of those, it just won't scale at all. Some want to do their own thing. FF is one of those, it can scale, but won't listen to Windows for scaling. However there worst is some scale some things. They'll scale their text (because they use the Windows text renderer) but not the boxes the text is in (because they use their own pixel based controls).
So that's the issue. Developers have to start following the spec. If they use the provided Windows controls, it is no problem they scale themselves. If they make their own also no problem, they just have to write in the scaling logic. Problem is they don't, they are lazy about it.
The graph on that page shows that in 1024x600 only "desktop apps" will be supported, not Metro, which will require a minimum of 1024x768. ....Which means that a large percentage of currentNetbooks won't be compatible with Win8/Metro.
Which really means they will ship the screens to China (thus burning oil), where the item will be recycled by workers not wearing masks, breathing dangerous fumes or dust, and the toxic components like mercury just dumped to the ground.
BESIDES most of the toxicity actually comes from the manufacture of the new item: Digging-up the materials, or strip-mining the ground, plus shipping them from who-knows-where to the factory (more oil burned), plus side effects like pollution caused by the workers and their living quarters or cars. The longer you use an item the more you postpone the damage which manufacturing causes.
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This isn't about bitmap "images." It's about user interface elements. Few applications use images for icons unless, of course, we are talking about thumbnails which, interestingly enough, are scaled down images which works well enough without requiring every image come in multiple sizes.
I know too well what the limitations of both vector and bitmapped graphics are. But for user interface design, nothing beats vector graphics when keeping things future-proof. As Microsoft sets about saying "okay, here is the finite list of things Windows 8 supports" they are closing the door on flexibility, versatility and the future. They are, in effect, casting their vote in favor of backward compatibility over forward compatibility. And when you are planning to be relevant into the near future, it makes sense to care more about backware compatibility. But when you are planning to be relevant into the distant future... well... isn't it obvious to see how far Microsoft's vision extends?
Bravo!
I bought a high end tube TV in 1985, kept it until it couldn't be fixed anymore, finally replacing it in 2004. The computer on which I am writing this was first purchased around the turn of the century, replacing the guts over the years as they died. I tend to buy lease return vehicles (which tend to be low mileage and no "new car" premium on the sticker) and keep them for 15 - 20 years.
A new version of my phone just came out this year. It has dual cores and a lot of other neat stuff. So I'm going to run right out and KEEP THE PHONE I HAVE, because, you know, it still works. When it stops working and can't be fixed, I'll look at what's available then.
This rabid consumerism is shameful. It's not just electronic waste on the back end; the process of creating the devices is dirty also. As consumers we're expected to spend a significant portion of our discretionary income on the next incremental improvement on our entertainment devices, while a few companies, and a few people in each of those, get fabulously rich. So when 4K comes out, I fully expect a massive re-purchasing of TVs and monitors, along with a measureable spike in electronic waste. What a con game.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm beginning to wonder if they just take a handful of high-value tiles from Scrabble, put them in a dice cup to shake 'em up, and then pull out letters until they get something unique. Perhaps not, or we'd have resolutions with Js and Ks in them. ;-)
Program Intellivision!
Yeah I've thought about that, but I measured my CRT at only 50 watts. Ditto the P4 (I turned-on the laptop low power mode a few years ago). The manufacturing energy & strip-mining of new materials & toxic chemicals plus shipping from the other side of the planet would far-exceed anything I would save by switching to LCD or a new iCore CPU. (Same principle applies to why I use US-manufactured incandescent bulbs not CFLs imported from non-environment-friendly China.)
Forgot to mention my phone which many of my coworkers call "ancient". I bought it in 2006 so I guess that is pretty old, but it still makes phone calls and accepts text messages, so why toss it in the trash? No reason I can think of.
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And I have a laptop from 2004 with a 17" 1920x1200 resolution LCD built-in. A replacement with similar resolution is nigh on impossible to find
The 17" Macbook Pro for a while now has had a 1920x1200 display. In fact all MacBooks eschew the HD fad and use a more realistic aspect ratio for display. You can even choose glossy or matte.
The system is due for an update later this year possibly to an ever higher DPI display...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The manufacturing energy & strip-mining of new materials & toxic chemicals plus shipping from the other side of the planet would far-exceed anything I would save by switching to LCD or a new iCore CPU.
That's probably not true.
I've heard this kind of thing said a number of time before, for example about electric cars, the theory being that it somehow costs more energy to manufacture a battery pack than it will ever save compared to an ICE engine.
However, a simple economic analysis shows this to be false in many cases. Energy is largely fungible, that is, it doesn't really matter if you're using electricity or oil, it's all pretty much just watt-hours at some fairly equal cost. There's variances of course -- electricity is cheaper near a hydroelectric dam, oil is cheaper in some countries, and both is cheaper to buy in bulk.
Manufacturers pay for energy the same as everyone else, and they're not just going to ignore that cost out of the goodness of their hearts, it's going to be baked right into the cost of manufacture. So, looking at the cost of a good gives you an idea of the maximum amount of energy it could have taken to produce. You don't need to know anything about the specifics of its manufacturing process, just the cost.
You can get a 23" Dell LED backlit LCD monitor for USD 170 delivered. Now, at most half of that is the manufacturing cost, because Dell has to pay taxes, make a profit, and this is the RRP that resellers can also make a profit on. Hence, lets say $85 manufacturing cost, including all design, materials, factory and equipment depreciation, etc... Of that, at most $40 would be energy costs, directly or indirectly, the other half would be paying for "man hours" in one way or another. These are rough numbers, but bear with me.
Now, taking that estimated $40 worth of energy, we can figure that at a typical cost of $0.15 per kWh, it cost 280 kWh of energy to make that monitor. Now, an energy efficiency review shows that that model uses 16.65W of power when on, so that means that after 9,930 hours of operation, it will have made back its own manufacturing energy cost in savings compared to your current 50W CRT. At 8 hours per day, that's just over 3 years, and you've had your CRT for 6 years.
Admittedly, this won't make it cost effective for you to personally purchase this monitor based on energy saving alone, that would take well over a decade of usage. However, it shows that it isn't wasteful environmentally to buy a new monitor, and you do get a new monitor that would look much better than your old CRT. Better colour gamut, no flicker, always perfectly sharp, no distortion, etc...
Your example of CFLs is even more clear, in which case you would be personally saving money quite quickly by switching away from incandescent bulbs. That's been true for pretty much all models of CFLs for years now, and LED lights promise to improve on those savings even further.