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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.
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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!
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.
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?
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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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.