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Windows 8 Graphics: Microsoft Has Hardware-Accelerated Everything
MrSeb writes "Microsoft has detailed the extensive changes made to the Windows 8 graphics subsystem and DirectX 11.1. In short, everything in Windows 8 is hardware accelerated, and as a result its text, 2D, and 3D performance will blow Windows 7 away. DirectX 11.1 has also received a significant overhaul that should result in faster and more efficient games and applications. The bulk of the graphics changes in Windows 8 pertain to hardware acceleration for simple, typographically-rich Metro-style apps. In Windows 8, the rendering speed of text and simple shapes has been massively increased across the board: Title and heading text renders 336% faster than Windows 7; Lines render 184% faster; Rectangles render 438% faster; and so on. The rendering of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image files has also been improved in Windows 8, mostly by expanding SIMD usage. In one demo, Windows 8 decodes and renders 64 JPEGs in 4.38 seconds, while Windows 7 performs the same task in 7.28 seconds. Amongst a few changes to DirectX, the most significant feature in DX 11.1 is the new, simplified, unified Direct3D 11.1 API, which finally brings together the many API offshoots that MS has implemented in recent years."
but I have a fairly modest PC and I couldn't tell you the last time I said "Man, I wish I could render these 64 JPEGs in 4 seconds instead of this lousy 7." As far as I'm concerned, text and image rendering hasn't noticeably changed in 10+ years. But, I suppose you have to have something to make up for alienating your userbase with an interface designed for a machine it's not running.
no it isn't :-P
maybe your machine isn't hardware accelerated enough.
So, "typographically rich" is the new buzzword, yes?
It's ugly. I really want to like it, but metro's big colored blocks feel like a step back on a desktop. I have four screens, several feet away from me, I don't want to touch them. I suspect that once its released the first thing that will be done is the "back to the desktop and start menu" hack. And yes, I know this has been done, but still. Its ugly.
Over the years I've knocked Microsoft quite a bit. But I have to say that after 2 years of using Windows 7 I am still happily pleased. I've had one crash with blue screen of death. And very few problems outside of trying to run iTunes.
So let's be a bit fair. Heck, Windows 7 crashed less than my OS X experience of the same amount of time. Not saying it's perfect. But on decent hardware with good drivers, it's pretty darn good. And a lot better than anything Microsoft did in the past.
Here's to hoping they've got their driver-related ducks in a row... methinks they don't... at least not for everything. So while one person is getting sunburned eyes from the speed of the Metro interface, there are a few others who watch their computers implode in a steaming pile of pastel shit.
In other words... I have reservations about how well this will work, and since this is Microsoft... You'll get full hardware acceleration in Windows 9.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Software has dramatically outpaced hardware over the last decade. The lowest end PCs available for purchase can easily run Windows 7, especially if given a few extra gigs of RAM (by far the cheapest component) or given an SSD (by far the slowest component).
End users will never, ever notice this speed because I've never waited for Windows 7 to render text. Ever.
By all means, software speedups are more than welcome and it's good that Microsoft have avoided the typical bloat that many have suspect Intel pushes, but the most important battlefields by far for Windows 8 acceptance will be stability, ease of use, compatibility with legacy applications and hardware support.
Stability is in doubt if there's big changes, which there looks like there will be.
Ease of use... Metro has been copping a lot of flak from the technical user camp, but we don't know what Joe User will think of it yet. In any event, it's a lot of retraining, which is not a good sign.
Legacy application and hardware support will probably be equal to Windows 7, with a loss in application support and a gain in hardware support.
TL;DR: Well done, but I hope this isn't *all* Microsoft have when it comes to Windows 8.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
As side benefit you computer double as heater as soon as it turned on.
last year?
In Gnome,(Meacity) and other xwindow managers use of composite extentions and other stuff has been long and painful, full of fuck ups.
Something tells me pain for windows users has just began!
There's plenty of sections like e.g. the one about memory utilization where the author tells about various situations the devs have been benchmarking and why, but then ends bluntly with "Measuring memory usage across many types of apps and these various scenarios has helped us further optimize DirectX and the display drivers." without actually describing how or what they did. There is similarly no mention whatsoever about the devs improving performance for GDI-based applications; all they talk about is DirectX and/or Metro. With regards to e.g. "Improving geometry rendering performance" we find this gem: "For Windows 8, our improvements in this area have primarily focused on delivering high-performance implementations of HTML5 Canvas and SVG technologies for use in Metro style apps, and webpages viewed with Internet Explorer 10." which to me seems like saying that non-Metro applications won't really see any benefit from this at all. I may be interpreting it wrong, I admit, but it's hard to say without any more details.
Yes I know you trying to be funny but as an IT consultant for small and midsized businesses, I haven't seen a Windows system totally crash since XP and even then rarely saw any crashes after SP3. For all the haters here on Slashdot, Windows is still by far the best desktop environment available for use in a business setting.
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To be fair, a Commodore 64 could render the Metro interface at a reasonable speed. The advantage of changing to an interface that looks like it is from the 80s or 90s is that you don't have to push around a lot of pixels or do fancy 3D tricks to make it work.
When they finally retire the old non-Metro UI and just have the full-screen interface, I wonder if they will rename the product from Microsoft Windows to Microsoft Window. The tagline: there can be only one (program onscreen).
Many Windows crashes was caused by hardware acceleration. As a result Vista supported less hardware acceleration than XP.
This makes me wonder if what they've done is gain back some of that performance. They say they render lines and Rectangles faster, and that's hardware accelerated on XP, while software on Vista (don't know about 7).
The only application that runs painfully slowly on my Windows machine is Office 2010 (try Word with track changes enabled). The other stuff is actually quite snappy. Is this another case of MS modifying Windows to fix Office?
Joke aside, I wonder what this will do to battery life on a typical laptop?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
might restore your faith in windows crashing.
Jesus, these initial comments bore the hell out of me.
Here's the way I see it: Microsoft has finally gotten off their asses and recognized that efficiency really does matter when dealing with power efficient mobile GPU's. Given that Metro's ethos is stark simplicity, it'll be entertaining to watch how developers exploit the new capabilities. If the result is silky smooth navigation in nearly all apps, that'll be a big win. If the result is a rebirth of gradients, glows, glass, and other crap, I'll be pretty disappointed.
Hats off to Microsoft for focusing not just on Metro speed, but speed for all apps.
I've seen three Windows 7 crashes - caused by overheating graphics cores, all on the same computer.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Do you understand what happens when you give applications direct access to the hardware? The #1 source of crashes on the NT line has always been video card issues. Windows 8 will have the same problem. These idiotic moves will destabilize the OS until they can patch it in Windows 8 SP3.
And why do you give a shit about hardware acceleration on a desktop computer in business? Do your Office fonts not load up fast enough? Is that 336% faster going to help you? From my experience, the only thing that matters for speed in business settings is antiquated hardware, database settings, and network speeds.
Are you trying to imply rendering things in less time than before and more efficiently with a GPU produces more heat than the previous method of using more time to render the same thing less efficiently on the CPU? You might wish to rethink that.
Those areas aren't really where hardware acceleration is important. We've got overpowered CPUs with cores just waiting for jobs.
Why would I care if text renders in 100 microseconds or 300? There has always been some 2D acceleration for text and scrolling and such. Not everything has to be a video game with graphical effects.
As for DirectX 11.1, just fuck off. Very few games even bother to overlay a few DirectX 10 or 11 effects for those who qualify. No, they use DirectX 9, because Microsoft has alienated previous versions of Windows (and the consoles use DX9 too of course)
A boring, crippled user interface with a seriously insulting attempt to lock people into their application store. THAT is what I see in WIndows 8. I very much despise it and I will actively fight against it.
Sooo, by integrating over each Windows iteration, supposedly x% faster than the previous, is Windows 8 1000% faster than Windows 3.1?
Will Metro run on my Commodore PC 20-III?
Actually I have to correct myself. I have had servers crash but that was primarily due to being improperly configured.
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I'm pretty sure an erase background message filling a solid block of colour will also be substantially (437%?) faster than rendering a translucent gradient texture filled rectangle. Aero is some what hardware accelerated, but it certainly isn't operation 'free'.
Well then you can't blame the software for a hardware failure. I was running my original Windows 7 installation until a few days ago, when I decided to start fresh. 3 years without any significant problems, it's been the smoothest experience so far. I distinctly remember the day it launched, my coworkers asked about it, and they had to ask twice when they heard me speak the words "Windows 7 is fucking awesome". This, coming from a guy running a heavily-modified Gentoo-KDE workstation, bragging about 300-day uptime with XP relegated to a tiny VM on a side monitor.
3 years later, well, I still think Windows 7 is great. Does what I expect from Windows, nothing more, nothing less. Runs fast, supports all my hardware, sleeps/resumes without a hitch, uptime is dependent on whether I care to install monthly updates. Pretty much my only gripe is I wish the default shell were Bash instead of CMD (and Cygwin still sucks).
-Billco, Fnarg.com
What time does it now take to draw the entire screen blue?
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Indeed, the blog post doesn't mention GDI with even one word and basically talks only about speeding up DirectX, Metro and HTML. Unless some Microsoft representative clearly says GDI+ has also been improved I'd say it's safe to assume the answer is "no, and never will be."
Windows is still by far the best desktop environment available for use in a business setting.
Windows is only the "best" desktop environment for business purely because most business use MS Office. Those businesses that DON'T use MS Office (and there a a surprising number, which is increasing with each "improvement" in Office releases), funnily enough would say that Windows is NOT the "best" desktop environment for business.
applications don't get direct access.. drivers do. if the drivers clobber things they shouldn't, they can crash the kernel.. just like the unix derivatives in service today.
I was a Linux guy for many years, ran RedHat, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian... all on servers and all on the desktop. I am more satisfied with Windows 7 than I was any of those OS's. They were good, and when I was in the Linux server business, they were vital for remaining integrated with my servers. But anymore, Windows 7 has better apps available (OMG you have to PAY for them?! OMG!! yes who cares they're good) and is plenty stable. I no longer have to reboot every day. I reboot when its needed for an update or something else, but not because "windows is acting weird, I had better reboot."
The truth of the matter is that I am impressed with MS's bounce back from Vista, moving forward with a nice stable OS that is easy to use and easy to work on, too. I look forward to Windows 8, although I'm nervous about the huge paradigm shift and what it'll do for computing at large. I've had the start menu for almost 20 years, I'm kind of used to it. But, times change and we've got to change with them, like it or not. The hardware acceleration is about time, IMHO. They've apparently streamlined it enough that they can start optimizing for every day tasks. I wish them the best, because frankly, like it or not, the Desktop OS's run throughout the world, are Windows based. Anyone who is still waiting for the "year of the Linux Desktop" will be waiting for a long time.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Probably improve it, seeing how both OS X and iOS are hardware accelerated through and through and deliver solid battery life.
In the handful of malware cases I've seen on a Win7 system, the have been limited to userland and easily cleaned. As to rebooted they are primarily reserved for software updates and installations requiring drivers.
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they claimed they did this in windows 7, but it turns out that minimising windows and so on can make audio programmes skip.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Do you mean GDI or GDI+ (they are two different things)?
GDI+ has been a legacy API for years, barely maintained solely because .NET WinForms sits on top of it. I don't think it was ever properly hardware accelerated - the framework for that was created in XP, but no-one bothered on the driver side.
My Windows 8 RP install crashed itself three days ago, and the install was only two weeks old. Tried a reboot and the system booted up already logged in to my user account (and this was a full reboot, BIOS screen and all) and I couldn't get past the login screen to log out of it properly. Tried rebooting again and the system wouldn't boot to Windows 8 at all. It went into a self-repair mechanism and couldn't fix the issue. I also couldn't "refresh" or "reset" the installation. Only solution was a full reformat of the hard disk.
Thank goodness it was a dual-boot machine to start with and I could still boot into XP-64 (that was on a separate internal drive). Was able to save some configuration files but lost a few actual files. So I guess it was a disk directory issue.
what I remember is that with vista rtm, gdi+ was not accelerated.. after people complained, it was put back in with a service pack, and it is accelerated in windows 7.
A GPU is till a CPU. Either your intel chip will render the text (which involves font files/ glyps/ floating point math), or your Nvidia GPU will, which has specifica hardware instructions optmized for the tasks which rendering text needs.
So really, I can see why offloading rendering text to GPU makes sense.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
I remember them doing something similar in Windows 95. Of course, back then it was 2D graphics accelerators rather than 3D...
Windows Server 2012 (server version of Windows 8) comes with a new filesystem (ReFS). Just not the one that was promised in Longhorn (WinFS).
But it isn't just office. Active directory is much easier to deploy and manage than an assortment of linux servers running ldap, DNS, etc. Business isn't just email, word, and excel. It is about effortless collaboration and communication.
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The post fails to mention if old GDI+ apps are accelerated too? (In Vista they were, but not in W7)
GDI/GDI+ is not accelerated at all in Vista. Windows 7 reintroduced some of the acceleration in GDI (mostly blitting if I recall correctly).
You should give PowerShell a chance. It's built in and it's actually pretty cool once you learn the environment.
SEE? Windows is buggy!
A REAL OS would have just kept on chugging until those puppies burned out.
just like every single operating system in service today.
There, FTFY.
AD is nothing to do with DESKTOP environment - which is what we were talking about. AD is the NETWORK infrastructure.
"due to being improperly configured."
was that during install time when you inserted the Windows install disk instead of SuSE or Redhat? --
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Why do you think we still use CPU? GPU core can't stop if it started thread, it can only ignore result on early return. Neither it do branch prediction or efficient caching. Basically through into it big data or small data - if the size is not hardcoded it will do the same amount of work. Simplifying it somehow you can say It recalculate whole screen buffer to change a single pixel.
Fair enough but then there is the issue of readily available, fully supported, Industry specific software.
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Because it is a good OS. This isn't the only place they've increased speed. Cakewalk tried out Sonar X1 (their top flight digital audio workstation product) on 8 and found an across the board speed improvement. Not a recompile or something that used new special 8 features, just the code they have out now running on 8.
The technical types have done good work on it. It looks like they were just able to make it faster, more efficient and all that kind of jazz, and do so without increasing hardware requirements. Wonderful. What's more, they made it so it could run tablet and phone apps, which is cool if you find an app you like and want it on the desktop.
Unfortunately marketing got involved and said "We have to use desktops to drive sales of the tablets nobody wants! Make it use a tablet interface even though that sucks for desktop use!"
So we have a good OS, with a shitty UI. Oh well. Personally, it doesn't bother me much. I'll just replace the UI. I imagine Stardock will make a good set of tools to make it look good (they've already released a beta start menu tool) and Classic Shell already has Windows 8 support. So no problems for me.
It more annoys me at work. What I can guarantee will happen is people will get it either because they want to try it or because they get a new computer, they'll hate the changes, demand 7 back (which we'll give them) and then never want to move from 7, ever, because they'll decide it is "The last good OS."
I'm sure the MS programmers are pretty bitter at the marketing heads right now fucking up what really is quite a good set of technical improvements.
As far as I know, OS X has used the GPU to render everything for several years. So how does Windows 8 compare? Is this another example of Windows playing catch-up?
Didn't Mac OS X have this years ago?
Next, people will be trying to sell me bottled water.
Apple's Wild New Patent Covers TV & Advanced 5D Technology -
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/07/apples-wild-new-patent-covers-tv-advanced-5d-technology.html [patentlyapple.com]
Twenty five more patents were just granted to Apple that blow past Wii, Move, and Kinect which will all be instantly rendered obsolete the moment these patents appear as Apple 4D and 5D hardware.
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/07/apples-25-granted-patents-include-apple-tv-future-id-app.html
Could this be why Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all now fear Apple TV?
Samsung get your hardware and software copiers ready, you know you have nothing to fear.
Quote
“They copied all they could follow,
But they couldn’t copy my mind.
“So I left ‘em sweatin’ and schemin’,
a year and a half behind”
I bet it also crashes much much faster!!
Jokes aside, I've been testing the latest release, and not only is it stable, for the first time in my experience, a new Microsoft OS is faster on older hardware than the previous versions. Yes, I know Apple did that for years, but it's still a welcome trend for users (if not for hardware makers, as it provides less incentive to go out and buy new stuff". I've been pleasantly surprised how fast it is thus far. I hate the new interface paradigm, but performance-wise, I just can't complain.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I hate windows a great deal, but I must admit I've seldom seen people complain about windows 7 crashing, so I guess at least they finally gotten rid of that.
When it comes to freezes and slowdowns, I've heard a pretty great deal though.
C'mon, the only reason this is downvotes is because of fanboyism, it's cleary intended to be funny, and it very much is.
Yes, PowerShell is very useful especially if you are managing a large environment, well worth the investment in learning. I forced myself to only use PowerShell for last six months and it is good. Some simple bash commands like ls work in PowerShell. Having said that I did install ActiveState Perl today because I missed Perl and someone gave me a screwed up data file that needed a good cleanup. Could have parsed it in PowerShell, but Perl is so easy...
Pretty much my only gripe is I wish the default shell were Bash instead of CMD (and Cygwin still sucks).
Well, you have powershell for that. In case you didn't know, Powershell is windows' answer to bash. It is a runtime interpreter, has a programming language of its own and can automate any kind of administrative task in seconds. Its pretty cool.
I'm using Customer Preview 8250 right now to build the windows port of my software.
It is so much faster and more responsive than any windows I've ever used before.
Please Please Please put the start menu back. You can keep your overlay mode; I don't care, just make it work like every other version of windows out there.
In QNX *most* drivers drivers will not crash the OS.
Not true. Many embedded systems use microkernels that can't do this. The driver can issue DMA requests, but it must call into the microkernel to request some memory for the target or the IOMMU will raise an exception.
It's increasingly easy to implement operating systems where buggy drivers can't trash the entire system now that most consumer CPUs come with an IOMMU. If you're using an nVidia GPU, almost all of the complex logic is actually in userspace. All that the kernel-space driver does is set up a context on the GPU with a command submission buffer mapped into userspace and allocate memory in VRAM or in main memory accessible from the GPU. The card can only DMA to regions registered in the GART, so there's basically nothing a malicious or buggy userspace program can do except trash its own memory and fill the image buffer that he windowing system will composite for its window with nonsense. High end NICs (e.g. infiniband) have also been designed in this way for a long time, because the overhead of going via the kernel was too high.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
last year?
Possibly. FFMPEG also has an astonishingly fase decoder and encoder, much faster than libJPEG. I suspect it doesn't decode all features properly, but it is very, very fast. I still can't figure out how to get in to be able to decode JPEGs usin it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Most likely it will improve it. In general, running tasks on the GPU uses less power than on the CPU. It's almost always more power-efficient to use dedicated silicon than general purpose, and while a GPU is a general-purpose processor these days it's still heavily optimised for this kind of task, whereas the CPU is not.
It's also worth noting that MS has had a long time to tune this. The original implementation of GPU-accelerated font rendering was done by MSR about a decade ago. In the time it's taken them to transfer the technology from research to a product, academic research projects have spun out companies, had them bought by MS, and had their products integrated into the MS lineup. This is a pretty good case study of what's wrong with Microsoft's interaction with its research division.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, Microsoft has fixed crashes, and Windows is now at least technically an acceptable system. But the only reason it is any good in a business setting is because people actually know it and because backwards compatibility is important. Objectively, if Microsoft would offer Windows and Office as a new product on the market, they'd be laughed at: Microsoft's products are ridiculously complex, inconsistent, and buggy.
...be any faster than what it is now, due to this complete hardware acceleration?
Part of what went wrong with Vista (part) was that they were aiming up the CPU/RAM upgrade curve, and no one upgraded because their computers were already Good Enough to do everything they wanted to do. I can still see the speed differences on the same (decent!) hardware between XP and Win 7 ... Granted Win 7 has a proper Administrator/Sandbox layer so I expect some slowdown but not that much.
So yeah, enough praising MS for this move, they're 7 years late with it.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Not necessarily, some OSes have drivers separated in groups
ics
You can use Windows as a server? Gosh, next you'll be saying they do phones too.
DNS, LDAP, etc. are available with easy-to-use web-based managment interfaces as appliances, far easier than maintaining Microsoft stuff. But that's the wrong argument to make, because the entire style of computing Active Directory represents is itself obsolete.
Yes, and cloud solutions like Google Apps and Zoho beat anything Microsoft has to offer hands down, both in terms of usability and ease of management. Microsoft knows that their stuff is obsolete, which is why they'll drag you into cloud computing whether you want to or not anyway, all the while keeping a tight grip on your wallet.
I keep getting a weird issue where Windows will behave as if the CTRL key is stuck down on the keyboard, even when it isn't (and so trying to switch app in the taskbar just selects multiple). I get this on basically every computer I've used, so it can't be a hardware problem.
Anyone else get this?
120 characters should be enough for anybody
Anyone who is still waiting for the "year of the Linux Desktop" will be waiting for a long time.
I don't know about that, but Ubuntu has clearly not sang its last song. With smooth and nice Wayland coming, Steam for games and, the slick Unity interface (yes, I like it, especially when it runs faster now), there's interesting times ahead for desktop Linux too.
I can see the potential a productivity increase by at least 200% already.
*writes memo to management*
I will also recommend to turn on the caps lock by default, because I learned that also gives a better experience.
Privacy is terrorism.
Windows 7 is nice. As usual, it has some questionable but not outright catastrophic UI design choices and some annoying but harmless quirks but it's vastly better than XP was. Then again it suffers from not being POSIX compliant (sure, Windows might have something similar to grep, sed or awk but having to relearn everything to cater to one specific OS vendor is somewhat wasteful when everyone else supports those tools).
Of course it depends on what you do. I'm a web developer, so having a well-configured local server environment is paramount and XAMPP never meshed well with me. Between the platform-independent IDE, the platform-independent office suite and a bash with all the tools I need out of the box I really don't have anything on Windows that I particularly miss. Okay, IE for compatibility testing but you can always keep a Win box around or use a VM.
As for bluescreens: I did get bluescreens that only occurred in Win 7 but I'm pretty certain that the computer had a subtly flaky mainbord.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
In a corporate environment? HELLO?! If your shop is so small, that you actually can look at the desktop environment without your networking, then it's not really a corporate environment.
Yeah, your point may be factual and correct but in the real world, it's mighty useless...
BIOS screen doesn't prove anything.. I dual (quad?) boot with two instances of Ubuntu, one of Win7 and one of Win8. Usually, there's only one entry for both WIndows in GRUB, WIndows 8. Sometimes after selecting Win8 from GRUB, it goes directly to Windows 8 instead of waiting for the choice on 7/8, almost as if Windows 8 had slept/hibernated/resurrected. And in such instances I am invariably logged in. Has happened about 4 times so far. But no problems before or after booting.
.
.
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[adding some lower case text to get past slashdot's all-caps filter. i appreciate encouraging people not to use all-caps all the time, which can be annoying. but in this case that is the whole point.]
Windows is only the "best" desktop environment for business purely because most business use MS Office. Those businesses that DON'T use MS Office (and there a a surprising number, which is increasing with each "improvement" in Office releases), funnily enough would say that Windows is NOT the "best" desktop environment for business.
Crap. Window is the best because Microsoft offer a complete suite of products catered to integrating all the common back office functions. Directory, file, print, email, proxy, database, web and Office (and a whole bunch of other stuff too long to list here) all integrates seamlessly out of the box. I've seen plenty of MS haters attempt to replicate this functionality with a bunch of bespoke home brew 'free' solutions that are undocumented, unreliable and impossible for another employee to figure out what is going on.
Getting a bit off topic, but I'll bite: /.) I have the impression that the influence of the current console generation on graphics features is waning, because they can no longer keep up with current gaming PCs.
Games publishers are increasingly using DirectX10 and DirectX11 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support). In case of Battlefield 3, DX10 is even a minimum requirement.
Based on other articles and forums (not only on
Of course, this might change with the next console generation. Which will probably support DirectX 11.1 (at least the new XBOX will do it). Then we can have the same discussion again over DirectX13 ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
"I want my apps and my config to move with me if I have to work on another computer". NFS mounted home directories on UNIX means that this isn't a problem on those machines. It does it without AD, therefore why implement it?
However, windows wants it all on the C: drive and locally mounted, therefore they have to have this all reconfigured on boot/login.
Yeah it's a real shame windows don't have something that lets your profile roam with you.
- Roaming profiles
- Folder redirection (with or without mandatory profiles)
- Group Policy
- Group Policy preferences (can't remember how I managed without those, now. What's a login script again?)
And probably a bunch of other stuff I missed, that was off the top of my head. And it's click-and-drool to deploy for the most part, and troubleshooting is just right-click-and-drool.
Which goes back to it only being the best business desktop because most businesses use MS office (thus run windows, thus have the install base to maximise profit on a dev platform).
In an ab-initio race with today's platforms, I think we'd see something like the home computer market in the 80s. Very diverse. Any evolutionaly system can achieve a false maxima, which is the niche that Windows occupies at the moment. It may not be the most effective tool to bring to bear in many situations these days, but it has the most momentum, so it gets used.
I understand the concept, just don't figure that text rendering should need to be benchmarked, it is the most basic PC display function. (a hint of sarcasm here)
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Question: do you like eating cupcakes while working?
Alternatively, do any of your co-workers like to play practical jokes, and keep turning on one of the accessibility options like sticky keys? It may be possible to turn that on via policy, or remotely...
Or maybe you're triggering one of the keyboard shortcuts but that isn't easy to do, like pressing the left shift key 5 times quickly and then not seeing the prompt.
I guess the drawcall for the material with the blue texture would be calculated fast enough with the additional GPU-power so perhaps in less than 0.01 seconds. This could mean a potential of 6000 blue screens per second.
It's surprising to me as well how long it's taken them to do this. Mac OS X has been using GPU acceleration (Quartz Extreme / Core Graphics) since 10.2 in 2002, and really ramped it up in subsequent releases with Core Image and QuartzGL.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Really? How do they do that then? Give us the technical details.
applications don't get direct access.. drivers do. if the drivers clobber things they shouldn't, they can crash the kernel..
Actually, Windows (since Vista) has a more fault-tolerant hybrid driver model for graphics drivers: A "core" part runs in kernel space and the bigger more complicated part runs in user space. If the part of the driver which runs in user mode causes memory corruption, only the user process is affected. This is the major reason why Vista and 7 systems seems more reliable than XP. Microsofts telemetry indicated that poor graphics drivers and overheating and misbehaving graphics cards were *the* major reason for instability of Windows systems.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188739.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220.aspx
Windows also can allow the graphics card to re-initialize if it determines that it has faulted or freezes. For a period I was really annoyed about Internet Explorer 9 when I tried it out. It seemed smooth, especially so when I were scrolling up and down (GPU accelerated). But every 5 seconds or so it would pause for just a fraction of a second. Not much, but definitively enough to being annoying. Little did I know that it was actually the nVidia driver that faulted and the Windows graphics system was actually resetting and re-initializing. When I realized that and updated to the latest nVidia driver the problem went away (I still use Chrome; there still is this "feel" to IE9 that isn't quite right - cannot put my finger on it, though).
they can crash the kernel.. just like the unix derivatives in service today.
I don't think that OS X has a similar model - but then again on OS X Apple can tightly control and regression test the limited number of cards and drivers. I have definitively had X crash on me and taking all the apps down with it on more than one occasion - not so much after running Linux mainly under VMWare and Hyper-V.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
osx for estheticity
linux for diversity
windows for jobsecurity
For me it's -
Windows for games
Linux for getting stuff done
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Ha.. that's a bit of a stretch. I turn roaming profiles off on a number of desktops and if the system hasn't been down for too long, windows will allow cached credentials to get you to a desktop as long as the last valid password is used. Well, at least XP will, we have application issues stopping a move to newer operating system at one of my sites. I have never tried to log on with vista or windows 7 with the AD down at my other sites. But you can get to a desktop without touching the network at a corporate site.
Well then you can't blame the software for a hardware failure. I was running my original Windows 7 installation until a few days ago, when I decided to start fresh. 3 years without any significant problems, it's been the smoothest experience so far. I distinctly remember the day it launched, my coworkers asked about it, and they had to ask twice when they heard me speak the words "Windows 7 is fucking awesome". This, coming from a guy running a heavily-modified Gentoo-KDE workstation, bragging about 300-day uptime with XP relegated to a tiny VM on a side monitor.
3 years later, well, I still think Windows 7 is great. Does what I expect from Windows, nothing more, nothing less. Runs fast, supports all my hardware, sleeps/resumes without a hitch, uptime is dependent on whether I care to install monthly updates. Pretty much my only gripe is I wish the default shell were Bash instead of CMD (and Cygwin still sucks).
Wow, this is probably the first honest and thoughtful yet believable post I've seen on the tubes actually giving win7 the praise it deserves. I also was running xp at home and linux at work until win7 came out, and now I have it in both places. Just can't justify the "hassle" of setting up and configuring linux - which always takes a lot of time for *me* (maybe not a more leet haxxor) because win7 really does just work in a very non-annoying fashion.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
I've seen three Windows 7 crashes - caused by overheating graphics cores, all on the same computer.
I've never seen win7 crash except for my laptop - and it's BSOD'd maybe 4 times (maybe 5) in probably 3 years. I traced the problem to a buggy ATI graphics driver clashing with the AV which WAS on there at the time. It seems fine now, I just use MSSE because I run every browser in a sandbox and don't do stupid things.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Many Windows crashes was caused by hardware acceleration. As a result Vista supported less hardware acceleration than XP.
What? Vista came with Aero which is entirely *dependent* on HW acceleration. If your graphics card does not support HW acceleration, you could not run with aero.
Also, Vista changed the graphics model from a redraw model to a composition model. The composition model is again mandatory hardware accelerated. If your card doesn't support graphics composition Windows falls back to the redraw model.
What happened with Vista was that Microsoft split the graphics drivers so that the drivers had to come in two parts: a core part running in kernel mode and a user mode part which does most of the computations.
So while you are somewhat correct that many Windows crashes was due to HW acceleration (actually, more generally dure to bad cards or drivers - not necessarily acceleration), the new driver model did not support *less* acceleration. It supported *more* acceleration (composing, aero glass etc) - only it moved it from kernel mode to user mode to increase reliability.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
I use Linux (fedora/ubuntu), OS X (personal rMBP), and Windows (7 64bit ultimate at home, 32bit professional at work).
I have always wanted to "hate" windows, and "love" Linux, and in the past I have wanted to "love" mac os too.
in the past I have had plenty of reasons to hate windows, but by XP sp3, it was less, thoguh now that I am on 7, i actually HATE xp.
I was probably one of the few people that didn't hate Vista. Maybe because i used the 64bit version, I dont know, but it was stable if not particularly spectacular. It got the job done.
Windows 7 is a phenomenon in comparison. Together with the SSD, it just worked. Being able to send movies to my TV with a right click on the file, and without installing anything. Windows 7 just works, and although i do have a dual boot Ubuntu partition on my computer, i rarely use it. My chief annoyance is its inability to read any file systems on USB Mass Storage other than FAT/FAT32, and is the real remaining evilness of MS (forcing manufacturers of devices such as cameras to support FAT and pay their "tax" to MS)
OSX, is pretty, but not necessarily better than 7. It is not more easier either (keyboard shortcuts are more extreme). OSX is just different in my books. It too has some evilness such as the restriction on supporting TRIM only on Apple approved SSDs. It also has in some ways less application support (excluding BSD)
Linux is the OS i prefer to use for development, and also servers. However, I still spend way too much time configuring it than I have time for. When I was younger, and have time, it was fun. These days, I am married, a professional, and simply don't have time.
Have a nice day!
I've had one blue screen with Windows 7. I was in a meeting with my laptop connected to a large display. We got off on a tangent talking about something and my laptop display went to sleep. I reached down and woke it up by swiping across the touchpad and it displayed a bluescreen then promptly rebooted.
Every other time I've been pissed off by Windows was while playing a game (different machine) and alt-tabbing out or otherwise forcing the video sub-system to switch Aero off/on. In those cases I get no bluescreen. The computer just outright freezes up. This has happened much more often than the bluescreen I got in the meeting, but that's mainly because I spend most of my Windows 7 time as a Steam Kernel.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
>Well then you can't blame the software for a hardware failure.
I think that was the point of his post.
I really like Windows 8, and in general, I tend to prefer the way it does things on the desktop. I'm on the fence about Metro.. I think its awesome if you have your PC plugged into a TV, the way I do. And, I like the idea of flipping to a full screen view when looking for applications... but, oddly, I find that Ubuntu's latest version does it better.
This is my sig.
If you think that "roaming profiles" are what "collaboration and communication" are about, you're about 30 years behind the times. And if you think that in 2012, you can give people a corporate laptop and force them to run corporate software on it, you're working for a dinosaur.
Sure you haven't seen a crash since XP, was that when you began your consultant position?
To counter your luck with windows: my acer aspire one with the amd APU 50 with win7 crashed during the first boot ever, while on the "god knows what it's doing" configuration/registration/whatever thing.
The hardware is not at fault having worked reliably under linux for one year, even if the support of the hardware is not fully functional.
Now, a preinstalled OS that crashes during the post-pre-installation phase is something you should find on a comic strip, not IRL.
What about a win7 desktop that transfers to the same USB3 disk data in a FAT partition at 20 mb/s less speed than it does when the partition is reformatted to NTFS, in the same session? What about all the win desktops that cease network operation because of a misconfigured router that shouldn't act as DNS server, while the linux workstations on the same network continue to hum along happily?
Anyway all of this is irrelevant. Those who understand the importance of using an OS which stays out of the way instead of being a tool that a corporation employs to make more profit take the time to try alternatives. Those who don't will be stuck in the 3 years upgrade cycle for their basic office automation needs and think it's normal.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Sure it may draw faster but I can load 5 other office programs by the time Metro Mail loads. Maybe uh, work on that.
Windows 8 should scare you a little. If you look at Microsoft's history, they have a pattern of in-between favorite releases being more of a testbed then a release.
If we start with windows 95, we get windows 98 which they fixed half way through with windows 98 second edition which was pretty stable by the time windows ME came out. Windows Me either rocked for you or it sucked donkey balls. If it worked, it worked well, if it didn't, it hardly ever did. Then came XP which by all accounts was a world of improvement over windows ME and stability once again resumed. We then got the testbed for windows7 which was windows vista. Vista is comparable to windows ME in that it seemed to try but wasn't the little engine that could. Now we have windows 7 which once you get used to the UI differences from XP, is once again the solid result of the previous operating system or beta version.
It actually goes back a little further then win9x. As a user who has had experience with working on and fixing MS based systems since DOS 4.01(a), and later windows, I will gladly wait for windows 9 or at least a service pack or two for windows 8 before trying to be productive with it. windows 8 should be the testing platform if MS maintains its trend.
Of course you could always go here and play with the windows really good edition.
Linux might.... about 12 years ago I had an old 486 running Redhat as a router. I did something stupid like put the cover back on the computer case while it was running. About a half hour later the internet stopped working. I go to the server and look at the console. I must have knocked the IDE cable out of the hard drive because the screen was filled with messages like "write failed", then a big HALT "out of memory" error. When the hard drive was unplugged, the OS kept pending HD writes in memory (logs, etc.) until it ran out of RAM. The rest of the system functions (NAT routing) kept on chugging along until then!
How cross platform is it? Will Powershell scripts work equally on 64bit Windows 7 as on 32bit XP?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
All this acceleration can only mean one thing - a faster way to render all those flashy ADs to your screen. Without all the bloated flash on most websites, we wouldn't need all this acceleration, in-fact you could probably get by with an old Pentium 100 Mhz PC with a 2MB Trident video card.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
And how quickly does it kill the battery running 2D rendering through the GPU?
I'm a little confused. Is this a mostly-mobile OS or not?
-
I read that a lot here. What exactly does "getting stuff done" entail? I get stuff done all day long on my Windows 7 notebook.
This is just amazing! Microsoft has written something which can accelerate my hardware! Those efficient coders in Redmond have done it again. Making the most of our older hardware which would otherwise end up in landfills all over...
Then we can render more than 64 JPEGs at once.
From the wikipedia (hard to find, I know :P):
"Version 1.0 was released in 2006 for Windows XP SP2/SP3, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista. For Windows Server 2008, it is included as an optional feature.
Version 2.0 is integrated with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and is released for Windows XP with Service Pack 3, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista with Service Pack 1.[29]"
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell for more info.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
In other words, a corporation.
You may think that the mainframe model applied to PCs constitutes a dinosaur but that's simply how anything beyond a one man shop operates. If you think otherwise, you need to stop going to "occupy" rallies, move out of mom's basement, and get an actual job.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I had a smoothwall box where the hard disk failed and we didn't notice for 6 months.
I got suspicious when PFY informed me that there hadn't been any updates for it in about 9 month, I checked the website and the other smoothwall box and found a few updates released in that time. Turns out it tried to download the list of available updates to the hard disk and then checked those against the list of updates installed. As it couldn't save the list it found nothing to install!
As it loaded all software into RAM upon boot, and the logging was buffered in memory (and we hadn't needed to check it as it was a backup anyway) everything just kept on running (Firewall rules, VPNs, everything, it just kept on running) until the PFY rebooted it and found it woudn't boot.
SgtWilko.
Sorry if I'm being obtuse, but does that mean that scripts written for version 1 will run on version 2 and vice versa? Is version 2 a superset of version 1, so that it's possible to write scripts in a portable fashion?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
OS X does not use the GPU for font rendering. It renders each character to a texture on the CPU and just composites on the GPU. This was added with Quartz Extreme. X11 also does the same thing via the XRENDER extension, and so does Vista via Direct2D stuff. The MSR paper that I am referring to described how to store the bezier control points on the GPU and then construct the glyph with pixel shaders.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Though I'm all for Linux advocacy and the low-end, it's not been easy to run a basic PC on 512Mb RAM for anything like common usage for a while now. Firefox alone will kill it, and as soon as you're picking and choosing apps which you can run or not, it's not exactly "perfectly fine".
That said, your point is true. Windows 3.11 used to be just fine for office work on a 386 with 4Mb RAM. I could even whack resolutions up to something considered "HD" today. It could do all the same things that most business apps manage today. The thing is that MS (and a lot of the desktop environments, to an extent) lost sight of what the desktop could be. I don't want an intelligent desktop, any more than I want a smart TV.
You know what I want? Fast boot times. Instant window open times. Fast application response. Sensible application control (i.e. just last week I was STILL fighting with an Ubuntu distro that likes to pop up unrelated programs over the top of the program I'm typing a password into and I end up typing my sudo password into a word processor that stole keyboard focus without warning rather than the secure login I was supposed to be typing into - obviously *my* fault for LOOKING DOWN for a fraction of a second...). And nothing that I don't need to be there.
I don't expect HL2 to run like a daemon on a smartphone, but we're not far off. But I do expect my word processor to load quicker than it did in 1990. And I expect my windows to actually minimize/maximise/drag without lag and (if I want) in the most graphically boring way possible (dotted outline boxes, anyone?), so long as it's faster.
There's a real market, I think, for a "business" OS. Locked down to a set of programs that load quickly and do exactly what they need to in a boring interface that needs no resources. As it is, we have businesses trying to shoehorn an operating system designed for games and pretty effects into their networks and then having to deal with the consequences.
Seriously, if I can run Windows 3.11 at LUDICROUS speeds in an emulated environment on a modern PC and get more productivity out of it (if it were for the inconvenience of the software being just-that-old and incompatible), why can't I just have an OS like that? I saw the ship sinking when Active Desktop came along, and it's been slowly sinking ever since - as has relative productivity (i.e. the amount you COULD have got done on a certain specification of PC, compared to the amount you DID get done).
Hell, I've spent literally minutes just staring boot screens, logon screens, hourglasses and everything else just to load up a web browser this morning. It's so bad, I use suspend rather than shutdown by habit now. But still I can't approach the simplicity and productivity that I'd get if someone made LibreOffice work on Windows 3.11, even if I ran it through an emulated environment.
My windows toaster is hardware accelerated. :) Unfortunately, it tends to overheat.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
As an example, how would you do the following in PowerShell: Read a file of text, determine the n most frequently used words, and print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies.
Here's the classic Bash answer:
tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed ${1}q
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Ofcourse it renders faster if you remove a lot of bling bling.. I like the bling bling of windows 7 and I want to keep it for Windows 8. I HATE the fullscreen metro apps, yes they are excellent for tablets and phones, but oh so bad for regular desktop applications.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
you know what QNX is?
No kidding! If the drivers have drivers, then thats an extra layer of protection.
It's written as a bifurcated choice. He said it, just not with text.
In QNX there are several "supervisor" drivers that other drivers talk to via messaging(a special kind of memory messaging". I used to write drivers for QNX2 and 4... if one of my drivers crashed from say a null reference it would just crash and I could restart it. Also drivers generally didn't run in ring 0... I think on 386 arch it was ring 2 or 3... which meant I coudl also run drivers in the standard debugger.
Great story, except that Windows 7 required less memory than Windows Vista... and Windows 8 requires significantly less memory and CPU than Windows 7.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Wait...you're running an unreleased version of software and complaining it crashed...
Well that's what a BETA/RC is supposed to do. Crash. If it didn't, than it would be a release version. ;-)
I will grant you that Skype does in fact have a memory leak that will eventually require a reboot as it slows the system dramatically. But it's never blue screened me....
My windows toaster is hardware accelerated. :) Unfortunately, it tends to overheat.
I bet it's that damn FireWire.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
In fact, it set up a lot more easily than Windows.
However, I do agree that ten years ago Linux was more a hassle to set up.
Windows does have some advantages over Linux, but Linux is no longer a hassle to set up, far from it.
I respectfully disagree that Windows is the best. It's always been my experience that Windows is nothing more than a trap to lock people into Microsoft products, products designed as much as possible to not be compatible with open standards. I don't know what your experience with Linux has been, but my experience has been that configuring and installing "Office" products is trivially easy with any Debian based distro, or even RedHat. If you've seen people attempting to replicate Microsoft products using "home brew 'free' solutions that are undocumented, unreliable and impossible for another employee to figure out what is going on" then I would have to guess those people are new to linux and don't realize that almost every Linux distro comes with a package manager, a package manager that can install free and open standard office automation software that's been available for years. I would encourage you to tell your friends to read up on Ubuntu or Linux Mint and give either either one a shot and especially practice using their package managers to see how easy it is to install software. It's really amazing how much software comes prepackaged in Debian based Linux distros.
never mind metro... ;)
how will Battlefield 3 and 4 run on Windows8.
if real performance gains are to be had, this is the first news i have heard of the OS that calls for myself to upgrade. forget business for a moment & lets focus on bleeding edge performance. Things that business & MAC users know nothing of
Kill your TV
I was thinking on the GDI part of Windows, it is software rendered on Vista. Some applications ran quite badly because of this.
If you wrote WPF or DirectX apps on Vista you got hardware acceleration, but 6 years later and most stuff is stilling using GDI instead.
Looking at the article they're talking about improving Direct2D and SVG performance, which is something apps are starting to use I believe.
I was thinking on the GDI part of Windows, it is software rendered on Vista. Some applications ran quite badly because of this.
But GDI was never hw accelerated on XP. So there was no hw acceleration removed in Vista, as you claimed:
As a result Vista supported less hardware acceleration than XP
Indeed, Vista did come with GDI+ which *introduced* some hw acceleration into the old GDI.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Yes - it's basically just compiling small .NET programs from your input -- which tend to be pretty portable. You should only run into problems if you use new features that aren't available in older environments (but - I'm pretty sure the latest version of .NET can be installed on XP, so that might be a moot point.)
#!/bin/csh cat $0
Microsoft does something positive; Slashdot readers complain.
You're just piping a bunch of programs together. I imagine you could do it the same way with the standard Windows command shell, as long as you have those programs installed.
Why are you deciding "to start fresh" after only "3 years without any significant problems" if it's "the smoothest experience so far"? What keeps you from wanting to continue using it as-is?
I don't have this problem on Windows.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It runs on the 2.0 framework, so you don't need the latest version of .NET.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
Does Windows have the equivalent programs installed? Or alternatively, is there a more Windows-centric way to achieve the same result?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
And in the mean time, Linux still offers no way to draw smooth animations by synchronizing them to vblank. Xsync was supposed to solve that problem 30 years ago, and yet, it still hasn't.
[string]::join(" ",(get-content file.txt)) -replace "[^[a-z]"," " -split " " | group-object | sort-object -desc Count
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
PowerShell is a definite improvement but it's still wrapped in the same functionally crippled terminal window they've been using for years. I haven't yet found a better alternative - if anyone knows about one I'd be grateful.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
That's not the Bash answer, that's the GNU textutils answer. Since you asked, however, I'll give you the PowerShell answer:
get-content .\datasheet_text.txt | foreach-object { $_ -replace '[^a-zA-Z ]', '' } | foreach-object { -split $_ } | group-object | sort-object count -desc | select-object -first 10
That is, of course, quite verbose, and dangerously understandable by coworkers. In the real world, you'd want to do it like this:
gc .\datasheet_text.txt | % { -split ($_ -replace '[^a-zA-Z ]', '') } | group | sort count -des | select -f 10
No programs other than PowerShell are involved here. No external processes are being started. If that was still too much typing, you could alias some of the cmdlets to shorter names.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
So in this age of computer technology I'm still waing for a system that can keep up with my three finger typing...
Point is, had computers of the 80's had the speed of computers today, the graphics would be at realtime speed.
So why the slowdown? Its simply because as computer technology provided more speed and resources the developers find ways of using it up and sometimes even giving the users less than they had before...sooooo
This graphics speed up is either a de-bloating of Windows of the resources are being taken from elsewhere.
How many hours does it take to load that lightening fast graphics based game?
Not by default. There may be equivalents for some, but personally I just have them all installed to C:\bin.
Your video card's driver sucks. Install a working version, or switch to a company that provides working drivers (haha, as if that existed...)
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
GDI has been hw accelerated since Windows 3.1. There was a time they even benchmarked graphics card on how quickly they accelerated windows drawing calls.
GDI+ introduced different text rendering and alpha colors, but you don't get anymore hardware acceleration in GDI from GDI+.
From Wikipedia's GDI article on Vista: "GDI is no longer hardware-accelerated by the video card driver"
Two different cards from different manufacturers. (AMD and nVidia)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Something like:
[regex]::split([io.file]::readAllText($fileName).ToLower(),’\W+’) | group -NoElement | sort count -desc | select -first 6
For power users, Windows simply cannot match the ease of use of a command line that can do literally everything. For example, I switch between three sets of screen resolutions and layouts with shell scripts. Also, KDevelop4.
I read that a lot here. What exactly does "getting stuff done" entail? I get stuff done all day long on my Windows 7 notebook.
I suspect that there are tools for Windows, but I don't know what they are, and I don't care to pay for them.
I've got 16 desktops (only 8 in use right now) with 1-4 terminals open on each, plus other software for those tasks that need graphics or sound. 301 active processes (ps uax|wc -l), machine using 2% CPU.
Unfortunately I can't keep everything open on the various desktops like want it for six months at a time anymore, due to the frequent kernel updates.
Windows has a lot of annoyances for someone who has been using Linux for a long time. No swipe-to-select, click to paste. GUIs require you to click on the text rather than on the button or line that the text is on. Applications serve as their own window managers, so you can't do anything with the window if the application is misbehaving. Everything you do requires confirmation. If you want to work with something in another directory, you have to click around in an explorer rather than just use a relative path with tab completion. Mouse wheel has to be explicitly told what to scroll. (On Linux I often use it to scroll things in windows that aren't even active.) Etc. etc. etc.
Plus if you want to use grep, sed, pipes, etc., you have to install software that turns your Windows box into a host for a Linux environment. Why bother?
I'm sure Windows developers have their own work habits, but these suit mine.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Read a file of text, determine the n most frequently used words, and print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies.
You are just citing a very common question asked in universities. But come to think of it, is determining n most frequent words a part of your daily job. Anyway, I never said that powershell was better than bash. If you see the quoted text, the context was bash vs cmd., I just made it to bash vs powershell. ;)
And for your answer, here you go -
Get-Content file.text | Group | Sort | ft name,count -Autosize
Now you see the coolness of it ?
Like I said... there are no companies producing video cards today with stable, quality drivers.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
GDI has been hw accelerated since Windows 3.1. There was a time they even benchmarked graphics card on how quickly they accelerated windows drawing calls.
I stand corrected then. However, the software rendering was done because of the introduction of the composition engine (applications writing into a memory buffer representing the Windows which is then composed by the driver rather than each app being asked to redraw itself in reverse Z-order) - not because hw acceleration was making it unstable.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Google Apps claims 4 million businesses as their customers, and they're just one of many companies offering cloud services. Many more businesses are converting their in-house IT services to web-based services. And Microsoft is doing the same thing with their product line, they're just slow, as usual.
Sounds like you need to get out of your dark IT basement and update your skills. If you actually work for a corporation, you might find that your users have thrown most of your work under a bus already; my coworkers and I certainly have.
--Ever heard of 4DOS? They updated the product for Windows as a CMD replacement:
http://jpsoft.com/index.php
I use the free version, but I'm really happy with it. I'm more of a Linux guy these days, or I would prolly pay for the full version.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Bet you want free housing and food stamps too!
Wait didn't our governments sue to prevent Microsoft from doing things like that?
From this and the other replies, it (PowerShell) certainly looks quite capable and I'm impressed enough to go and learn something about it (I don't usually admin Windows, but when I do I can maybe start using PowerShell)
You're right about it being a common academic question and I've never had to do that, but I've done similar text manipulation pipelines to convert MYSQL dumps into Oracle sql statements. Real world tasks are usually more difficult to describe, so I just looked for the classic Knuth/McIlroy word count.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
I read that a lot here. What exactly does "getting stuff done" entail? I get stuff done all day long on my Windows 7 notebook.
I'll bite.
It obviously varies per user, but I'm in the same category as the poster you responded to.
All the servers I do dev work for are running FreeBSD. I'm a creature of the command line, I think in pipelines sometimes. I manipulate very large text files. Doing this in Windows is certainly possible; I did it for several years at my current position. But last time I was due for a machine upgrade, I decided to install Linux instead. Once I got through the initial adjustment I found it much easier to do development locally. YMMV, if Windows is a better work environment for you then by all means continue to use it.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
If they want to improve performance of the OS they should look at improving disk accesses - the boot from a classic hard disk can take ages. CPU performance is not much of an issue these days - and only computers I have experienced slow graphics on are computers ripe for retirement anyway.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Plus if you want to use grep, sed, pipes, etc., you have to install software that turns your Windows box into a host for a Linux environment. Why bother?
And I actually use that stuff, frequently. Here's an example of what's in one terminal right now, slightly censored:
Some of it won't make sense (such as sequential commits), because you can't see what I did in other windows or the editor. (The ampersand means it pops up and operates independently of the terminal that I launched it from.)
You also can't see command-line recalls and tab completions (much of the example didn't actually have to be typed), command-line edits with ^a, ^e, ^w etc., and the stuff I did in the other terminals.
Comments added for this post. Many occurences of the "something" censoring are different but not distinguished here.
(Started by clicking the panel for a terminal, then did this in it:)
4581 pushd controlled/something/something/something/ /home ../something/ .. ../someth ### pressed return without intended tab completion ../something/ ### that's better! .pdf extension ../something1/ ### looking for what I renamed it to on another project... ../something2/ ### or was it this project...
4582 ~/make-xterms-1600 ### Shell script creates three more windows on the same desktop, with distinct names and the same present working directory.
4583 emacs to-do.txt &
4584 svn commit -m "More updates to something."
4585 svn commit -m "More updates to something and something."
4586 grep itemsep *.tex
4587 grep -B5 -A5 itemsep *.tex
4588 ~/bin/something --something something.tex|more
4589 svn commit -m "Polish-up on something."
4590 ~/bin/something --something something1.tex
4591 ~/bin/something --something something2.tex
4592 ~/bin/something --something something3.tex
4593 ~/bin/something --something something4.tex
4594 ~/bin/something --something something5.tex
4595 more something.tex
4596 A ### fatfinger
4597 ~/bin/something --something something5.tex
4598 emacs something.tex &
4599 make something ### I use makefiles to build my LaTeX documents.
4600 ~/bin/something --something something.tex
4601 make something
4602 emacs something.tex &
4603 make something
4604 ls -1 *.tex
4605 make something
4606 emacs something.tex &
4607 svn commit -m "More tweaks to various parts."
4608 ~/bin/something --something something.tex
4609 history|grep pdftk ### looking for a command that I can't remember the syntax for, but used earlier
4610 pdftk something.pdf cat 16-17 output something1.pdf
4611 evince something1.pdf
4612 evince something2.pdf
4613 pdftk something.pdf cat 1-15 output something2.pdf
4614 svn commit -m "Final tweaks to something."
4615 ls ~/*something
4616 ls ~/
4617 ls
4618 mv ~/something something.pdf
4619 eog something.pdf ### oops
4620 evince something.pdf ### that's better!
4621 svn commit -m "Added the something of the entire something."
4622 dirs
4623 pushd
4624 emacs something.tex &
4625 make something
4626 svn commit -m "Updated notes w.r.t. new something."
4627 ls
4628 pushd
4629 pushd
4630 ls ~/Desktop/
4631 ls
4632 make something
4633 evince ~/Desktop/something ### web app stored a PDF on my desktop, without
4634 ls
4635 ls
4636 mv ~/Desktop/something som
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Is that Windows fault?
Probably not.
I have seen Linux Crash a lot more then Windows. Mostly because Linux has poor drivers. Vista had bad drivers too, and we laugh and said how inept Microsoft is. However with Linux having a poor set of drivers, we go an blame the driver maker, or the manufacture for not agreeing 100% with RMS view of software.
I agree with the Grandparent here. Ever sense XP SP3 Windows has ran very solid, except for understandable coinsurance, of failing hardware.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Aye, Microsoft apps integrate wonderfully with other Microsoft apps. Too bad that those of us in the real world have hundreds of apps made by other developers that Microsoft is trying to put out of business by purposefully kneecapping compatibility.
how inept Microsoft is
MS changed the driver model with windows vista. With linux the driver model has been the same for quite some time and developers have had time to learn to use it. For vista it was half MS not doing as good a job as it could have explaining how to write drivers, and half companies not giving a shit because Vista was terrible.
And why do you give a shit about hardware acceleration on a desktop computer in business? Do your Office fonts not load up fast enough? Is that 336% faster going to help you? From my experience, the only thing that matters for speed in business settings is antiquated hardware, database settings, and network speeds.
Well this has been microsofts great conundrum for a decade. Windows XP works, so what can they offer that is actually an improvement. Given that every computer sold will have a kind of decent on chip GPU at a minimum you may as well use that, but sure, the difference between wasting 3 seconds and 10 seconds isn't going to hugely improve office productivity.
I think though, it's just one of those things that will reduce the frustration of users. Some of it is 'why not, you have the hardware you may as well use it' and some of it is 'the quicker this task the less likely it is that the employee with tab over to /. and spend 15 minutes goofing off while waiting for a 10 second load screen'.
I don't know about that, but {$currentpopularlinuxdistro} has clearly not sang its last song. With smooth and nice {$currentversion.next}, {$app.next} and, the {$feature.next}, there's interesting times ahead for desktop Linux too.
Fixed that for you so you can reuse it for the next 10 years.
DIGI international, is that the same company that used to make the Digiboard multiport serial boards? Probably. They had some very nice hardware, but their software drivers were always pretty buggy. I remember having to dig into their binaries and patch their software, or working around certain calls to avoid the buggy functions.
Not glad to see things haven't changed in the past 15 years. How are they still around???
What? Are you sure you've used PowerShell? PowerShell scripting gives you access to pretty much all the .NET framework libraries, and all the usual programming concepts that you'd want in any useful language. It's f'ing awesome, actually. There are a number of good tutorials and webcasts available via MSDN.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
anss123 is correct, there were some GDI functions that were hardware accelerated in XP, most notably BitBlt, but there were some others. Vista created a new model, but it required that GDI be rendered to both system and video memory (Where XP rendered directly to video memory or frame buffer) and even BitBlt was software rendered. Windows 7 when coupled with a WDDM 1.1 video driver no longer requires GDI to be rendered in 2 places, and re-enables hardware acceleration on many GDI functions.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff729480(v=vs.85).aspx
I found Windows 7 to be faster on older hardware than it's previous version (Vista), does that not count?
Going back a long ways, Windows for Workgroups was faster than Windows 3.1.
I don't usually admin Windows, but when I do I use DosEquisShell.
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
What they will accelerate is their downfall after Windows 8.
Fuck you Microsoft.
I just realized I've had zero blue screens with Windows 7 and I've been using it hard since the free RC2 or whatever it was (2 home computers, and a work computer I built). I am pleasantly surprised. Usually I have a little adjusting to do for something like that but with 7 everything was better and I knew it right away so I got over the change pretty fast and enjoyed it.
I'd probably be using Linux though if it weren't for gaming at home and a few things at work.
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
I know this is off topic but I think it's important:
I fix malware infected PCs for a living. Every Windows user should be aware that in the last 4 weeks or so I have seen what I believe is the beginning of a new pandemic of malware infections. Unfortunately, the anti-virus companies still haven't agreed on a common naming process. Microsoft Security Essentials is calling it Trojan:Win32/Sirefef.AC (or AH or C, etc.). AVG is calling it Dropper.Generic_C.MMI. This is a rootkit and multi-virus type infection and in many cases it is so difficult to remove that for the AH variant, Microsoft doesn't even offer removal instructions and recommends reformatting and re-installing Windows. All of the systems that I have cleaned have become infected via web site "drive-by": simply visiting infected web sites.
Most of these infections are taking over the Services.exe file. I also strongly suggest using a Repair Disk or DART and learning how to use the SFC command line utility. Booting off of CD/DVD, deleting the infected Services.exe and running SFC, which will scan all of the Windows system files and fix or replace them, including Services.exe. You can also delete other infect files from the command line. Then you can at least have a somewhat clean boot into Windows and run a tool like Hitman Pro to finish the job.
A Google search for those virus names will show the huge number of threads on the malware help sites and note how recent the dates are. I think we'll be hearing about this in the news very soon.
I cut my teeth on Irix back in the 90's, so on my DOS machines, I had an extensive set of Pascal and C utilities to replicate some of that Unix functionality. Perl and PHP have replaced many of those old scraps, but I think part of the problem is that I'm a classic programmer. I expect the shell to handle the occasional loop or conditional statement with some degree of nimbleness, particularly when managing directories. In my mind, it's a half-step down from proper scripting.
Powershell to me feels nonsensical. I like the concept on paper, but it becomes far too verbose to do even basic things like launching Explorer on a folder. I think of it more as a weird GUI-less VB.Net dialect than a proper shell. If I wanted to write proper code, I'd fire up MSVC and go to town...
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I bet it also crashes much much faster!!
AC might have been trolling, but it's correct. If there's a bug in the gpu driver (if?), applications which use the gpu will crash semi-randomly.
This thing looks really interesting. I'll give it a try later, thanks for the rec!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
That's the problem: it's too much .Net at the expense of basic functionality. Sure, it can do just about anything, but for everyday file-based sysadmin tasks, I find the syntax way too verbose. It certainly has its purpose, but it is too codey for what I have in mind. As a programmer, if I want .Net, I'm quite happy to fire up MSVC and write a proper app. I just need a simple, fast, scriptable shell for the basic stuff.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I also strongly suggest using a Repair Disk or DART and learning how to use the SFC command line utility. Booting off of CD/DVD, deleting the infected Services.exe and running SFC, which will scan all of the Windows system files and fix or replace them, including Services.exe. You can also delete other infect files from the command line. Then you can at least have a somewhat clean boot into Windows and run a tool like Hitman Pro to finish the job.
Just spend $50 on a new HDD and reinstall the OS. Safer, faster, less costly. And your data survives on the original disk.
had a couple black screens due to very poorly written graphics drivers in a game but outside of that no troubles in windows 7.
I get stuff done on all three platforms, but these days Windows is where I feel the most productive. Years ago I was all about KDE 3.5, but then KDE 4 made me want to strangle puppies. The Mac is still new to me after a year, and it seems I spend more time mousing than typing, thanks to some serious deficiencies in the keyboard shortcut department.
Windows by itself is pretty useless, but it has some very mature applications the other platforms lack. For example, I've been using the same FTP client for 14 years. It is still updated with subtle but useful features, without ever disrupting my workflow. It isn't free, but for my uses it runs circles around Filezilla. On the Mac, it's even worse with Cyberduck, that thing behaves so mysteriously that I'd rather copy files to my Fusion VM and FTP via Windows.
Linux runs on every other machine I own, except for the one vCenter host, and I regularly berate VMware for that irksome requirement. The problem with Linux, is that I only use it for network admin stuff anymore. KDE is dead to me, Gnome was never a contender, and I occasionally run Fluxbox over VNC for those rare tasks that require X or a Java GUI.
I hate to say it, but for most of my work, Windows is where it's at. It's far from perfect, but it seems every other platform does it even worse.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Agree 100%, I'm in a very similar situation. I picked up a Macbook Pro last year, because my boss needed me to write iPhone apps. I absolutely love the hardware, but hate Mac OS, because it hates the keyboard. Sure, the fancy touchpad is quite hip and responsive, but it's still slower to swipe and drag and tap, than it is to instinctively hit three keys in the middle of a furious typing marathon. It is indeed pretty, but that's all it is: a thin veneer covering up some seriously fucked up code. When it does break, oh man, I'm far from any help. The Apple forums are utterly useless, and the OS itself is incredibly bad at telling me what is actually broken. Sometimes the system log nudges me in the right direction, but it is obvious that nobody spends any significant time in there, because the messages are ambiguous and often misleading.
That said, I've taken a liking to Objective C. It, too, is a bit sloppy under the hood, but for developing GUI apps I think its object/message model makes my life a lot easier than C++ or .Net. It is an order of magnitude less frustrating than writing X apps, that's for sure.
I do miss my lovingly-tuned Gentoo/KDE3 setup, which ran on my old workstation and laptop, but like you, I no longer have the time nor patience to make alternative desktops not suck. I must have spent close to 100 hours tweaking that distro just the way I wanted it, with my own overlay patches and everything. Today, I consider my time far more valuable and would rather spend 2 hours getting Windows 80% of the way there, with the remaining 98 hours logged as billable, or doing other things. Hacking is still fun, but I guess I've grown out of the obsessive vanity that is a Linux desktop.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I don't like WAMP stacks either, and I used to do exactly what you do, a Linux host with Windows in a small VM, but in recent years I've reversed that arrangement. I run Win7, with a bunch of Linux VMs to handle all my dev needs. The main benefits are that I can accurately replicate the live environment, and the VMs are portable. I can even copy the whole thing to my Macbook and go "work" on a sunny patio. If I'm really lazy (read: efficient), I can clone that same VM to the ESXi host and flip it live.
One key motivator is that I was never really happy with any Linux IDE. I take on lots of odd freelancing jobs, so I often wind up working with very messy setups like direct FTP edits or SFTP as root (!). Working within clients' budgets means I don't always have the luxury of fixing those messes, sometimes you just have to tiptoe around the filth, do your thing, get paid and get the fuck out. I don't need nor want an IDE dictating my workflow in those situations, often resorting to Textmate(Mac) or even plain old FlashFXP and Notepad2 on Windows.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
They all suck. AMD, Nvidia, Matrox, Intel... the only stable display drivers are the VMware emulated ones.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If a driver crashed or a piece of hardware malfunctioned it should be possible to kill and restart the driver without crashing or locking up the operating system. X86 has all those ring levels how about actually using them? Not that this is a problem exclusive to Windows but OSes still are not resilient enough.
Actually ever since MS decided backwards compatibility is not very important the chances for Linux or any other alternative desktop OS taking over keep increasing. Not to mention the threat to MS from the smartphone and tablet OSes which will eventually filter to the desktop.
They need to support hardware-accelerated 3D in C# / Xaml metro apps, not just C++ apps. I don't care if they bring back XNA (as in WP7) or if they integrate 3D into Xaml (as they did with Silverlight 5 and WPF 4). Either way, we can't rely on third-party wrappers around old DirectX libraries. It needs to be officially supported and baked into the tools and libraries.
I'm pretty sure Vista shipped with XPDM support, so in theory you could install XP drivers (video) on Vista. In addition I think Vista also shipped with a software rasterizer to avoid the driver clusterfuck altogether. I agree with Vista being a bitch, but like you have to do with any Microsoft product.. install their OS after the first service pack or so.
They fixed that ever since NT came out. Windows 2000 was the first useable desktop NT OS they made. The only way Windows can crash today is if you have a buggy device driver. I still remember having to reboot every 30 minutes in Windows 9x when doing video editing. After I switched to Windows 2000 the crashes stopped and if the video editing program had a bug at least only the program crashed not the entire OS.
hm... for me it's:
Windows 7 for hosting:
Several Linux and an OSX86 virtual machines, most of them farming out to thin clients on my LAN (this laptop has that much juice it's silly), and pumping video to a 19" panel
Linux for getting real work done
through the same laptop via a USB composite capture card, XBOX for games, VCR for analogue ripping.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
That is probably their accursed accessibility misfeature "Sticky Keys". They should have learned by now that the user should enable that in the configuration panel. As it is today if I snooze on the keyboard I enable that crap.
ah, Vista... the ME of NT.
I never got on with Vista, at all. I avoided it like the plague after wrestling with one install, which I eventually gave up on and threw XP on instead.
I didn't say the crashes were Windows' fault, I did say that it was down to an overheating graphics core... which is now solved, the laptop spends most of its time on a wire cage to maximise airflow underneath.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
well, no, that's not what I'm saying.. .although, a while ago my Dell Inspiron 8200 (NVidia AGP card) had a bit of a fit while I was running Debian; similar thing, the graphics chip overheated and the desktop froze then disappeared... to be replaced almost instantly with a shell prompt. I was able to save the machine state and shut down while the poor GPU was starting its half-hour cooldown. When a Windows box does a BSoD you don't get that luxury.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I found Windows 7 to be faster on older hardware than it's previous version (Vista), does that not count?
Going back a long ways, Windows for Workgroups was faster than Windows 3.1.
Maybe it's just me, but I found 7's performance to be about the same as Vista 64bit on the same or similar hardware. That in and of itself was an improvement to me. But 8 seems genuinely more responsive than 7.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Honestly, XP was stable enough for me, Win 7 seems ok. But that's irrelevant. Linux does what I want it to do, it works the way I want it to work. Windows does not. Mac does not. Period. I love Linux, and not because I hate Windows. I've been using it exclusively on my computer since 1998, and I have no reason to change.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I used to use a Linux VM inside a Windows host but the computers we have at work are fairly weak (with upgrades being promised "in the near future"). I think the CPU doesn't even have proper virtualization support (thank you, Intel). Given that I spend virtually all of my time in Linux I got a nice productivity boost when I started booting straight into it.
As for the IDE, I'm kind of partial to Komodo's free offering. While it doesn't have too many bells and whistles it has what I need (syntax highlighting, code completion and click-to-find-definition), it's cross-platform and it's free. Project management amounts to pointing at a directory. I'd love the commercial version, especially since it has a built-in DBGP-based debugger, but the free version works well enough for day-to-day use and I think I'll be looking for a new job before the boss is ready to pay for the thing.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
In some situations that may be beneficial, but I can think of a large number of situations where you really do just want the OS to fail when persistent storage is no longer accessible.
Consider: Next time you boot, there will be zero record of what traffic went through your network during that time. Whether that is good, bad, or a huge security problem depends a lot on where that server is.
I know that Lotus Notes causes this issue on my work computer. (Yes, yes, I know it's a horrible thing to run but I've no choice in the matter). Killing the Notes process always made it all work again. I'm not sure *what* it's doing, but I know that it's Lotus that's doing it. It's annoying as all get out, too.
The American Dream has too much grinding and the leveling makes no sense. -GameboyRMH (1153867)
PowerShell is to administrative shells like the car some 15 year old kid builds in his garage with spare parts from a junkyard is to top-of-the-line race car or luxury car engineering from world leading engineers. It's just not even remotely close to what we get in *nix shells. And all it does is provide you with a CMD + script environment. Everything you can do in it could be done trivially via VBScript or JScript with COM. Microsoft once again instead of embracing technologies just re-invents them and poorly. They could have ported bash and the entire GNU environment with lots of other goodies over to Windows legally and we'd have the best of both worlds, but they instead decided to create some convoluted and terribly designed "competitor." This is similar in many respects to what they do for web browsers. Instead of embracing what we've already created (WebKit is open source, so is V8, WebKit + V8 is almost Chrome, and Microsoft could easily leverage both of these and even contribute back to the community by improving both), they create their own stuff which is years and years behind every other modern browser and which holds the entire industry back because they don't have an insignificant market share. This is the Microsoft way. It needs to stop, now. This is a golden rule, and one of the only rules we adamantly enforce in software engineering: if it isn't broke, don't fix it. More specifically, if something already exists that does what you're doing, use it or improve it. Unless you have a revolutionary approach that is significantly better (demonstrably), such that it is your business value to provide a better implementation, don't ever re-create something that already exists. Microsoft routinely violates this rule. I'm not sure why, maybe because they want to demonstrate to the world that they're still relevant somehow, but instead they end up looking like fucking idiots and pissing everyone off in the process.
When you need to heat your food, do you grab some iron and create an alloy of it to achieve a higher electrical resistance then wire it into your home's grid? No, you buy a stove, because someone already fucking did that. When you need to keep something cool, do you find a gas with a very low boiling point and create a phase-exchange system for moving heat from a small confined and insulated space to a larger heat dump? No, you buy a refrigerator, because someone already fucking did that. When you live 40 miles from work and need to get there today, do you invent an internal combustion engine, refine crude oil to obtain gasoline, invent strong rubber-based inflatable tires, create a mechanism for distributing power from your engine to the wheel assemblies, etc? No, you buy a fucking car or use public transportation, because someone already solved that problem. In all of these cases, you need TO DO SOMETHING, not make something better than what already exists. You don't decide "well I need to use a linux shell in Windows, let me go ahead and completely invent my own shitty version." No, you port the existing open-source implementation to your platform, at the very most. Because someone already fucking did that.
Almost forgot the most important exception: *unless it's for educational purposes. Sometimes educational research leads to a better implementation which leads to competing technologies, which is a perfectly reasonable outcome, but more often than not result in a potentially better approach at one thing than the original, which is better used to improve the original.
Lacert, DMS, "productivty suites", Quickbooks, random other 14 year old software we still use. the big one for my shop is quickbooks. it is silver or worse on the winehq database. if you could get quickbooks to run as a proper sql instance and a web interface front end, several small accounting firms could go witj iDevice, android, linux, mac anything but windows.
Windows has been using GPU acceleration since 3.0. They were just called video cards then, and it was GDI and not directx.
Here's a benchmark where a Voodoo 4 on Win98 out-BitBlts an Intel G45 on Aero.
that's the classic 'bash, tr, sort, uniq & sed' answer.
now, do it just using bash...
You must not be dealing with a wide spectrum of workloads then. Sure they're fairly stable under standard conditions (locked down workstation with Office etc.)
I see Windows (XP, Vista and 7) regularly crash (BSOD, hangs, critical Windows processes crash) under the non-office workloads though. Key issues from SP3 -> 7: Enormously buggy IEEE1394 (FireWire) support even with native Microsoft drivers regularly hang the system, high-throughput devices on USB (USB HID devices with Microsoft HID drivers) regularly BSOD the system when queried, and enormously slow and bad TCP/IP stack that doesn't perform well under bad conditions.
Also Windows 7 checking for HDCP and forcing it down your throat at random times (which when on DVI-D splitter will bring snow to one of the displays) even when the system is idle it will randomly decide to enable HDCP.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Most other OSs deal with drivers themselves, or at least audit third party drivers quite carefully, and the main and recommended mechanism for installing drivers is through the OS, not an installer provided by the hardware vendor.
This changes this a lot, however, when it comes to MS, DOS tradition of the vendor providing the driver is still the de-facto, as well as some monetary intereses that are incompatible!
if it isn't broke, don't fix it.
*cough* xargs -0 *cough*
ConEmu
You've probably managed to hit Scroll Lock. Turning it on causes what I think you mean, and yes, for years this "feature" caused much swearing for me... well, even more swearing than Notes causes every day...