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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
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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
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.
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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
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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 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!
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!
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.
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.
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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
No kidding! If the drivers have drivers, then thats an extra layer of protection.
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. ;-)
Microsoft does something positive; Slashdot readers complain.
I don't have this problem on Windows.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
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)
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
--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??
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.
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
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.