Windows already prefetches and caches data and gives a priority boost to the foreground task. You'd be better off tweaking some parameters than installing unknown and untrusted software, especially with such over the top performance claims.
Quartz Extreme was not in the first release of OSX, it was only included in version 10.2. The Avalon vector model goes beyond Quartz Extreme in that QE is only used to hardware accelerate the compositing software-rendered windows while Avalon renders all vector graphics and animations directly on the graphics card. Avalon also includes equivelent features to Core Image, guess you never looked in the Longhorn SDK for system.windows.media.imageeffect etc.
No they havn't forgotten about notebooks. The UI is designed to scale down its operations when running on battery power. There is also a lot of work going into inproving power management features.
Both of those features are present in the command line on windows. To past text simply right-click, and if you drag and file or folder over a command window it will enter the full path and filename of that item.
There will be basic mode system with graphics at a level similar to Win2k if you want that sort of thing. You won't be forced to have a GPU. If you want to see the sorts of things they are doing for Developers and Admins you only need to look at Monad to see the new command line features.
I've only ever seen that happen once and even then I couldn't quite believe it. A 3D game I was playing crashed and it dumped my back to a desktop with a message that the graphics system had failed and I should restart my computer.
Is there any reference or white paper available about this feature as it does not seem to be mentioned very often, it's pretty cool that the system can survive a problem like that.
You don't even get to see the full Aero Glass UI unless you have a WHQL signed driver made to the new Longhorn Driver Model specification. The new driver model makes graphics drivers simpler to develop and MS is making a whole suite of driver testing and profiling tools to ensure that every part of the code is rigorously tested before a driver can be certified.
Except not all soldiers are fighting willingly. They may have been drafted and might be shot for desertion if they do not agree to fight. Just because he is in the military doesn't mean he supports his government or is prepared to die for his country, it could jst be that it was better to risk being killed in the military than certainly being killed and dishonoring his family for refusing to sign up.
Take a look at some of this stuff from their social computing group. Nearly everything on the page is going to end up in Longhorn in one form or another, some of it has already appeared in products.
They are trying to drive the PC towards a central point in peoples work, entertainment and interactions, not just a box sitting on a desk.
Don't a lot of companies already do that? I know all our source code goes into "Escrow" so that should our business ever fail the customers won't be left in the lurch. It's not open source but its much the same sort of protection.
The nearest equivelent to DirecTivo in the UK is SKY+, the box lets you record two programs at once or record one and watch a prerecorded one. SKY+ is pretty expensive though so people that don't want to pay a SKY subscription can get FreeView for nothing. There are only a couple of FreeView capable PVRs of which the most featureful is the Pace Twin, made by the same people that make the boxes for SKY+, but the twins software has been very unreliable, it often crashes or does not record programs correctly and the monthly OTA updates don't seem to have improved it much.
For PC based solutions a DVB-T card can be used to pick up FreeView and record it directly to the hard disc. I use a Nebula DigiTV which has nice, well supported software for watching tv, scheduling recordings and streaming the broadcast stream over your network to other PCs. They are trying to make their UI simliar to the MCE one but they are only a small company so it will probably be a while before it has equivelent features.
It's in both places actually. So thats one more place to check if you want to stop programs from running at startup. Of course on Windows XP you can just use msconfig which aggregates all the locations used for automatic startup and lets you prevent them starting with a simple checkbox.
Did you notice that it said it was caused by the bios/power/cooling detection hardware built into the motherboard? Not a problem with windows at all then. The same hardware running any other operating system would behave in exactly the same fashion. Microsoft were just trying to explain it.
The microsoft bluetooth keyboard comes with a usb dongle/desktop antenna for communicating with the computer. This dongle requires a software stack to support a bluetooth connection to the keyboard. The software is not loaded until Windows has booted to the logon prompt. Thus if you only have a bluetooth keyboard you cannot adjust your bios settings or choose an OS to load from a boot loader. On some older motherboards the bios can be set to check for a keyboard on boot and will fail if one is not present. If you have just chucked out your old PS/2 keyboard and replaced it with a shiny new bluetooth one, but haven't set the bios not to check for a keyboard you will have a problem. I know of no bioses that support a bluetooth stack natively so this is likely to be a problem on and operating operating system.
Its not quite true that the Bluetooth support provided with the MS mouse doesn't allow any other functionality. It does allow bluetooth Printers to be used and bluetooth phones can be used as dial up modems etc. It does not support serial connections except through a socket api so programs must be modified to work with it. Some programs that work include Floats Mobile Agent http://sourceforge.net/projects/fma/ TDK Mobile http://www.tdksystems.com/software/apps/co ntent.as p?id=3 and Nokia's PC Suite, (at least the 6600 version)
The support in SP2 is much better as it includes virtual serial ports so that pretty much any bluetooth device will connect, this would include GPS devices, phones, pocket pcs etc. It also has support for bluetooth file transfers and PAN profile networking.
Yes, you can sometimes force it to do it by modifying an.inf file to include the product IDs of your bluetooth adaptor. I got my Tecom BT3030 to work this way and it is not officially supported.
The file you need to alter is c:\windows\inf\bth.inf If you do not know the product and manufacturer IDs for your device you can get device manager to display them. From the command line enter "set devmgr_show_details=1" then "devmgmt.msc", this will make device manager appear with a new "details" tab on all the device property pages. Connect your bluetooth device and it should appear as "unknown device", look at the device properties details tab to get the device ids.
Most bluetooth devices seem to use CSR chipsets but there are a few that use broadcom, if you know which yours is then it helps, otherwise they are basically all pretty much the same.
Add a new line to bth.inf that includes your device ids and save the file. From device manager get it to install a driver for your device and point it at the modified bth.inf.
It should then install the bluetooth stack and various supporting services. There will be a "Bluetooth Devices" icon in control panel, and "Bluetooth Radios" in device manager. It will also install a networking device for PAN connections and fsquirt.exe for transfering files over bluetooth.
The dongles mentioned in bth.inf of SP2 RC2 are;
ALPS Integrated Bluetooth Device Alps Bluetooth USB Adapter Belkin Bluetooth Adapter Brain Boxes USB Bluetooth Adapter BL-554 Blutonium BCM2035 Bluetooth 2.4 GHz Single Chip Transceiver BCM2033 Bluetooth 2.4 GHz Single Chip Transceiver NanoSira Bluetooth Reference Radio Cambridge Silicon Radio Ltd. Bluetooth Adapter Dell TrueMobile Bluetooth Module Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth Module FIC Bluetooth Wireless Adapter GVC Bluetooth Wireless Adapter HP USB BT Transceiver [1.2] Bluetooth UltraPort Module from IBM IBM Integrated Bluetooth IBM Integrated Bluetooth II IBM Integrated Bluetooth III Microsoft Wireless Transceiver for Bluetooth Microsoft Wireless Transceiver for Bluetooth 2.0 Silicon Wave Bluetooth Wireless Adapter USB Bluetooth Device Sony Bluetooth USB Adapter TDK Bluetooth USB Adapter TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth 2 TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth 3 TOSHIBA Bluetooth Adapter Zeevo Bluetooth Solution
It turned itself on if you ran the network setup wizard but otherwise it was off out of the box. It is now on by defualt on all network adaptors and starts up before any other networking services during the boot process.
That is in fact what they will be doing. SP2 is going to turn up everywhere, almost as much as AOL discs and with massive TV and press coverage as well. Thats what the whole "XP Reloaded" thing was about, its all a big marketing push to get people to install "Windows XP SP2 with Advanced Security Technologies" or upgrade to XP+SP2 from Windows 98, or get XP+SP2 installed on a new PC etc. I expect to see almost as much press as the release of XP itself.
See "Preparing for Windows XP SP2" (The dates are a few months out now) The discs will be freely available in PC Stores and probably on magazine covers as well and will be shipped on request to anyone who fills out a web form. No one will go without hearing about SP2 or how they can get hold of it without having to download it.
They are going to roll it out in several stages, first RTM and make it available online and to OEM and Retail Packages, then start the major media coverage when all the stock is in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows already prefetches and caches data and gives a priority boost to the foreground task.
You'd be better off tweaking some parameters than installing unknown and untrusted software, especially with such over the top performance claims.
Mod Parent DOWN! Redundant
Guess you havn't heard of Virtual PC for mac 7 it should be out in a couple of months.
Why would Microsoft want to miss the oppotunity to sell licenses for Windows and Windows Specific programs, Project, Visio etc on Macs?
Quartz Extreme was not in the first release of OSX, it was only included in version 10.2. The Avalon vector model goes beyond Quartz Extreme in that QE is only used to hardware accelerate the compositing software-rendered windows while Avalon renders all vector graphics and animations directly on the graphics card.
Avalon also includes equivelent features to Core Image, guess you never looked in the Longhorn SDK for system.windows.media.imageeffect etc.
Image effects classes
No they havn't forgotten about notebooks. The UI is designed to scale down its operations when running on battery power. There is also a lot of work going into inproving power management features.
Both of those features are present in the command line on windows. To past text simply right-click, and if you drag and file or folder over a command window it will enter the full path and filename of that item.
At least it works that way on Windows XP.
Dave Cutler?
There will be basic mode system with graphics at a level similar to Win2k if you want that sort of thing. You won't be forced to have a GPU.
If you want to see the sorts of things they are doing for Developers and Admins you only need to look at Monad to see the new command line features.
Theres something in longhorn for everyone.
I've only ever seen that happen once and even then I couldn't quite believe it. A 3D game I was playing crashed and it dumped my back to a desktop with a message that the graphics system had failed and I should restart my computer.
Is there any reference or white paper available about this feature as it does not seem to be mentioned very often, it's pretty cool that the system can survive a problem like that.
You don't even get to see the full Aero Glass UI unless you have a WHQL signed driver made to the new Longhorn Driver Model specification.
The new driver model makes graphics drivers simpler to develop and MS is making a whole suite of driver testing and profiling tools to ensure that every part of the code is rigorously tested before a driver can be certified.
Thanks man,
Just the DNA fix I needed.
Flollops off happily to be hip with the froods.
Except not all soldiers are fighting willingly. They may have been drafted and might be shot for desertion if they do not agree to fight. Just because he is in the military doesn't mean he supports his government or is prepared to die for his country, it could jst be that it was better to risk being killed in the military than certainly being killed and dishonoring his family for refusing to sign up.
Take a look at some of this stuff from their social computing group. Nearly everything on the page is going to end up in Longhorn in one form or another, some of it has already appeared in products.
They are trying to drive the PC towards a central point in peoples work, entertainment and interactions, not just a box sitting on a desk.
Don't a lot of companies already do that? I know all our source code goes into "Escrow" so that should our business ever fail the customers won't be left in the lurch.
It's not open source but its much the same sort of protection.
The nearest equivelent to DirecTivo in the UK is SKY+, the box lets you record two programs at once or record one and watch a prerecorded one. SKY+ is pretty expensive though so people that don't want to pay a SKY subscription can get FreeView for nothing.
There are only a couple of FreeView capable PVRs of which the most featureful is the Pace Twin, made by the same people that make the boxes for SKY+, but the twins software has been very unreliable, it often crashes or does not record programs correctly and the monthly OTA updates don't seem to have improved it much.
For PC based solutions a DVB-T card can be used to pick up FreeView and record it directly to the hard disc.
I use a Nebula DigiTV which has nice, well supported software for watching tv, scheduling recordings and streaming the broadcast stream over your network to other PCs. They are trying to make their UI simliar to the MCE one but they are only a small company so it will probably be a while before it has equivelent features.
It's in both places actually. So thats one more place to check if you want to stop programs from running at startup.
Of course on Windows XP you can just use msconfig which aggregates all the locations used for automatic startup and lets you prevent them starting with a simple checkbox.
Did you notice that it said it was caused by the bios/power/cooling detection hardware built into the motherboard?
Not a problem with windows at all then.
The same hardware running any other operating system would behave in exactly the same fashion. Microsoft were just trying to explain it.
The microsoft bluetooth keyboard comes with a usb dongle/desktop antenna for communicating with the computer.
This dongle requires a software stack to support a bluetooth connection to the keyboard. The software is not loaded until Windows has booted to the logon prompt. Thus if you only have a bluetooth keyboard you cannot adjust your bios settings or choose an OS to load from a boot loader.
On some older motherboards the bios can be set to check for a keyboard on boot and will fail if one is not present.
If you have just chucked out your old PS/2 keyboard and replaced it with a shiny new bluetooth one, but haven't set the bios not to check for a keyboard you will have a problem. I know of no bioses that support a bluetooth stack natively so this is likely to be a problem on and operating operating system.
So try the XP PowerToy Calculator it has multiline display and graphing functions and its a free 620k download from microsoft
Its not quite true that the Bluetooth support provided with the MS mouse doesn't allow any other functionality. It does allow bluetooth Printers to be used and bluetooth phones can be used as dial up modems etc.o ntent.as p?id=3
It does not support serial connections except through a socket api so programs must be modified to work with it. Some programs that work include Floats Mobile Agent http://sourceforge.net/projects/fma/
TDK Mobile
http://www.tdksystems.com/software/apps/c
and Nokia's PC Suite, (at least the 6600 version)
The support in SP2 is much better as it includes virtual serial ports so that pretty much any bluetooth device will connect, this would include GPS devices, phones, pocket pcs etc.
It also has support for bluetooth file transfers and PAN profile networking.
Yes, you can sometimes force it to do it by modifying an .inf file to include the product IDs of your bluetooth adaptor. I got my Tecom BT3030 to work this way and it is not officially supported.
The file you need to alter is c:\windows\inf\bth.inf
If you do not know the product and manufacturer IDs for your device you can get device manager to display them. From the command line enter "set devmgr_show_details=1" then "devmgmt.msc", this will make device manager appear with a new "details" tab on all the device property pages. Connect your bluetooth device and it should appear as "unknown device", look at the device properties details tab to get the device ids.
Most bluetooth devices seem to use CSR chipsets but there are a few that use broadcom, if you know which yours is then it helps, otherwise they are basically all pretty much the same.
Add a new line to bth.inf that includes your device ids and save the file. From device manager get it to install a driver for your device and point it at the modified bth.inf.
It should then install the bluetooth stack and various supporting services. There will be a "Bluetooth Devices" icon in control panel, and "Bluetooth Radios" in device manager. It will also install a networking device for PAN connections and fsquirt.exe for transfering files over bluetooth.
The dongles mentioned in bth.inf of SP2 RC2 are;
ALPS Integrated Bluetooth Device
Alps Bluetooth USB Adapter
Belkin Bluetooth Adapter
Brain Boxes USB Bluetooth Adapter BL-554
Blutonium BCM2035 Bluetooth 2.4 GHz Single Chip Transceiver
BCM2033 Bluetooth 2.4 GHz Single Chip Transceiver
NanoSira Bluetooth Reference Radio
Cambridge Silicon Radio Ltd. Bluetooth Adapter
Dell TrueMobile Bluetooth Module
Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth Module
FIC Bluetooth Wireless Adapter
GVC Bluetooth Wireless Adapter
HP USB BT Transceiver [1.2]
Bluetooth UltraPort Module from IBM
IBM Integrated Bluetooth
IBM Integrated Bluetooth II
IBM Integrated Bluetooth III
Microsoft Wireless Transceiver for Bluetooth
Microsoft Wireless Transceiver for Bluetooth 2.0
Silicon Wave Bluetooth Wireless Adapter
USB Bluetooth Device
Sony Bluetooth USB Adapter
TDK Bluetooth USB Adapter
TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth
TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth 2
TOSHIBA Integrated Bluetooth 3
TOSHIBA Bluetooth Adapter
Zeevo Bluetooth Solution
It turned itself on if you ran the network setup wizard but otherwise it was off out of the box. It is now on by defualt on all network adaptors and starts up before any other networking services during the boot process.
That is in fact what they will be doing. SP2 is going to turn up everywhere, almost as much as AOL discs and with massive TV and press coverage as well. Thats what the whole "XP Reloaded" thing was about, its all a big marketing push to get people to install "Windows XP SP2 with Advanced Security Technologies" or upgrade to XP+SP2 from Windows 98, or get XP+SP2 installed on a new PC etc. I expect to see almost as much press as the release of XP itself.
See "Preparing for Windows XP SP2" (The dates are a few months out now)
The discs will be freely available in PC Stores and probably on magazine covers as well and will be shipped on request to anyone who fills out a web form. No one will go without hearing about SP2 or how they can get hold of it without having to download it.
They are going to roll it out in several stages, first RTM and make it available online and to OEM and Retail Packages, then start the major media coverage when all the stock is in place.
You'll be able to do a that sort of stuff through MONAD.
So how is it that I am running Firefox on Longhorn?