WMV/VC1 is still the most used Video distribution mechanism, even as crazy as that sounds to the Linux user world and even with the YouTube/Flash markets.
Even if you only think of Silverlight in the context of the video capabilities, you would be surprised how many sites that want you would be using it. It is Flash, but without the Adobe tax for developers and server owners. (Being that you can even stream Silverlight video off an Apache Linux server without any costs.)
Silverlight also adds a lot to video since this was the main focus of Version 1. It brings VC1/WMV formats in a way that is lighter and higher quality than Flash, in addition to playing better on clients with higher quality (pixel resampling, etc.)
So there are going to be sites that will make moves to Silverlight at some point rather than continue down the Flash only road just for sake of bandwidth and video quality. Adobe's only HD mechanisms are sad and flawed, and client performance (especially on Firefox) is horrid at best.
Silverlight you can get the streaming HD experience - even on a 3G cell phone connection, this is not something Flash offers. Let alone Silverlight can do multi-bandwidth streams so content can adjust on the fly to your connection, so when you take your WiFi device out to 3G world, the content continues to play even if you have to give up a few bits if your providers can't handle it.
Also think about video content distributors dealing with HD adoption. Most HD/Blu-Ray is in VC1, not MPEG4, so to stream directly from the converted content by providers, they only have to convert to VC1 once, and can take the video to Blu-Ray and also distribute it online without any additional processing.
So instead of thinking of Silverlight as what it is capable of (Full replacement of Flash with better performance), you should think of it as a universal video content delivery client. (V3 of Silverlight adds in MPEG4 and other codecs as well natively, so it is also working to not only offer the best of VC1/WMV but work with any standard codecs out there - being able to stream everything except probably Adobe Flash Video format.)
Take a look at XBox Live, and although it technically is not a Silverlight platform, it can and does use existing VC1/WMV 'Silverlight' content to provide movies to users and instant playback HD video content.
Remember there was the Windows Media infrastructure, and Silverlight's team took that packaged a tight client to use the technology and also shore up the abilities of Windows Media (VC1) technologies, in addition to saying, we not just MS's bitches for codecs, and will support MPEG4 and AAC and other formats as we can.
The XBox 360 NGE update added tons of new Divx and MPEG4 and AAC support as standard features (Divx was originally added quite a while back, but now various versions and audio codecs are now supported as well.)
This is something the silverlight team deserves some thanks for, and is one of the few, we want everyone to get the best experience and get access to the best content even if it isn't MS's. And the irony is Silverlight was started as a web implementation of the Vista WPF APIs, with no intention of doing much else.
Linux does not require a "pagefile" (do you mean "swap partition"?) to run, and never did. It does require one for suspend-to-disk ("hibernate"), but then so does Windows (hiberfil.sys).
Ok, no and again no...
Do you have concept of what a swap partition is? Just because 2.6 allows you to use a swap file instead of a partition, doesn't mean that 'effectively' Linux needs a form of VM, even if it is emulated when booted from a CD. Understand?
Please go look this stuff up. If you don't even understand how the OS is alloating RAM and VM, you might want to educate yourself if you are going to respond to topics with a semi-technical nature.
Oh and the suspend to disk thing, ya you are way out of left field there with regard to VM and HD paging, and lost all credibility with that comment.
Turn off your NT page file Fill up the RAM Malloc more than is free Core dump (or kill a random task, which will cause a core dump later)
Let me guess on a non-NT box, requesting more RAM than is physically available just magically works by allocating ionized gas from the user? Do you call it the plasma memory area too?
By the way, Linux and OS X do not require page files either. Furthermore you can completely tune your page file to do anything you want. You want more system cache, adjust swappiness down. Want to swap everything, make it 100. You can even make your swap file on a RAM disk if you're really brave. You can of course, totally rewrite the VM system if you want, or replace it with one of the other VM's you can get for Linux because you have the source code.
Really? You might want to fact check a bit of this.
As for configuration and memory management offering you the ability to 'to do anything you want'... How often do you write your own VM? Ok, done with this silly placating. Do you even have a grasp of the VM in Linux and that by replacing the VM it is no longer Linux, right? I could write my own VM for NT as well (and truly could) and run it, but it would no longer be NT or NT VM mechanisms...
(Just because software is closed source does NOT mean people cannot read the binaries and modify the code themselves. Open Source is making people stupid and lazy instead of sharing knowledge. Does anyone from the OSS world even get that 'having source' is barely different than reading the assembly code from the binaries?)
The VM of Linux is configurable, yes, but so is the VM of NT, as well as the cache priorties, etc. And one could even argue there is more control of this on NT, as many of the features you can configure on NT are not even available to Linux. Hell it wasn't even until 2.6 that you got reverse mapping or other basic concepts NT and other OS VMs have been doing for a long time.
Even doing an install without a swap partition was a hack and a trick prior to 2.6, and this makes no sense since HDs don't contiguously allocate partiions, as they did MANY years ago and why a 'partition' was used. BTW Even a Linux swap parition can be fragmented, even though Wikipedia reads that it is only NT's use of a dynamic pagefile that could create a fragmented VM area. - Anyone that wants to fact check this and fix Wikipedia, please feel free, and you can even credit yourself.
We could take this argument to technical levels and talk about -pmap and the three levels of VM in Linux and the medium/media priorty system for VM, but I am afraid if the concept of depleating RAM with a Malloc request seems 'magical' to you, this would be more of a lecture with you getting a free class in kernel architecture and memory management rather than a real debate.
Its not often 70keys and a mouse can be replaces by a few buttons and knobs
True, but there have been some games that also destory they myth if the UI design is well thought out. Specifically I would refer to KOTOR as one of the ground breakers of making a complex game and UI feel more natural with a XBox controller than a keyboard and mouse.
I would like to see more console games support and require the keyboard add-ons (like XBox Messenger Keyboard), and instead of re-inventing the wheel between platforms, use the best of both.
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately?
Have you?
Vista's paging system specifically is rather different than XP, with the new memory prioritization mechanisms, so that a big application, background app, or file operation doesn't shove crap to the page file as it did under XP and as other OS notoriously do.
Shockingly this is one area where Vista's team really did a good job with system architecture and memory handling and the usage of a pagefile when applications do need more RAM, use of a pagefile with background I/O priorities and other mechanisms like states and events that make a world of difference.
Besides...
If you don't like the pagefile in Vista, turn it off. (NT is not OSX or Linux and does not require a pagefile to run.)
Side Note: If you have a lot of RAM, turning it on or off has virtually no difference in performance, as the Pagefile is only used to lazy write RAM contents of low priorty applications to improve resume from hibernation support, so the computer can just reference the already on HD contents of RAM when it resumes.
I also won't even go into the history of NT and Windows and what brought it some early sucess was its ability to operate well with low amounts of RAM. Windows 3.x DLLs and paging allowed it to easily run applications that were 10x the size of physical RAM, and is an area where other OS technologies of the late 80s, early 90s could not compete. (Winword's EXE (not couting DLLs) was almost 2mb alone and ran on 2mb 286 machines rather well.)
Running Windows 3.x x86 on 2mb of RAM was comfortable and what helped Windows adoption. NT of the time even as big os the portable code was, still ran well in 12-16mb, and as late as 1998, running NT 4.0 on a 486-66 with 32mb of RAM as a server worked really well.
There is a reason the 'weight' of *nix hurt the earlier *nix movements, and there is still a myth about Linux or other *nixes being significantly more lightweight than NT. Remember today's Vista kernel and basic operational 'layers' can be shoved into 25mb, and this is light enough to run on most watches, let alone routers and other appliances, where Windows Embedded does have a significant presence already.
So before you fire an arrow over the wall, you might want to make sure you have any understanding of what you are talking about.
And for people that care, go check out a Vista Memory whitepaper or even check out Channel9.com and look back to Vista architecture videos for a better explaination.
Using an instanced image boot and still not getting numbers beyond a normal user on a generic system doing standby or hibernate? Really?
On an average system Vista SP1 should do a real full boot in 15-20 seconds. A Resume from Hibernate in about 5 seconds and a resume from suspend instantly, ok maybe 1 second.
If you don't see these number with Vista, you have something wrong somewhere, some crap software or a horrid piece of hardware.
So really? This is news really? How? And why would someone want to boot to a instanced image and not just use a hibernated image?
Taking an initial and progressive snapshots are a good idea to start with and a VM tool will let you do this if you are just monitoring what software is doing. Go with Virtual PC 2007, it is free and will let you take the VHD images and later remount them as secondary drives on a VM to compare them.
However depending on your end goal, it might be better to 'also' just data mine the changes to the system. Use http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx (Process Explorer) as it tracks all the changes, including read/writes to everything on the OS from the File System to the registry specifically.
Process Explorer has been around for a while and is kept updated. It is a valuable tool for tracking what install software is doing on your system, what it is changing and touch and although it can produce huge logs of data, doing a bit of dataming on this data can produce a lot of information about system changes. (It is something crackers even use to see what keys or files are changed to store random information to unlock software, etc.)
On Windows, this is the key tool for monitoring the system all the way down.
So Virtual PC 2007 for VHD images and Process Explorer (always running) storing the data of all the changes.
Just what you took time to demonstrate in your post, Microsoft was doing all of this crap before Apple.
Therefore, the comment "Monkey see, Monkey do", would better be suited at an attack at Apple, as they are the 'me too' once again. Of course their fanbois wouldn't know this, and probably still think they invented everything, as long as Apple marketing tries to make people believe it.
And yes Apple INTENTIONALLY tries to create this perception. When they run ads about the first 64bit computer - which the UK made they stop saying (and OS X still isn't even 64bit), and then use their marketing strength of cool to run ads about the iPhone or iPod 'revolutions' and then describe features that have been available for years.
But since the basic consumers and Apple fans didn't realize it existed before, they run to buy it and give Apple all the technology credit for crap they ripped off. Yes even the iPhone is a sad knock off. It looks like a rotary dial phone compared to phones in Japan and is very featureless compared to basic Windows Mobile devices people had been using for years. Can anyone say freaking voice dialing even, who in their right mind would release a bluetooth enabled device without any voice features? (And don't say iPhone=multi-touch, it is even a rip off, google TED multi-touch, let alone the Tablet PCs that were multi-touch enabled years before.)
I am tired of the myth of Microsoft is copying Apple crap, especially when Apple vampires the entire industry, puts a cute logo on it and people think it is the gold standard. Some of us had multi-GB MP3 players in the mid 90s, and phones with touch interfaces, real 3G, and even an OS running our own applications for almost 4 years before the iPhone.
The only thing Apple has done well is offer few choices and lock users into their products further, so people that are dumb as rocks feel 'comfortable' about using the product and don't have to worry about even which store to buy the song from.
So ya, Monkey See, Monkey Do - Apple keep up the rip offs for as long as people are stupid enough to believe your marketing, a time will come when people find out they were duped.
Pelosi doesn't speak for the Democratic Party, she is just one voice and her personal agendas are usually not in line with the Democratic platform.
If you want to put a face to the Democratic Party, try Obama, as he now sets the platform, and he is far from liberal and is a good mix of the better ideas from both ends of the political spectrum.
One note about Obama, he didn't even use the Democratic party to get elected, which in a weird way makes him the first President elect in modern history that isn't influenced by any special interests nor even the special interests of his own party. This allows him to recreate the Democratic party around his more centrists views that like Clinton are fiscally conservative and semi socially liberal. He also should do better with upholding the constitution, considering this was his legal specialty.
I have a lot of respect for both conservative and liberals and find neither have all the answers. I don't agree with Democratics 100%, but at this point all I can feel is shame for what the Republican party has transformed into over the past 20 years.
Truly go pick up any of the recent John Dean books, he is a traditional Goldwater conservative, and is fighting to keep what is left of the conservative ideals alive.
BTW Goldwater even helped start the book "Conservatives Without Conscience" with Dean, before his death, and this was based on ideas they worked on in the 90s when him and Goldwater already felt like the Republican party left them both behind as traditional conservatives.
PS Using the Pelosi argument is like saying the Republicans are horrible, but the Democrats are almost as horrible. (Not a really good argument basis.) It also leaves the impression that you can't properly just defend the Republican decisions without pointing the finger at someone else.
It would be far better if your political thoughts would be more like, here is how I am defending what the Republicans are doing based on 'this and this' and because you think they are right. From your response, I don't think you can defend what they are doing, so why are you fighting for them to do stuff you disagree with?
Truly, if you can't defend what people are doing that you support, you might question why you support them and at what cost.
Are you referring to the Microsoft Software and Music stores that were online before iTunes and the iPhone store?
Wait, that makes Apple the monkey... Right?
Microsoft is talking about expanding their online sofware distribution to portable devices like the Zune and Windows Mobile. This is more of a revamp focusing on specific software for specific devices from the online store.
You do realize people have been buying music and software from Microsoft Online services for over 7 years right? You also realize people have been renting movies online via Windows Media Center and now the XBox 360 since 2003? Or does the Apple distortion field make everyone not notice what 'other' people are doing if Apple didn't make it?
Great system - government doesn't allow market to work - and then takes money to make it work (for sufficiently poor values of "work").
This is the 'modern' Republican way.
Privatize profits and socialize losses. (Corporations only of course.)
Conservatives need to take this last election and use it as fuel to go read any of John Dean's recent books on the failure of the Republican party by betraying true conservatives.
(Even Goldwater before he died screamed for the Republicans to stop going down the road that led to Bush II and the move to corporate authoritarian policies.)
Being able to run CIL isn't the same as being able to provide all the libraries involved in Microsoft's APIs.
Otherwise Wine would have been trivial to implement.
Wow, talk about jump the tracks...
Do you really think you need MS libraries to provide.NET 'like' features or expose similar functionality? Considering this is ALREADY being done on Apache Linux servers everyday, your argument is a bit self defeating.
Here is the deal...
Use MS's Cloud if you want, just keep your client application updated (as they will already automatically do, and 3rd party applicaitons will probably not break with the version scaling features MS is using.)
Or... Use your own freaking Cloud and Servers
Or... Pay another company to be your cloud.
There is NO LOCKIN or Version lockin to Microsoft.
Get it yet, or do you want me to explain it like you are a five year old?
Not sure about numbers, but RDP originally ran well on 14.4 modems, and the newest incarnations of RDP are even lighter depending on the application. For example a Vector WPF/Vista based application over RDP can do 3D graphics on a 56K modem.
For the power options, RDP is going to be reliable 99.999% of the time, if the system is configured properly. However if you have a hardware failure a remote boot/restart card/device would not be a bad idea, just to cycle power on the fluke encounter when it might be needed.
Here are my concerns:
1) If the person is having to ask this type of question here, should they really be responsible for a deployment like this?
2) Why would they be asking a primarily Windows question on Slashdot?
3) Why would they be 'forced' to using Windows, but not even realize RDP is a built in option (Yes even on Home versions of XP/Vista)?
When is the last time your computer could see what you were doing outside the computer, and assist you with it?
It seems small at first, but really is a huge UI construct making the jump to reality.
Seeing how full a drink is may not break the UI glass ceiling, but for the demonstration market these devices are launched in is a no brainer use of its technologies.
Next imagine the world poker championships where the table is automated, and your two white cards never leave your fingers, yet you can hold and view them like real cards, or even with real cards, and the table can watch how you are playing... (And people thought Win3.0 Solitaire was the dope.):)
This platform is not tied to Microsoft 'run' servers, but sure you can host or use Microsoft hosting servers. So the only way this article is true is if the developer is hosting the content on a Microsoft owned Server.
However, independant vendors, and even personal businesses can HOST the platform on their own in house, or 3rd party servers and be locked to whatever freaking versions they want.
PERIOD.
This stuff is just freaking insane that A) people don't get it and B) can go around the bend and off the cliff trying to understand it.
(A lot of this 'platform' is NOT EVEN tied to MS Windows Server technologies - geesh.)
If this functionality is useful, why couldn't you just have the software display a rectangle that you can drag across the screen that affects what is displayed within the rectangle?
Ok, this is what kills me. Someone adds a new perspective on technology and interfaces and people run to yell how it doesn't matter because THEY don't understand it or see how it could be useful or see past today's use of techonology to imagine applications for it.
The examples given are 'basic', but the potential is actually quite powerful in terms of future interactivity.
Even in this concept, think of a display that 'projects' additional images past the main display. So the computer could 'show' you something without disrupting the onscreen image.
So imagine holding a sheet of paper and have information appear on it as a secondary display while working with the surface imaging technolgy.
Next imagine a white model with a texture laid on it when you are working with the surface computer interface.
The concept of a 'seeing' computer is basically what surface brings, now add that in a two way fashion so that instead of just infared vision, it can also project images beyond the 'surface'.
Heck holding something that has an image on it and the computer responding to what I am doing with it is quite a handy and simple concept but powerful with where it could lead.
Back to the Surface technologies and a simple concept to be practical in some of the 'cute' applications it is used for now:
The Surface computer can already let a person order drinks and pay for them by seeing the selections, it can also see the drinks sitting on the display, and it can now also see how full the glass is, to send your wait-staff to your table sooner to refill your drink.
Now add a drinking glass that the surface can display images on to label your drink so people don't mix up the glasses after getting up for karaoke, dancing, or whatever you might do. Or maybe add advertising to the glasses so that the drinks are cheaper.
Again this is off the top of head simple ideas, but just a step into a new interactive world MS is making happen. When it comes to UI expertise, MS has some people that really are the leaders in the world and their work inside MS pushing these concepts into products, even if just 'test' or limited use products at first are at least getting these ideas out there for people to work with, build on, and think about. (Unlike their multi-touch UI work done in the late 90s that didn't get any public acknowledgments.)
The people inside Xerox in the 70s had a heck of a time getting their ideas out in the world for people to play with and build on, and your 'attitude' about this technology is the same opposition many of the Xerox people faced.
The first person to use a mouse or even a silly pen on a screen were also mocked by people that didn't think it would lead anywhere, and in their 'daily' technology it didn't do much for them.
Interactive projected content with an interactive seeing system has a lot of possibilities, and is also why the infrared 'seeing' surface technologies are not something as simplistic as multi-touch that people often misrepresent it to be.
The Mouse took almost 20 years before its usefulness became a reality in mainstream computing and the pen another 15 years, but someone had to start somewhere...
For years Apple takes technology and lets their marketing department transcend the technology into god like status.
When Apple finally admits that the technology wasn't the end all or best, they kill it, move on and users backlash because they believed the Apple marketing and bought not only into the thinking, but the products that surrounded it.
Apple has done this time and time and time again, and will continue to do so as long as Apple Marketing is 'better' than the technology they are shoveling.
Here is just a look back at the bigger ones off the top of my head, where one week Apple users were demonstrating how much better Macs were and the next week when Apple killed them off, had to eat their own smug reality pile: 68xxx, PowerPC, SCSI, System 7,8,9 - Oh, and the importance and power of the 'claimed first' 64bit computer (That still to this day has a 32bit OS, and only offers 64bit memory addressing to applications with none of the other 64bit optimizations that can make a 64bit computer faster.)
(Also don't forget some of the crazy crap, One button mouse is less confusing, keypads are not needed, greyscale displays are 'crisper' and less distracting than full color for DTP, stereo speakers on a notebook are worthless, and other out of nutland arguments to justify the smug insanity.)
So the more Smug the arguments from rabid Mac users are about a 'crappy' or outdated technology, the bigger the backlash when Apple itself moves on.
Mac fans, roll with the punches, it happens to all technology and even Apple technology is mortal. Also, embrace the future, and stop believing Apple's Marketing, instead go read about the technology outside the reality distortion field before you put on your smug smile and 'know' Apple has only given you the 'best'.
This is why hibernate and other state technologies exist. Hibernate your freaking computer, stop shutting it down. Even in a hibernate state, the computer can turn itself on to grab updates or performance maintenance if allowed and then re-hibernate.
(The concept of 'shutdown' for modern computers is something that will die in a few years anyway, like like application states of being off will be a thing of the past before long also.)
Why aren't people better educated about this. Even Vista by default puts itself to sleep and hibernates.
On my work laptop, it has been restarted about once a month for updates. The rest of the time it is either ON, Standy/Sleep, or Hibernated when traveling. I literally wait longer on the 'aged' BIOS than the OS itself.
As for the statement about Linux 'instant on' media features on some laptops... Um, some of the current instant on Media/DVD utilities use a modified form of XP more than I have seen Linux versions, as embedded XP is what was used by some of these companies.
As for Vista, it already supports Media or Hotstart features, that just haven't been used much by the OEMs, because it boots in 15-20 seconds instead of the 2-5 seconds of the embedded XP implementation.
Again, why settle for a single application instant on, when people are getting 15sec boots times on a full Vista boot? (Even the PS3 or XBox 360 take 10seconds to boot) Are people just getting insane about boot times? -And if you want to see a 'real long' boot time, restart your Cable Box or Sat Receiver, yes even the *nix based ones. 5 minutes or more you will be waiting.)
This is crazy on several levels. Especially when several OEM's BIOSes take longer to intialize than the OS itself takes to boot.
Microsoft should: 1) Demand OEM BIOS times are 'instant'. 2) Educate users to use freaking hibernate ALWAYS. 3) Forget the limited feature OS boot (A form of WinPE or an embedded Vista core, like the XP media center instant on features use already).
Actually Apple acquired a company called Fingerworks for their multi-touch technology. Fingerworks had started working in this are in 1999. I know that others probably had been working on this even before then, but Microsoft didn't have multi-touch in their Tablet PC until after 2003/2004. I think Microsoft Surface was the first try at multi-touch and that was 2007.
Ok, there is so much wrong here, I don't even know where to start.
Multi-touch input goes back to at least the 80s, Apple, nor Fingerworks created this. Apple may be using Fingerworks code for the recognition, but the UI multi-touch concepts they put in the iPhone are a direct rip off of both MS Research and TED conference demostrated concepts. (Google the TED multi-touch video that was long before Apple's iPhone.)
Microsoft Surface is NOT ABOUT multi-touch. Microsoft Surface is about 'unlimited touch' or 'visual touch' input, as it uses imaging devices that allows it to see unlimited points of input, their size, and even what they look like. That is why it can see things laid on the display, in addition to providing cute 'multi-touch' type UI interactions.
When you can swipe 5 fingers on your Mac or iPhone and it sees all 5 fingers and even see they are fingers and their size, and then responds to all of them at the same time, then you can start to compare any of this to Microsoft Surface technology. It is not even in the same class or generation as freaking dual or simple multi-point input that Apple uses. Think different, like years beyond what Apple is doing.
Tablets are not new at ALL in any way shape or form. Microsoft touts this stuff every 5 years as "revolutionary" Bah.
It sucked then, it sucks now. In fact the Handwriting recognition was better back then. Somehow it got worse as XP and Vista came along.
Ok, you are missing the point, and losing some credibility here.
1) This was about 'multi-touch', not touch or tablet devices. 2) Yes, Pen Windows 3.1 was around in the 1993 timeframe, and I know this because our company made products for it. 3) As for recognition being better 'in the old days', you really need to check out the 'ink' concepts Microsoft has advanced and how well it works across the board in Vista. (Even using an external Wacom tablet for $100 bucks, you can be long-handing everything you do on your computer with 99% recognition.)
If you have doubts on #3, go to YouTube, search for Vista and Handwriting or Vista and Tablet, etc. There are tons of videos of people either going OMG it can even read my crap handwriting or comparing Vista to OS X. (Hint, OS X loses because it doesn't handle Ink like Vista and instead uses more of an image recognition process.)
The Microsoft Ink concepts compute stroke direction, pressure, speed and also the vector image created to discern 'intent' of the person writing, not just what it 'looks' like, thus giving recognition levels that are truly amazing when a human can't read the handwriting and yet Vista does.
(And again, this is why preserving the 'ink' data in documents is important to Microsoft, and the thousands of companies and industries that use it. Go look up medical for one example. Ink is one reason MS has fought to keep OOXML the standard instead of people losing the 'ink' data by down-saving their documents to the OpenDocument format.)
Display Port is a cheap alternative way for Video only displays, and currently only has Apple and Dell backing on a grand scale.
HDMI is designed to deliver standard HD resolutions, and has specifications for the newer HD 2560x1600 and higher resolutions along with digital audio including advanced audio streams. One cable, all the content.
Display port would be classified as more of a direct replacement for computer only display interfaces without Audio.
Display port is in theory suppose to be cheaper and more 'open' but this ends up being more headache and hype than actual results. (Even just end users stringing multiple cables to their big screen was enough to shove DVI to the back of the industry)
If a MFR is using Display Port, they are trying to get by cheap and not expecting their users to hook up their computers to consumer level equipment, nor provide the uncompressed or Dolby audio streams that HDMI provides.
So it is 'ok' Apple is using Display Port, but it is not the HDMI replacement, especially when it doesn't even address audio or other signialling HDMI does. It is the cheap alternative. Display Port also has some severe cable length problems for higher bandwidth/resolutions. (Display Port does support HDCP although, but that is not so much of a feature to many DRM scared users.)
A LOT of people use PCs to control their video equipment in their houses, not only the standard Media Center installations, but everything from Myth and Beyond TV to even just PCs for displaying online content from Netflix or YouTube and hooking up their laptops to the big screen for various reasons. Computers controlling consumer level equipment and hooking in to the main 'screen' at the house is a common thing today. (AppleTV is a come late and do little concept here.)
Also, on Laptops, HDMI solutions are a lot more important, and also why even old DVI interfaces on laptops are a better choice, as they at least are signal compatible with HDMI displays, even if you have to provide separate audio.
Interestingly, it's listed as coming with XP installed, so we'd guess Asus will be using some sort of proprietary touchscreen interface
I think this statement is also pulling straws.
A) An XP interface would NOT be any harder than a freaking mouse driver.
B) TabletPC XP already has multi-touch driver interfaces, that go back to 2003 from several vendors. Yes Apple Fans, WindowsXP TabeltPC devices existed back in 2003/2004 with multi-touch, far before any iPhone or multi-touch trackpads from Apple.
Crap like this is why Apple's marketing works so well, it gets repeated no matter what the truth is.
Part of the motherboard ACPI problem is that Windows expects, and uses, some functions within ACPI that are not compliant with the ACPI specification... you know the drill: embrace, extend, obscure, try to screw the opposition
Yet Windows works around more 'crap' ACPI implementations than it 'takes advantage of' non-compliant specifications.
This is really a goofy argument, as there is very little mainboard ACPI implementations that are Windows specific, let alone off spec to be Windows specific.
Instead you find crap Motherboards that still have exceptions for OS/2 RAM usage, non-Windows features like VGA palette crawling, cobbled Sx states, and horrid USB support for 'legacy' OS methods that Windows hasn't used in 10 years. (Yes we know these are not all ACPI specific)
I'm sure it is fun to blame windows for ACPI sucking and Linux's support of ACPI sucking.
The bottom line is, ACPI tends to suck, and Linux doesn't have the development resources to make it work in all circumstances, even though it does a pretty good job. Apple has trouble with their hardware, yet have few model, moved to EFI and still have some of the same inconsistent behavior Linux and Windows users encounter or messed up combinations of hardware.
As for ACPI, MS tried to push the industry on ACPI and move past it back in the 90s, and it was hobbists that were using non-Windows OSes like Linux that screamed and stopped EFI type suggestions from taking hold. MS shoved for legacy free BIOS concepts, and there is some hardware even out there that used a generic proprietary EFI type of legacy free BIOS system, go look at Toshiba laptops from 2002 that required OS level drivers, as there was no traditional BIOS. They also didn't have legacy ISA or older device support and could boot WindowsXP in less than 10secs on some machines, and return from a full hibernate in under 2 secs because of no BIOS time delay.
Just to blow your argument to the side, crap like this link would not exist if Windows did have more control over ACPI compliance as you suggest. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/831691
Specifications and variations in the specification is an area that 'logic' would dictate that the OSS model would be supreme; however, in reality, the complexity and diversity of the implementations favors larger production OSes like Windows where exceptions have to be implemented, and a large vendor like Microsoft can force Motherboard companies to clean up their crappy implementations or work around them, as Windows often does.
One of the biggest bitches users had with Vista and hibernation and Standby were because of Vista adhereing to the specifications and trying to force vendors to do the same, so that S1,S2,S3 etc were consistent. Instead MS had to write a bunch of 'exception' code for motherboards and even up until SP1 was still adding code to deal with crappy motherboard implementations to get the hibernation and standby back in line so that hybrid sleep could work consistently.
Microsoft doesn't have control over the hardware markets like people assume they do, and never really have. If they did, they would not have had to resort to proprietary hardware for the XBox 360, as some of the hardware specifications in the console are things MS shoved for in the PC market years before. Just an example would be unified shaders, and this didn't finally get shoved to PC users until Vista's DX10 required them, even though the benefits of a more agnostic GPU shader system was known years and years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume that I am not the target user
You don't watch movies or video ever uh?
WMV/VC1 is still the most used Video distribution mechanism, even as crazy as that sounds to the Linux user world and even with the YouTube/Flash markets.
Even if you only think of Silverlight in the context of the video capabilities, you would be surprised how many sites that want you would be using it. It is Flash, but without the Adobe tax for developers and server owners. (Being that you can even stream Silverlight video off an Apache Linux server without any costs.)
Silverlight also adds a lot to video since this was the main focus of Version 1. It brings VC1/WMV formats in a way that is lighter and higher quality than Flash, in addition to playing better on clients with higher quality (pixel resampling, etc.)
So there are going to be sites that will make moves to Silverlight at some point rather than continue down the Flash only road just for sake of bandwidth and video quality. Adobe's only HD mechanisms are sad and flawed, and client performance (especially on Firefox) is horrid at best.
Silverlight you can get the streaming HD experience - even on a 3G cell phone connection, this is not something Flash offers. Let alone Silverlight can do multi-bandwidth streams so content can adjust on the fly to your connection, so when you take your WiFi device out to 3G world, the content continues to play even if you have to give up a few bits if your providers can't handle it.
Also think about video content distributors dealing with HD adoption. Most HD/Blu-Ray is in VC1, not MPEG4, so to stream directly from the converted content by providers, they only have to convert to VC1 once, and can take the video to Blu-Ray and also distribute it online without any additional processing.
So instead of thinking of Silverlight as what it is capable of (Full replacement of Flash with better performance), you should think of it as a universal video content delivery client. (V3 of Silverlight adds in MPEG4 and other codecs as well natively, so it is also working to not only offer the best of VC1/WMV but work with any standard codecs out there - being able to stream everything except probably Adobe Flash Video format.)
Take a look at XBox Live, and although it technically is not a Silverlight platform, it can and does use existing VC1/WMV 'Silverlight' content to provide movies to users and instant playback HD video content.
Remember there was the Windows Media infrastructure, and Silverlight's team took that packaged a tight client to use the technology and also shore up the abilities of Windows Media (VC1) technologies, in addition to saying, we not just MS's bitches for codecs, and will support MPEG4 and AAC and other formats as we can.
The XBox 360 NGE update added tons of new Divx and MPEG4 and AAC support as standard features (Divx was originally added quite a while back, but now various versions and audio codecs are now supported as well.)
This is something the silverlight team deserves some thanks for, and is one of the few, we want everyone to get the best experience and get access to the best content even if it isn't MS's. And the irony is Silverlight was started as a web implementation of the Vista WPF APIs, with no intention of doing much else.
Linux does not require a "pagefile" (do you mean "swap partition"?) to run, and never did. It does require one for suspend-to-disk ("hibernate"), but then so does Windows (hiberfil.sys).
Ok, no and again no...
Do you have concept of what a swap partition is? Just because 2.6 allows you to use a swap file instead of a partition, doesn't mean that 'effectively' Linux needs a form of VM, even if it is emulated when booted from a CD. Understand?
Please go look this stuff up. If you don't even understand how the OS is alloating RAM and VM, you might want to educate yourself if you are going to respond to topics with a semi-technical nature.
Oh and the suspend to disk thing, ya you are way out of left field there with regard to VM and HD paging, and lost all credibility with that comment.
Turn off your NT page file
Fill up the RAM
Malloc more than is free
Core dump (or kill a random task, which will cause a core dump later)
Let me guess on a non-NT box, requesting more RAM than is physically available just magically works by allocating ionized gas from the user? Do you call it the plasma memory area too?
By the way, Linux and OS X do not require page files either. Furthermore you can completely tune your page file to do anything you want. You want more system cache, adjust swappiness down. Want to swap everything, make it 100. You can even make your swap file on a RAM disk if you're really brave. You can of course, totally rewrite the VM system if you want, or replace it with one of the other VM's you can get for Linux because you have the source code.
Really? You might want to fact check a bit of this.
As for configuration and memory management offering you the ability to 'to do anything you want'... How often do you write your own VM? Ok, done with this silly placating. Do you even have a grasp of the VM in Linux and that by replacing the VM it is no longer Linux, right? I could write my own VM for NT as well (and truly could) and run it, but it would no longer be NT or NT VM mechanisms...
(Just because software is closed source does NOT mean people cannot read the binaries and modify the code themselves. Open Source is making people stupid and lazy instead of sharing knowledge. Does anyone from the OSS world even get that 'having source' is barely different than reading the assembly code from the binaries?)
The VM of Linux is configurable, yes, but so is the VM of NT, as well as the cache priorties, etc. And one could even argue there is more control of this on NT, as many of the features you can configure on NT are not even available to Linux. Hell it wasn't even until 2.6 that you got reverse mapping or other basic concepts NT and other OS VMs have been doing for a long time.
Even doing an install without a swap partition was a hack and a trick prior to 2.6, and this makes no sense since HDs don't contiguously allocate partiions, as they did MANY years ago and why a 'partition' was used. BTW Even a Linux swap parition can be fragmented, even though Wikipedia reads that it is only NT's use of a dynamic pagefile that could create a fragmented VM area. - Anyone that wants to fact check this and fix Wikipedia, please feel free, and you can even credit yourself.
We could take this argument to technical levels and talk about -pmap and the three levels of VM in Linux and the medium/media priorty system for VM, but I am afraid if the concept of depleating RAM with a Malloc request seems 'magical' to you, this would be more of a lecture with you getting a free class in kernel architecture and memory management rather than a real debate.
Its not often 70keys and a mouse can be replaces by a few buttons and knobs
True, but there have been some games that also destory they myth if the UI design is well thought out. Specifically I would refer to KOTOR as one of the ground breakers of making a complex game and UI feel more natural with a XBox controller than a keyboard and mouse.
I would like to see more console games support and require the keyboard add-ons (like XBox Messenger Keyboard), and instead of re-inventing the wheel between platforms, use the best of both.
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately?
Have you?
Vista's paging system specifically is rather different than XP, with the new memory prioritization mechanisms, so that a big application, background app, or file operation doesn't shove crap to the page file as it did under XP and as other OS notoriously do.
Shockingly this is one area where Vista's team really did a good job with system architecture and memory handling and the usage of a pagefile when applications do need more RAM, use of a pagefile with background I/O priorities and other mechanisms like states and events that make a world of difference.
Besides...
If you don't like the pagefile in Vista, turn it off.
(NT is not OSX or Linux and does not require a pagefile to run.)
Side Note: If you have a lot of RAM, turning it on or off has virtually no difference in performance, as the Pagefile is only used to lazy write RAM contents of low priorty applications to improve resume from hibernation support, so the computer can just reference the already on HD contents of RAM when it resumes.
I also won't even go into the history of NT and Windows and what brought it some early sucess was its ability to operate well with low amounts of RAM. Windows 3.x DLLs and paging allowed it to easily run applications that were 10x the size of physical RAM, and is an area where other OS technologies of the late 80s, early 90s could not compete. (Winword's EXE (not couting DLLs) was almost 2mb alone and ran on 2mb 286 machines rather well.)
Running Windows 3.x x86 on 2mb of RAM was comfortable and what helped Windows adoption. NT of the time even as big os the portable code was, still ran well in 12-16mb, and as late as 1998, running NT 4.0 on a 486-66 with 32mb of RAM as a server worked really well.
There is a reason the 'weight' of *nix hurt the earlier *nix movements, and there is still a myth about Linux or other *nixes being significantly more lightweight than NT. Remember today's Vista kernel and basic operational 'layers' can be shoved into 25mb, and this is light enough to run on most watches, let alone routers and other appliances, where Windows Embedded does have a significant presence already.
So before you fire an arrow over the wall, you might want to make sure you have any understanding of what you are talking about.
And for people that care, go check out a Vista Memory whitepaper or even check out Channel9.com and look back to Vista architecture videos for a better explaination.
Using an instanced image boot and still not getting numbers beyond a normal user on a generic system doing standby or hibernate? Really?
On an average system Vista SP1 should do a real full boot in 15-20 seconds. A Resume from Hibernate in about 5 seconds and a resume from suspend instantly, ok maybe 1 second.
If you don't see these number with Vista, you have something wrong somewhere, some crap software or a horrid piece of hardware.
So really? This is news really? How? And why would someone want to boot to a instanced image and not just use a hibernated image?
Geesh...
Taking an initial and progressive snapshots are a good idea to start with and a VM tool will let you do this if you are just monitoring what software is doing. Go with Virtual PC 2007, it is free and will let you take the VHD images and later remount them as secondary drives on a VM to compare them.
However depending on your end goal, it might be better to 'also' just data mine the changes to the system. Use http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx (Process Explorer) as it tracks all the changes, including read/writes to everything on the OS from the File System to the registry specifically.
Process Explorer has been around for a while and is kept updated. It is a valuable tool for tracking what install software is doing on your system, what it is changing and touch and although it can produce huge logs of data, doing a bit of dataming on this data can produce a lot of information about system changes. (It is something crackers even use to see what keys or files are changed to store random information to unlock software, etc.)
On Windows, this is the key tool for monitoring the system all the way down.
So Virtual PC 2007 for VHD images and Process Explorer (always running) storing the data of all the changes.
This should give you everything you need.
your point would be...
Just what you took time to demonstrate in your post, Microsoft was doing all of this crap before Apple.
Therefore, the comment "Monkey see, Monkey do", would better be suited at an attack at Apple, as they are the 'me too' once again. Of course their fanbois wouldn't know this, and probably still think they invented everything, as long as Apple marketing tries to make people believe it.
And yes Apple INTENTIONALLY tries to create this perception. When they run ads about the first 64bit computer - which the UK made they stop saying (and OS X still isn't even 64bit), and then use their marketing strength of cool to run ads about the iPhone or iPod 'revolutions' and then describe features that have been available for years.
But since the basic consumers and Apple fans didn't realize it existed before, they run to buy it and give Apple all the technology credit for crap they ripped off. Yes even the iPhone is a sad knock off. It looks like a rotary dial phone compared to phones in Japan and is very featureless compared to basic Windows Mobile devices people had been using for years. Can anyone say freaking voice dialing even, who in their right mind would release a bluetooth enabled device without any voice features? (And don't say iPhone=multi-touch, it is even a rip off, google TED multi-touch, let alone the Tablet PCs that were multi-touch enabled years before.)
I am tired of the myth of Microsoft is copying Apple crap, especially when Apple vampires the entire industry, puts a cute logo on it and people think it is the gold standard. Some of us had multi-GB MP3 players in the mid 90s, and phones with touch interfaces, real 3G, and even an OS running our own applications for almost 4 years before the iPhone.
The only thing Apple has done well is offer few choices and lock users into their products further, so people that are dumb as rocks feel 'comfortable' about using the product and don't have to worry about even which store to buy the song from.
So ya, Monkey See, Monkey Do - Apple keep up the rip offs for as long as people are stupid enough to believe your marketing, a time will come when people find out they were duped.
Pelosi doesn't speak for the Democratic Party, she is just one voice and her personal agendas are usually not in line with the Democratic platform.
If you want to put a face to the Democratic Party, try Obama, as he now sets the platform, and he is far from liberal and is a good mix of the better ideas from both ends of the political spectrum.
One note about Obama, he didn't even use the Democratic party to get elected, which in a weird way makes him the first President elect in modern history that isn't influenced by any special interests nor even the special interests of his own party. This allows him to recreate the Democratic party around his more centrists views that like Clinton are fiscally conservative and semi socially liberal. He also should do better with upholding the constitution, considering this was his legal specialty.
I have a lot of respect for both conservative and liberals and find neither have all the answers. I don't agree with Democratics 100%, but at this point all I can feel is shame for what the Republican party has transformed into over the past 20 years.
Truly go pick up any of the recent John Dean books, he is a traditional Goldwater conservative, and is fighting to keep what is left of the conservative ideals alive.
BTW Goldwater even helped start the book "Conservatives Without Conscience" with Dean, before his death, and this was based on ideas they worked on in the 90s when him and Goldwater already felt like the Republican party left them both behind as traditional conservatives.
PS Using the Pelosi argument is like saying the Republicans are horrible, but the Democrats are almost as horrible. (Not a really good argument basis.) It also leaves the impression that you can't properly just defend the Republican decisions without pointing the finger at someone else.
It would be far better if your political thoughts would be more like, here is how I am defending what the Republicans are doing based on 'this and this' and because you think they are right. From your response, I don't think you can defend what they are doing, so why are you fighting for them to do stuff you disagree with?
Truly, if you can't defend what people are doing that you support, you might question why you support them and at what cost.
Are you referring to the Microsoft Software and Music stores that were online before iTunes and the iPhone store?
Wait, that makes Apple the monkey... Right?
Microsoft is talking about expanding their online sofware distribution to portable devices like the Zune and Windows Mobile. This is more of a revamp focusing on specific software for specific devices from the online store.
You do realize people have been buying music and software from Microsoft Online services for over 7 years right? You also realize people have been renting movies online via Windows Media Center and now the XBox 360 since 2003? Or does the Apple distortion field make everyone not notice what 'other' people are doing if Apple didn't make it?
Now do you feel stupid or just really stupid?
Great system - government doesn't allow market to work - and then takes money to make it work (for sufficiently poor values of "work").
This is the 'modern' Republican way.
Privatize profits and socialize losses. (Corporations only of course.)
Conservatives need to take this last election and use it as fuel to go read any of John Dean's recent books on the failure of the Republican party by betraying true conservatives.
(Even Goldwater before he died screamed for the Republicans to stop going down the road that led to Bush II and the move to corporate authoritarian policies.)
Being able to run CIL isn't the same as being able to provide all the libraries involved in Microsoft's APIs.
Otherwise Wine would have been trivial to implement.
Wow, talk about jump the tracks...
Do you really think you need MS libraries to provide .NET 'like' features or expose similar functionality? Considering this is ALREADY being done on Apache Linux servers everyday, your argument is a bit self defeating.
Here is the deal...
Use MS's Cloud if you want, just keep your client application updated (as they will already automatically do, and 3rd party applicaitons will probably not break with the version scaling features MS is using.)
Or...
Use your own freaking Cloud and Servers
Or...
Pay another company to be your cloud.
There is NO LOCKIN or Version lockin to Microsoft.
Get it yet, or do you want me to explain it like you are a five year old?
Not sure about numbers, but RDP originally ran well on 14.4 modems, and the newest incarnations of RDP are even lighter depending on the application. For example a Vector WPF/Vista based application over RDP can do 3D graphics on a 56K modem.
For the power options, RDP is going to be reliable 99.999% of the time, if the system is configured properly. However if you have a hardware failure a remote boot/restart card/device would not be a bad idea, just to cycle power on the fluke encounter when it might be needed.
Here are my concerns:
1) If the person is having to ask this type of question here, should they really be responsible for a deployment like this?
2) Why would they be asking a primarily Windows question on Slashdot?
3) Why would they be 'forced' to using Windows, but not even realize RDP is a built in option (Yes even on Home versions of XP/Vista)?
So I can run it on Red Hat?
I don't know can you?
Can you run a form of OpenID? .NET or functional equivalent server side?
Can you run
Can you push out AJAX or serve up Silverlight content?
This sounds like stuff any Server OS can currently do.
So can YOU?
I loved that game...
BTW, Here is a thought for people:
When is the last time your computer could see what you were doing outside the computer, and assist you with it?
It seems small at first, but really is a huge UI construct making the jump to reality.
Seeing how full a drink is may not break the UI glass ceiling, but for the demonstration market these devices are launched in is a no brainer use of its technologies.
Next imagine the world poker championships where the table is automated, and your two white cards never leave your fingers, yet you can hold and view them like real cards, or even with real cards, and the table can watch how you are playing... (And people thought Win3.0 Solitaire was the dope.) :)
This platform is not tied to Microsoft 'run' servers, but sure you can host or use Microsoft hosting servers. So the only way this article is true is if the developer is hosting the content on a Microsoft owned Server.
However, independant vendors, and even personal businesses can HOST the platform on their own in house, or 3rd party servers and be locked to whatever freaking versions they want.
PERIOD.
This stuff is just freaking insane that A) people don't get it and B) can go around the bend and off the cliff trying to understand it.
(A lot of this 'platform' is NOT EVEN tied to MS Windows Server technologies - geesh.)
Seems pointless to me.
If this functionality is useful, why couldn't you just have the software display a rectangle that you can drag across the screen that affects what is displayed within the rectangle?
Ok, this is what kills me. Someone adds a new perspective on technology and interfaces and people run to yell how it doesn't matter because THEY don't understand it or see how it could be useful or see past today's use of techonology to imagine applications for it.
The examples given are 'basic', but the potential is actually quite powerful in terms of future interactivity.
Even in this concept, think of a display that 'projects' additional images past the main display. So the computer could 'show' you something without disrupting the onscreen image.
So imagine holding a sheet of paper and have information appear on it as a secondary display while working with the surface imaging technolgy.
Next imagine a white model with a texture laid on it when you are working with the surface computer interface.
The concept of a 'seeing' computer is basically what surface brings, now add that in a two way fashion so that instead of just infared vision, it can also project images beyond the 'surface'.
Heck holding something that has an image on it and the computer responding to what I am doing with it is quite a handy and simple concept but powerful with where it could lead.
Back to the Surface technologies and a simple concept to be practical in some of the 'cute' applications it is used for now:
The Surface computer can already let a person order drinks and pay for them by seeing the selections, it can also see the drinks sitting on the display, and it can now also see how full the glass is, to send your wait-staff to your table sooner to refill your drink.
Now add a drinking glass that the surface can display images on to label your drink so people don't mix up the glasses after getting up for karaoke, dancing, or whatever you might do. Or maybe add advertising to the glasses so that the drinks are cheaper.
Again this is off the top of head simple ideas, but just a step into a new interactive world MS is making happen. When it comes to UI expertise, MS has some people that really are the leaders in the world and their work inside MS pushing these concepts into products, even if just 'test' or limited use products at first are at least getting these ideas out there for people to work with, build on, and think about. (Unlike their multi-touch UI work done in the late 90s that didn't get any public acknowledgments.)
The people inside Xerox in the 70s had a heck of a time getting their ideas out in the world for people to play with and build on, and your 'attitude' about this technology is the same opposition many of the Xerox people faced.
The first person to use a mouse or even a silly pen on a screen were also mocked by people that didn't think it would lead anywhere, and in their 'daily' technology it didn't do much for them.
Interactive projected content with an interactive seeing system has a lot of possibilities, and is also why the infrared 'seeing' surface technologies are not something as simplistic as multi-touch that people often misrepresent it to be.
The Mouse took almost 20 years before its usefulness became a reality in mainstream computing and the pen another 15 years, but someone had to start somewhere...
Marketing, Smug, Technology, Backlash...
For years Apple takes technology and lets their marketing department transcend the technology into god like status.
When Apple finally admits that the technology wasn't the end all or best, they kill it, move on and users backlash because they believed the Apple marketing and bought not only into the thinking, but the products that surrounded it.
Apple has done this time and time and time again, and will continue to do so as long as Apple Marketing is 'better' than the technology they are shoveling.
Here is just a look back at the bigger ones off the top of my head, where one week Apple users were demonstrating how much better Macs were and the next week when Apple killed them off, had to eat their own smug reality pile:
68xxx, PowerPC, SCSI, System 7,8,9
- Oh, and the importance and power of the 'claimed first' 64bit computer (That still to this day has a 32bit OS, and only offers 64bit memory addressing to applications with none of the other 64bit optimizations that can make a 64bit computer faster.)
(Also don't forget some of the crazy crap, One button mouse is less confusing, keypads are not needed, greyscale displays are 'crisper' and less distracting than full color for DTP, stereo speakers on a notebook are worthless, and other out of nutland arguments to justify the smug insanity.)
So the more Smug the arguments from rabid Mac users are about a 'crappy' or outdated technology, the bigger the backlash when Apple itself moves on.
Mac fans, roll with the punches, it happens to all technology and even Apple technology is mortal. Also, embrace the future, and stop believing Apple's Marketing, instead go read about the technology outside the reality distortion field before you put on your smug smile and 'know' Apple has only given you the 'best'.
Screw instant on, Computer should always be on...
This is why hibernate and other state technologies exist. Hibernate your freaking computer, stop shutting it down. Even in a hibernate state, the computer can turn itself on to grab updates or performance maintenance if allowed and then re-hibernate.
(The concept of 'shutdown' for modern computers is something that will die in a few years anyway, like like application states of being off will be a thing of the past before long also.)
Why aren't people better educated about this. Even Vista by default puts itself to sleep and hibernates.
On my work laptop, it has been restarted about once a month for updates. The rest of the time it is either ON, Standy/Sleep, or Hibernated when traveling. I literally wait longer on the 'aged' BIOS than the OS itself.
As for the statement about Linux 'instant on' media features on some laptops... Um, some of the current instant on Media/DVD utilities use a modified form of XP more than I have seen Linux versions, as embedded XP is what was used by some of these companies.
As for Vista, it already supports Media or Hotstart features, that just haven't been used much by the OEMs, because it boots in 15-20 seconds instead of the 2-5 seconds of the embedded XP implementation.
Again, why settle for a single application instant on, when people are getting 15sec boots times on a full Vista boot? (Even the PS3 or XBox 360 take 10seconds to boot) Are people just getting insane about boot times? -And if you want to see a 'real long' boot time, restart your Cable Box or Sat Receiver, yes even the *nix based ones. 5 minutes or more you will be waiting.)
This is crazy on several levels. Especially when several OEM's BIOSes take longer to intialize than the OS itself takes to boot.
Microsoft should:
1) Demand OEM BIOS times are 'instant'.
2) Educate users to use freaking hibernate ALWAYS.
3) Forget the limited feature OS boot (A form of WinPE or an embedded Vista core, like the XP media center instant on features use already).
Actually Apple acquired a company called Fingerworks for their multi-touch technology. Fingerworks had started working in this are in 1999. I know that others probably had been working on this even before then, but Microsoft didn't have multi-touch in their Tablet PC until after 2003/2004. I think Microsoft Surface was the first try at multi-touch and that was 2007.
Ok, there is so much wrong here, I don't even know where to start.
Multi-touch input goes back to at least the 80s, Apple, nor Fingerworks created this. Apple may be using Fingerworks code for the recognition, but the UI multi-touch concepts they put in the iPhone are a direct rip off of both MS Research and TED conference demostrated concepts. (Google the TED multi-touch video that was long before Apple's iPhone.)
Microsoft Surface is NOT ABOUT multi-touch. Microsoft Surface is about 'unlimited touch' or 'visual touch' input, as it uses imaging devices that allows it to see unlimited points of input, their size, and even what they look like. That is why it can see things laid on the display, in addition to providing cute 'multi-touch' type UI interactions.
When you can swipe 5 fingers on your Mac or iPhone and it sees all 5 fingers and even see they are fingers and their size, and then responds to all of them at the same time, then you can start to compare any of this to Microsoft Surface technology. It is not even in the same class or generation as freaking dual or simple multi-point input that Apple uses. Think different, like years beyond what Apple is doing.
Tablets are not new at ALL in any way shape or form. Microsoft touts this stuff every 5 years as "revolutionary" Bah.
It sucked then, it sucks now. In fact the Handwriting recognition was better back then. Somehow it got worse as XP and Vista came along.
Ok, you are missing the point, and losing some credibility here.
1) This was about 'multi-touch', not touch or tablet devices.
2) Yes, Pen Windows 3.1 was around in the 1993 timeframe, and I know this because our company made products for it.
3) As for recognition being better 'in the old days', you really need to check out the 'ink' concepts Microsoft has advanced and how well it works across the board in Vista. (Even using an external Wacom tablet for $100 bucks, you can be long-handing everything you do on your computer with 99% recognition.)
If you have doubts on #3, go to YouTube, search for Vista and Handwriting or Vista and Tablet, etc. There are tons of videos of people either going OMG it can even read my crap handwriting or comparing Vista to OS X. (Hint, OS X loses because it doesn't handle Ink like Vista and instead uses more of an image recognition process.)
The Microsoft Ink concepts compute stroke direction, pressure, speed and also the vector image created to discern 'intent' of the person writing, not just what it 'looks' like, thus giving recognition levels that are truly amazing when a human can't read the handwriting and yet Vista does.
(And again, this is why preserving the 'ink' data in documents is important to Microsoft, and the thousands of companies and industries that use it. Go look up medical for one example. Ink is one reason MS has fought to keep OOXML the standard instead of people losing the 'ink' data by down-saving their documents to the OpenDocument format.)
People still aren't getting it.
Display Port is a cheap alternative way for Video only displays, and currently only has Apple and Dell backing on a grand scale.
HDMI is designed to deliver standard HD resolutions, and has specifications for the newer HD 2560x1600 and higher resolutions along with digital audio including advanced audio streams. One cable, all the content.
Display port would be classified as more of a direct replacement for computer only display interfaces without Audio.
Display port is in theory suppose to be cheaper and more 'open' but this ends up being more headache and hype than actual results. (Even just end users stringing multiple cables to their big screen was enough to shove DVI to the back of the industry)
If a MFR is using Display Port, they are trying to get by cheap and not expecting their users to hook up their computers to consumer level equipment, nor provide the uncompressed or Dolby audio streams that HDMI provides.
So it is 'ok' Apple is using Display Port, but it is not the HDMI replacement, especially when it doesn't even address audio or other signialling HDMI does. It is the cheap alternative. Display Port also has some severe cable length problems for higher bandwidth/resolutions. (Display Port does support HDCP although, but that is not so much of a feature to many DRM scared users.)
A LOT of people use PCs to control their video equipment in their houses, not only the standard Media Center installations, but everything from Myth and Beyond TV to even just PCs for displaying online content from Netflix or YouTube and hooking up their laptops to the big screen for various reasons. Computers controlling consumer level equipment and hooking in to the main 'screen' at the house is a common thing today. (AppleTV is a come late and do little concept here.)
Also, on Laptops, HDMI solutions are a lot more important, and also why even old DVI interfaces on laptops are a better choice, as they at least are signal compatible with HDMI displays, even if you have to provide separate audio.
Interestingly, it's listed as coming with XP installed, so we'd guess Asus will be using some sort of proprietary touchscreen interface
I think this statement is also pulling straws.
A) An XP interface would NOT be any harder than a freaking mouse driver.
B) TabletPC XP already has multi-touch driver interfaces, that go back to 2003 from several vendors. Yes Apple Fans, WindowsXP TabeltPC devices existed back in 2003/2004 with multi-touch, far before any iPhone or multi-touch trackpads from Apple.
Crap like this is why Apple's marketing works so well, it gets repeated no matter what the truth is.
HDMI has patents and licensing involved. That's why almost no PC maker is using it.
Almost every PC maker is using it. Is this satire?
Additionally most external monitors and consumer level large screen 'TV' displays are designed around HDMI.
I am not cheering for HDMI, just looking at reality.
Part of the motherboard ACPI problem is that Windows expects, and uses, some functions within ACPI that are not compliant with the ACPI specification ... you know the drill: embrace, extend, obscure, try to screw the opposition
Yet Windows works around more 'crap' ACPI implementations than it 'takes advantage of' non-compliant specifications.
This is really a goofy argument, as there is very little mainboard ACPI implementations that are Windows specific, let alone off spec to be Windows specific.
Instead you find crap Motherboards that still have exceptions for OS/2 RAM usage, non-Windows features like VGA palette crawling, cobbled Sx states, and horrid USB support for 'legacy' OS methods that Windows hasn't used in 10 years. (Yes we know these are not all ACPI specific)
I'm sure it is fun to blame windows for ACPI sucking and Linux's support of ACPI sucking.
The bottom line is, ACPI tends to suck, and Linux doesn't have the development resources to make it work in all circumstances, even though it does a pretty good job. Apple has trouble with their hardware, yet have few model, moved to EFI and still have some of the same inconsistent behavior Linux and Windows users encounter or messed up combinations of hardware.
As for ACPI, MS tried to push the industry on ACPI and move past it back in the 90s, and it was hobbists that were using non-Windows OSes like Linux that screamed and stopped EFI type suggestions from taking hold. MS shoved for legacy free BIOS concepts, and there is some hardware even out there that used a generic proprietary EFI type of legacy free BIOS system, go look at Toshiba laptops from 2002 that required OS level drivers, as there was no traditional BIOS. They also didn't have legacy ISA or older device support and could boot WindowsXP in less than 10secs on some machines, and return from a full hibernate in under 2 secs because of no BIOS time delay.
Just to blow your argument to the side, crap like this link would not exist if Windows did have more control over ACPI compliance as you suggest. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/831691
Specifications and variations in the specification is an area that 'logic' would dictate that the OSS model would be supreme; however, in reality, the complexity and diversity of the implementations favors larger production OSes like Windows where exceptions have to be implemented, and a large vendor like Microsoft can force Motherboard companies to clean up their crappy implementations or work around them, as Windows often does.
One of the biggest bitches users had with Vista and hibernation and Standby were because of Vista adhereing to the specifications and trying to force vendors to do the same, so that S1,S2,S3 etc were consistent. Instead MS had to write a bunch of 'exception' code for motherboards and even up until SP1 was still adding code to deal with crappy motherboard implementations to get the hibernation and standby back in line so that hybrid sleep could work consistently.
Microsoft doesn't have control over the hardware markets like people assume they do, and never really have. If they did, they would not have had to resort to proprietary hardware for the XBox 360, as some of the hardware specifications in the console are things MS shoved for in the PC market years before. Just an example would be unified shaders, and this didn't finally get shoved to PC users until Vista's DX10 required them, even though the benefits of a more agnostic GPU shader system was known years and years ago.