With roughly a 10Gb minimal install footprint; Windows 7 is composed of (roughly): 7Gb of DRM, 1Gb of committee designed UI fluff that adds no form to function, 1.5Gb of Microsoft proprietary shovel-ware (browser, crapplets, mono-ware), 500Mb OS.
The 'new technology, features and benefits' are all Committee, At tourney, Marketing Weenie derivative fluff that have little or nothing in the way of real innovation and a everything to do with revenue generation and marketing copy -- and carry enormous heft and bloat as a consequence.
With Management, Marketing and Development bureaucracy top heavy and ungainly then what IBM employed to develop OS/2, and with less in the way of objective design goals -- it shouldn't surprise anyone that the 'new OS' is little more then 'Vista SE'.
I used to be a Microsoft Fan, but now I think it's shocking and disgusting that products like Windows 7, and all the anti-competitive chicanery is the best that a company with Microsoft's resources can do...
A bloated monopoly, swimming in too much easy money; devolving from the meritocracy that got it where it is to a cumbersome bureaucracy -- makes bloated unoriginal software products by process of bloated and awkward bureaucratic committee design; and applies a concomitant approach to research, development and it's application.
We've never seen anything like this before...
^_^
While this outcome was inevitable and just effect; what's sad about it is the Santa Cruz Operation was originally a pretty cool company that made a pretty cool UNIX -- one of the first that ran and ran really well on a PC with a lot of feature 'firsts'.
It's unfortunate that a more functional and collaborative approach to UNIX and just doing business wasn't taken by SCO's new owners...
It's hard to feature why more UNIX Developers and Partners don't work together to standardize UNIX and with it Linux, and in turn to better distinguish their products. This wouldn't just be healthier, better business practice; it's a lot more FUN for all involved.
I can't imagine someone like Darl McBride or any of his legal cronies go to work anticipating a fun filled day of innovation, value creation or excitement about the what they're helping sustain and foster...
From a Sound Designer's perspective a much larger issue and limitation to "What's up with computer audio?" is that most of the market is driven by game sound and the status of what is regarded as 'State-Of-The-Art' in game sound render is laughable to be generous.
To be fair, until recently sound render capability and fidelity in games has really not been much of a concern with good reason; games and game design haven't offered the level of play detail and subtlety to take advantage of much more then crude 'positional' sound render capabilities, and as far as fidelity is concerned most game Fans listen to game sound on the most abject sound hardware as far as fidelity is concerned even when under the illusion they have purchased State-Of-The-Art rig.
There are a slew of issues and challenges unique to game sound rendering that will only be overcome when some generous or concerned Developers and Programmers assumes the onus of seriously addressing them -- to date no one has. Fundamental issues and serious limitations of game sound render that bring it in way below the bar of what's technically feasible can be summarized (in no particular order):
limited dynamic range (due to the following)
crude sub-mixing of multiple sound channels
gross compression/companding
simplistic, crude compression and companding algorithms
gross interactions between mixer, compression and companding
lack of sound and level designer control over aforesaid parameters
complete lack of even the most basic engineering documentation of the aforesaid
no (or very crude) steridian based boundary effects
use of cheap canned DSP & positional libraries
very poor perspective (first to third person) and proximity effects
crap-tastic tools (worst in the industry)
no security
poor sync
undocumented black-box sound manipulation
As just about everything that can be wrong with sound render in games is wrong even the smallest concerted attempt at addressing some some of these issues with the crudest of solutions would be a [i]God Send[/i]. In many cases issues and limitation of crusty sound renderer 'back planes' and features could be overcome by the simple expedient of documenting how they perform and at the very least offering Sound & Level Designers means to disable mixer compression, ACG, and DSP effects and features, and create or adjust these effects statically/manually.
Arguably the largest issue confronting fidelity in game sound render is having automated dynamic mixing of an indefinite and changing number of sound sources, of dynamic position and not have them overload. In essence sound renderers are required to automate the task of live show Sound Engineer that is setting up for multiple performers, performing different kinds of music with different instruments, different number of performers in each ensemble, and different musical genera on-the-fly -- a virtually impossible task with no automation, only crude DSP, and very crude compression schemes.
The current solution has bee to use massive amounts of audio compression and companding (not to be confused with digital file compression) reducing dynamic range on a heinous scale -- and while this is a better sounding solution gross digital overload -- the dynamic range achieved and double digit distortion figures obviate any need for high fidelity audio hardware beyond the cheapest EAX compatible card and discount headphones that aren't physically painful to wear. The surround sound processing offered by even the best audio hardware and game renderers is little more then laughable marketing gimmick to be polite.
The value of decent sound render performance capability won't be readily apparent unless or until it's available for a capable Sound Designer and Game Designer to collaborate and exploit and the results won't be the 'knock your socks off' kind of thing like HUGE explosions and cheap positional panning effects of jets, or magical plasma balls screaming past or behind yo
Slashdot Mirror
With roughly a 10Gb minimal install footprint; Windows 7 is composed of (roughly): 7Gb of DRM, 1Gb of committee designed UI fluff that adds no form to function, 1.5Gb of Microsoft proprietary shovel-ware (browser, crapplets, mono-ware), 500Mb OS. The 'new technology, features and benefits' are all Committee, At tourney, Marketing Weenie derivative fluff that have little or nothing in the way of real innovation and a everything to do with revenue generation and marketing copy -- and carry enormous heft and bloat as a consequence. With Management, Marketing and Development bureaucracy top heavy and ungainly then what IBM employed to develop OS/2, and with less in the way of objective design goals -- it shouldn't surprise anyone that the 'new OS' is little more then 'Vista SE'. I used to be a Microsoft Fan, but now I think it's shocking and disgusting that products like Windows 7, and all the anti-competitive chicanery is the best that a company with Microsoft's resources can do...
I was being sarcastic; the examples in business and industr are endless...
A bloated monopoly, swimming in too much easy money; devolving from the meritocracy that got it where it is to a cumbersome bureaucracy -- makes bloated unoriginal software products by process of bloated and awkward bureaucratic committee design; and applies a concomitant approach to research, development and it's application. We've never seen anything like this before... ^_^
While this outcome was inevitable and just effect; what's sad about it is the Santa Cruz Operation was originally a pretty cool company that made a pretty cool UNIX -- one of the first that ran and ran really well on a PC with a lot of feature 'firsts'. It's unfortunate that a more functional and collaborative approach to UNIX and just doing business wasn't taken by SCO's new owners... It's hard to feature why more UNIX Developers and Partners don't work together to standardize UNIX and with it Linux, and in turn to better distinguish their products. This wouldn't just be healthier, better business practice; it's a lot more FUN for all involved. I can't imagine someone like Darl McBride or any of his legal cronies go to work anticipating a fun filled day of innovation, value creation or excitement about the what they're helping sustain and foster...
From a Sound Designer's perspective a much larger issue and limitation to "What's up with computer audio?" is that most of the market is driven by game sound and the status of what is regarded as 'State-Of-The-Art' in game sound render is laughable to be generous.
To be fair, until recently sound render capability and fidelity in games has really not been much of a concern with good reason; games and game design haven't offered the level of play detail and subtlety to take advantage of much more then crude 'positional' sound render capabilities, and as far as fidelity is concerned most game Fans listen to game sound on the most abject sound hardware as far as fidelity is concerned even when under the illusion they have purchased State-Of-The-Art rig.
There are a slew of issues and challenges unique to game sound rendering that will only be overcome when some generous or concerned Developers and Programmers assumes the onus of seriously addressing them -- to date no one has. Fundamental issues and serious limitations of game sound render that bring it in way below the bar of what's technically feasible can be summarized (in no particular order):
limited dynamic range (due to the following)
crude sub-mixing of multiple sound channels
gross compression/companding
simplistic, crude compression and companding algorithms
gross interactions between mixer, compression and companding
lack of sound and level designer control over aforesaid parameters
complete lack of even the most basic engineering documentation of the aforesaid
no (or very crude) steridian based boundary effects
use of cheap canned DSP & positional libraries
very poor perspective (first to third person) and proximity effects
crap-tastic tools (worst in the industry)
no security
poor sync
undocumented black-box sound manipulation
As just about everything that can be wrong with sound render in games is wrong even the smallest concerted attempt at addressing some some of these issues with the crudest of solutions would be a [i]God Send[/i]. In many cases issues and limitation of crusty sound renderer 'back planes' and features could be overcome by the simple expedient of documenting how they perform and at the very least offering Sound & Level Designers means to disable mixer compression, ACG, and DSP effects and features, and create or adjust these effects statically/manually.
Arguably the largest issue confronting fidelity in game sound render is having automated dynamic mixing of an indefinite and changing number of sound sources, of dynamic position and not have them overload. In essence sound renderers are required to automate the task of live show Sound Engineer that is setting up for multiple performers, performing different kinds of music with different instruments, different number of performers in each ensemble, and different musical genera on-the-fly -- a virtually impossible task with no automation, only crude DSP, and very crude compression schemes.
The current solution has bee to use massive amounts of audio compression and companding (not to be confused with digital file compression) reducing dynamic range on a heinous scale -- and while this is a better sounding solution gross digital overload -- the dynamic range achieved and double digit distortion figures obviate any need for high fidelity audio hardware beyond the cheapest EAX compatible card and discount headphones that aren't physically painful to wear. The surround sound processing offered by even the best audio hardware and game renderers is little more then laughable marketing gimmick to be polite.
The value of decent sound render performance capability won't be readily apparent unless or until it's available for a capable Sound Designer and Game Designer to collaborate and exploit and the results won't be the 'knock your socks off' kind of thing like HUGE explosions and cheap positional panning effects of jets, or magical plasma balls screaming past or behind yo