The new Windows 2006, the benefits?

[HopperJF]

Framiga wrote:
@mattabat

No wonder Microsoft has to advertise Windows XP on TV here in Australia - they are quite afraid their new OS won't get any takers.

WinXP TV adv here in Italy too.

And here in England.

[Karlos]

adz wrote:
@NoFastMem

TPG?

Exactly what I just thought. I hope so anyway :-D

[Karlos]

Trev wrote:

The principal benefit of as 3D accelerated desktop is user interface speed. So much time and effort has gone into pushing the 3D hardware envelope this last decade that not using their 3D capabilites for conventional user interface rendering is a waste.

Well, just about every chipset since the Voodoo Banshee has included features for accelerating 100% of the Windows GDI API, and full DirectDraw support (now part of Direct3D, I think) followed soon after. I don't see any benefit to a 3D interface on a 2D surface--unless someone comes up with a substantially different mode for controlling productivity applications.

GDI sucks in extremis. DirectDraw is much better of course (performance wise, that is) but overall the featureset is still quite basic IMO.

My earlier point is that modern "interfaces" are hell bent on 2D effects that the existing 2D acceleration does not support too well - transparency, shading, fast resampled scaling etc etc. These functions are, of course, well catered for by 3D chipsets.

Heh, try comparing basic drawing operations provided by AmigaOS graphics.library to the same things performed using Warp3D ;-)

[seer]

Yeah, very restrictive DRM (digital right management)

FUD I would say.

http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/about56096.html

If any part of your computer gets broken (hd, motherboard, or anything else) you won't be able to use that stuff any more, you will need to buy it again!

Source ? That's the same as with XP activation, put in another HD and you are forced to reactivate.. Well, never happened to me.. And I have added / changed my HD's, burner and even my mobo (same make / model..)

[Vincent]

Trev wrote:
a prettier Windows Explorer and XML-based everything doesn't really do anything for me. :-/

I'd only just read about going down the XML way.  Could this be a big problem with backwards compatability?

[seer]

Could this be a big problem with backwards compatability?

Depends, xml wil mostly be used by the new API calls and longhorn features, so any old Win32 program shouldn't need to worry about that.

Longhorn is, according to MS the biggest change since Win 3.1 -> 95 or 95 -> NT.

[Trev]

Responses to various posts in no particular order. . . .

From what I can tell, the Longhorn kernel isn't substantially different from any other version of Windows NT. Improvements here and there. . . . Changes to the driver model. . . . Some new native API calls. . . . And the Win32 API is still the same API we all know and love.

I usually disable all the flashy GUI stuff (fades, transparency, etc.) and get everything as close to a Windows 95 style shell as possible, with the addition of the address bar in Explorer for quick entry of file system paths.

Getting past and current versions of Windows NT to run with a console interface shouldn't be all the difficult. Of course, you'll be limited to console applications, and that defeats the purpose of running Windows. It should also be possible to run Windows NT with a UNIX-style set of consoles, including separate GUIs (e.g. the Windows NT 3.x vdesk driver), but you'd need to do a bit of kernel hacking.

Anyhow, it's an operating system. You can do whatever you want with it. Most people just stick with the operating environment provided by Microsoft.

Trev

[Waccoon]

Karlos:  So that they can say "look, we have a 3D accelerated graphical user interface engine too." to all the MacOS X users

Turning a 2D surface into a texture and doing slideshows is child's play.  I wish they would improve their damned toolkits instead.

The principal benefit of as 3D accelerated desktop is user interface speed.

Unless, of course, their crack interface design department tries to add in all sorts of "directional" behavior, like on Macs.  I've always found the Windows interface to be very responsive if it's programmed correctly, and I don't want that to change.

TBone:  They're improving the console too.

Any change would be an improvement.  I've never liked the old MS-DOS promt, but after starting to learn how bash works, CMD looks completely braindead.

Trev:  Anyhow, it's still just Windows NT. The kernel has improvments and new features, but a prettier Windows Explorer and XML-based everything doesn't really do anything for me. :-/

I don't see the big fuss over getting everything based on XML.  Like HTML, it's only nice if done correctly, and few know how to use it right.  If you've ever looked at source XML generated by Microsoft PowerPoint, you'd die laughing.  It's simply wretched.  No wonder both MS Office and OpenOffice are such bloatware.

I'll continue using Windows 2000 until nothing runs on it, thank you.

[seer]

From what I can tell, the Longhorn kernel isn't substantially different from any other version of Windows NT. Improvements here and there. . . . Changes to the driver model. . . . Some new native API calls. . . . And the Win32 API is still the same API we all know and love.

True, the kernel is based on Windows 2003. The Win32 is there for compatiblety. Longhorn programs are supposed to use the new Api, some of wich are going to be backported to XP. The GFX engine isn't going to be, so no "fancy" longhorn effects on XP.

Current alpha isn't even that compatible with XP at the moment..

/edit
win32 -> winfx
Avalon

longhorn apis

[Trev]

Any change would be an improvement. I've never liked the old MS-DOS promt, but after starting to learn how bash works, CMD looks completely braindead.

I'm rather attached to the Windows command prompt, but I would like to see support for Bourne-style command substitution using backquotes or $() syntax.

[Trev]

True, the kernel is based on Windows 2003. The Win32 is there for compatiblety. Longhorn programs are supposed to use the new Api, some of wich are going to be backported to XP. The GFX engine isn't going to be, so no "fancy" longhorn effects on XP.

Bits of the kernel have been moved around and rewritten over the years, but it's still Windows NT, regardless of what Microsoft labels it.

Windows without Win32 would be pretty useless. (And actually, the lack of a 16-bit WoW environment in Windows x64 will probably keep me from upgrading.) And unless the new interfaces interact with the kernel directly (i.e. int 2e, syscall, or sysenter) or indirectly through ntdll.dll, they're riding on Win32 just like everything else. I suppose I could install Longhorn and take a look. :-) So little time to play. . . .

Trev

[seer]

I suppose I could install Longhorn and take a look.

If you have VMWare or MS VirtualPC be sure you install it on a formatted virtual disc.

If you have a build with begins with 4, it probably based on XP. If it's a 5 it's should be based on 2003. Note it's an alpha, the current release is more aimed at driver development (or so they say) then anything else. It might be nothing more then Win2003 with Avalon/Indigo out in and some other tweaks (have "fun" with the security center in the latest build..) I hope I can get the beta from my friend as well as it comes out ..

Oh, and the latest 5 has a new boot manager. Nothing fancy, just prettier. (Ehm.. fancier I suppose ;-))

[Karlos]

@Waccoon

Aye, true. I was commenting on the general reasons for using a 3D based UI engine. I never commented on any specific implementation of one. Leave it to MS to produce something that consumes more resources than the basic 2D one would have ;-)

[mikeymike]

T_Bone wrote:
I hated NT4, it was always wonky setting those damned things up.

Soundcards were hit or miss, same for video cards, service packs had to be constantly reinstalled everytime you make a slight configuration change that pulled an original file off the install CD, USB was ignored, CPU cache size had to be manually set. No device manager. Ugh, no fond memories of Nt4 here.  :lol:
(Running it wasn't bad, but if anything "Murphy Lawish" happened to the machine it was a PITA to work on)

Out of the 50 or so workstations I set up with NT4, apart from USB, I had none of those complaints.  Drivers were fine.  Anything that required the original CD were settings I set when I first set the machine up (like say locale), SP reinstalls were last-resort and rare, and CPU cache size, well, big deal :-)

2000 and XP seemed exactly the same to me, I keep hearing people say they liked 2000 but hated XP, but most of the reasons are down to default settings that can be changed to accomodate the preference for 2000's defaults.

On about half of the XP setups I've seen, if one sets up task manager to have a systray icon and run minimised all the time, the icon disappears, regardless of the auto-hide settings (I like having task manager there!).  The DMA issue of having to delete a registry entry if DMA goes wonky is just plain irritating, if trying to delete a locked file, "access denied" takes ages to appear, memory footprint is a good bit larger than Win2k, explorer memory usage is a lot larger than Win2k (regardless of how minimalistic your tastes are, the minimum mem. usage I've seen with XP is ~12MB), and Windows Product Activation (say no more).  I'm sure there are other issues, I just can't think of them right now :-)

XP-64

One report I've heard (not sure how reliable the source is) says that even 64-bit optimised games with Win64 drivers isn't as good as normal XP on the same hardware.  That's probably just a product maturity issue, a few SPs later and it'll be probably fine :-)

About Longhorn, I think it won't be anything new, they keep stripping out features to meet the 2006 deadline.

[Trev]

One report I've heard (not sure how reliable the source is) says that even 64-bit optimised games with Win64 drivers isn't as good as normal XP on the same hardware. That's probably just a product maturity issue, a few SPs later and it'll be probably fine

That sounds more like a developer maturity issue. It will be awhile before developers work out optimizing their code for x64 processors. In the meantime, you'll see similar performance with more features (more detailed models, deeper playing fields with less fog, etc.).

Trev

[T_Bone]

T_Bone wrote:

adz wrote:
Yeah, eye candy sucks, too much clutter, too much colour ;-) Give me a text based terminal anyday. TBH, looking at the next generation of Windows OS's, I'll be sticking with XP for a loooong time, besides the only reason I run Windows is for gaming, I do all my work on either SuSE or OS X.

They're improving the console too. IIRC it'll be possible to actually run windows completely from the console again, although this may be only on the server versions, but even the console application in the desktop should be improved.

Here's that shell
http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/06/09/1219213.shtml?tid=201&tid=218