When will AERO be useful?

AlexCode

I can certainly find a use for those! No problem! :-D

Jim Crafton

One quibble - while linux does have various projects attempting this, none, to the best of my knowledge are ready for widespread, everyday use, i.e. they are not as mature and stable as OS X and Aero. At least one of the issues that causes problems is the requirement of "tainted" drivers, drivers that are not compliant with the GPL, and therefore many distro's don't include them by default, meaning you don't get the best performance out of your graphics card. Because of this, IMHO, idiotic and childish decision people have to to manually upgrade to nvidia or ATI drivers after they install a distro, which is a complete waste of time.

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StevenWalsh

ok... i might have to switch my ubuntu server to my main workstaion.... so I to, can have snow on top of my wall paper :) I don't think linux would handle 4 monitors well though...

realJSOP

When Microsoft removes it from Vista.

"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001

AlexCode

Great explanation... Thanks! That really answers the "what's the use of Aero" question. Now as you said, it could show up exactly as XP but working differently on the back, more efficiently. But they (M$) wanted it also to be different on the front-end... of course... makes sense! And the question is... Why isn't it useful?! :(( We got fancy buttons, windows drop-shadows and opened windows previews... that's all folks! I want to think that this one more unfinished feature included in a rush just because it just couldn't miss the scene... Should we expect new on this on the upcoming SP1? :confused:

AlexCode

:laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

AlexCode

How does this cube desktop virtualization handle a multi-monitor scenario at all?

Russell Jones

Rohde wrote:

But when KDE 4 is out I'll consider switching to Linux.

My new PC is going to be turning up just before the release date for KDE4, I've had beta 2 running since release date and not experienced too many problems, so I think i'll install "Gutsy Gibbon" with the KDE beta at that point and upgrade to the final version on its release. I'm looking forward to the next release of compiz-fusion though, promises much eyecandy to show off my new vid card; that said I'll then turn all the funky features off and go back to a simple GUI.

Russell Jones

What doesn't make sense to me is that they haven't just produced a simple 2D effect for the windows. 2D is a subset of 3D so it should be a simple task to provide a 2D desktop using 3D hardware while it is obviously a highly intensive task to provide 3D using 2D hardware. Just because they have the ability to use 3D acceleration why did they feel the need to use frosted glass effects? My video card at work is capable of many 3D effects and has an amount of 3D acceleration but is totally incapable of producing the kind of effects that AERO demands. It seems that MS in their wisdom have made a good and sensible decision and then ruined their hard work by going so totally over the top with the effects they have used. Compiz-fusion on Linux allows independent selection of each feature and includes a theme manager to provide "skinning" of the OS for those who want to control their dektop experience; It runs perfectly well on my 4 year old dell laptop, albeit with many features turned off. I suspect that the implementation of AERO was more motivated by the desire to get a really fancy looking screenshot in PC format magazine than any sound design principles but I fully agree that a 3D accelerated environment is the way to go. Russell

PIEBALDconsult

They already are : Honda Shadow Aero[^] :cool:

Shog9 0

Jim Crafton wrote:

Because of this, IMHO, idiotic and childish decision people have to to manually upgrade to nvidia or ATI drivers after they install a distro, which is a complete waste of time.

Used Vista lately? None of the machines i've installed it on can do the Aero stuff on a base install - and only one out of three has been able to at all so far, even when upgraded to the latest-and-greatest OEM drivers. Heck, using OS-blessed video drivers has been a bad idea (performance-wise, if nothing else) for as long as i can recall; i suspect it's just a function of how video hardware is developed and released.

every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?

Jim Crafton

Well I tried Vista Ultimate on my machine at home, and I don't remember having to install anything special video driver wise. But maybe I have a good enough graphics card? It's an nvidia with 256 MB of VRAM.

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Member 96

AlexCode wrote:

The Windows+Tab is just nice to see but how many times do you actually use it while you're working?

Never and I've never actually got to use it only because my keyboard doesn't seem to support it and I'm not giving up my keyboard for any feature short of a miraculous one.

Modo vincis, modo vinceris.

Shog9 0

Jim Crafton wrote:

It's an nvidia with 256 MB of VRAM.

Better than what i'm using then. The best i've tried so far is a NVidia notebook thing - so shared RAM.

every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?

El Corazon

Russell Jones wrote:

What doesn't make sense to me is that they haven't just produced a simple 2D effect for the windows. 2D is a subset of 3D so it should be a simple task to provide a 2D desktop using 3D hardware while it is obviously a highly intensive task to provide 3D using 2D hardware. Just because they have the ability to use 3D acceleration why did they feel the need to use frosted glass effects?

hehehe, you obviously have never been on a committe for anything. ;) Lets say the programming team comes up with a new invention, 3D accelerated desktop (forget someone else did so first), that saves a good 60-80% of the time rendering the desktop. What happens? do you accelerate it and send it out exactly the same as before but faster? Nawwwww.... the customer was accustomed to the speed before, so lets add this, add that, that would be cool, yeah, I like that, hey can you do this, how about that? Pretty soon you have a camel where you wanted a horse. :) Aero is the camel where the horse should be. :)

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

Russell Jones

that's so true. I fully understand the need to produce crazy effects for marketing purposes but surely it should have been implemented in such a way that my old PC will run it and get some benefits. If MS want me to spend £200 pounds on Vista do they really believe I want to spend another wedge of cash just to run it? It seems that supporting old machines so they run at a similar speed to the ones before would be a good idea. I ran XP with the duplo front-end turned off when it first came out and it was the same speed as Win2k give or take. In fact I never got round to turning the flufy gfx back on as it just seemed to eat real estate for no reason. Vista however runs like a stoned 3 legged pony on a machine that is less than 6 months old because the video card doesn't have the right kind of 3d acceleration. Had MS provided a 3D accelerated basic theme the video card would probably have made up for the crap performance of the rest of the OS and I wouldn't be working out when i'm going to have time to upgrade back to XP. Russ

AlexCode

Keep the keyboard... :->

El Corazon

Russell Jones wrote:

I fully understand the need to produce crazy effects for marketing purposes but surely it should have been implemented in such a way that my old PC will run it and get some benefits.

Surely you don't really believe that? :) Microsoft is in the Operating System business, but a large market comes from new hardware vendors selling Vista on new machines. Just as XP ran slow on machines of that age, so too Vista runs slow on machines only a little older. Graphics card capability ranges from the cheap to the expensive, from the weak to the powerful. And sometimes the equation isn't clear. We just had a customer buy the quadros, but not the highest end one for $4500 (that would be rediculous right?), but instead of the high end Geforce for $600 they bought a low-end Quadro for $1000 and actually got lower performance for more money. Mass market cards in the $100 to $250 range are the most popular, but also are not very capable. Vista could have been done in directX 9, but this would not sell as many new graphics cards. It could have been written with cooperative to minimal threading or even non-interupted thread-like tasking for some operations. But that would not sell new multi-core processors. But two things we have to keep in memory also: Multi-core was late, Vista was meant to reach this environment in its mainstream which is happening now, not when it was released then. Sure it was already out, but it wasn't bleeding down the line to the mainstream as much as it is now. Multi-core will grow, Vista must be capable, as my software is too, to handle well beyond 4 cores. Vista must survive efficiently to 16 and maybe 32 cores until the next OS is released. Both single core and massive-core is hard to build compatible models for. I have struggled for years and finally gave up. I moved from 16 processors to dual processors, but never made it to one processor for my software. Now with multi-core here, I have to expand back the other direction. Vista can't change as often as my product does, so they have to be ready now, for the cores to come. And last, as I have admitted, I am partly to blame. The bridge to OpenGL and other graphical frameworks embedded into the render-to-texture pipeline of Aero, reduced speed. It was a last minute "fix" due to market pressure, and Microsoft did it against their better judgement and did it in such a way that speed was decreased between the Betas that implimented this newer model and the one before that

Member 96

A lot of programmers seem to forget that in many cases marketing's job is to show potential customers that the company has the products they want. In other words I as a typical consumer enjoy the 21st century aspects of windows in Vista, I like aero, I think it looks cool and I don't really give a crap about the underlying technical aspects unless they cross my development path negatively (which they never do). Microsoft didn't make aero to piss off programmers, it made aero because it found that it's customers wanted it.

Modo vincis, modo vinceris.

Member 96

You might as well ask: When will red cars be more useful than plain black ones? This is marketing 101, Microsoft does market research like nearly everyone else, they know for certain that their customers and potential customers on average want a cooler looking windows. They've probably mocked up many different UI's and focus grouped them. Got a lot of feedback from ordinary users of windows. Probably a lot of business users in there. Programmers can bitch all they want but the market has spoken and will continue to whether we like it or not.

Modo vincis, modo vinceris.