(no subject)
I'm so far behind livejournal :) but I will go back and catch up I promise!
In other news I've been playing with Windows Vista on my system at home for the last .... week or so now, and generally I think I'm not too impressed. I know it'll improve with time (I remember how bad XP was compared to Win2k when XP was first released, and now their stability is pretty comparable) but my first few gripes are
Apart from this the system appears to be a pretty neat upgrade, I don't miss the defragmenter progress bars as much as I thought I would; and the new Start Menu is a welcome improvement that was long overdue. In fact, it's removed my need for several programs that I normally install to gain the missing functionality that's been in OSX for ... quite some time now. Since my monitor is a 19" widescreen I didn't normally care about having to pollute my quick launch bar, but now this is totally unnecessary! Aero also appears FAST - given how complex it must be to calculate hundreds of overlaying windows all with smoke effects on top of each other, I was surprised to find that dragging windows around quickly was quick, if not quicker, than doing the same thing in XP/XP64. My guess is that the CPU welcomes the GPU assistance when it comes to drawing things on the screen, I can't think of any other reason, other than perhaps the new graphics foundation libraries being upgraded to use more of DirectX - which is probably more streamlined as far as code performance goes.
I haven't found any recent games that do not work, but it appears as though DOS games now do not function at all, although this was lost in XP64 anyway so it's not really a loss incurred by Vista so much as perhaps the switch from 32bit to 64bit computing. The loss of OpenGL is a serious issue though, and I really do hope Microsoft see fit to add this back soon. Or perhaps ATI or nVidia can step up to the plate... although it's a pretty old, static, set of functions to support now, I can just see the nightmares of the 3DFX Voodoo miniGL driver era coming back to haunt us in what should be a fairly unchanging era for OpenGL. Specification battles almost killed UNIX decades ago, has killed several different competing models for Sound drivers, and it would be a shame to see this killing off OpenGL when it's already on the way out (on Windows at least) - as this would be a loss to interplatform compatibility.
Anyway my database restore is just finished, so it's back to work for me. Happy Friday everyone!
In other news I've been playing with Windows Vista on my system at home for the last .... week or so now, and generally I think I'm not too impressed. I know it'll improve with time (I remember how bad XP was compared to Win2k when XP was first released, and now their stability is pretty comparable) but my first few gripes are
- Aero appears horrendously memory hungry, easily capable of consuming 2GB of memory with a paltry 150 windows open. XP64 seems to have no trouble with this, and XP just doesn't seem to like having this many things running at once. I imagine Vista32 would have issues even if Vista64 just suffers from insane memory consumption.
- Copying different files in Windows Explorer between 2 directories in 2 seperate copy threads, with "More Information" opened up appears to crash explorer. XP's explorer.exe was initially pretty unstable so I'm not really surprised at this development, but given that you can simply not open the "More Information" dialogue box component and it doesn't crash, this appears to be a silly programmer error more than an underlying OS inability. (Although arguably it is both)
- UAC seems a bit more intrusive than I would like but this isn't really a big issue, given that it only asks new programs once (so once it's annoyed you it's also never going to pop up again) and the 'padding' on Administrative functions is a nice way to see how the underlying parts of Windows are all glued together.
- What the fuck happened to OpenGL???? I have never seen DirectX outperform it so blatantly ;-]
Apart from this the system appears to be a pretty neat upgrade, I don't miss the defragmenter progress bars as much as I thought I would; and the new Start Menu is a welcome improvement that was long overdue. In fact, it's removed my need for several programs that I normally install to gain the missing functionality that's been in OSX for ... quite some time now. Since my monitor is a 19" widescreen I didn't normally care about having to pollute my quick launch bar, but now this is totally unnecessary! Aero also appears FAST - given how complex it must be to calculate hundreds of overlaying windows all with smoke effects on top of each other, I was surprised to find that dragging windows around quickly was quick, if not quicker, than doing the same thing in XP/XP64. My guess is that the CPU welcomes the GPU assistance when it comes to drawing things on the screen, I can't think of any other reason, other than perhaps the new graphics foundation libraries being upgraded to use more of DirectX - which is probably more streamlined as far as code performance goes.
I haven't found any recent games that do not work, but it appears as though DOS games now do not function at all, although this was lost in XP64 anyway so it's not really a loss incurred by Vista so much as perhaps the switch from 32bit to 64bit computing. The loss of OpenGL is a serious issue though, and I really do hope Microsoft see fit to add this back soon. Or perhaps ATI or nVidia can step up to the plate... although it's a pretty old, static, set of functions to support now, I can just see the nightmares of the 3DFX Voodoo miniGL driver era coming back to haunt us in what should be a fairly unchanging era for OpenGL. Specification battles almost killed UNIX decades ago, has killed several different competing models for Sound drivers, and it would be a shame to see this killing off OpenGL when it's already on the way out (on Windows at least) - as this would be a loss to interplatform compatibility.
Anyway my database restore is just finished, so it's back to work for me. Happy Friday everyone!