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neliz said:
I'm not advocating piracy here, but everyone able to fill in 040-1111111 in the CD-Key box was the happy owner of a fully working workstation or (enterprise/terminal) server.
Even for our machines that were under a 5000 client license used that code.

Piracy was easy back then, M$ widespread.
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No, what I was talking about really had nothing to do with piracy. MS was literally paying for the hardware (or a significant portion of it even after discounts) if you committed to running NT on it. Basically they wanted to seed NT to universities in order to influence the familiarity of the students when they went out into the real world.
 
Albuquerque said:
Again, I don't see how their decision to move drivers to Ring 0 was somehow "bad" given the era. We have plenty of examples of their competition having no issues with it. Maybe when I hear your expanded story about why they made the change late in the development cycle (I'm taking your word on this, although I cannot find any documentation that specifies either way) then perhaps I'll have a different take on it.
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What OS were the majority of device vendors targeting and how different was that device model than the non-ring 0 model in NT3?

DX10 is not entirely comprised or limited to SM. If it were that simple, you could immediately run DX10 rendering paths on XP right now without issue, with no exceptions.
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You are kidding right? the ONLY THING that matters in DX10 is the SM. That is the ONLY real distinction. Driver models, etc, are just blah. Realistically the only thing that even the programmers see as a major distinction in their day to day is the differences in the shader model. All the other stuff is buried in setup code off in the yonder.
 
aaronspink said:
What OS were the majority of device vendors targeting and how different was that device model than the non-ring 0 model in NT3?
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I honestly don't know. If we're taking about the original NT3.1 days, then "most" device vendors were targeting DOS if we're staying specific to the x86 platform. I'm not really following the rest of your thought process here, so I assume you wanted me to answer with something different.

Please try to be more verbose in your next response so that I might follow you better.

aaronspink said:
You are kidding right? the ONLY THING that matters in DX10 is the SM. That is the ONLY real distinction.
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So there was nothing in DX10 about batching draw calls, or sharing of 3D surfaces across processes, or a uniform method of framebuffer virtualization, and there was certainly no components involved in DX10 regarding the new thread scheduling and arbitration, nor the I/O prioritization?

Are you sure? Because I remember reading a few things about some of this technology in DX10. And most of what I just rattled off required WDDM. You could "emulate" several of those things via driver layers in DX9, but they certainly weren't uniform...
 
Albuquerque said:
And yet, drivers in NetWare 3 ran entirely in Ring 0. Netware 4 offered the admin the ability to 'decide', but Ring 0 was the preferred location for performance.

Oh wait, didn't you say competitors weren't doing this? Are you wrong yet again?
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Yup, if that is true, I am wrong. I will have to go digging on this when I have some free time. I could have sworn that NW ran almost everything in Ring 3.

-Charlie
 
Groo The Wanderer said:
Yup, if that is true, I am wrong. I will have to go digging on this when I have some free time. I could have sworn that NW ran almost everything in Ring 3.

-Charlie
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Unfortunately for you, NW3 and NW4 defaulted to running everything in Ring 0. I say "defaulted", because NW4 allowed you to load drivers on an as-requested basis in Ring 1. I recall doing this on an old HP server we had back in the day for some reason, but it's been too long since I've messed with any Netware.

I had quite a bit of NDS and Bindery experience back with my work in PepsiCo in the late 90's. Netware was a very solid server operating system, far more so than NT4 of the same era.
 
Albuquerque said:
Unfortunately for you, NW3 and NW4 defaulted to running everything in Ring 0. I say "defaulted", because NW4 allowed you to load drivers on an as-requested basis in Ring 1. I recall doing this on an old HP server we had back in the day for some reason, but it's been too long since I've messed with any Netware.

I had quite a bit of NDS and Bindery experience back with my work in PepsiCo in the late 90's. Netware was a very solid server operating system, far more so than NT4 of the same era.
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I ran a lot of NW 3 and 4 machines, and I have vague memories of the ring structure, which is why I mentioned it originally. I am still mildly annoyed that NT doesn't have the tools for figuring out rights problems that NW had in the 4.1x generation. :(

-Charlie
 
Speaking of NT 3.51 it was actually given away free with a pc magazine in the u.k. It timed out after a certain date, but you could just set the clock back
 
Davros said:
Speaking of NT 3.51 it was actually given away free with a pc magazine in the u.k. It timed out after a certain date, but you could just set the clock back
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That's still how Windows works, They (Can) release Win7 Trials that only work on certain dates etc. and, as long as you don't hit the time-out, you can set the clock back. I can provide MS manuals on how to do this as well.
 
neliz said:
That's still how Windows works, They (Can) release Win7 Trials that only work on certain dates etc. and, as long as you don't hit the time-out, you can set the clock back. I can provide MS manuals on how to do this as well.
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Though nowadays setting the clock to something else than correct date/time can cause issues elsewhere.
But you can "re-arm" the trial twice at least, giving you 90 instead of 30 days
 
Kaotik said:
Though nowadays setting the clock to something else than correct date/time can cause issues elsewhere.
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True True, But M$ provides machines for their demos with limited pre-activation that simply require the machine to be set to a specific date for installation, it's not similar to the 30 day grace period and using the System License Manager to rearm your grace period.

That's how we currently work with Asentus (Canada), Microsoft's roadshow partner. They simply create one baseline (fixed date) that needs to be set in the BIOS of every machine before deployment and gives you a proper trial without the "you have 7 days left to Activate Windows" messages.

Having a wrong RTC prevents you from running Windows Update.. normally ;)
 
Albuquerque said:
So either shut up about MS not changing anything, or shut up your complaints about them changing things. I'm tired of reading / hearing / seeing people bitch about what doesn't get changed, and then when something does change, they bitch more. It makes anyone pulling this nonsense look entirely ignorant, which apparently, and I see several instances of it right above me.
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Spare me the inane pestering. I already explained my position on the matter, go back and re-read what I said. I never complained about anything being broken and I do not complain about things being fixed. I'll tell you what I'm tired of seeing, people jumping to conclusions and lumping others into categories. I have many reasons for disliking Vista and for you or anyone else to call me ignorant as a result is well......sad and pathetic actually.

Yes, Vista is SLOW. Any arguments to the contrary are just wastes of breath or rather brain function with this being the internet.
 
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After using XP and 7 alongside each other for months now, I've found that 7 is generally faster. It is dramatically faster with respect to HDD I/O for ex. There are other aspects, such as folder thumbs, that work way way better in Vista/7 than XP. There are just lots of little refinements like that and not much that makes me yearn for XP enough to say it has an overall advantage. XP is certainly preferable if your CPU & RAM are limited though (say Athlon XP / P4 era hardware).

I'm not convinced that 7's worse for games (outside of ancient Win9x games). If XP had access to DX11, I think it would have a future for gamers, but it doesn't because it does not. DirectX 10 is going to go down the path of DirectX 6, having been rather ignored. Unfortunately most of our DX10 hardware's DX10 features will probably enjoy the same fate now. 3 years of DX10.x hardware that almost exclusively ran DX9 code. Unprecedented.

I think 7 is pretty decent so far. The taskbar is a real mixed bag though IMO. It feels like a half-complete implementation in quite a few ways. I also wish Aero was way more customizable.

Albuquerque said:
WDDM removed 3rd-party developed drivers from ring level 0, which drastically reduces stability problems that Microsoft cannot otherwise control, or see or effectively change (but are ultimately still held responsible for.)
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Amusingly, we were enjoying BSODs for almost the first year of Vista's existence due to NVIDIA drivers. ;)
 
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swaaye said:
Amusingly, we were enjoying BSODs for almost the first year of Vista's existence due to NVIDIA drivers. ;)
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I never really understood this either. It's obviously possible for a catastrophically bad driver to still tank the OS I guess; leave it to NV to find such a way ;)
 
Albuquerque said:
I never really understood this either. It's obviously possible for a catastrophically bad driver to still tank the OS I guess; leave it to NV to find such a way ;)
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Even with WDDM, there's still a ring0 component to the display drivers. The graphics portions are all in ring3, like it's been for OpenGL for years, so this helps with system stability quite a bit. A crash in your graphics driver rarely results in a BSOD now, results from other vendors not withstanding :D
 
ANova said:
Spare me the inane pestering. I already explained my position on the matter, go back and re-read what I said. I never complained about anything being broken and I do not complain about things being fixed. I'll tell you what I'm tired of seeing, people jumping to conclusions and lumping others into categories. I have many reasons for disliking Vista and for you or anyone else to call me ignorant as a result is well......sad and pathetic actually.

Yes, Vista is SLOW. Any arguments to the contrary are just wastes of breath or rather brain function with this being the internet.
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Wow, that was just "sad and pathetic actually."

Considering on every single system I have. XP, Vista, Win7...run at almost exactly the same speed in general. There's small variations here and there depending on task and application, but it's virtually the same no matter which platform I'm using.

I haven't even run into a slow Vista install in the past year once Nvidia got their hiney's in gear and released good drivers for Vista. Well as long as you stay away from the Nvidia MB chipsets that Nvidia won't release good drivers for.

That said, I still grade Vista higher than both XP and Win7 just due to the far superior UI. Been using Win7 for a week now and I STILL don't like many of the absolutely idiotic UI changes.

And everytime I go back to XP, I die a little inside from having to use such a horrible UI.

Oh wait there is one thing that XP is WAY slower than both Vista and Win7. Startup time. Since sleep mode is still generally broken on my XP installs, I have to shutdown and boot rather than just put those machines to sleep.

Regards,
SB
 
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