Vista rant ---- MS must dump it...

[Quitch]

Or you get the equivalent of G80. Obviously a hugely different angle, but there are some similarities. It would be risky and a huge undertaking. I guess it all depends on whether there are potential gains. Maybe there aren't?

In the world of software you're not going to gain from starting over when writing an OS totally tens of millions of lines of code. Software doesn't have barriers in the way hardware does, you can simply add and improve. I wonder whether the nVidia driver team wrote the G80 drivers from scratch, or based them on existing techniques and code?

 

[swaaye]

Well considering little quirks like 16-bit color looking absolutely terrible, it's an interesting question. ATI did recently rewrite their OpenGL driver. It had some performance and compatibility problems for a while, as a result.

I can see a huge software code base becoming spliced together with tons of workarounds, and eventually becoming entirely untenable. Unless you have some ubergenius who can somehow keep the whole mass of code conceptualized all at once in his head, hack jobs are just going to inevitably happen. A rewrite would let them take what they learned from that base and build it in a new way.

 

[doob]

I guess 16.4k files is enough for everybody? uh what, no? C'mon its funny!

 

[RobertR1]

Best Vista feature I discovered last night was sleep mode!

You have to make a couple of edits in your Power Profile. Now, I hit the power button on my PC but I have it assigned to sleep. The whole PC is off in a matter of seconds. Whenever I want it back out of sleep, I hit the power button again. In under 5 seconds I'm back on the desktop and everything is running smooth as butter.

 

[patsu]

IMHO, it's better to run XP in a VM on a MacBook Pro (using Parallels or VMware). You can close it anytime almost instanteously. Sharing files and clipboard between Mac and Windows is a breeze too. If you have dual screens, XP can take one and Mac take the other. Transition between them is seamless.

Only downsides are: (i) You'll need a large HDD if you want to maintain multiple copies/configurations of VM... and (ii) I have not tried gaming yet.

Vista is a little too bloated to do it this way.

 

[Frank]

In the world of software you're not going to gain from starting over when writing an OS totally tens of millions of lines of code. Software doesn't have barriers in the way hardware does, you can simply add and improve. I wonder whether the nVidia driver team wrote the G80 drivers from scratch, or based them on existing techniques and code?

I don't agree: at some point simply rewriting it is MUCH less painfull. Which is where MS was with Vista.

And they can simply run XP in a VM for backwards compability. The only thing that suffers are the drivers, but they already do.

 

[dZeus]

Best Vista feature I discovered last night was sleep mode!

You have to make a couple of edits in your Power Profile. Now, I hit the power button on my PC but I have it assigned to sleep. The whole PC is off in a matter of seconds. Whenever I want it back out of sleep, I hit the power button again. In under 5 seconds I'm back on the desktop and everything is running smooth as butter.

how is this different from S3 standby mode in for example Windows XP?

 

[aaaaa00]

how is this different from S3 standby mode in for example Windows XP?

S3 didn't work as well in XP.

Also Vista has hybrid sleep, which does a hibernate and S3 sleep at the same time. That way it comes back really quickly when you push the power button, but if you lose power, it will just do an un-hibernate instead of losing your sleep state.

 

[nutball]

S3 didn't work as well in XP.

Worked well enough for me under XP. For ~2-3 years now.

(Worked a lot better than it does now under Linux on the same hardware... hello yes Linux folks you seem to be busy having massive ego wars about who knows best how to do this. But Microsoft has been doing it better than you for three years now... whereas you go for the typical "better to have five broken-but-elegantl solutions than an functional-but-ugly solution" point-of-view).

 

[aaaaa00]

Worked well enough for me under XP. For ~2-3 years now.

Well not on all hardware. There was a big problem with USB devices plugged in blocking S3 sleep on a bunch of broken USB controllers. You had to hack in a registry key to force S3 sleep to be enabled on XP, and even then sometimes it didn't work.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841858/en-us

 

[AlphaWolf]

Worked well enough for me under XP. For ~2-3 years now.

Yep, I have only one complaint about sleep mode on XP, it occasionally loses the connection to my router and is unable to restore it without physically removing and replacing the cable or a complete restart.

 

[nutball]

Fair enough. But if a registry hack could enable it then it sounds to me like maybe a patch could fix, rather than an whole new operating system?

 

[aaaaa00]

Fair enough. But if a registry hack could enable it then it sounds to me like maybe a patch could fix, rather than an whole new operating system?

Hybrid sleep is really cool.

 

[Frank]

Fair enough. But if a registry hack could enable it then it sounds to me like maybe a patch could fix, rather than an whole new operating system?

And how would that be different from Linux?

 

[dZeus]

S3 didn't work as well in XP.

Also Vista has hybrid sleep, which does a hibernate and S3 sleep at the same time. That way it comes back really quickly when you push the power button, but if you lose power, it will just do an un-hibernate instead of losing your sleep state.

hybrid sleep sounds very nice, but how exactly is the regular sleep different from XP S3?

Never had a single problem with S3, including waking up from USB devices (keyboard, mouse, remote control). I've seen the network connection loss, but I tend to believe it's a driver issue as only one network adaptor in one PC I've seen suffered from that (a VIA controller to be exact).

 

[swaaye]

Oh Linux. I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on the crust bucket Duron + KT266A + TNT2 M64 at work yesterday. The machine is used as a simple web kiosk. Well, haven't had any quirks with prior Ubuntu versions, but apparently now the NVIDIA-Legacy driver doesn't detect monitor refresh rates correctly. It took me an hour to get above 800x600 60 Hz. Had to manually edit xorg.conf. Ease of use ha ha. (At least this distro has wireless out of the box tho!)

I suppose that's all NV's fault though. The freeware "nv" driver that is used by default got the resolutions right, but it's also way slower.

Evil MS operating systems since Windows ME (whatever has TNT2 drivers built in) wouldn't have caused that problem.

 

[Frank]

Developing Vista drivers for GPUs is prohibitely expensive. So they cut back on support for anything else. Like Creative did as well, and everyone else needing to produce Multimedia drivers for Vista.

Blame Microsoft, but that's still the only platform worth the effort. Which is just as Microsoft likes things.

 

[Kaotik]

Developing Vista drivers for GPUs is prohibitely expensive. So they cut back on support for anything else. Like Creative did as well, and everyone else needing to produce Multimedia drivers for Vista.

Blame Microsoft, but that's still the only platform worth the effort. Which is just as Microsoft likes things.

I developing DOS drivers was cheaper than [insert random windows here] - Let's go back to DOS!

 

[Frank]

I developing DOS drivers was cheaper than [insert random windows here] - Let's go back to DOS!

It surely was: every software designer had to write his own drivers for any hardware he supported. Like it is with Linux. But that made the software more expensive. Although most of those costs are in retail and profit nowadays, except for the big names, who have to feed many thousands of employees.

 

[swaaye]

Well at least until stuff like Miles Sound System and HMI Audio (or whatever it was). And the VESA standard was (is) helpful, even if it never really offered access to any acceleration functions.