Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 29th Jan 2007 20:13 UTC
To avoid having 8573 stories related to Vista atop one another, this item groups some of them. Fortune: "After five years in development, Microsoft's new operating system is finally about to hit the street. Is it a keeper? Fortune's Peter Lewis takes it for a test drive." eWeek: "Some have taken exception with Vista's permission-asking proclivity, but it may be that we've just become too cavalier about making fundamental changes to our systems." eWeek: "We check out the first systems bundling Microsoft's newest OS and tell you what you will, and will not, be getting with Vista." Click read more for, well, more items. This item will probably be updated regularly.
Permalink for comment 207108
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-08-28
"At one time, it seemed like it would be a cold day in hell before Microsoft would release Windows Vista... Tomorrow, Microsoft will give the real Windows Vista kick-off - much splashier than November's business launch - in New York City. The forecast is minus 1 degrees Celsius, with gusty winds."
New York City is Hell?
"Microsoft is looking to supplant the ubiquitous JPEG with an image format of its own"
I'd much rather see JPEG2000 than a Microsoft format. And I'm not sure the article's comparison to PNG is really fair- JPEG replaced GIF for everything but, well, animated advertisements (and images with transparency, thank you Microsoft for that one); and PNG does not emulate GIF's animation format. That's MNG, which even Linux distros don't seem to support. Besides, animated GIFs are being replaced with Flash banners... I dunno, I use PNG extensively for digital picture editing.
As for JPEG2000, it sounds like (as with MP3) with the proper tuning and better compression software, the JPEG format can produce far better images... so JPEG2000's lead is not quite as big. I think it is used in high-end video capture like the movie studios use, though.
I suspect "HD photo" will run into the same problems any attempted replacement of PDF will run into.
"Security researcher Alex Ionescu claims to have successfully bypassed the much discussed DRM protection in Windows Vista, called 'Protected Media Path' (PMP), which is designed to seriously degrade the playback quality of any video and audio running on systems with hardware components not explicitly approved by Microsoft."
I have to wonder, with all the strange restrictions on buying and installing Vista (with the carrot that they're all on the same DVD), and all the Digital Media restrictions (though they can play the discs)... Is Microsoft intentionally enticing people to pirate Windows Vista (or hack its features)? To gain vast marketshare very quickly? Or to justify further, even more Draconian measures in the future?
EDIT: Just noticed this: HD Photos can be easily rotated in 90° increments. JPEG images must be decoded and re-encoded, degrading quality slightly with each change.
I'm pretty sure this has been overcome for JPEG images by now.
The rest of the statements seem to be valid, though; I'm not sure even PNG supports 32 bits-per-color. I know PNG has a 64-bit RRGGBBAA mode, but this sounds far more... uh, deep?
On a side note, are there any digital cameras that output PNG?
Edited 2007-01-29 21:58