Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 28th May 2008 19:09 UTC
Yesterday, during the opening hours of the D6 conference, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher jointly interviewed Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. While the interview dealt mostly with the past, Yahoo, and a bit of Vista, by far the most interesting part was the first ever public appearance of Vista's successor: Windows 7. Earlier today, the team behind D6 posted a video of the demonstration, which was conducted by Microsoft's Julie Larson-Green. From a graphical user interface point of view, there were some interesting things in there.
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Member since:
2006-02-15
Current systems, as I understand them capture what's being displayed and apply varying degrees of compression to it before sending the output across the network. Theoretically, with a 3D accelerated desktop you could just send the instructions for drawing the primitives the desktop is composed of across the network and have the GPU at the other side render them freeing up processing power on the server side and allowing for higher quality and a richer experience on the client side.
There's quite a few catches here actually: the whole windowing subsystem would have to support network transparency all the way from the lowest graphics functions. X does support network transparency so that would be possible with X, but it just hasn't been done. With Windows it is not possible without rewriting the whole thing. There's also a few other caveats: both ends would have to have exactly same fonts or the end result wouldn't look the same, also you'd still have to send all pictures like icons and web page elements over the network.