OSNews regular Kaiwai takes a superficial look at Vista and MacOS 10.4/10.5, and concludes: "To say that the changes in Windows Vista are only skin deep is missinformed to say the least; spend some time reading those sources I have listed, and even if you don't have a desire to run Windows Vista or particular interested in Windows based technology, it does provide some good resources explaining the changes and rationale behind those choices made. So from a purely technical point of view, Windows Vista is actually looking a whole lot more interesting than what the detractors have been saying in the computer press about the current direction."
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Member since:2005-06-29
The problem with postscript is threefold:
1.) Microsoft doesn't own it.
2.) It's too widely implemented.
3.) It's not associated with Microsoft.
See why they don't like it? It's actually a widely used standard that works! They've got to rectify that quickly so that the market can be flooded with incompatible printers and their competition can spend months trying to reverse engineer their badly documented system.
That or they had some little problem with it and decided to scrap the whole thing. Or this somehow extends beyond postscript and is therefore "better."
I think they're trying to unify printing and display, which is sort of cool considering people actually still like WYSIWYG. They didn't like how a guy with a 1900x1200 monitor needs to use different fonts than a guy with an 800x600 monitor. So, to rectify this, they're going to make the 1900x1200 largely useless and things will appear about as big on it as on the 800x600, they'll just look sharper!
I still really dislike how they talk about pixels and big displays having things really small being bad. The first thing I'd do on a Vista system, if I can, is resize things down a bit so my young eyes can get some work done with the extra space on my fancy monitor. People buy high res monitors to make things smaller! That's .... the point!
Member since:2005-07-06
Not everyone buys bigger monitors to make things smaller. For instance, laptop resolutions have been on the rise for years, to the point where it's difficult finding one with XGA these days. Anyway, as long as things are adjustable, I wholeheartedly support an entire scalable UI. XP defaults ARE too small on my screen, and I am a young person, but I prefer not to squint. KDE and GNOME generally get it right off the bat, but XP defaults are tiny, and XP's scalability settings are way less intuitive than they should be--plus they only apply to fonts....
Member since:2006-01-06
He talks about XPS and how great it is to have an unique, bugless format for printing. I just ask, what is Postscript for then? It is standardized decades ago, even human readable and just works...
XPS, unlike Postscript, is an open standard. Adobe licenses Postscript to OEMs. XPS has no such restrictions.
Will there be printers which can interpret XPS themselves? I bet no.
You're wrong. Printer OEMs at WinHEC already announced that they will support XPS natively.
Member since:2006-03-13
Member since:2006-01-16
So what do you mean by native? Alike GDI, which was "supported natively" and resulted in drivers converting in whatever stinky format nobody could understand, even windows not?
A really open standard which is supported natively would result in the following cool side-effect: You can pipe whatever XPS file you have under whatever OS you have to your printer, without the need of a driver for it.
This is already possible with Postscript, while cheap printers don't support it and give us driver hell. *If* XPS would really be an *open standard* supported by cheap printers *natively* we could really benefit from it. If not - which I clearly doubt - it won't benefit anyone.
Member since:
2006-01-16
He talks about XPS and how great it is to have an unique, bugless format for printing. I just ask, what is Postscript for then? It is standardized decades ago, even human readable and just works... Will there be printers which can interpret XPS themselves? I bet no.
I don't like how everybody talks for years what will be included in the upcoming windows release (this time: Vista). Most people don't really know anything about it, others know some things, but there is a lot no one really can have a clue of. Mostly, people told about features which never really showed up.
Microsoft had this strategy from the beginning - getting the people to compare their competitor's actual software with what could be "expected" from MS in the next two years. Look at OS/2 3.0, which was released, had fully 32bit code, a strong object oriented graphical desktop, real cpu scheduling and so on. Most people (alike the press!) didn't give much about it and better talked (wrote) about what could be or not in Windows "4.0" (which would be released as '95 2 years later)...
So, no thanks, I won't do the mistake and wait forever for what Microsoft tells me I should wait for. I see what I can have from them *now* and it isn't really mindblowing. In Q3, or better Q4, I will have still time left (which I saved this time) to compare the real thing!
Edited 2006-03-12 19:46