O’Reilly’s DevCenter continues its foray into all things Vista by investigating Aero Glass, presentation broadcast tools, UAP and RDP security, and more. Here’s part 1 for those of you that missed it.
An In-Depth Look at Vista, Part 2
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Adam Scheinberg
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For me, when I installed Vista, the system does not boot properly (Read, it blue screens) unless I have the CD loaded.
Now, it’s not booting off the CD. Basically, it has the familiar “if you want to boot to CD, press any key”, I wait that out, and then it just completely skips over the boot menu and boots into Longhorn.
Without the CD in there, it displays the new Longhorn boot menu, and selecting Longhorn just brings up a blue screen. Selecting “Legacy Pre-Longhorn” loads the old XP boot menu, and XP boots just fine.
I am thinking that this is the reason why it won’t install on his USB drive. A very very odd problem, but a problem none the less.
The presentation broadcast, while seeming like rdesktop, looks pretty handy.
I’ve used VNC for similar tasks before.
I could see this being used in computer labs where there is no data projector available, and multiple users can view the presentation.
It is functionality that exists previously, but now it can be used by the people because it’s “In their face”
Just curious:
does the thing work with multimedia presentations? I mean – streaming those movies to the projector sounds sort of unlikely to me…
Do not make text easier to read.
I agree completely. The phrase “Windows are translucent, ensuring that text is easier to read.” is nonsensical and false.
Agreed completely. As far as I’m concerned the translucent windows are just an annoying waste of clock cycles.
You mean GPU clock cycles? It’s barely touching the CP U to do all that, and is actually faster than the traditional XP interface or classic interface using the CPU solely.
I mean any clock cycles that may happen to be used by it, and for that manner any other system resource involved.
It may be faster, but it’s still the most grating Windows effect since “Clippy”.
I don’t see it as an issues considering there will be themes out for it once it’s released and Themes are supposed to be unlocked this time around.
And what’s wrong with actually using the GPU to provide a more advanced and capable user interface? This is 2005.
And what’s wrong with actually using the GPU to provide a more advanced and capable user interface?
Nothing, though neither are particularly evident here.
What do you mean? Using the GPU to do the interface will provide a much faster experience. This glass interface is simply a showcase of what is possible as a result of using the GPU. Even if MS fucks up and releases the current Aero Glass theme as-is in Vista final (please God I hope not), we will see third-party themes released very soon as we have with XP.
Erm… using a GPU to do the interface really won’t make much difference with modern graphics cards and processors. It’ll make it faster to do silly effects with the windows, like make them transparent and do distortions, but aside from that, it’s not going to speed up the experience.
Window data still ultimately needs to be worked out by the processor, the layout arranged, components set up, and the rendering scheme established. If compositing and effects are done by the GPU, yeah that is faster, but if the CPU is tied up, nothing is going to be sending the GPU window data, and nothing is going to be listening to respond to the interface when it is up.
The only other option is to move massive quantities of window manager logic onto the GPU and rewrite it completely, which probably isn’t reasonable at this point.
Actually it is faster. Windows are composited onto surfaces in DirectX and when you move them, they won’t require a redraw by the source program like is required currently.
I think the translucency might refer to the background text being gaussian-blurred, so that the foreground text stands out more. Standard alpha-blending results in overlapping and difficult to read text, Vista just takes it to the next level up.
Nvidia’s XP drivers already have a similar feature that makes windows transparent when you drag them. A friend of mine whose computer I sometimes maintain likes it, but whenever I have to work on his machine for him I find it intensely irritating and I always turn it off for longer sessions.
Note: Remember that the drivers (at least for nVidia) are still in alpha stage. So, don’t be surprised if using the drivers will cause problems later on. In fact, after running Aero Glass for a while, I was not able to log into my account after a reboot. The ultimate culprit turned out to be the nVidia driver. To restore the original driver, use Safe Boot (press and hold the F8 key during reboot) and then restore the video driver to the original one.
This is quoted from the O’Reilly’s DevCenterarticle.
How exacyly is the NVidia driver a problem to well log on an account?
I think this is somewhat of a newbie review (Newbie to Windows I mean).
What I don’t understand, is why you had to reboot in the first place to change a graphic driver, when one of the functionality of Vista is that you can change a grpahic driver without reboot …
Another thrown out feature ?
Ookaze
This stuff is already possible in XOrg! The translucent windows and window drop shadows.
And KDE has the Glow theme for a window decoration. Plastik theme also lights up like that.
And all this is capable of running on an ANCIENT ATI card back from 1995!
I personally don’t like the nice GUI effects. . . they are too distracting and anti-productive. There’s nothing wrong with showcasing GUI, but save that stuff for games. Let the real users do their real work.
Do you mean real trasluccency? As far as I know, it is a ‘fake’ effect in XOrg. Any update to the obscured part of the window in the background isn’t visible through the foreground window. They are working on the real transluccency, but they are not yet there…
Who the f$^k cares about future StagnantSoft crap?