“At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2003 trade show in New Orleans in May 2003, Microsoft finally revealed its roadmap for Longhorn, the next major Windows desktop version, and the successor to Windows XP. Longhorn, as readers of this site know, will be the most dramatic and exciting release of Windows ever, and the most important update to the product since Windows 95.” Read the article at WinSuperSite.
The Road to Windows “Longhorn” – Part Two
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“Longhorn, as readers of this site know, will be the most dramatic and exciting release of Windows ever, and the most important update to the product since Windows 95.”
Didn’t Microsoft say the same thing about XP?
Sounds to me…
Wow, this is pretty cool. You can view multiple animations while interactively working with the system. While not a big productivity booster, it does show improvements in the OS’s ability to leverage the horsepower of the underlying hardware.
Finally! We have a Windows version that can do what BeOS was doing what? 6 years ago?
… “minimum Longhorn system will have to be able to display at least 1024 x 768 with 32-bit color, and it must include a hardware accelerated 3D video card with at least 64 MB (128 MB of RAM graphics memory” recommended)”… and this is only the video system.
What? Microsoft is crazy?… I from Argentina and here the hardware is very, very expensive. Long live to Linux.
Wow, Windows will soon be able to compete with Rasterman’s Evas libraries! (I suspect that the Enlightment accelerated display system [under X11 no less – take that X bashers!] will be truely mature by ’05
)
I guess M$ needs all this hardware acceleration in the GUI for the next incarnation of Clippy
>What? Microsoft is crazy?… I from Argentina and here the hardware is very, very expensive. Long live to Linux.
This is why Longhorn is going to be released end of 2005 and not tomorrow. These requirements are not weird at all.
why I need translucent windows, ‘sheering’ animation when I move a window or video icons?
Rant:
The Web is bad enough with animated GIFs and Flash!!!!!
Now the Desktop too!!!
Whatever happened to designing _USEABLE_ interfaces and GUIs?
End Rant
…the anti-MS morons get more idiotic by the day. DCE is NOT Quartz Extreme. The onyl similarity between the two is they both use hardware to accelerate the display. Quartz Extreme does not utilize 3D because Display Postscript (Quartz) is not 3D based. DCE is entirely 3D, from the top down and everything inbetween. Also, While Quartz Extreme can accelerate the genie effect, the genie only scales the UI down, not up like DCE. Once again the anti-MS people display a level of ignorance and stupidity that astounds. Grow the fcuk up and analyze the technology based on its merits, not its name sake. Oh, sorry, I forgot the whole lot of you were hypocrites.
MS is just displaying what DCE is capable of. You won’t see Aero until later this year at which time you will get to see what the UI will do with the technology. Don’t be an idiot and judge the UI until you have actually seen it. Longhorn is barely an alpha right now.
::yawn::
While I liked BeOS, DCE will take what BeOS did a step further. If you look at the screenshots, DCE can handle more than lots of video at a time, it can handle hundreds of animated, windowless objects floating around the screen while a demi-transparent window is dragged across the screen, animated to look like it’s blowing in the breeze. WHile the power of DCE won’t necessarily be fully utilized in the UI, the capability is still there and it’s the next step of where BeOS was going, not where it was at when it died. Give Microsoft some credit here.
I enjoy experimenting with a variety of operating systems (which is also why I enjoy OSNews so much), and it still amazes me how much the Linux crowd attacks anything Microsoft like sibling rivalry. From reading the article, it shows that Microsoft is providing three different interfaces, (Classic, Tier1, Tier2), to allow die-hard simple-gui fans the choice of omitting gui extras. However, the DCE technology itself seems VERY impressive. Just because something looks nicer or has more graphical capability doesn’t mean it is less efficient. Furthermore, I think that anything that makes a computer easier to use or more approachable is good for career programmers. If animated GUI queues in a 3d environment convinces Grandma to finally use a computer, then it’s better for the industry, IMHO.
OK I just had to respond:
DCE is NOT Quartz Extreme.
You’re right it’s not, but there are similar ideas. Taking advantage of a 3D graphics lib to handle things like scaling, compositing, etc, and then having this be hardware accelerated.
Quartz Extreme does not utilize 3D because Display Postscript (Quartz) is not 3D based
Quartz is NOT Display Postscript. Easy to understand why you think it is, because you are assuming it due to OSX’s NeXTStep heritage. NeXT used DisplayPostscript, and they also paid a pretty hefty license to Adobe to allow for this. Anyone who uses DisplayPostscript MUST pay a license. To avoid this for MacOSX, Quartz has tons of support for PDF, which does NOT require any licensing fee, and has a nearly identical imaging model to Postscript with slightly a different syntax and names of operators.
Quartz is the 2D graphics lib.
Quart Extreme is the compositing portion and is hardware accelerated and uses OpenGL.
While Quartz Extreme can accelerate the genie effect, the genie only scales the UI down, not up like DCE
That is simply because that’s how Apple has choosen to utilize it in Aqua UI. If you can scale one way there is no reason you can’t scale any other way – it is simply a transform. Also there is scaling up: for example, open a folder, open the preferences for that folder and turn on the auto previewing. Any images in the folder will show as thumbnails. Now change the icon size and watch stuff scale up and down as the image thumbs are changed on the fly in accordance with your settings.
Note I am not bashing DCE per se, simply noting that much of what they described seemed to already exist in OSX in one form or another. Undoubtedly there are other features that we’ll hear about, but the main ones seem to already be working in the case of OSX.
As a plus for DCE, it appears to take fuller advantage of the graphics card than any previous version of the GDI which is nice, a bit late, but better later than never.
The resolution independent window scaling is kinda cool. Looks like basicly mapping the win32 Graphic Contexts to hardware mananged polygon textures.
This should help kludge around high resolution and all thoes Windows programs that do not use a modern lay out manager* and are stuck at a specific physical resolution and font size.
* One that uses proportonal layout boxes that can self adjust to changing the default font size to be readable in high resolution. See: Tk, GTK, QT, XUL, Swing, etc.
me: “…the anti-MS morons get more idiotic by the day. DCE is NOT Quartz Extreme.”
Yes, they are very similar however.
“The onyl similarity between the two is they both use hardware to accelerate the display. Quartz Extreme does not utilize 3D because Display Postscript (Quartz) is not 3D based.”
OS X does not use DisplayPostscript. It does accelerate 3D graphics. Quartz is Quicktime (for video), PDF (for 2D), adn OpenGL (for 2D and 3D).
“DCE is entirely 3D, from the top down and everything inbetween.”
No, it’s not. PT is wrong that GDI/GDI+ is gone. Everything is fed through the standard graphics system before going to the DCE. GDI/GDI+ are going away but the standard graphics display system is simply being wrapped in DX.
“Also, While Quartz Extreme can accelerate the genie effect, the genie only scales the UI down, not up like DCE.”
The genie effect is a particular effect having nothing to do with general scaling. Quartz can scale up just as well as Longhorn can.
“Once again the anti-MS people display a level of ignorance and stupidity that astounds. Grow the fcuk up and analyze the technology based on its merits, not its name sake. Oh, sorry, I forgot the whole lot of you were hypocrites.”
Your ignorance level runs pretty high as well.
quartz extreme hardware acceleration was introduced by apple because before that they had no hardware acceleration at all in osx..
Bye the way anyone saw the Bill Gates video on news.com
about the HP “athens” prototype… It looked rather nice 🙂
Apple built QE because we’ve reached the time where GPUs are powerful enough to consider offloading some of this work to them.
How hardware-accelerated do you think GDI+ is? It’s mostly for cursors and low-level stuff and to ameliorate the already pathetic graphics system of WIndows.
If Apple did it just to get some form of hardware acceleration, then why would they only accelerate the compositor with hardware?
WinPE looks cool, sounds much like a windows version of knoppix, just hope they let us use it instead of leaving it as just an installer. a real recovery tool in windows would be very welcome!
I wonder if one wil be able to have actual 3d objects as icons. Kind of like power-ups in you favorite FPS.
If you have 3D Icons, that Longhorn sidebar could become (a nicer looking) version of those bathroom corner shelves
http://www.ansan.com.tr/english/corner_caddy.htm
I use every major operating system within a weekly basis. I like this new graphics approach that Microsoft is using, let’s hope it will be utilized to its full potential. Microsoft realizes the potential of the human being, it’s time we should respect Microsoft for what they have done. That is bring a whole generation of humans towards a wonderful tool called the computer. Specifically the x86 architecture. The intel chip has empowered countless numbers of people around the world, thanks mostly to Microsoft.
Eugenia:
“This is why Longhorn is going to be released end of 2005 and not tomorrow. These requirements are not weird at all.”
Do you mean that you’ll get HW for free in Argentina by 2005?
I don’t get it.
The architecture of Quartz + Quartz Extreme and DCE look identical. Their capabilities: GPU compositing, vector graphics, each window having its own buffer. The current Windows graphics layer is a generation behind Quartz, but I would consider Quartz and DCE the same generation. DCE looks alittle more comprehensive than Quartz, but Quartz has two yeas to catch up.
As for WinFS, I am confused. Say Notepad wanted to open a file, would it just read it off of the HD like normal, or would it get the file from WinFS which in turn would read it from the HD. Anyone know?
What she means is that the hardware requirements, which are fulfilled by current DX 9-class video cards, won’t be in any way unreasonable by 2005. You can currently get hardware fulfilling these requirements for under $100 US. By 2005, it’ll be cheaper, and include integrated graphics chipsets.
If, for some reason, those requirements are still too steep for anyone, a DX 7-class video card can be used for Tier 1, or a standard VGA card for the baseline tier.
The requirements stated in the original message (64 MB minimum/128 MB recommended) are only for the top tier (Tier 2). You can use lesser hardware, but you give up hardware acceleration of features that require technology only provided by higher-end hardware (like hardware accelerated text rendering/antialiasing, some video acceleration features, features that use programmable shaders, etc.).
As I understand it, WinFS is not a CVS-like application, it’s an indexing system. Notepad, then, would get the document off the hard drive like anything else. WinFS is a different kind of file sytem – it relies on queries and filtering criteria to locate documents and files. The files still exist on your hard drive.
Keep in mind it’s based on the next generation SQL server.
I think Microsoft does a great job here. Why does Eugenia always have to prevent some of you guys here from slashing everything in half as soon as Microsoft says they accomplished something? I personally think what MS does here is impressive. I’m particularly interested in Aero, though the WinFS service needs drastical improvements if you look at it in current leaks, but I guess they’re at it.
Somehow I doubt they will leave this out … Anyone more info ?
I guess M$ needs all this hardware acceleration in the GUI for the next incarnation of Clippy
I can’t wait to see a true 3D, translucent Clippy!
Actually, all we have from Microsoft are a few technology demos (or short, vague articles on the technology) and very little info on what features will be available to apps.
Microsoft likes to make promises it doesn’t deliver. Apple on the other hand hasn’t said a word about Panther and whatever else will be coming in the (likely) Fall 2004 release. All of which will be out well before Microsoft releases Longhorn in 2005. And, of course, Quartz/Quartz Extreme are out now.
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
Ring a bell?
Homer J. Computer User sezs:
More Eye Candy!!! More Donuts!! Pentium 4 4GHZ!!!!
haha so true crudge
Wow, Microsoft is creating this advanced display engine! I wonder if DCE is just a working name. I suggest that they rename it Quartz. C’mon, Microsoft is creating a Quartz engine for Windows. Hey, I’m glad, but a lot of people are going to complain about the speed. 3rd generation display engines are slow and no ammount of offloading to graphics cards will make them as fast as 2nd generation engines.
Be didn’t have anything equivalent to DCE/Quartz. The Dano leaked beta did buffer the display so that it wouldn’t change the display until everything had rendered, but it was still using the old display model (ie. one surface with no knowledge of what is on the screen and no way of manipulating windows in the way that DCE/Quartz does, but it limited the artifacts you get when, for instance, moving a window).
This is where Linux might get left behind a little (at least as far as the desktop is concerned). There aren’t enough people with the necessary skills to rewrite the entire display engine to be as complex as Quartz/DCE. X is OK as a 2nd generation display server, but with Apple and Microsoft offering 3rd generation models with features just waiting to be tapped it kinda makes Linux look – legacy. These display engines take a long time to write – Microsoft and Apple spent about 3 years on their’s. The OOS community hasn’t even begun to get into it and it will likely take them a lot longer. Maybe a university will offer something that they cooked up like MIT did with X, but I doubt it.
This could serve as a problem for OSS. Right now, OSS can claim near feature parity with Windows, but Longhorn (and likely Apple’s Panther) will make commercial OSs look like you’re getting more than just spit and polish with them.
How hardware-accelerated do you think GDI+ is? It’s mostly for cursors and low-level stuff and to ameliorate the already pathetic graphics system of WIndows.
Certainly more than OSX that is so freakingly slow in 2D.
If Apple did it just to get some form of hardware acceleration, then why would they only accelerate the compositor with hardware?
Because otherwise OSX would run faster on older hardware
and that will not sell enough new slightly faster powermacs.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned this point: while many of us have great 3d hardware to play the latest games, most corporate desktops have very low end 3d capabilities. If Microsoft wants the majority of corporate desktops to switch to Longhorn, they will have to make the case that they need a Radeon just to run Word.
the other point that should be made is this means I will have to shut off even more special effects that look cute but become quickly annoying after 5 minutes. After every install of Windows I have to go through the system like a comb looking for all the junk that Windows likes but doesn’t need
arielb: Are you really that daft?
It’s a matter of simply putting everything on either classic or Teir 1.
Perhaps you should actually do some reading before you start bashing and showing how incredibly ignorant you are.
OK. Oohh 3d GUI. AND this is enough of a reason to Go out and buy Longhorn for $200 upgrade when released? SO I can flip Windows around on a screen and have a True 3d translucent window.
unbelievable.
But I know there’s alot of computer nerds out there who will buy it and Give Microsoft another 3 billion dollars.
No thanks. i’ll just stick with windows XP until someone else can turn up a Better OS.
“I can’t wait to see a true 3D, translucent Clippy!”
Oh the horror… The sheere horror.
What ever happened to extensible, real-time help?