Discussions

I have to admit that I run as administrator almost always.  Shame on me.  I understand that this isn't best practice, so I'd like to run a limited account.  The problem is that it's too limited.  What does everyone else do?

Also, after reading about the "high security threat flaw" in sp2, I wonder why Microsoft doesn't educate the user more about not running in Admin mode.  It would be rediculous in linux to run on a root account, why is this different for Windows?

It seems like they could have added like a toaster popup that says "You have just spent 1 hour as an admin, click here to find out why this is bad."  And have this feature defaulted on.  Maybe something to think about for Longhorn.

Clearly you've underestimated the scope of WinFS, or have never worked on a large scale project.  Microsoft cannot simply code up features at a whim because they have to deal with the long term repercussions of their actions.  Making a major change of plan (full server support with sycronization) will require a lot of planning,designing, coding, testing, debugging, etc.  You cant simply add a million people to a project like this to get it done faster.  If you did, then you would end up with what we seen in the Open Source community every day.  Forked projects, poorly designed projects, little documentation, only the fun stuff getting done, alpha projects being released to the masses, perpetual sub v1.0...I could go on.

If you hate that it wont be done on time, why dont you apply at Microsoft for the WinFS team and help out?

My thoughts on the topic:

http://www.brandonfurtwangler.com/index.php?p=24

paolohu wrote:

This is mostly directed to Mr Hill...

Why are ClearType and DPI settings global to Windows?  And, is this going to change in the future.

Here's an example - my general use machine is a zd7000 laptop - I use the zd7000 screen as a secondary screen and my primary screen is a 20" ViewSonic LCD screen.  The ClearType settings that look good on the laptop screen aren't necessarily the ones that look good on the ViewSonic LCD (to be honest - it's tough to get ClearType looking good on the ViewSonic) - so ideally I'd like to configure them individually.

Does anyone know how to calibrate two monitors independently?  With the tools i've used, it applies the same profile to both monitors.  I dont have the same monitors, so it looks awful on one of them.

XNA is something different.  It's going to be a higher level set of API's used to cut down on boilerplate code in future games.  It may use DX10, but it isn't DX10.

Also, I very much doubt that DX11 will be out before Longhorn.  DX9 was designed to be a reatively long lasting api compared to previous versions, and we still dont have a retail card that supports pixel shader model 3.0

DX10 would no doubt contain several more 'profiles' that will take another 2-3 years for the hardware to catch up.

When it comes to DirectX, the software is definately outpacing the hardware.

hum...guess you're not suppose to talk about it yet.

After reading the WinHEC slides on Avalon text rendering I'm interested hearing what features of DX10 will help to accelerate the text.  The slides dont really ellaborate, but the picture shows that it can hanndel the "glyph cache" where a DX9 card cant.  What's going on in this stage that needs DX10?  I assume it has something to do with triangle generation from a shader, but that's just a guess.

Beyond3d has an article that talks about some of the features, but any extra info would be of interest.

Will DX10 ship with Longhorn?

i've always done the first one, but i wondered about doing it the other way.

i never tried it, but I assume they can go anywhere in the file.

This is exactly what Avalon will do in Longhorn.  What you want is a higher dpi display.  Windows currently has some support for it, but many programs assume a fixed size dpi.  With avalon, running at a higher dpi should be transparent to the application, and therefore work much better.

So to answer you question...probably 2006+ before it's really feasable. (At least with Windows)