OT: vista cool feature!

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Rasmussen" <ras at anzio.com>
To: "Bill Campbell" <bill at celestial.com>
Cc: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 1:00 PM
Subject: Re: OT: vista cool feature!


> Interesting that you should mention that. Vista has a new API for
> magnification, by which a program can invoke a magnifier with
> program-supplied parameters. I haven't played with it yet, but thought it
> might be a good added feature for Anzio.


Much as I hate to admit any possible justification for MS's or Windows's or 
Vista's existence, you just pointed one out.

Everyone is busy saying the obvious: "The point of computers is to run APPS 
not to run the OS!"
and therefor, Vista eating 60%* of a machine just for itself the OS, makes 
it a bad OS.

But all along Windows's whole design philosophy has been to enrich the os 
with features that apps can use.
That way apps can be smaller and easier to write, using fewer, higher level 
instructions.
So, is it really so unreasonable if the OS eats 60% of the resources if it's 
doing 60% of the work?
That trend is not only MS's way, but the way of all computing since the 
first people decided to make a handy dandy human readable assembly language 
instead of raw machine opcodes. Even if the resulting gestalt of app & os is 
less efficient than a similar traditional standalone app, if the pace of 
development is faster it's probably better all in all. Those human 
developers time and the pace of development of new, ever more advaned 
features we users all get, is worth more than the extra hardware it takes to 
run an app that was written in visual-whatever instead of C.

To go to the other end of the spectrum, DOS is so lightweight the whole 
entire OS fits not only in ram but in _cache_.
It also provides almost no services in trade for the almost no resources it 
consumes.

This presumes that taking over some of the lifting from apps IS why the OS 
is so power hogging, which I at least don't know if that's true at all.
And if true, also only works if apps are written specifically to take 
maximum advantage, which many probably aren't yet.
But it's more than plausible and means it's not really objective to say 
"Vista is garbage". The most you can really say is "Vista is garbage today"

* invented statistic, use whatever number you like

As for Macs, well, much as I'd like to like them, even now that they have 
the same cpu's as win/lin boxes, the few benchmarks I've seen comparing 
similar hardware they still come up way short. So it's the same old story. 
Pay a significantly higher price, for a significantly prettier, 
significantly less flexable, significantly slower machine.

Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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