Windows Vista

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2007, Bob Rasmussen wrote:
>On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Bill Campbell wrote:
>
>> Let's see.  XP has been around since August 2001 or so.  One would think
>> that the driver writers would have been able to get it right in six years
>> or so.  Perhaps the problem is Microsoft's constantly changing things under
>> The hood that break working drivers.  
>
>There is neither conspiracy or surprise here. In Vista, MS wanted to make 
>it possible to provide enhanced vide, such as 3-D rotation and 
>transparency. So they defined a new set of calls that drivers need to meet 
>(to provide these features), and it takes the driver writers a little 
>while to get it ironed out. 

Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by

With proper engineering, added functionallity can be provided without
breaking existing drivers.  One can add members to structures so long as
the names and functions of existing members isn't changed.  Methods can
have new parameters added such that defaults are provided for them and the
calling sequence for old paramaeters aren't changed.

If one can't provide the extended functionallity with existing methods,
then new methods can be created leaving the old ones working without the
added functionallity.

David Korn, author of the Korn shell and uwin, an AT&T project to provide
Unix services on Windows, made a presentation to the Seattle Unix Group
several years ago in which he talked about the development of uwin.  The
thing that he said that astonished me was that they found the same system
call's API could differ in parameters and returns, not only between
different Windows families (win95, win95, NT), but within a family
depending on build or patch level.

>> Then again, having the video drivers in the kernel is simply asking for 
>> trouble.
>
>I was not aware that they were in the kernel. Can you substantiate that?

I first learned of this about ten years ago working with engineers of the
``Nterprise'' Windows server system, a system that allowed one to run
Windows applications on an NT server using standard X11 clients.  IMHO,
this was a far superior solution to the similar Citrix program which didn't
work with standard X11.  Unfortunately the company that did Nterprise had a
source code licence from Microsoft for NT, but M$ wouldn't sell them a
license for NT 4.x so they had to drop the product (it seems that Microsoft
did a source license to Citrix -- and then M$ bought Citrix).

Bill
--
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``...I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil.  I simply
suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an
interpreter.'' -- Nick Petreley