Windows Eight

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Only as of Windows Vista, which is part of the topic. The constraints are now artificial and a result purely of Microsoft's design. Prior to Vista, memory limits were bound by price and motherboard limits.

In the future, MS will need to sell the next windows as a luxury, without semi-valid excuses about hardware limitations. Now that the OS isnt holding the hardware back, can we expect the OEM companies to populate boards with a dozen memory slots? Will we see 8 and 16 gig ram sticks? Or will the average user decline to purchase - and justify - that much unused potential?

Considering that MS already dominates the market and have little room for growth, this new situation does not bode well for the next version of windows. Certainly not when the trend is to increase the sales price.

Windows 3.11 cost me 80 bucks. Xp pro was about 100, Vista ultimate cost 140 and Seven seems to be 270 for the ultimate. Nothing is certain in life, but the trend certainly does seem to be upwards. Asp-Z's hypothetical 500 bucks certainly isnt out of reach.

Now danieltaiwan suggests that the next windows will be a new kernel necessitating migration nightmares - and plain old zero backwards compatibility.

Last edited by Fuzzy on 12 Aug 2010, 5:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

What features do openGL and DirectX have that the other does not?

DirectX version 11 has tesselation and Microsoft were saying it's the next best thing since sliced bread, but this feature was already being used by openGL some years prior.

I don't like Microsoft's practises. First saying that Vista will not be supporting openGL and forcing people to use DirectX, then later supporting it as developers were lead to believe that openGL will be implemented via a DirectX wrapper seriously hampering what openGL can really do.

I've seen a server based motherboard capable of around 128GB RAM or so. That's pretty much Vista's limit hit already.

It's likely that with the next release of Windows, the memory limit will be higher - maybe 256GB-512GB. If people are willing to buy it - maybe 1TB.

Then with the whole charade that Windows 6.x won't support x version of DirectX just like DX9 and DX10 with XP and Vista

I think people will be reluctant to move from Windows 7 because it is just so stable I think Microsoft will have to really pull out the stops to make windows 8 sell able but I think its a hard job. It would not surprise me if the next OS from Microsoft is just Windows 7 in a more pretty dress . Im hoping that they will launch it when 3D graphics happen (by this I mean the ones you see in 3D films) on home computers. This is still hard to justify I think that Windows 7 is the new XP.

That's the same story with Windows XP and Windows 98 (back when XP was fairly new)

How pretty can you make something? There is an end to that line of design. You can keep changing the theme, but the effects and colors have some definite limits. We passed the color limit decades ago with 16 bit colors.

As far as 3D goes, we had some sort of 3d html in the 90s. Sure, it was ugly, but it pointed something out: its a pain in the ass finding stuff in 3D. Second Life has experienced that for 10 years or so too. Eventually they fell back on old fashioned 2D searches.

Imagine if you wanted to buy a real life shirt from inside world of warcraft and there were 10,000 vendors selling them. You have to run around to check each one. Then you wanted to visit each of your favorite web comics in turn. As you arrive at each one you need to line your camera up. Even with teleports it gets old really fast.

Worst, you'll be at some beautifully designed site, but you'll always see someone elses horribly colored large font web design flashing nearby. You'll hear all the annoying music around you, and wandering porn ads will be trying to get in your view.

Well, maybe it wont be that different. But it'll suck even more in 3D.

XP had a different kernel than the Windows 9x series. Were there migration nightmares there? Was there some level of backwards compatibility? (Not a rhetorical question; I actually don't know. At the time I was transitioning from Mac Class to MacBSD)

To tell you the truth, the big hassle was immigrating from windows laptops that didnt support usb. Around that time the network cards changed as well. Drives had gotten too big to do the slow transfer with floppies, and I didnt own a zip drive. While the kernel changed, for the most part the sandboxing of applications hadnt happened yet(till xp service pack 3). Older windows apps expect to run with rampant permissions and midori totally redesigns that. That is already a problem with Vista/Seven. Midori applications will be required to register with the midori sandbox system. XP era applications are not programmed to do this.

In linux apps have top down application control. For instance, if an app freezes you can kill it instantly. Windows adopted bottom up, which is why applications can hang the system. Normally when they have focus they have to relinquish control, but can sit there until the file manager notices a problem. Thats why you get that delay before it shuts(or when alt-tabbing). Likewise, sometimes the close button just does not work and you have to use the control panel to yank the plug.

Midori should be less like herding cats, and despite the pain will likely be a better system. Thats no sales pitch for Joe Q. Public however.

XP and 2000 have a different kernel yes but it was relatively easy to transition because the new kernel was based on the old one.
MS made NT have some MS-DOS compatibility which means it is somewhat compatible with Windows 9x allowing easier transition. So yes, NT does have backwards compatibility. Much of NT's kernel is actually from OS/2 which means that OS/2 has compatibility with some Windows applications.

The new midori kernel is going to be completely different as it will be micro kernel based and will make migration hell.

A lot of people on this thread (and in the computer industry in general) have a tendency to air their opinions without the means to genuinely back them up.

- Lots of software is bloated. This is true both in open source and proprietary software these days.
- Either Windows 7 or a modern Linux distribution should be reasonably fast on a system built in the past 3 years. You can reasonably expect a new computer to be able to keep up with the latest software for 3 years. After that, either upgrade the hardware or stop upgrading the software. Ubuntu 10.04 in its default form is not that fast on most 6 year old systems.
- It's impossible to make a blanket statement that this OS is faster than that one. ext* filesystems are clearly faster than NTFS. I've seen faster boot times on Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 9.x on systems with an SSD. It's relative, and upward of 95% of computer users don't care. Their priority is that the user interface works the way they want it to. If something slows them down because it's confusing, they stop buying that brand. End of story.
- Microsoft screwed the pooch on Vista, and lost a lot of money and market share.
- Microsoft's flip flopping on OpenGL is another example of them screwing the pooch.
- If Windows 8 has a significantly better UI than Windows 7, people will buy it for that reason, and they will get what they're paying for.
- People don't care about gigs of RAM. They care about dollars per computer.

Just trying to adjust the context of the discussion

Just have a look at the OpenGL changelog. DirectX 10 is released on Nov 2006. OpenGL has been playing catch up since then. OpenGL 4.1, released just last month finally make it quite close to DirectX. IMO the only major missing feature left is an immutable object model.


I'm 100% sure tessellation isn't available on OpenGL before version 4. So it can't be available "some years prior" in any standard way. OpenGL supports extensions so it's possible some manufacturer exposed this function on their hardware before v4 but I'm sure AMD did not. And NVIDIA didn't have tessellation until this year so I'm doubtful someone actually did that. In any way, support only in form of private extension is worse than a public proprietary standard like DirectX.


I'm under the impression that this FUD is spread by anti-M$ publications. M$ has never bundled ICD with any version of Windows. Before Vista, Windows only provided a CPU driven OpenGL 1.3 stack until you install a GPU driver with ICD. Vista actually improved out-of-the-box support by translating OpenGL 2.0 to DirectX. You still have to install a driver with ICD to get full support. And to keep Aero alive, the ICD has to be updated to support new functions of Vista. That has been M$'s position I read from day one. I'm not sure where this so called flip-flop came from.


Even Windows Server 2003 Enterprise (based on XP) already supported up to 1TB of RAM.

Never let qualifications get in the way of a good(and wrong) opinion.

Just saying. You in particular probably have a pretty good handle on the situation.


No arguments there, and I dont think the claim was made in this thread. If I started the thread over again I'd phrase it as "Is software bloat a necessity to drive the market?"

That seems likely.



Correct. But again, its something I dont recall being debated in the topic.



Sure, but did anyone compare file systems in this thread? I think not. While factually correct, you are battling calm air.


Now this is pertinent to the discussion. It actually raises a topic that hasnt been touched on: people get set in their ways and dont want something new. There was a lot of grumbling about that in regards to transitioning from XP to Vista. Its why its hard to get most senior citizens to start using computers.


They did. To be fair, I am sure they had a hell of a battle. XP was satisfactory for the tasks that most people wanted. A formated and printed report is only so complicated.


Did it hurt them all that much? They screwed over their customer base, but didnt it have positive results for directX?

Yup. With the definition of better being some strange hybrid of "what I am comfortable with" and "it makes my life easier". Really its anyones guess and only time will tell.

Gnome is poised on the brink of this. Their impending gnome shell has people worried.


Quite right. And the question of why they need a new machine at all. Sure, use technophiles enjoy it, but not everybody does.



Thanks. Good to see you are still around WP.