Microsoft revises minimal GPU requirements for longhorn

[leech]

GUI's have their place, as do Command lines. My point was that does the GUI NEED to look fancy...

My point here is this... the GUI by default should be a pretty dull, yet functional thing. But have theming abilities for those that are bored and want to customize. (I'm thinking Gnome is perfect in this...) The Amiga was great, it also was good at this, the standard GUI was pretty plain to look at, but there were a lot of third party utilities to make it look a whole lot better. Good old MagicWB... This makes me want to go play with the Amiga emulator again...

I think it's a bad idea for Microsoft to make it so the operating system requires a 3D enabled card. It's not like we have displays like in the movie Minority Report (I want one though!)

Leech

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
As far as a GUI goes, it's nice to have a simple GUI, even if it's only text based (text graphics count don't they?) I remember learning Pascal on Apple ]['s back in high school, and really enjoying the development system it used. The next year they "upgraded" to Mac's, much to everyone's dissapointment. Then you suddendly were having to fight with the UI, and, shockingly, it also compiled programs noticibly slower.

Ah yes, Apple Pascal, my first real programming language. Those were the days....

I also had a C compiler under CP/M on my Apple, called BDS (not BSD) C, and it was fast. Orders of magnitude faster than Zortech on my 486-66. On a 4MHz Z80. Heck, it wouldn't suprise me if it was faster than GCC on my dual 1.6GHz Athlon.....

[Wombat]

Originally posted by leech
GUI's have their place, as do Command lines. My point was that does the GUI NEED to look fancy...

My point here is this... the GUI by default should be a pretty dull, yet functional thing.

So you're running in 640x480x8bit color then?

My point is that having the new technology will enable features that we can't even imagine now, but will find indispensible once we're used to them.

I for one am really glad that XP installs a default 800x600x16bit driver, instead of the old 640x480x4bit that used to be the "safe minimum" until you installed specific drivers.

[Jon P. Inghram]

I for one am really glad that XP installs a default 800x600x16bit driver, instead of the old 640x480x4bit that used to be the "safe minimum" until you installed specific drivers.

That's one of WinXP's better features.

I think a major problem with modern technology is that the marketing departments have beecome the driving force behind product design, that combined with mindless consumerism just ends up making more and more useless features that seem to exist only to satisfy the idea that the more complex something is the better it must be.

[DGhost]

there are a lot of things that the enchanced gui will bring to the table. one such thing is something that OS X has had since Jaguar - syncing page flips with the refresh rate of the monitor/lcd.

i agree that having an interface that screams for attention is a bad idea for a default, but having a dull, drab interface as a default is no better of an option. the default GUI should have subtle flare (like the mouse cursor shadow in 2k/XP (and i believe even NT4)), but still be simple and not scream at the user.

in the end, there are a lot of things that this stuff could be used for. the idea of showing which window an alert is coming from is something that can help the user intuitively understand the flow of logic. the thing is that they have to be less intrusive and "loud" as XP's defaults were.

oh, and its not like Longhorn requires a 3d card. however, since pretty much every computer now days is shipping with a 3d graphics card, it does not really pose any problems from a market standpoint.