[COLOR=DarkGreen]Spaces after commas.[/COLOR]
This is fun, query can a mod troll? :P
[COLOR=DarkGreen]Watch it. Remember, don't harass the mods. :mad: [/COLOR]
Break out the coffee this is a long read.
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[url]http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38372[/url]
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Part One What we got and why
By Liam Proven: Wednesday 21 March 2007, 08:43
"The only problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They have absolutely no taste." - Steve Jobs to Robert X Cringely in Revenge of the Nerds
REGARDLESS OF WHAT Bill Gates might have claimed in interviews, a lot of the goodies in Vista have – I'll be diplomatic – drawn inspiration from rival products, primarily Apple's Mac OS X. The trouble is that Microsoft has prioritised the wrong bits, taken the wrong inspiration. And the sad irony is that if it had made different choices, we'd have got a simpler, faster, safer Vista a lot sooner.
So what sources and where has MS got its ideas from? And where should it have done so instead? You don't have to look far.
System-wide instant search and a query-driven, location-independent view of the filesystem are very useful things to have. Microsoft spent years working on "Windows Future Storage", a complex system that would store all your data in a SQL database.
Instead, Apple came up with Spotlight. A minor tweak to the filesystem code means that every file saved to disk is indexed as it's saved, making it simple to offer near-instant file searching. Once you've got that, it's relatively trivial to offer folders showing all image files or all files containing "Dear Mrs Jones" or all files of over 38.45Kb generated by used "alice" between 2:30 on 13 April 2004 and 5:15 on 26 September 2005. No need for a big heavy relational database or SQL or anything else.
And guess what happened? Microsoft quietly dropped WinFS and Vista gained a very Spotlight-like index-driven search system instead. On Linux, GNOME's Beagle search is much the same. If you use an older version of Windows, you can get much the same functionality from Google Desktop Search, MSN Search Toolbar or others; they don't have the benefits of integrating with the shell, or of being able to put indexing hooks right into the filesystem, but the end result is similar.
The idea for Vista's pseudo-3D GUI surely came from OS X – as it did with open source versions such as Compiz and Beryl. The live previews of taskbar buttons strongly resemble the live icons in OS X's Dock. The visual inspiration for the 3D window flipper was probably Sun's 3D Java desktop Looking Glass, but the competitive pressure was surely from OS X's Expose.
A bit of background
Bear with me for a second. To understand what Vista does and why, you have to know the history - and the history comes from a different company.
The whole concept of using a 3D graphics card to accelerate the windowing system comes from the Mac's Quartz Extreme. Apple's OS X is based upon NeXTStep, NeXT Computer's pioneering Unix-based OS from the 1980s. The NeXTStep GUI didn't have hardware acceleration, because it was drawn by Display PostScript, which was too complex for the simple 2D graphics cards of the time to provide any useful help. OS X's graphics system, Quartz, uses Adobe's royalty-free PDF imaging language instead – which is derived from PostScript anyway. In OS X 10.0 and 10.1, Quartz was unaccelerated.
