What happened to Vista
2017-06-06 01:16:32.032134+02 by Dan Lyke 3 comments
Remember "Longhorn" and all of the tremendous things that Windows Vista was supposed to be? What Really Happened with Vista is worth a read.
2017-06-06 01:16:32.032134+02 by Dan Lyke 3 comments
Remember "Longhorn" and all of the tremendous things that Windows Vista was supposed to be? What Really Happened with Vista is worth a read.
[ related topics: Microsoft ]
comments in descending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: What happened to Vista made: 2017-06-06 13:52:12.099129+02 by: DaveP
Hmm. the "edit" link isn't working. :s/even r/even then your/
#Comment Re: What happened to Vista made: 2017-06-06 13:48:11.509311+02 by: DaveP
"Vista Printing" was the area I knew most about. Whereas GDI printing forces you to jump through extra hoops to get color managed output, and even r colors get truncated down to sRGB due to ICM2's model, Vista Printing (aka XPS printing, aka some other Codename I'm not remembering at the moment) offered the promise of truly managed color printing to printers that were just beginning to exceed the gamut of sRGB at the same time as cameras were capturing colors outside the gamut...
A bunch of people were excited about this.
But the printer vendors had no reason to develop XPS Printing drivers for their printers. A GDI driver was sufficient until there were applications using XPS printing. Applications saw no point in adopting the (managed, which required changing your whole damned app) XPS printing APIs without drivers there that could print the colors you were asking for. And while it's possible to use XPS printing from a non-managed application (I work on such an application), it's an immense pain in the ass to thunk things across that boundary.
Chicken, meet egg.
And with no drivers or applications moving to XPS, there's a metric shit-ton of bugs lurking in the shadows, waiting to be found by the first person to venture off the well-paved GDI path.
Worse, when I tried to talk to someone at Microsoft about this, I got turned away. Multiple times. Then management (both at my company as well as at MS) changed, and the few people willing to commit resources to even investigate XPS were gone.
So applications on Windows still print (almost exclusively) using GDI interfaces.
Now multiply that across the entire OS, rather than just an obscure corner like printing.
Fuuuuuu...