Tiptup said:I wasn't really speaking in terms of planned OS time lines or what Microsoft defines as support. I'm talking about the kind of reasonable functionality support we'd get if Microsoft had a competitor or two that were able to earn some of their business. As it is, there aren't really any practical ways for me to run my software or programs on a different operating system made by another company and, as such, Microsoft has less incentive to make me happy. My programs work in 2000, XP, and Vista yet Microsoft limits me to go with the last one or else pay a price.
No they don't. If your stuff works just fine on XP or 2000, then stay with that. If you're worried about needing to reinstall and reactivate, just clone your drive so you have a spare. The only time you'd really have to pay is if you ever needed support for 2000 or XP. I don't think I've ever known anyone that actually had to call Microsoft about an issue with either OS. 99% of the time, if you find a problem, they've already released a fix or there's a workaround.
Tiptup said:
It's interesting how you mention Vista's re-written driver model since that's a perfect example of what I'm saying here. I'm sure the brand new driver model for Vista is really cool (and stuff) and I don't begrudge Microsoft wanting to make money for their work there. However, newer hardware effects don't ultimately rely upon a "driver model" to work. There's no reason XP's driver system couldn't have given gamers access to the latest, 3D-hardware driven, graphical effects. Even if it didn't work as well as what Vista offers, it wouldn't be hard for Microsoft to expand functionality in this tiny way.
It has nothing to do with the "latest 3D hardware driven, graphical effects". Anyone that's seen comparisons of DX9 and DX10 can see that they look very similar. The difference is in the actual code though. DX10 makes those same effects much easier to program. And since DX10 takes advantage of the newer driver model (which DX9 doesn't use), it's nearly impossible for XP to use DX10 without a major rewrite in the graphics driver subsystem. Why do you think it took up to 6 months for Nvidia and ATI to release good Vista drivers? They basically had to rewrite their existing drivers to work with the new subsystem.
Your comment about newer effects not needing to rely on a driver model to work is laughable. Of course they rely on the drivers. Without drivers, newer effects can't do anything. As an example, just try running Bioshock on hardware that supports DX9, but doesn't support Shader Model 2.0. You might be able to hack it and get it to work, but it doesn't work natively. Same goes for Portal. Without hardware support for SM 2.0, that game crashes after walking through the first Portal.
The differences between Vista's graphics driver model and XP's are not "tiny", they are monumental. Again, this is why good drivers took so long to come out. XP drivers actually made things slow on Vista. Once good Vista drivers were out, speeds were comparable and sometimes better (talking about in game here).
I'm guessing that most of you don't program or at least don't program at a low level. You'll never understand how something that looks very similar might be completely different under the hood. You'll just keep sitting here and saying how they could easily make it work under whatever OS is your favorite at the time. The reality is that unless you can actually see the code, you have no idea how easy or hard something is to implement.