Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM, also WVDDM during the Vista time-frame, Longhorn Display Driver Model and LDDM prior to the introduction of the Vista name) is the graphic driver architecture for video card drivers running Microsoft Windows versions beginning with Windows Vista.
It is a replacement for the Windows XP display driver architecture aimed at enabling better performance graphics and new graphics functionality.
WDDM provides the functionality required to render the desktop and applications using Desktop Window Manager, a compositing window manager running on top of Direct3D...
WDDM 1.2 == new graphics driver API/ABI == new graphics drivers
stereoscopic 3D now a standardized DirectX/WDDM thing rather than a vendor-specific hack
Hmm. I wonder if transitioning to requiring finer granularity multitasking in WDDM -- DMA buffer, primitive, triangle, pixel or instruction -- will make it incompatible with semi-fixed-function GPUs like Intel 945G(M) and 965G(M), which only support command submission at the batch buffer level
Having WDDM ask for multitasking at the pixel or instruction level on hardware like that would mean submitting a batch buffer for one pixel or instruction, which sounds painfully slow
Maybe it's just an optional thing but the wiki article makes it sound un-optional
well... supporting WDDM 1.0/1.1 was already a struggle for that generation of hardware, so I guess it's fully out of the picture or in some kind of legacy / doghouse mode now
but yes @r.tanner.f
in all likelihood, AMD HD4000 and earlier cards, which are in legacy support, and Nvidia's cards that only run on the legacy or very-legacy drivers, are probably not going to receive WDDM 1.2 support.
AMD massively scaled back their Catalyst driver team (stupid idea imho) so they've had to drop support for older hardware sooner than they'd like, and scale back the release cycle for Catalyst also
scaling back driver support and maintenance for a driver that's already extremely shoddy and needs a lot of support is like committing corporate suicide. AMD hardware is wonderful but their drivers are horrendous. now they're going to remain horrendous in perpetuity.
Supporting WDDM 1.2 and dropping backwards compatibility for WDDM 1.1 drivers is likely just a ploy to sell more Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge CPUs with on-board graphics... Intel colluding with MSFT again. Old news.
All those old Nvidia FX5200s and Intel 945Gs have to go.
ARGHGL:SKDJH:LSDGHEWI:JOIEWLGJDSG:LIDHG:DLX I"M SICK OF IT. What's everyone's preferred method of backing up a PC that you might be potentially borking?
actually I tend to back most things up on the cloud nowadays, and I'm more than willing to lose trifling things like operating system configuration and bookmarks and passwords (Xmarks for bookmarks, LastPass for passwords)
My Intel software RAID0 was broken. 1 drive marked missing. Booted into Ubuntu, ran dd on both disks, rebooted. RAID array was marked as functional again :D
@allquixotic well, I'm working with other people's PCs. And every time without fail, when I nuke their system they go "Oh wait! I had this one super-duper important file that I totally forgot about! Can you magically bring it back?" ~_~
Intel's motherboard RAID0 is indeed "fake RAID", which means that the BIOS/SATA controller fake out the operating system to recognize it as two different disks at some layers and as one disk at other layers
it still needs software support and parity bits, stripes, etc. are all done on the host CPU
one thing I can say for sure about RAID0 is I love the throughput... I love watch Skyrim gameplay videos on Youtube, so I can laugh at how long it takes people to load between areas. I can take FRAPS video to disk at full resolution and load 20 times faster than they do
I need to find a program that does the following:
Monitors number of keypresses, mouse movement and mouseclicks (NOT a keylogger)
Tracks/saves results by date
Can export to CSV or something similar
Can monitor per-application / differentiate by application (ie. show me stats for keystrokes/mous...
Ok, I did something really stupid. I put a 35GB VHD on my desktop, which is attached to my roaming profile. Trying to log out now and I think it's trying to transfer the file back to the server over a 10Mbps link. -_- Think if I cut the power the file will still be on my desktop?
every single Verizon customer who's grandfathered into an unlimited 4G contract will be buying out of contract phones in perpetuity until Verizon kills our contracts forcibly
I save thousands of dollars per year (hundreds per month, probably) by staying with unlimited rather than paying the absolutely heinous fee of 10 dollars per gigabyte overage
not only am I a road warrior but I also use it as my primary internet connection, because getting decent cable/fiber to the premises where I live is impossible
I need to find a program that does the following:
Monitors number of keypresses, mouse movement and mouseclicks (NOT a keylogger)
Tracks/saves results by date
Can export to CSV or something similar
Can monitor per-application / differentiate by application (ie. show me stats for keystrokes/mous...
it's funny because AT&T is advertised very aggressively on TV and radio here, but Verizon has a much stronger presence in terms of signal coverage, variety of phones and number of official Verizon stores in the region
@avirk I'm pretty certain taht I'll have to carrier-unlock my phone if I move to T-Mobile or something. Even though I bought it off-contract, pretty much all phones you buy in the US are carrier-locked unless otherwise specified.
I'm currently hating Lenovo's guts about how well they locked down the Thinkpad Tablet. The WIFI version! With absolutely no ties to any cellular carrier whatsoever! And I can't even unlock it without downloading a hack? Come on, people...
I ended up bricking it (I think) after several attempts to manually upgrade to ICS
@allquixotic I can tether, I just have to buy the 5 GB data plan. Luckily, I can do that on my phone, and if I cancel it early, they refund me for the days that I don't use it. So I stay on the 3 GB plan except for those rare instances where I want to tether.
@sidran32, that's very unusual.... on Verizon the USB tethering is unlocked regardless of what plan you're on, out of the box... it just eats into your data plan if you have an unlimited data plan; if not, it doesn't eat into it at all
@allquixotic They had to because of the frequencies their service operates on. Locking down tethering violated some net neutrality thing or something, so they were forced to open it up.
I know that one of the bought a frequency band that the FCC specifically earmarked for cellular data and required whoever bought it to operate under net neutrality regulations
ah, you're right, very good, I had no idea that Verizon would actually accede to that
I'm impressed though; that's excellent of the FCC
see, now I want to work for the FCC I love them so much. They are actually doing things that protect consumers. Whodathunkit.
Not only do they license out the bands so that nothing except lightning is legally allowed to broadcast and mess up your signal; but they made Verizon open up their phones to tethering. Wow.
The reason I stick with AT&T and similar stuff though is simply because I love SIM cards. I can pull one out and stick it in another phone and use it without having to call the carrier up.
well that must be because you have a primary internet connection other than cellular, which makes you a conformist :P (not derogatory, just makes me le sigh because I'm not part of that group)
$10/GB is definitely not fair, and there is absolutely no reason why people shouldn't be able to use LTE as their primary internet connection. $10/GB has no place in 2012. There's enough spectrum for it to be charged at like $1/GB at most.
it's a perfectly viable technology with plenty of spectrum and bandwidth and suitable for desktop purposes -- streaming video, gaming, surfing with sites using heavy AJAX...
However, 4G LTE is pretty awesome. I went on a trip with my friends to Virginia this summer, and our primary Internet connection was the Wifi off my phone. We were able to play multiplayer XBox games online and there was no noticable speed difference.
and it makes you stop worrying about things like the limits of your wifi router's range, so you can just walk across the street with it and not care
yeah... hell, even back on Verizon's 3G (EvDO) in 2007-2008, I took four total (one-way) train trips across country from DC to California and I had EvDO most of the way, and it was usable
although there were lots of dropouts because they were still getting the network up and running at that point
if I took the same trip today, I'd probably never lose connection at all, and have 4G at least 50% of the time
A note about the tethering + Verison thing: if I remember right those that were still grandfathered in to an unlimited data plan were exempt from the FCC's decision to make Verison open up tethering. So... if you're still on a Verison unlimited data plan the apps might still be blocked.
@r.tanner.f -- that certainly isn't the case here. It's not an "app"; it's a feature built-in to Android in the Settings menu where you just enable RNDIS tethering to your desktop.
they could very easily have disabled it, though
just don't ship the kernel module for it, or remove the feature from the settings app
It's not an app. It's just a piece of the operating system. They would have to detect that my account is grandfathered-unlimited and disable a core piece of the Android operating system. I don't think they do that.
Their policy may say that I can't tether, but nothing about the phone is in any way obstructing me from doing that by single-tapping a checkbox that's built into the stock ROM.
@allquixotic Aside from the pricing though, which I concede would be an issue for heavy users, unlocking it is really simple. I just purchase the 5GB plan with the myAT&T app, and then go into settings, enable Internet Connection Sharing, and I'm good. When I'm done, I just go back into myAT&T and switch back to my old plan.
It's that easy, and that immediate. No waiting a day for things to process or whatever :P
but you know, making a real serious business out of cellular data as a primary internet connection isn't all that difficult for companies like Verizon. If they'd just allow new customers to get unlimited data and advertise it heavily, along with explicitly allowing tethering for all customers and unlimited data on their MiFi hotspots, the world would be a much better place.
if people started to truly saturate the LTE spectrum at that point, they could easily remedy that by gradually reducing the distance between towers over time and reducing their transmit range, so that you can fit more unique spectrum-spaces in.
AT&T does have a data-only plan. You can get wifi hotspots from them I think. I never really investigated it though, or their pricing (which I think is different than their cell data plans).
the whole argument by certain "experts" that there isn't enough cellular spectrum to enable truly unlimited data tethering and hotspot usage for everyone, is an argument based on a false assumption that the distance between towers is fixed and must remain the same as it is now
as society starts to accept more towers as a necessity and beneficial thing for our digital life, you will see previously-denied tower provisioning permits start to be accepted in areas like parking lots and on top of buildings
At my old job, there was a Verizon tower right in the parking lot. AT&T service sucked. They had to install micro towers in our building for us AT&T users.
they have AT&T 3G repeaters at my customer site because it's the officially supported solution for all the execs' blackberries
but Verizon service in that building is godawful
Qualcomm needs to make a more efficient LTE baseband though, or integrate the baseband processor's functionality directly into the host CPU on a Snapdragon or something, because the main drawback of LTE today is the battery consumption
I gave my friend a demo of the Otterbox Defender on it the other day. I dropped it from chest-high standing up onto a hard datacenter floor. It elicited a "holy shit!" followed by covering-of-mouth, nervous giggling, then awe as I showed him the complete lack of damage to the case or the phone.
the Razr Maxx can survive on standby for a week, especially if you turn off 4G and just use 3G, but if you're watching youtube constantly you can kill it in about 8 hours
@allquixotic Mine last a good 20 hours so long as I have my email accounts set to pull instead of push. Even with normal usage (I use it for twitter/facebook and some web browsing throughout the day)
But ya, doing games or netflix and it will probably get about 6-8 hours of life.
I wonder how long until companies are allowed to eavesdrop on cellular data originating from handsets inside their premises, or just install a Faraday cage to prevent it altogether
so they can monitor/measure how much of your time you're spending on your phone
7.0 Hour(s) Maximum 3G talk time 300.0 Hour(s) Maximum 3G standby time 60.0 Hour(s) Maximum music playback time 6.5 Hour(s) Maximum video playback time
the main things that kill a smartphone's battery are using the 4G (if any; but 3G is okay); or having the screen on. Worse if you do hardware-accelerated 3d graphics
screen off + no GPU accel + no 4G can give you a very long run doing almost anything else
I think I may be experiencing that horrible moment when the backup fails. Somewhere hiding on this VHD is an SQL database I need to extract. This is from a Windows backup, not a virtual machine. I'm totally stumped. What can I do with a vhd I can't even mount anywhere?
Diskpart has referenced an...
Just got a new sub, what do these knobs do and what should I set them to?
Phase
Crossover
Also, what is LFE?
Also, is the headphone jack crappier quality compared to the white and red inputs?
It's pretty cool that I work for a company that has its own /8 in IPv4. That's pretty leet. There can only be at most 255 of them, and in practice there are many fewer
So a company large enough to purchase a /8 block, and have multiple offices, but not so large that it might ever actually actually fill said /8 block...
removing an Otterbox Defender either requires you to grow fingernails to exactly the right length and durability or else buying a guitar pick or an iSesamo. ugh.
This is frustrating. I can't get my phone out of this stupid case. I want to throw it, but I know that doing so wouldn't even hurt it, because the damn thing is so strong.
well, I did something right. it literally fell apart all at once. and my phone hit the table.
the Otterbox Defender is the real thing. the commuter is less sturdy
I have the Defender on my Razr Maxx. it doesn't do much for water protection (there are still ways for water to get through the case and into the phone) but it can take a football-style Hail Mary Pass and land on concrete with no damage to the phone
it has an outer rubber moulding to protect from scraping and an internal very-hard-plastic shell to absorb shock
I wouldn't go as far as to say that it should be able to survive terminal velocity due to gravity, but pretty close to that.
I could see it easily surviving something like, you're walking down the street holding it casually and a passerby bumps you and knocks it out of your hand, it falls, and one of you steps on it accidentally while trying to catch your balance from the collision
whereas without the case that would be a situation for major damage or destruction to a raw phone
I've got one of those Casio g'ZOne Commando phones. It's an awful phone, but it is pretty much bullet proof. I threw it down a small cliff so my wife could take a picture. It landed screen-first on a rock, bounced off, and bruised her leg with no other damage. xD Not even a scratch. Next time I'll just get a normal phone and an Otterbox though... I'm sure I can find a good alternative use for an indestructible device.
They can probably restore it by dating the individual pieces of paint and studying their layering to very carefully remove the new stuff, but that's gotta be even more expensive than just restoring it after deteriorating from old age
@allquixotic Yeah no mods. It's supposed to be "mil spec" or whatever. I've had people drop kick it, throw it in water, throw it in beer, grind it in the dirt, nothin'. Too bad it's slow and glitchy... I want to flash it with something but I can't find anything.
I don't know if Otterboxes are milspec but they're, uh, definitely way more than "civspec" (where that arbitrary term is defined as the average durability of an iPhone)
you can pretty much treat an otterboxed phone like you'd treat a little league baseball that never gets hit by a bat. n00b throwing and impacts with hard surfaces are fine, but I wouldn't try to hit a home run off of it
Q: What happens when you take a telecommunications engineer from the pre-cellphone days and try to make them into a subject matter expert on modern (2012) smartphones? A: You get me editing their 81 page document all night to make it somewhat close to what the customer actually wants before delivering it on Friday
I would like to overturn some tables now. Can I? Pleeeease?
disregard; parser testing
I would like X
I would like to X
I would like to more than one word
I would like to .
I would like to --; SELECT * FROM DontWorryIllBeGentle;
Oh well. Clippy is immune to SQL injection. But I can still probably edit the JS for this page so that he doesn't display.
@OliverSalzburg, for the same reason I would be hacking the Microsoft 2010 binaries to remove Clippy if the Microsoft Office team decided that Clippy was, in fact, here to stay, and that moreover, giving the users the option to remove him would be "confusing" and "add complexity" and "make little children cry when he goes away".
Fortunately, sanity prevailed within the Microsoft Office team, and Clippy was made anti-mandatory. That is, gone. But then insanity made a triumphant return with Windows Product Activation.
It's the reason I use OpenOffice exclusively and give away every MS Office key that's mine. It's just not worth the time and effort... I reinstall too often to have a 3 install limit. Bad enough that I have to make the phone call for Windows, not gonna do it twice just to open a .doc
The problem is, the church doesn't have a reputation system. If they did, hers would be 1, or negative.
2
She needs to spend a couple months building up about 2000 rep before she can go ahead and paint Jesus into a monkey. After that, people will tolerate it. Then if she keeps gaining rep, later on she can make him into a stegosaurus; it's all good -- she's a moderator. ♦