[conspire] Bad hardware category HP Printers [was Re: Bad hardware categories (wasL: July 13th CABAL meeting cancelled)]]

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):

> ok, fine, but still we are talking about novel and closed interfaces
> where existing ones would have done well and been interoperable.  no
> doubt the new interface will be good once its reverse-engineered but
> in the meantime harm is still done

(Quibble warning.)

I don't think this one is amenable to reverse-engineering, or at least
that the kind of engineering required is just not an attractive task to
anyone but Microsoft.

MS-GDI graphics-primitive output is generated by core system software 
(and tailored in some OS release but not others for
hardware-acceleration features in recent PC video hardware).  In
MS-Windows Vista and later, it's done in the OS's core compositing
engine on top of the Windows Display Driver Model layer.

I don't know how much of that is publicly documented and don't care
enough to find out, but my point is that adding that functdionality to
any non-Microsoft OS would entail developing a huge codebase to
replicate the core functionality of MS-Windows's compositing engine, and
the question is less whether anyone could do that than why _would_ they
try?  

No, the new interface won't be good once it's reverse-engineered
because this is something that nobody else _wants_ to engineer it, but
that doesn't prevent these from being good dedicated Windows devices.