When designing a website, apart from the usual gradients and other graphical elements, the single most important constituent is the Font. It takes a hell lot of trial and error to get the right font for your website, you need to try different ones, look at them from different angles and decide if they’ll work for you or not. On the other hand, since the browsers will be finally rendering whatever you’ve chosen as your favourite, a designer also has to keep in mind how different browsers are generating the fonts according to the underlying code. That’s why I decided to give the 3 most popular browsers a go on their own capabilities of font rendition. And here’s the result,

As you can see, Google Chrome 4 Dev builds have some problems with Font Anti-Aliasing, while IE shows a bit more blur than anyone else. In my opinion Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 gave the best results with both Serif and Sans-Serif fonts.

Browsers used: Firefox 3.6 Beta 5, Google Chrome Dev Build 4.0.266.0, Internet Explorer 8

OS: Windows 7 (64 bit), Cleartype ON

Fonts used: Arial (Sans-Serif) and Georgia (Serif)

P.S. I don’t have Photoshop installed currently in my PC, that’s why the graphics presented here is rather ‘basic’. Had to do with Paint.NET and don’t know much tricks on it.

Going through 2008, hardware vendors like Intel, NVidia and AMD buzzed off the terms Multi Core Processing and GPGPU support several times over various keynotes and presentations. While we had multi-core processors for last few years, none of the current operating systems can leverage that hardware power rightfully in multi-threaded applications. On the other hand, GPGPU (General-purpose computing on Graphics Processing Unit) is relatively new term, and signifies the use of GPU in common tasks which are traditionally meant for CPU. And that’s too largely unused in general computing apart from those developer junkies who like to play with codes.

Two biggest players in the worldwide consumer operating system market, Microsoft and Apple, recently announced their interests on these emerging technologies to provide way better user experiences by using prowess of latest hardware line. In PDC’08, Microsoft made it clear that they’re definitely tweaking Windows 7 to use multi-core processors more efficiently and the latest publicly released build of Windows 7 shows significant performance increase than Vista with newer processors having more than one core. In WWDC’09, Apple presented their current implementation of Multi Core Processing and GPGPU support in upcoming version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. After the event, people who got Developer Preview of the operating system appreciated more fluency in terms of processing power and user interface in comparison to its previous version, namely Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

While it’s great to see that modern operating systems are going to use properly what they have under the hood, a typical comparison between efficiency levels is obvious.

Windows 7

Windows 7 is going to be the best operating system Microsoft has ever released since its existence. Unlike the vaporous hype Vista had till its release back in 2007, Windows 7 will definitely going to hit the target for Microsoft. Coming into the topic, the 32bit architecture of Windows, namely win32 was never optimised (better to say meant) for parallel processing from multiple cores. From Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie’s own words,

“Win32 was never designed for highly concurrent, asynchronous processing”. “Parallelism requires adjustments at every level of the stack. It involves the repartitioning of different tasks to different layers. . . . So look for a rebalancing of roles and runtimes. We need to formalize that in the operating system. Expect their first pieces in the next generation of Windows.”

Advertently, as some people were already suggesting (and are still suggesting), a complete rewrite of Windows core can only bring a solution. But MS is afraid of losing support for millions of PC that runs legacy software and hardware and since Vista shook the ground beneath their feet, they’re most eager to gain a fair share with Win 7 first. But, users need not to worry about that, Microsoft is already tweaking as much as possible keeping the current Windows core model intact and early benchmarks have shown notable extensions in performance.

In the graphics front, Windows AERO UI is already hardware accelerated and the introduction of WDDM 1.1 promises greater augmentations. Graphic card manufacturers like NVidia and AMD announced newer drivers supporting the new version of WDDM even before the actual release of the new OS. Still there’s no word on GPGPU support in this version of Windows. There are no words on GPGPU support in Windows 7 and it’s still not clear if Microsoft already implicated the technology within their new OS. I don’t think there will be much of that kind of support (if any) and MS will introduce it with DirectX 11.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

WWDC’09 saw the official release announcement of Snow Leopard, featuring Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. Keeping up with their tradition of hypocritical Microsoft bashing, they didn’t forget to ridicule Vista and 7 in saying about some increasing complexities. While these claims are totally idiotic, Apple’s introduction of above technologies is simply great.

Grand Central Dispatch (GCD for short) is the Apple’s incarnation of native multi-core support in OS level. They want Snow Leopard to control the threads generated by various applications rather than letting those apps to do it. This gives greater control to the OS and makes it stable & efficient to use the available system resources. In their own words,

“A new technology called Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage of multicore systems by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central Dispatch also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that utilize all the power of multicore systems.”

That means everything from opening a finder window to backing up in Time Machine will be multi-threaded and the threads are in turn processed by multiple cores at the same time. While this sounds really cool, user installed third-party applications need to be GCD enabled to take advantage of it.

OpenCL is Apple’s foray into GPGPU and they have all the major graphic card manufactures with them for that cause. It stands for Open Computing Language which is based on C and easier to implement for developers than a whole new coding system. As Apple puts it,

“With graphics processors surpassing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL in Snow Leopard is a technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the vast computing power currently in the graphics processor and use it for any application.”

The everlasting feud between MS and Apple is going to take an interesting turn as they’re both waiting to release their brand new OS in a month’s difference. While Apple is quite clear with the features they are bringing to access these two current technologies, MS is relatively quiet with their part in this. I hope something significant is really brewing on Redmond that’ll blow others out of water on release. It’s too early to tell since both of the releases are at least 3.5 months away. Personally, I’m quite attracted by what Apple’s going to offer soon and thinking about buying a MacBook Pro in recent future. Let it come October, let the technology to unleash the prowess of processing power.

Windows 7 is just around the corner. As various sources put the news in, the next version of Microsoft’s coveted operating system is most probably going to release on this holiday season. Before the actual release, since MS already announced the SKUs, actual pricing of the various versions will be officially declared. Now the rumor mill has interesting information about this valuation but they are not exactly financially beneficial for customers.

According to the hearsay, Microsoft’s going to make Windows 7 pricier than both XP and Vista. It doesn’t take a genius’s mind to discover that a heftier sum won’t please the consumers, not in a present state of economic turmoil all over the world. Since the recent studies have shown that people are increasingly buying cheaper computers, a ridiculous pricing means yet another dent on their wallets. On the other hand, MS must think about the competition as well. Apple is on the brink of releasing their new iteration of Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) and possibly a cheaper version of MacBook (a netbook maybe?). Intel is also working hard on a netbook-0ptimized version of Linux called ‘Moblin’ and that’ll be free of cost. So, no one is going to welcome a bigger than ever price tag, even if the OS is superior in quality than the others.

If we look at the current pricing of both Mac OS X Leopard and Windows Vista Ultimate, we’ll find that the Microsoft offering is at least 2.5 times pricier than the first one. Even the Mac Box Set (consisting of Leopard, iWork’09 and iLife’09) is available at $150 less than Vista Ultimate.

Windows is still pricier than its Mac counterpart

Increasing the present value of $319.95 (Vista Ultimate) for Windows 7 Ultimate will be disastrous, only adding to the difference between the two main players in the market.

I’m not going to suggest an appropriate price here, Microsoft have their appointed people to do that. Just keep in mind the current economic situation and also consider the competition, the rest will fall in place.

Windows 7 pre-RTM builds are already hugely popular among technology enthusiast. And now, with the public release of Windows 7 Release Candidate, Microsoft advanced another step to bring a super solid operating system on the market that actually works. Since Windows 7 requirements need fairly lower resources in today’s terms, PCs from circa 2005-06 can also run the OS effectively. Unfortunately, it appears that Windows 7 installation DVDs are not bootable in most of these old PCs, making it difficult for a clean installation. As I do have an old PC on my home too, I decided to dig into the matter and find some fixes.

Technically speaking, those yesteryear computers don’t have capabilities built into their BIOS to boot from current Windows 7 DVDs, causing ‘CDBOOT: Cannot boot from CD – Code: 5’ error. While they can easily boot from a Windows Vista disc, seemingly some changes regarding EFI on Windows 7 booting structure shun them to boot from a Win 7 DVD.

Fear not, my friend! Hopefully, it’s still possible to perform a clean installation from Windows 7 disc instead of going through an already installed OS on these old PCs. All you require is a Windows Vista DVD along with Win 7 installation disc. Since, Vista DVDs are still compatible with these old hardwares, it’s possible to boot from them. Follow the next steps for a successful and clean installation of Windows 7,

Step 1. Pop in the Windows Vista DVD on your PCs DVD drive and set the computer to boot from it.

Step 2. Once booted, choose “Repair your computer” from ‘Install Windows’ window.

Step 3. A new window named ‘System Recovery Options’ will open. Click on ‘Command Prompt’ from there to get a CLI based window.

Step 4. Once you get the command prompt on screen, the most important part of whole procedure starts. Just input the drive name of your DVD drive on command prompt, such as D: or E: or whatever applicable. In my case, I typed E: and pressed enter.

Switch to your DVD drive on Command Prompt

Step 5. Get the Vista DVD out of drive and put in the Windows 7 disc now.

Step 6. Back in the command prompt, with your DVD drive selected there, type ‘dir’ (without quotes) and press enter. Now it’ll show the contents of your current Win 7 disc. Change the directory to ‘Sources’ by typing ‘cd Sources’ (again without quotes) and pressing enter. You’re now in the directory/folder where setup files for Windows 7 reside. Type ‘setup’ and press enter. You’re done, the Win 7 setup will just begin from there.

As it can be seen, the process involves of booting the computer from a Vista installation disc and then starting the actual installation of Windows 7 from its own media. It’s just a nifty trick to get the work done without customizing or editing anything on the original Win 7 DVD.

N.B. Newer PC users don’t need to apply this trick beforehand. Just check if your PC can boot from your Win 7 disc. If it does, then the above stated steps are not required.