OpenGL 3.0 Released, Developers Furious 643
ikol writes "After over a year of delays, the OpenGL ARB (part of the Khronos industry group) today released the long-awaited spec for OpenGL 3.0 as part of the SIGGRAPH 2008 proceedings. Unfortunately it turns out not to be the major rewrite that was promised to developers. The developer community is generally furious, with many game developers intending to jump ship to DX10. Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?"
Re:This can't be good. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
WINE's Direct3D sits on top of native linux OpenGL.
I don't think most developers are "furious". When OpenGL 3.0 was described as a backward-incompatible rewrite, they were a bit closer to furious. They spoke, and said they wanted backward compatibility retained a while longer. And lo, Khronos delivered, while providing a mechanism for migration to the new architectural constructs (buffer objects, shaders, moar buffer objects, moar shaders), and a way to build your code so that deprecated constructs fail.
Seriously, most people in the OpenGL community are fairly happy (though there's some grumbling over the still-wide OpenGL / OpenGL ES split).
Is this the end? (Score:5, Interesting)
jump ship to DX10
And when they do they wander into Direct/Input/Sound/Video/Play/etc. OpenGL does 3D rendering. The rest? Cobble it together from whatever other obsolete scraps are available.
The non-Microsoft "stacks" suck. Bottom line.
The concept of a 2D "layer" still hasn't impinged on the basic SDL API. Couldn't believe it when I learned that.
I guess professional game developers don't care that Microsoft owns the machinery of their livelihoods. They sure aren't contributing to their own independence in any noticeable way.
Err, yeah. (Score:5, Interesting)
Heh - Games developers may have that luxury, but 3D/GC vendors certainly don't. So unless someone decides to port DX10 to OSX (*snort*) or Linux (sing it with me now: "render farms!"), OpenGL will continue to have a decently-sized userbase for a very long time.
IMHO, anyone making the claim that they're going to suddenly jump to DX10 is only making noise; nobody is dumb enough to cut off the fastest-growing consumer market sectors.
(...besides, doesn't the PS3 use OGL, or do they use some other home-brewed library set? Not sure there...)
Re:This can't be good. (Score:5, Interesting)
How about the creation of a fully operational open source, cross platform, DX10 or DX11 implementation, not created by Microsoft but by the community,
Wine will do this, eventually.
and fully working natively (not through Wine)
That's a bit harder, because it requires driver support.
and supported by NVidia and ATI drivers?
The official ones? Never going to happen. Anyone want to guess how many patents Microsoft has on DirectX tech?
And the unofficial ones haven't even gotten GL right, yet, and you're proposing they try to support another interface?
More importantly, you're assuming this is a good idea -- that we should be working to clone a Microsoft technology, instead of improving on one which has been open from the start (GL).
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Question is, what does OSX currently have handy that would replace it? (it's been way too long, my memory sucks, so let me take a stab here... Quartz, Core Graphics, whatever-it's-called-nowadays?)
Either way, any developer having to keep two separate code branches for two separate library sets is (okay, just IMHO) begging for pain.
OpenGL falling down a pit (Score:4, Interesting)
Not much unlike the one XFree86 fell down.
It needs to be forked. We need a fork of the 3D library, much like Xorg was forked.
The fork/rewrite should be more like DX10 than like OpenGL.
The library needs to be able to interoperate with current and future video hardware, so that all hardware acceleration features will be available to applications using the 3D library...
That means providing an underlying interface compatible with both the OpenGL and DX10 ABIs and conventional hardware drivers.
Re:This can't be good. (Score:5, Interesting)
How about the creation of a fully operational open source, cross platform, DX10 or DX11 implementation, not created by Microsoft but by the community,
Wine will do this, eventually.
Wine uses OpenGL to do the actual rendering AFAIK, it reads the DirectX function calls, but it doesn't interface with the hardware itself, it basically just implements the functions with OpenGL calls.
So while the OpenGL dependency may be less obvious for the user or casual developer, it's still there, and a bad OpenGL release means a bad DirectX implementation in Wine
I'm no expert though, correct me if I'm wrong about this
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
That certainly isn't my experience. Most people on the OGL discussion boards were very much looking forward to the changes to the API. The previews Khronos posted in the Pipeline newsletter looked bloody amazing.
But when those previews are followed by almost a year of complete silence and then finally an API which is nothing at all like the one they promised, but rather some more spit and polish on the mess that is OGL 2.1 (much like OGL 2.0 was really just 1.6 with a new name), people got pissed off. And rightfully so.
The only ones pleased with this change as far as I've been able to gather are the CAD people wanting to continue to run their old, stale OpenGL bases code until the end of time. For new development, using OpenGL is a pain in the back side, which is why I just began bringing my renderer up in D3D10.
No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?
it isnt. because OpenGL ARB is gonna play it nice, and revise their specs, therefore pleasing developers and therefore GAMERS as much as they can, and fix the matter, wont you now ? dont make us wait.
Re:people still make opengl games? (Score:1, Interesting)
I've seen many, many studies showing that OpenGL2 beats DX9 in performance, (but only if you DON'T use Microsoft's implementation of OpenGL, which for some reason sucks ass.)
Obviously OpenGL2 vs. DX9 is very different to OpenGL3 vs. DX10, but to 90% of the market it's irrelevant since they don't run Vista and therefore don't have DX10, OpenGL is competing with DX9, not 10, and winning.
Re:Is this the end? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry my anonymous brethren, but you're exaggerating a bit. First off, DirectDraw (DirectX 2d API), DirectInput, and DirectPlay are all deprecated for other APIs. Granted, the other APIs are Microsoft but even they aren't always consistent across MS platforms. For example, DirectInput [wikipedia.org] is replaced by one API on the 360 and a different one for the PC.
SDL handles cross-platform input and some basic platform functionality on the open side. Not that you could expect it to run on a console, but it should run on a Mac, Linux, or Windows.
The open equivalent of DirectSound is OpenAL, which looks a lot like OpenGL in usage. Of course, that's more of a negative, since they both need an overhaul. It *is* cross-platform and supports 3d sound though.
The other APIs aren't nearly as important for game development.
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
This has however everything to with ATI and nothing really with OpenGL, as it is the hardware manufacturer who ultimately decides which capabilities will they expose in the drivers. ATI's OpenGL drivers was *always* bad, buggy, and badly performing (go on, search for some old benchmarks, you will see that ATI cards that easily outperform their NVidia counterparts in DirectX falls heavily behind when it comes to OpenGL apps and games).
The developers' expectations here was that if OpenGL 3.0 will include all the newest stuff in core spec, ATI (and Intel and others) will be forced to support them (so they can pass the certification and be able to call their products compliant), however the same expectation for improved OpenGL drivers was there when ATI was bought by AMD, and that too never really materialized. ATI simply doesn't care enough about OpenGL, their main focus was always DirectX, and i don't see that changing in nearby future.
As for OpenGL 3.0, the rage is that Khronos group promised us moisty delicious cake (whole new API, yay!), but after long long wait delivered only small biscuit. I didn't expect much so i'm not disappointed and overall the spec is good step (deprecation model for lots of old stuff, FBO finally promoted to core, direct access extension), but just like KDE 4.0, it is only first step, and it *really* depends on where it will go from now.
OpenGL Not Really a DirectX Competitor (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No it doesn't (Score:2, Interesting)
For the same reason that people do not want to use the DirectX 10 Engine, because it is proprietary and serves little (except in this case, where it would likely serve no) purpose outside of the hardware and operating system it was built to run efficiently on.
And besides, look at games like World of Warcraft and Half Life, they've managed to port (What I'm assuming to be) C-based code over and implement it on the Mac with no relative drop in performance (if not a relative gain compared to similar PC hardware, as is my experience with World of Warcraft). It's not that MacOS doesn't NEED a 3D Engine implemented, it's just that people are already working around the lack thereof already, with good success, leaving Apple as a company little incentive to do such a thing.
DirectX 11 (Score:2, Interesting)
DirectX 11.0 will be released on nVision 2008, 25-27 augusti.
The OpenGL consortium had to release opengl now to be take the egde. Too bad it had to be "finished" in a hurry.
Re:Err, yeah. (Score:5, Interesting)
Render farms don't use OpenGL or DX for rendering in programs such as Lightwave/Maya/blender, the frames are rendered by the CPU not GPU. (there are a couple exceptions to this).
The only place the video comes into play is when you are running the 3D app and modelling of huge poly objects. I can slow Blender down to a crawl in big scenes on my older powerbook with only 64MB of video ram, but it runs smooth in my old G4 tower with 256MB of video ram, yet the render times on the same frame are about the same. (1.5Ghz vs. 2x1Ghz G4 CPU's., both with 1.25GB of Ram).
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, but that does nothing to help driver development. They still need to support all the deprecated features if the application requests them (most likely for a very long time to come as well), and driver quality is one of the major problems with OGL right now.
The "old" GL3 was also supposed to include interoperability with GL2 mind. But it would not do it by layering yet more stuff on top of the old, which I can't imagine will do driver quality any favours.
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine you were the owner of a CAD or Animation software company. I suppose that when you have multiple OpenGL apps each with 10s of millions of lines of code, it's pretty hard to justify a rewrite from a business standpoint. Those "old stale" code bases each generate 100s of millions of dollars each year, and they're orders of magnitude larger and more complex than games. It would take millions of $$ to port one of the major OpenGl apps to another API, and from a business standpoint, those $$ would be wasted -- they wouldn't be doing anything other than chasing someone else's aims and objectives -- not doing anything that would generate a decent return on the investment.
Your customers don't care what the underlying API is that you use -- what they care is that you solve their problems in a cost effective way. If OpenGL3.x was a complete and incompatible break -- these companies would think "well if those a$$h0les are going to make us rewrite the software, we might as well jump to DX instead and be done with it" (At least if you don't have to support mac and linux).
It's not too hard for people to figure out who I work for so let me add that these are my opinions only -- my employer may share them, or they may not -- I certainly make no representations in this -- but these opinions are mine.
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
most likely for a very long time to come as well
Seems rather FUDy... Why introduce a deprecation model if not to encourage people to the more OpenGL ES like nondeprecated bits? Yeah, you still can call glBegin/End, but it'll presumably hiss nastily at you.
I just don't see it as "layered on top", particularly - you do things the new way if you want your code to run in forward-compat mode. It's "beside" rather than "on top".
(certainly unlikely to be "layered on top" at the driver sources level, would be inverted if anything - any old fixed pipeline functionality emulated with programmable hardware.)
Bit of a book-scam though. Whole 'nother round of red/orange book purchases...
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem here isn't the actual implementation of the old fixed function pipeline. That has been emulated with shaders for yonks already.
The problem lies in the state machine at the core of OpenGL. This will have to be there no matter what "deprecation level" you're running at and I can't imagine the IHVs will implement a standalone version of that for each of these levels. The result is that every feature will impact others since they interact with the same core system, enabled or not. IHVs will have to hack up their currently stable code to add OGL "3" support, and they will break things in the process.
What really breaks my heart is that OGL2 could "easily" be layered on top of the original GL3 they proposed. That way they could take care of backwards compatibility while still providing lean and mean drivers for the rest of us. The other way around isn't nearly as easy though (if at all possible), and will do jack squat for driver simplicity.
Re:Is this the end? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OpenGL is NOT only games (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps just after the long wait people just expected something that would be the Saviour of Graphics API's, but instead got OGL3. It's just the way of the world.
I also hear people yelling for a branch, and let me tell you that I think that is the wrong decision. Think of all the extra work Nvidia or ATI would have to go through to support both forks. It would overall mean a downgrade in performance when the IHV's could instead spend their time working on one standard.
So is this the godsend that we all hoped it would be? No. Let's just appreciate what we got, because there are lots of good things in here, and hope that in the future Khronos will do a better job communicating about the next major spec.
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Two levels, for now. There will be more in the future as more stuff gets deprecated if I'm reading it right.
And the forward compatible API is nowhere near as clean as the one promised a year ago. The fact that it may be layered on top of a cleaner API inside the driver doesn't really help me.
Will the IHVs (or Tungsten for Gallium) develop separate state trackers (or whatever it is they're doing internally) for each deprecation level though? Sound like an awful lot of duplicate work for what is essentially the same API. And if they're not, well that's where I get worried. The famed OpenGL rewrite over at ATI wasn't exactly painless (and lots of apps are still broken), and if they have to do all this refactoring underneath the API yet again I don't look forward to the fallout.
Re:The Chicken and the Egg (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No it doesn't (Score:1, Interesting)
One company is very good at fostering a developer community and making sure it's easy to get on board their API. The other seems like it goes out of their way to torture devs.
Agreed. Sun produces excellent documentation. Their javadoc API is truly well executed. Perhaps some day, one of their more profitable competitors will learn to do the same.
Re:Not licenses - users (Score:2, Interesting)
XP and Vista add up to 87% of market share. Yet Windows has a total of 91%. Only 4% of Windows users use another Windows, such as x64, 2000, Server 2003, NT 4, 98, etc.
XP very quickly dominated the market share previously owned by the 95, 98, and 2000 users. Vista is not doing the same.
You claim that numbers don't back up my claim that people are looking away from Vista. Perhaps you missed Apple jumping up to 7% market share, and continuing to climb. Apple is the #3 seller of laptops on the planet right now. Oh, and Linux is now being sold preinstalled on 3% of new computers right now, where as before Vista came along, Linux could never top 1% of market share.
Vista hasn't been adopted as fast as XP was, and Microsoft keeps hemorrhaging market share since Vista was released. But keep telling yourself that people are going nuts over Vista.
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
You are correct that code needs to be rewritten and even rearchitected -- the old way of doing things in GL is often a very poor match for today's hardware, and GL is pretty crufty these days -- but it would be nice to be able to do the rewrites incrementally over several releases as opposed to all at once (incrementally with multiple contexts is not so nice either). That said, I think it would have been better had GL3.0 been what we had been expecting as opposed to GL2.2, which is what we got.
Barthold Lichtenbelt made a good post recently on the OpenGL newsgroup explaining how things got to this point. You should check it out.
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
EXT_direct_state_access [opengl.org] is their answer to your state machine problems. Although it hasnt abolished state, the extension is designed to make it accessible: whereas previously programmers had to update selectors and latch in state, the EXT_direct_state_access extension attempts to, from what I can discern, provide easy on-demand access to various states, no context switching required.
As you are the only sane comment I've read from this entire thread, I'd be interested to hear what you think of EXT_direct_state_access.
Re:No it doesn't (Score:2, Interesting)
And have you tried looking for documentation on Microsoft APIs that are over a year old? (Try the http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb153255(VS.85).aspx [microsoft.com] link to Microsoft.DirectX.DirectDraw)
Or that the MSDN documentation for IDirect3DDevice9::SetMaterial (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb174437(VS.85).aspx) says that it returns "D3DERR_INVALIDCALL if the pMaterial parameter is invalid." but the tests on Wine show that D3D9 crashes with SetMaterial(NULL), whereas the DirectDraw version (no longer available on MSDN) *does* return D3DERR_INVALIDCALL!
Re:Question (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, but that does nothing to help driver development. They still need to support all the deprecated features if the application requests them (most likely for a very long time to come as well), and driver quality is one of the major problems with OGL right now.
The "old" GL3 was also supposed to include interoperability with GL2 mind. But it would not do it by layering yet more stuff on top of the old, which I can't imagine will do driver quality any favours.
One of the big steps in DirectX 10 was that this is not the case - there is no legacy code in the driver, though there is a legacy layer above the drivers so that DirectX 8 and 9 games still run.
Re:The Chicken and the Egg (Score:3, Interesting)
XP hit 20% of the market in less than a year, and was at 40% by the 24 month mark.
XP was a major upgrade (especially from the ignorant end-user perspective) over the existing Windows 98, Vista is not.
That's a dismal performance by any standards, but for a monopoly OS that was seven years in development, it's an astonishing failure.
The only people who think Vista should be storming the market, are those who take some sort of perverse pleasure highlighting that it is not doing so. Everyone else understands that it will be a gradual process of attrition.
They should have run with OpenGL ES (Score:4, Interesting)
As a developer I'd like to see OpenGL ES given priority over OpenGL. OpenGL ES matches the hardware much better than OpenGL does.
OpenGL itself could be implemented as a library on top of OpenGL ES. This would move all the legacy crud out of the main driver and make the jobs of driver writers a lot easier (an OpenGL ES driver is a lot smaller than an OpenGL driver).
OpenGL ES could become the basis for Linux graphics drivers instead of OpenGL (why does a window manager need all those OpenGL functions? It doesn't...)
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Something like SDL, but that had all (or most) of directX functions. Is this feasible or I'm way out of line here?
Re:The Chicken and the Egg (Score:3, Interesting)
This same principle goes for friends of my mom to; I asked them about this. They will use their computer until it breaks down before they buy a new one. What they need is covered by XP, and they does not feel justified in buying a new computer until it is essential.
Of course there are many factors involved; but I do believe that many people bought computers during the "XP era" because they needed to. As XP was the only alternative available pre-installed (for a lot of buyers at least).
If/When open source OS arrives at a point where it is easy to setup, and gives you all the basic functions you need. There is no doubt in my mind it will become more viable and more popular. Over the next years and decades I believe free software products will come to dominate certain functions; operating systems, browsers and word processors. Simply because it is hard to justify the price tag on such products when free alternatives are available and getting better and better.
With ODF becoming standard for official documents in certain European countries, and several ministers now speaking out for adopting Open Standards and Software in administration; I am certain the OS market will continue to break away from MicroSoft control. If nothing else, using Open Source software gives National Security Advisers a bit more peace of mind. I know personnel within the Norwegian military that would be very happy if they could scan the code for all the software they use. But I digress as I often do.
Point was simply the entire marked grew during after the release of XP, it is not growing quite so much these days (and in not quite the same way).
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
The state tracker is shared between all Gallium drivers. There are short-term plans to write an OpenGL ES state tracker and an OpenGL 3 state tracker, so any card with Gallium drivers can be used for OpenGL 2, OpenGL ES or OpenGL 3. A longer-term plan is to write DirectX 9 / 10 state trackers. WINE would them fill a similar role to Mesa, sending calls to the DX state tracker rather than to Mesa, eliminating two layers between DirectX apps and the GPU.
This should speed up DRI driver development a lot, since currently DRI drivers embed a load of OpenGL-specific code which will now be shared among all of them in the state tracker.
Re:Disappointing (Score:2, Interesting)
I have been part of the Khronos group previously (though not on openGL), but in general it tends to involve very long e-mail discussions about how X is broken. Half the people will agree. The other half will admit it's broken, but will be reluctant to change it because it'll require additional work for their companies (i.e. it'll cost them money to make that change). So whilst everyone may agree that a change is needed, very few people will vote to change it.
The result of months of e-mail discussions is basically not a lot. Unfortunately that's what happens with design by commitee. So whilst moving GL from the ARB to the Khonos group was well intentioned, I suspect that not very much has changed (as I think has been demonstrated with the GL3 spec).
The simple reason D3D keeps moving forward is that a dictator driven API can, and does, break the API in order to make progress. The sucky thing is that it's Windows only. If it was available on linux/mac/windows XP, then I'd gladly switch to D3D10....
Re:Probably lots of astroturf on this story (Score:2, Interesting)
adequate != ideal
Unfortunately, OpenGL in it's current state is far from ideal. It's the ease of use of D3D when compared to OpenGL that makes developers targetting the Windows platform use D3D. Not to mention the maths library. The debugging tools (Pix). The samples. The documentation. Etc Etc.
DX9/10 is not critical for *keeping* developers on windows. The sheer number of windows users does that well enough already.
Developing with OpenGL is do-able (It's core to the App's i work on), but when you get support tickets with things like:
* Texturing has errors on a Voodoo 5.
* Crashes on ATI radeon.
* Widgets not visible on Intel X3100.
* Overlay's not visible on 3D labs Wildcat
It does start to get a little bit depressing....
Re:Not licenses - users (Score:4, Interesting)
None of which is surprising, given the differences between the circumstances of the releases of XP and Vista.
1. XP initially wasn't a whole lot more than a facelift of Win2K. Which itself wasn't initially a whole lot more than a facelift of NT4.0 which initially was - well, you get the point. So while the development process that eventually resulted in XP was ongoing, they kept releasing versions of it along the way. This is perhaps the only *real* mistake they made when developing Vista.
2. Microsoft really did choose a great point in the NT timeline to cross the system over to be their consumer operating system as well. Their latest attempt at a consumer OS had been an abject failure, customers were getting more and more disgruntled with the inherent instability of the 9x platform, the home PC market was really picking up steam, and home-user hardware was finally to the point that it could support an NT OS that had all the bells and whistles needed to make it appealing to said home users. So when XP came out it was almost a no-brainer to switch from the problems that were the 9x system - and even so a lot of people held back for 2+ years.
3. XP had the advantage of being an upgrade from a clearly inferior system. Windows 9x was so much more limited in so many ways (couldn't even use more than 1 CPU!). Meanwhile, a lot of the improvements in Vista are not so obvious to the uninformed. It's not obviously more stable, and a lot of the small improvements don't immediately appear to be improvements because people have to re-learn shortcuts that they had been using for as long as 5 years or more.
4. WinME came out barely a year and a half before XP. It's not hard to remember the flaws of the last version when it's been that recent. But by the time Vista came out, it was 3 years since SP2, which fixed the majority of the glaring issues XP had. By then many people forgot the initial troubles of XP, if they were around to see them at all.
So sure, most people aren't going nuts over Vista. I don't use it (or like it) yet myself. But to say it's a failure compared to XP is false. In reality it's doing surprisingly well. In fact, if you want to point fingers the only real mistake you can point at that MS made while developing vista is that they didn't come up with at least one more *new* version of the old NT in the meantime to charge us for. So personally I'm happy keep using XP until I'm ready to upgrade to Vista, which will probably be in another 2 years or so. Meanwhile, many people I know are happily using and enjoying Vista.
Re:Shotgun Marriage (Score:5, Interesting)
All problems stem from one company. Microsoft. Microsoft has been the reason that Vista's adoption is 1/2 what it was and it is the reason we have that much of an adoption as it is. What do I mean?
Microsoft is forcing vendors to sell Vista instead of XP. Microsoft is also forcing hardware vendors to implement BIOS hacks to keep transitions from Vista to XP. This is evidenced by many factors, such as the lack of available XP drivers for these new pre-fab pre-installed Vista boxes.
Keep in mind that this is not the case with custom built. Custom built machines can take XP or Vista, or any other.
I remember back a while ago about the Foxconn debacle. I think there's something similar going on here. When you attempt to install XP on various hardware that came pre-installed with Vista you can get the OS installed. But if you attempt to install drivers for those components, if you can find them, there is an almost complete failure to get these components to function.
This is not the case with all manufacturers. It is the case with Gateway and with Toshiba. Both of these manufacturers are forcing Vista installs. It may be with a few chipset packages such as the Intel GM/GL 965. But it is happening.
After a successful install of XP (after verifying that the components work under Vista) and then attempt to install say the wireless, wired, sound, SMBUS drivers, you'll get messages from the installers informing you that the devices aren't present.
You can confirm that this is a BIOS level function due to the fact that if you take a component from a machine that came pre-installed with XP and put it into the new machine where you have removed Vista and installed XP, that component's driver installer will also tell you that the device is not present, even though it was properly installed in another machine.
This clearly is an attempt by Microsoft to mandate to the manufacturers that they are not to support XP any longer even if the customer has chosen to do this on their own.
We did not have this situation when going from Win2k to XP nor from Win98 to XP. It appears to be an issue specifically with going from Vista to XP. It appears to be a bios level hack which creates the situation.
Contact with others has confirmed the situation. Many have reported that this is occuring and the consensus is that it is a mandate by Microsoft to prevent users from running XP on these older machines.
As I said, it isn't all machines. It is a new tactic being implemented on newer hardware in an attempt to force us to stay with Vista.
One has to ask why this is the case. Why on earth is Microsoft so hell bent on forcing us to Vista? Is it some hidden back door? Why would Microsoft care which OS we run given that we have paid them for Vista and paid a second time for XP? What is their motive for mandating this type of issue? Why would they dictate that the sales support for XP has been dropped so quickly?
Something is awry here.