Furthermore a distinguishing feature of CISC vs. RISC is number of general purpose registers. RISC always tried to do everything in registers and treat RAM as an I/O device, instead of stuff like "load accumulator with value in RAM and write it back to RAM" or "load this register with this value from RAM, multiply it with the value in this register, then store it back to RAM." - there are many instructions like this in CISC architectures that encourage treating RAM as just as good for temporary storage as registers - which, of course, it hasn't been for a long time now.
Intel has become more RISCy with MMX/SSE and now with the amd64 extensions that give it 8 more general purpose registers.
"CISC" made a lot of sense when RAM was $1000/KB (pretty much was in mid to late 1970's). It meant you could have more complex programs for a given amount of RAM.
Some make the argument that RISC's low instruction density is a disadvantage, but the bottleneck in most systems is waiting on RAM, not waiting on decoding instructions (and ARM has the "Thumb" modes that serve effectively as a form of instruction stream compression in a way).
I think Microsoft mostly needs two things for Windows Phone 8 to succeed.
1.) Get rid of the Microsoft brand on phones
2.) Do things Apple doesn't do
The idea here is that Microsoft really has all it copied. Nokia had a very stable history of making good phones. Their feature phones really were rock solid. Nokia is the perfect partner Microsoft bought, and they have them by the balls. Motorola Mobility for Google doesn't even come close to what Microsoft-Nokia partnership is (failure bailing out failure). I seriously think that Elop tried to get Google on-board but they had already decided on Microsoft.
What comes to development tools.. well, you can't really go wrong with Visual Studio. It's an industry standard, really widely used IDE mostly used to develop cheap Visual Basic apps. Pretty much everyone agrees that VB6 was a rock solid product from Microsoft. Even if you hate Microsoft, you can but agree on this one (until it messes up some.DLL's and applications start trying to start a non-existent debugger randomly). And the availability of things like XNA, C#, great documentation and the fact that Visual Studio Express is free really helps. Microsoft really is the monopoly friendly company. Much more so than companies not Google or Apple.
I'd say these two things are well covered.
Then there's the matter of UI. Again, Microsoft has done remarkable Microsoft Bob with the design. While I agree that Metro UI doesn't work too well on computers, it really is great on mobile phones and tablets. Everyone who has tested one of the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 phones can agree. They would only use this phone if it was given to them for free.
The last part Microsoft has in front of it really comes down to casing on a monoply. Nokia never was that well known company in North America until 2005 or so when it decided to ignore the US smartphone market and that's why other companies like Apple and HTC have gained a following there. Nokia largely ignored NA market while they concentrated on Europe and Asia which made sense because their wireless markets aren't crippled by the sorry as oligopoly that exists in America. Let's not forget that Nokia is still the worlds biggest phone manufacturer and controls almost half of the markets when dumb phones are included (and this is relevant because Windows Phone 8 will work on dumb phones). Even without, Nokia has a much better base in Europe.
What Microsoft and Nokia need are phone companies that will push the products to consumers because Microsoft can't operate any other way except for the OEM to be the last mile bitch for the customer. That's all there is to it. They have a wonderful copy of a product in their hands but are missing the marketing required for it. I think it mostly comes down to so much different market than what it is in Asia or Europe. They just lack the experience.
Microsoft, or Nokia for that matter, could introduce one leading phone. The "one" phone that everyone would choose. But I think it's much better when Nokia produces many different phones and everyone can choose the one they like the best. Because having 20 different phones that run the same OS and look and operate the same really makes sense for Microsoft. Let's not forget that Microsoft does have hardware requirements so there is no problem with fragmentation like Android has except when we decide to add a feature that requires new hardware to make that "one" phone. Apple, of course, has little next to none fragmentation problems, even with the different resolutions. Nokia and Microsoft are almost at the same boat because we paid for it.
All in all, both Microsoft and Nokia have wonderful product. We just need to force people to buy it.
The bored socially-outcase girlfriendless 13-year olds that find all the security vulnerabilities have the time, inclination, and imagination to find all the vulnerabilities whether the code is open or not.
A well maintained open source project tends to fix them quicker than every patch Tuesday, though.
Well what they do is take a loss on the hardware and try to make up for it with software sales. So the game companies do not want competition from homebrew developers.
Of course I'd rather have the option to pay full price for the hardware with full ability to reflash the firmware to anything I want.
A bit of this fight happened in the mid to late 80's/early 90's with synthesizers. In the 70's/early 80's, analog synths were common, and were controlled by knobs and sliders.
Beginning around the time of the famous Yamaha DX7, this is when synthesizers started becoming digital, and sporting buttons, 2 or 3 character LEDs unable to really cope with displaying what was needed, and levels and levels of menus (a really good example of the pinnacle of this trend is the Kawai K4). Great for making things cheap for the manufacturer, terrible if you want to modify your sound in real time.
The resurgence of the "analog" sound in certain musical genres saw synth interface design sort of swing the way back to all the knobs and buttons in the mid 90's, even though inside you have "virtual analog" DSPs and what not.
Knobs vs. sliders though, that's a holy war unto itself...
One of the most useful "caution habits" I've picked up is to, if you are running as root (and needing to) and about to type in a potentially destructive command, start by typing a "#". Only when you are sure the command is correct, then remove the #.
Given that the BIOS/UEFI is responsible for all the following:
- implementing the braindead ACPI spec which is often prone to bugs - housing laptop's EC code in some systems which controls power management and the fans (not unheard of this to have bugs) - responsible for applying installed CPU microcode updates (fixing CPU bugs before the OS starts) - faking nonexistent hardware on dirt cheap systems via SMI (not sure if this is common anymore, and bugs may lurk here)
in my humble opinion updating it is necessary from time to time, especially on OEM systems, to suggest a BIOS update as part of troubleshooting or issue resolution. It's nice to be able to do this remotely in some capacity rather than have to travel 450 miles to flip a hardware switch.
This being said, can't they put the BIOS on an SD card now? Is a LPC (or whatever) to SD converter/translator whatever really that hard/expensive to build?
This would allow hardware manufacturers to provide a UEFI compliant firmware for Windows, etc., let me completely replace it if it gets borked or infected, and let hackers have their way with it as well.
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Furthermore a distinguishing feature of CISC vs. RISC is number of general purpose registers. RISC always tried to do everything in registers and treat RAM as an I/O device, instead of stuff like "load accumulator with value in RAM and write it back to RAM" or "load this register with this value from RAM, multiply it with the value in this register, then store it back to RAM." - there are many instructions like this in CISC architectures that encourage treating RAM as just as good for temporary storage as registers - which, of course, it hasn't been for a long time now.
Intel has become more RISCy with MMX/SSE and now with the amd64 extensions that give it 8 more general purpose registers.
"CISC" made a lot of sense when RAM was $1000/KB (pretty much was in mid to late 1970's). It meant you could have more complex programs for a given amount of RAM.
Some make the argument that RISC's low instruction density is a disadvantage, but the bottleneck in most systems is waiting on RAM, not waiting on decoding instructions (and ARM has the "Thumb" modes that serve effectively as a form of instruction stream compression in a way).
I think Microsoft mostly needs two things for Windows Phone 8 to succeed.
1.) Get rid of the Microsoft brand on phones
2.) Do things Apple doesn't do
The idea here is that Microsoft really has all it copied. Nokia had a very stable history of making good phones. Their feature phones really were rock solid. Nokia is the perfect partner Microsoft bought, and they have them by the balls. Motorola Mobility for Google doesn't even come close to what Microsoft-Nokia partnership is (failure bailing out failure). I seriously think that Elop tried to get Google on-board but they had already decided on Microsoft.
What comes to development tools.. well, you can't really go wrong with Visual Studio. It's an industry standard, really widely used IDE mostly used to develop cheap Visual Basic apps. Pretty much everyone agrees that VB6 was a rock solid product from Microsoft. Even if you hate Microsoft, you can but agree on this one (until it messes up some .DLL's and applications start trying to start a non-existent debugger randomly). And the availability of things like XNA, C#, great documentation and the fact that Visual Studio Express is free really helps. Microsoft really is the monopoly friendly company. Much more so than companies not Google or Apple.
I'd say these two things are well covered.
Then there's the matter of UI. Again, Microsoft has done remarkable Microsoft Bob with the design. While I agree that Metro UI doesn't work too well on computers, it really is great on mobile phones and tablets. Everyone who has tested one of the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 phones can agree. They would only use this phone if it was given to them for free.
The last part Microsoft has in front of it really comes down to casing on a monoply. Nokia never was that well known company in North America until 2005 or so when it decided to ignore the US smartphone market and that's why other companies like Apple and HTC have gained a following there. Nokia largely ignored NA market while they concentrated on Europe and Asia which made sense because their wireless markets aren't crippled by the sorry as oligopoly that exists in America. Let's not forget that Nokia is still the worlds biggest phone manufacturer and controls almost half of the markets when dumb phones are included (and this is relevant because Windows Phone 8 will work on dumb phones). Even without, Nokia has a much better base in Europe.
What Microsoft and Nokia need are phone companies that will push the products to consumers because Microsoft can't operate any other way except for the OEM to be the last mile bitch for the customer. That's all there is to it. They have a wonderful copy of a product in their hands but are missing the marketing required for it. I think it mostly comes down to so much different market than what it is in Asia or Europe. They just lack the experience.
Microsoft, or Nokia for that matter, could introduce one leading phone. The "one" phone that everyone would choose. But I think it's much better when Nokia produces many different phones and everyone can choose the one they like the best. Because having 20 different phones that run the same OS and look and operate the same really makes sense for Microsoft. Let's not forget that Microsoft does have hardware requirements so there is no problem with fragmentation like Android has except when we decide to add a feature that requires new hardware to make that "one" phone. Apple, of course, has little next to none fragmentation problems, even with the different resolutions. Nokia and Microsoft are almost at the same boat because we paid for it.
All in all, both Microsoft and Nokia have wonderful product. We just need to force people to buy it.
Would like to see the clerk's face if I took a bunch of hard drives to Walmart and asked if they could refill them with helium.
>hardware accelerated Java.
Already there. Some ARM chips have a technology called Jazelle that can directly execute many Java bytecodes.
One reason why .NET on ARM CE platforms sucked so hard.
Seriously, Pascal had it right with := being the assignment operator and = being the equality operator. Hard to confuse those two IMHO.
The bored socially-outcase girlfriendless 13-year olds that find all the security vulnerabilities have the time, inclination, and imagination to find all the vulnerabilities whether the code is open or not.
A well maintained open source project tends to fix them quicker than every patch Tuesday, though.
So basically this "uncertainty limit" is itself uncertain.
I don't know much about quantum physics but isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Is there more truth to recursive opensource software algorithims than we previously thought?
(-1 Completely Ignorant)
The original Xbox was a pretty nice media player with XBMC on it. Also gave it the ability to play DVDs without paying for that silly remote.
You also could run straight Linux on the Xbox.
Well what they do is take a loss on the hardware and try to make up for it with software sales. So the game companies do not want competition from homebrew developers.
Of course I'd rather have the option to pay full price for the hardware with full ability to reflash the firmware to anything I want.
A personal appeal by Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
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what's to become of Windows CE? Is this it's death knell?
Not to mention "drive".
There is, though. "Control" stuff is supposed to go in the HTTP header and "data" stuff is supposed to go in the HTTP body.
A bit of this fight happened in the mid to late 80's/early 90's with synthesizers. In the 70's/early 80's, analog synths were common, and were controlled by knobs and sliders.
Beginning around the time of the famous Yamaha DX7, this is when synthesizers started becoming digital, and sporting buttons, 2 or 3 character LEDs unable to really cope with displaying what was needed, and levels and levels of menus (a really good example of the pinnacle of this trend is the Kawai K4). Great for making things cheap for the manufacturer, terrible if you want to modify your sound in real time.
The resurgence of the "analog" sound in certain musical genres saw synth interface design sort of swing the way back to all the knobs and buttons in the mid 90's, even though inside you have "virtual analog" DSPs and what not.
Knobs vs. sliders though, that's a holy war unto itself...
The "mystery meat w/flavoring concoction" is known as surimi.
One of the most useful "caution habits" I've picked up is to, if you are running as root (and needing to) and about to type in a potentially destructive command, start by typing a "#". Only when you are sure the command is correct, then remove the #.
Pretty good advice.
Given that the BIOS/UEFI is responsible for all the following:
- implementing the braindead ACPI spec which is often prone to bugs
- housing laptop's EC code in some systems which controls power management and the fans (not unheard of this to have bugs)
- responsible for applying installed CPU microcode updates (fixing CPU bugs before the OS starts)
- faking nonexistent hardware on dirt cheap systems via SMI (not sure if this is common anymore, and bugs may lurk here)
in my humble opinion updating it is necessary from time to time, especially on OEM systems, to suggest a BIOS update as part of troubleshooting or issue resolution. It's nice to be able to do this remotely in some capacity rather than have to travel 450 miles to flip a hardware switch.
This being said, can't they put the BIOS on an SD card now? Is a LPC (or whatever) to SD converter/translator whatever really that hard/expensive to build?
This would allow hardware manufacturers to provide a UEFI compliant firmware for Windows, etc., let me completely replace it if it gets borked or infected, and let hackers have their way with it as well.
Microsoft Windows(tm) User Interface 8 Series, Build 6292, Service Pack 2a
Until they subpoena the logs of your VPN provider.