The OS provides an API layer at the code level, that is if you have source code you can usually recompile it to work on different architectures...
This works well on Linux, because the source code for most applications is available making it easy to port apps to other architectures... On windows, the sourcecode for most apps is not available and the owners of most of this source won't recompile their apps unless there is a sufficiently large market for them, and will usually take quite a long time to do the porting... Users similarly won't buy the hardware unless apps are available, catch-22 situation.
The only things that would work, are apps which don't come as machine code... That is, apps with source, or apps in a language thats compiled to hardware neutral bytecode such as java.
Most windows apps come in the form of x86 specific binaries, and these would only run on ARM if you used emulation... Emulation is slow at the best of times, but when you consider that ARM cpus are generally designed for power efficiency and lack the raw performance of x86 chips... The extra overhead of emulation would result in code which performed terribly and kept the cpu running flat out negating the power efficiency.
NT was actually more stable on Alpha than it ever was on x86...
Drivers are not really a problem for ARM, since most of these devices will be small (tablets, netbooks etc) with fixed hardware, the hardware manufacturer will supply the necessary drivers.
The problem is apps... Existing windows apps would need to be at the very least recompiled (or may require significantly more work depending on the code), and with most apps being closed source only the original vendor is in a position to do that... Now as with alpha, ppc mips and ia64, commercial vendors won't port their apps unless they see a market for them... And end users wont buy the platform unless they see available apps, catch 22.
Linux doesn't really have this problem because the vast majority of applications are open source, and have already been compiled for multiple architectures. If the original author hasn't ever tried to compile the app for another platform, chances are one of the distributors has (debian has been supporting arm cpus for years)...
The only advantage ARM has over alpha/ppc/mips/ia64 is cost of hardware, if those platforms had been price competitive with x86 they would have had a lot more sales to linux users (i know many people who wanted an alpha but just couldn't justify the cost).
There is a lot to be said for writing new applications which are actually designed for a tablet or netbook, rather than trying to shoehorn desktop apps onto small devices with different input methods... But if you're going to write new apps, why bother writing them for win32/arm instead of simply writing them for linux?
The only advantage windows has in this area is familiarity, they would lose their traditional selling point of compatibility/lockin, if you go arm you will need new apps regardless and if people have learned anything over the past 15 years they should take this chance to break free of the lock-in rather than getting caught up in another round.
Some of the demos are fairly poor tho... A few years ago, there was a platform game called "the lion king"... The demo of which, was the first level. I played that first level on the demo, it was pretty good, well thought out level, reasonable level of difficulty, nice graphics and sound. So i bought the full game, turns out subsequent levels were very half assed, too difficult and there was no way to save your progress so you were stuck repeatedly going through the early levels only to die in the later ones. I think i made it to about the third level before i got absolutely sick of playing the first and second levels repeatedly, only to die in the third and have to start again.
Low prices are exactly what the gaming industry needs... The production costs of a game are a one-off cost, the actual media/distribution cost is trivial which means that even priced at $1 the game can be profitable with enough sales. Now if the price is low enough, more people will buy it - look at iphone games, i know plenty of people who would never bother buying full priced games but are quite happy to pay $5 or less for an iphone game. And of course, when the prices are low enough you squeeze the for-profit pirates out of the market (writable media costs a lot more than having thousands of copies pressed).
At $5 it becomes a casual purchase, but at $60 it's a purchase seriously worth thinking about for most people..
Novell came and went in the low end small lan arena...
TCP/IP came first, and has outlived IPX/SPX, novell was only used in small companies that wanted to network together dos and early windows machines on a small scale. Unix, VMS and mainframe systems were being networked together long before novell ever introduced networking to the lowest end microcomputers.
Companies would most certainly still do R&D if there were no patents, they would just keep the results secret until they had a product for sale... That way they would still get a lead on anyone else, who would have to reverse engineer and develop their own clone of the product (even without patents, copyright law would prevent them from making direct copies).
Also, doing away with patents would actually reduce the cost of R&D... Instead of having to work around or license patents, not to mention all the legal fees involved doing patent searches to ensure your products don't infringe upon any... You could focus on building small but worthwhile improvements on top of existing ideas.
The problem is the software, a lot of medical software is extremely dated and its not uncommon to see supposedly web based apps which actually require IE6 and wont work on any modern browser...
Doctors used to write medical records on clipboards, a tablet would be a logical evolution from this and would work very well with appropriate software... The problem is that your $2000 tablets typically run windows, which has an interface designed for mouse+keyboard and works really poorly on a tablet, and the same can be said of the applications. Windows tablets are also either heavy making them impractical to carry around, or with extremely poor battery life.
If people would write software specifically for tablets (and various places werent already locked in to other stuff) then tablets would be very useful for many things, hospitals included.
No, because if one company did that the others would soon follow suit resulting in increased competition and lower profits all round.. Sure, that's how a free market is *supposed* to work, but more likely the operators would simply collude so they each have their share of of a market with fatter margins.
The "standard" way of implementing security these days seems to be to try and restrict users as much as possible... The problem is that doesn't work for a number of reasons, the restrictions are onerous enough to hamper people's ability to do their work which causes them to seek ways to bypass the restrictions and the restrictions are often poorly implemented and therefore easy to bypass.
Incidentally, if your company wants you to read mail when your away from your desk they should supply you with a handset from which to do it, the idea of using your own handset is ludicrous... That's your handset, with their data on it, but because its your handset they lose control... They have no right to enforce policies on it, nor to wipe the handset...
Depends on the program, exploiting a setuid ping would give you root, exploiting a ping with the capability to open raw sockets would give you the ability to open raw sockets, still bad but nowhere near as critical. It also as you pointed out makes it harder for exploit writers, most "hackers" are script kiddies who will use exploits written by other people, which may not target things like this (and certainly don't yet).
Well, setuid binaries were required to exploit the ptrace kernel vulnerability from a few years back, as well as the more recent vulnerability in glibc... An already running daemon which is running as root would not be vulnerable to either of these exploits.
On the other hand, i believe they use capabilities - that is rather than granting full root privileges ala setuid, you grant only the permissions a program needs... For instance listening daemons may only need root privileges to bind to ports below 1024, ping/traceroute only need to be able to open a raw socket etc.
There are already patent defense pools, if defense was the only goal then it would be easy to join such a pool (and werent many of the novell patents pledged to such pools already?)..
And how high is the additional cost of porting to linux? The game is already written, all the graphics and sound already exist, you just need to port the code and the difficulty of that varies on the apis used (directx vs opengl), ofcourse it also becomes a lot easier if you already have ports for similar platforms such as osx.
The cost of a port is pretty marginal compared to the cost of initially writing the game (especially if the game was originally developed with portability in mind), so even a relatively small number of additional sales can cover the cost.
Also, piracy doesn't just happen on linux, there are many more pirates using windows than there are on linux. Also, someone who is willing to pirate and wants to play games could just install a pirate copy of windows to play the games on anyway.
My thoughts (as a long term linux user)... I have a certain amount of goodwill (ie money im willing to spend) but it only goes so far.. If a piece of software is significantly better than any free counterparts enough to justify its price tag then i'm quite happy to pay for it, if not then i would very much prefer to do without it. Now games i can always do without, but if they're good i'm quite happy to spend a reasonable sum.
Windows users on the other hand have already paid for a mediocre os, and have probably paid again to get basic/essential functionality, so many of them will already be at the end of their patience.
A linux user will typically have got everything they *need* for their day to day use for free, so games are just optional extras.
I had a Dell laptop of about that vintage (D610 i believe) on which i installed ubuntu, and im pretty sure it worked out of the box with the onboard broadcom wireless...
That said, when purchasing new equipment i will explicitly avoid broadcom because they have been very unhelpful towards those trying to produce linux drivers for their chipsets. I have other systems using Atheros, Ralink, Realtek and Intel wireless chips which work very well (and yes most of them require firmware blobs, but the alternative is that the firmware is stored on a chip instead which would increase hardware costs and probably require a proprietary flashing tool to update).
Intel drivers are entirely open... ATI/AMD have open drivers which work reasonably well (and their closed drivers only work at all on newish models)... Nvidia also have open drivers available, although they are quite poor.
Unless your intending to play games, or do heavy graphics related work, all of the major card types are perfectly usable with open drivers.
This is for two reasons tho... First, their core market utterly depends on windows and compatibility with its various bugs and design flaws, most of their customers are locked in and to ditch windows would lose them a huge amount of their customers overnight...
Second, because they have had some success, for instance windows makes an absolutely horrendous server os (mandatory gui, graphics stack, no serial console, web browser, directx/directplay, email client and video conferencing tools installed by default? wtf, absolutely ridiculous) and yet it's still widely used here. MS idea of a server is "take a desktop os and add more network services to it", anyone else's is "a server os should be stripped down, no gui, no desktop apps, network services available as an option".
The problem is that netbooks (and atom) are not especially power efficient... The ipad is basically an iphone, with a larger screen. The battery size on the average phone is a fraction of the size of any netbook, and yet it will last a lot longer... An average phone today is far more powerful than a full size desktop of 10 years ago, but the problem is that software has got more bloated.
I would love an ARM based netbook, the toshiba ac100 looks nice but i would want to run a proper linux, not android (Android really is designed for a touchscreen, it somewhat sucks with a mouse) and more memory would probably be desirable (partly down to bloat, partly due to wanting lots of browser tabs open).
Tablets with pens have been around for years, and they never caught on... Using the pen is awkward, and makes it a lot more hassle to use than a finger based device.. Many functions on an iphone can be used in one hand, but an older windows mobile phone which needs a stylus is unusable in this way. Also losing the pen is very easy, and leaves your device somewhat crippled. The only people who really seem to benefit from a pen are those doing graphics work.
Thats what a list of "system requirements" are for... You get the same thing if you try to play windows games on a lowend videocard.
By compatibility he means that it will work, but obviously won't work very efficiently if there is no hardware/driver support for the feature. Most people who play games on linux tend to use nvidia cards, which have very capable drivers.
On the other hand, you could release games in the form of a livecd with a bundled version of linux so that it can boot directly regardless of the installed OS or how its configured... Many problems with games are down to misconfiguration of windows, or too much crap running in the background hurting the performance of the game.
Also there are plenty of binary linux apps out there which work across distros, opera, vmware, etc... It's really not that hard, and you could always just include copies of the libs you need (which is typically what windows games do) and reference them from the game dir.
I never saw the point of putting a desktop os on a tablet... There's a reason the ipad has its own interface, and not a crude port of finder and the regular osx environment, and there's a reason tablets typically run android and not a gnome/kde based linux distro.
What works on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard does not work on a tablet with a touchscreen! windows mobile was bad enough (and yes i know the current version has finally learnt from this), expecting you to have a stylus - who the hell carries a stylus around with their phone?
Windows tablets will just end up bigger, slower, more expensive, with inferior battery life and a cumbersome interface compared to ipad/android.
Windows may be a familiar name, but to many people it has bad connotations... Most people think it's an inherent part of a computer and grudgingly accept it, but it also has a reputation for crashing and being problematic... People don't realise that there is anything better in the computer space, but they do on phones and tablets.
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The OS provides an API layer at the code level, that is if you have source code you can usually recompile it to work on different architectures...
This works well on Linux, because the source code for most applications is available making it easy to port apps to other architectures... On windows, the sourcecode for most apps is not available and the owners of most of this source won't recompile their apps unless there is a sufficiently large market for them, and will usually take quite a long time to do the porting... Users similarly won't buy the hardware unless apps are available, catch-22 situation.
The only things that would work, are apps which don't come as machine code... That is, apps with source, or apps in a language thats compiled to hardware neutral bytecode such as java.
Most windows apps come in the form of x86 specific binaries, and these would only run on ARM if you used emulation... Emulation is slow at the best of times, but when you consider that ARM cpus are generally designed for power efficiency and lack the raw performance of x86 chips... The extra overhead of emulation would result in code which performed terribly and kept the cpu running flat out negating the power efficiency.
NT was actually more stable on Alpha than it ever was on x86...
Drivers are not really a problem for ARM, since most of these devices will be small (tablets, netbooks etc) with fixed hardware, the hardware manufacturer will supply the necessary drivers.
The problem is apps...
Existing windows apps would need to be at the very least recompiled (or may require significantly more work depending on the code), and with most apps being closed source only the original vendor is in a position to do that... Now as with alpha, ppc mips and ia64, commercial vendors won't port their apps unless they see a market for them... And end users wont buy the platform unless they see available apps, catch 22.
Linux doesn't really have this problem because the vast majority of applications are open source, and have already been compiled for multiple architectures. If the original author hasn't ever tried to compile the app for another platform, chances are one of the distributors has (debian has been supporting arm cpus for years)...
The only advantage ARM has over alpha/ppc/mips/ia64 is cost of hardware, if those platforms had been price competitive with x86 they would have had a lot more sales to linux users (i know many people who wanted an alpha but just couldn't justify the cost).
There is a lot to be said for writing new applications which are actually designed for a tablet or netbook, rather than trying to shoehorn desktop apps onto small devices with different input methods... But if you're going to write new apps, why bother writing them for win32/arm instead of simply writing them for linux?
The only advantage windows has in this area is familiarity, they would lose their traditional selling point of compatibility/lockin, if you go arm you will need new apps regardless and if people have learned anything over the past 15 years they should take this chance to break free of the lock-in rather than getting caught up in another round.
Some of the demos are fairly poor tho...
A few years ago, there was a platform game called "the lion king"... The demo of which, was the first level.
I played that first level on the demo, it was pretty good, well thought out level, reasonable level of difficulty, nice graphics and sound.
So i bought the full game, turns out subsequent levels were very half assed, too difficult and there was no way to save your progress so you were stuck repeatedly going through the early levels only to die in the later ones. I think i made it to about the third level before i got absolutely sick of playing the first and second levels repeatedly, only to die in the third and have to start again.
Low prices are exactly what the gaming industry needs...
The production costs of a game are a one-off cost, the actual media/distribution cost is trivial which means that even priced at $1 the game can be profitable with enough sales. Now if the price is low enough, more people will buy it - look at iphone games, i know plenty of people who would never bother buying full priced games but are quite happy to pay $5 or less for an iphone game.
And of course, when the prices are low enough you squeeze the for-profit pirates out of the market (writable media costs a lot more than having thousands of copies pressed).
At $5 it becomes a casual purchase, but at $60 it's a purchase seriously worth thinking about for most people..
Noone tries to counterfeit Zimbabwean dollars anymore, because counterfeit money would actually be more valuable than real ZWD...
Novell came and went in the low end small lan arena...
TCP/IP came first, and has outlived IPX/SPX, novell was only used in small companies that wanted to network together dos and early windows machines on a small scale. Unix, VMS and mainframe systems were being networked together long before novell ever introduced networking to the lowest end microcomputers.
Companies would most certainly still do R&D if there were no patents, they would just keep the results secret until they had a product for sale... That way they would still get a lead on anyone else, who would have to reverse engineer and develop their own clone of the product (even without patents, copyright law would prevent them from making direct copies).
Also, doing away with patents would actually reduce the cost of R&D... Instead of having to work around or license patents, not to mention all the legal fees involved doing patent searches to ensure your products don't infringe upon any... You could focus on building small but worthwhile improvements on top of existing ideas.
The problem is the software, a lot of medical software is extremely dated and its not uncommon to see supposedly web based apps which actually require IE6 and wont work on any modern browser...
Doctors used to write medical records on clipboards, a tablet would be a logical evolution from this and would work very well with appropriate software... The problem is that your $2000 tablets typically run windows, which has an interface designed for mouse+keyboard and works really poorly on a tablet, and the same can be said of the applications. Windows tablets are also either heavy making them impractical to carry around, or with extremely poor battery life.
If people would write software specifically for tablets (and various places werent already locked in to other stuff) then tablets would be very useful for many things, hospitals included.
No, because if one company did that the others would soon follow suit resulting in increased competition and lower profits all round..
Sure, that's how a free market is *supposed* to work, but more likely the operators would simply collude so they each have their share of of a market with fatter margins.
The "standard" way of implementing security these days seems to be to try and restrict users as much as possible...
The problem is that doesn't work for a number of reasons, the restrictions are onerous enough to hamper people's ability to do their work which causes them to seek ways to bypass the restrictions and the restrictions are often poorly implemented and therefore easy to bypass.
Incidentally, if your company wants you to read mail when your away from your desk they should supply you with a handset from which to do it, the idea of using your own handset is ludicrous... That's your handset, with their data on it, but because its your handset they lose control... They have no right to enforce policies on it, nor to wipe the handset...
End user devices are not trustworthy, regardless of the type of device a user could modify it to report anything back to an upstream server...
Depends on the program, exploiting a setuid ping would give you root, exploiting a ping with the capability to open raw sockets would give you the ability to open raw sockets, still bad but nowhere near as critical.
It also as you pointed out makes it harder for exploit writers, most "hackers" are script kiddies who will use exploits written by other people, which may not target things like this (and certainly don't yet).
Well, setuid binaries were required to exploit the ptrace kernel vulnerability from a few years back, as well as the more recent vulnerability in glibc... An already running daemon which is running as root would not be vulnerable to either of these exploits.
On the other hand, i believe they use capabilities - that is rather than granting full root privileges ala setuid, you grant only the permissions a program needs... For instance listening daemons may only need root privileges to bind to ports below 1024, ping/traceroute only need to be able to open a raw socket etc.
There are already patent defense pools, if defense was the only goal then it would be easy to join such a pool (and werent many of the novell patents pledged to such pools already?)..
And how high is the additional cost of porting to linux?
The game is already written, all the graphics and sound already exist, you just need to port the code and the difficulty of that varies on the apis used (directx vs opengl), ofcourse it also becomes a lot easier if you already have ports for similar platforms such as osx.
The cost of a port is pretty marginal compared to the cost of initially writing the game (especially if the game was originally developed with portability in mind), so even a relatively small number of additional sales can cover the cost.
Also, piracy doesn't just happen on linux, there are many more pirates using windows than there are on linux. Also, someone who is willing to pirate and wants to play games could just install a pirate copy of windows to play the games on anyway.
My thoughts (as a long term linux user)...
I have a certain amount of goodwill (ie money im willing to spend) but it only goes so far.. If a piece of software is significantly better than any free counterparts enough to justify its price tag then i'm quite happy to pay for it, if not then i would very much prefer to do without it.
Now games i can always do without, but if they're good i'm quite happy to spend a reasonable sum.
Windows users on the other hand have already paid for a mediocre os, and have probably paid again to get basic/essential functionality, so many of them will already be at the end of their patience.
A linux user will typically have got everything they *need* for their day to day use for free, so games are just optional extras.
I had a Dell laptop of about that vintage (D610 i believe) on which i installed ubuntu, and im pretty sure it worked out of the box with the onboard broadcom wireless...
That said, when purchasing new equipment i will explicitly avoid broadcom because they have been very unhelpful towards those trying to produce linux drivers for their chipsets. I have other systems using Atheros, Ralink, Realtek and Intel wireless chips which work very well (and yes most of them require firmware blobs, but the alternative is that the firmware is stored on a chip instead which would increase hardware costs and probably require a proprietary flashing tool to update).
Intel drivers are entirely open...
ATI/AMD have open drivers which work reasonably well (and their closed drivers only work at all on newish models)...
Nvidia also have open drivers available, although they are quite poor.
Unless your intending to play games, or do heavy graphics related work, all of the major card types are perfectly usable with open drivers.
What exactly is it that makes firmware loaded from disk by the driver any worse than firmware loaded from a rom chip by the driver?
This is for two reasons tho...
First, their core market utterly depends on windows and compatibility with its various bugs and design flaws, most of their customers are locked in and to ditch windows would lose them a huge amount of their customers overnight...
Second, because they have had some success, for instance windows makes an absolutely horrendous server os (mandatory gui, graphics stack, no serial console, web browser, directx/directplay, email client and video conferencing tools installed by default? wtf, absolutely ridiculous) and yet it's still widely used here.
MS idea of a server is "take a desktop os and add more network services to it", anyone else's is "a server os should be stripped down, no gui, no desktop apps, network services available as an option".
The problem is that netbooks (and atom) are not especially power efficient...
The ipad is basically an iphone, with a larger screen. The battery size on the average phone is a fraction of the size of any netbook, and yet it will last a lot longer... An average phone today is far more powerful than a full size desktop of 10 years ago, but the problem is that software has got more bloated.
I would love an ARM based netbook, the toshiba ac100 looks nice but i would want to run a proper linux, not android (Android really is designed for a touchscreen, it somewhat sucks with a mouse) and more memory would probably be desirable (partly down to bloat, partly due to wanting lots of browser tabs open).
Tablets with pens have been around for years, and they never caught on...
Using the pen is awkward, and makes it a lot more hassle to use than a finger based device.. Many functions on an iphone can be used in one hand, but an older windows mobile phone which needs a stylus is unusable in this way.
Also losing the pen is very easy, and leaves your device somewhat crippled. The only people who really seem to benefit from a pen are those doing graphics work.
Thats what a list of "system requirements" are for...
You get the same thing if you try to play windows games on a lowend videocard.
By compatibility he means that it will work, but obviously won't work very efficiently if there is no hardware/driver support for the feature. Most people who play games on linux tend to use nvidia cards, which have very capable drivers.
On the other hand, you could release games in the form of a livecd with a bundled version of linux so that it can boot directly regardless of the installed OS or how its configured...
Many problems with games are down to misconfiguration of windows, or too much crap running in the background hurting the performance of the game.
Also there are plenty of binary linux apps out there which work across distros, opera, vmware, etc... It's really not that hard, and you could always just include copies of the libs you need (which is typically what windows games do) and reference them from the game dir.
I never saw the point of putting a desktop os on a tablet...
There's a reason the ipad has its own interface, and not a crude port of finder and the regular osx environment, and there's a reason tablets typically run android and not a gnome/kde based linux distro.
What works on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard does not work on a tablet with a touchscreen! windows mobile was bad enough (and yes i know the current version has finally learnt from this), expecting you to have a stylus - who the hell carries a stylus around with their phone?
Windows tablets will just end up bigger, slower, more expensive, with inferior battery life and a cumbersome interface compared to ipad/android.
Windows may be a familiar name, but to many people it has bad connotations... Most people think it's an inherent part of a computer and grudgingly accept it, but it also has a reputation for crashing and being problematic... People don't realise that there is anything better in the computer space, but they do on phones and tablets.