The fact that NT has run on Risc architectures in the past an currently Windows on x86, x64, Itanium (and probably PPC for XBoxes) and Windows CE runs the GDI on ARM makes me think they could do it. The GDI code is probably quite portable, especially if it is shared between CE and the desktop.
Still they'd have to port Office. Office is x86 only but coming soon to x64. But that's not really the point - people run Windows because they have a bunch of CDs with x86 Win32 binaries on them. Those will run like ass on an x86 emulator running on ARM.
Even for native code I think that any shipping ARM is going to end up performing as fast or slower than an Atom. And desktop Windows, even XP or 7, is a bit slow on Atom for my tastes. Finally ARM is a cool chip with lots of clever addressing modes. Those clever addressing modes, if you believe Henessy and Patterson, have a cost in terms of maximum clock speed and building superscalar out of order chips, i.e. the sort of chips that get used even on notebooks these days. For a 500Mhz in order single chip in a cellphone that's no problem. For a 2+Ghz out of order dual issue chip, i.e. a Core2 class ARM I wonder if ARM is just a poor fit. Mind you you could get rid of the 32 bit instructions and run the MIPs like Thumb subset.
Still, I'm skeptical that ARM will end up replacing x64. Come to think of it that's another thing ARM doesn't do - 64 bit address spaces. Don't get me wrong - ARM is great if you want a small in order core in some embedded widget, but it's even less suited for the current desktop world than x64.
We have captured the freeloader Lance Davis. The reason is that Bud from QA got laid off yesterday and even the guys in Core Development are getting a bit scared of downsizing. We saw some poor dude getting his head sawed off on ogrish.com while having a few beers and a joint after work and we had a crazy idea.
We will behead Mr Davis unless all users of CentOS buy licenses for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Signed
The Mujaheddin of the Fedora mujaheddin@redhat.com
With commercial entities, it's not about the seriousness of the issue, it's all about how many people complain in a given span of time, so if you're one of their few complainers, they'll write you off as a statistic and continue doing whatever it is they're doing (wrong) despite your better judgment.
I'm not sure this behaviour is irrational. Basically commercial companies tend to either fix the bugs everyone is complaining about or go bust. Of course there are lots of commercial companies that have picked the second option and just don't know it yet - they don't know how to pick the patterns out of customer complaints and prioritize their development, or the developers are totally out of control and working on the next version but one and ignoring bugs in what is shipping.
Still there are commercial companies out there that can ship code that most people will never have a problem with. Just not very many. The others are dieing slowly or have been born so recently it is not clear if they will learn enough to survive. Then again when people buy commerical software they do it based on reviews and word of mouth. These tend to help them mostly buy from the companies that work.
Capitalism and commercial pressures are not a panacea though - lots of companies burn through their startup capital without ever producing anything that is usable by anyone other than their developers.
It always reminds me of a write up of Lois and Clarke in the Guardian where the reviewer said "In this episode Lois and Clarke visit a doctor to see if Clarke can get Lois pregnant or whether his super sperm will rip through her like dum dum bullets at the speed of light"
But yeah, humans breeding with aliens - who are not just a different species but the product of a completely separate version of evolution - seems to me to be a really implausible idea.
(N. Korea's is harder to see, since there's not a ton of info that gets out, but they don't have prisons with political prisoners due to everyone toe-ing the party line).
The presence of political prisoners does not imply a resistance movement. Mao's China and Stalin's Russia had tens of millions of prisoners but no organised resistance movement.
Maybe people use badnewseveryone to subvert the cliche of using goodneweveryone ironically. Or they are trolling. Or badnewseveryone is one of the famed steganographic tages used to transmit information about That Which Must Not Be Spoken Of.
IE has got much better at security and the browser process runs at a very low privilege - i.e. it only has write access to things like the temporary directory, called "protected mode". Also downloads of unsigned ActiveX controls are disabled.
Finally inside the OS, Data Execute prevention stops code from bring run from the stack and ASLR makes exploits harder to write by randomizing load addresses. And UAC can prevent processes from using their admin rights unless the user OKs the action.
Now I don't really like any browser but Opera, but sooner or later IE will end up being the most secure browser, because the NT kernel has lots of possibilities for security. Back before around XP SP2, Microsoft didn't care about this stuff. Now they do and sooner or later they will close all the holes.
I dunno, at the moment it seems like people will be telling sagas of M'kell J'ackson in at least a thousand years time. How I came down from heaven and wrestled small evil dwarfs that attacked him in bed and so on. Rather like Beowulf.
I don't just think there aren't any viruses out there that can infect Linux, I know it. I don't think there aren't any trojans out there that can damage my Linux box, I know it. I don't think that any site that tries to run a drive-by download on my box will fail, I know it. As long as the above statements are true for Linux out-of-the-box and aren't for a clean install of any version of Windows, I'll continue to consider Linux better than Windows.
If I have Vista with UAC turned on and Opera, how likely is a drive by download? I scan with a couple of (free) antivirus scanners every so often and I've never got a virus. I also scan with Spybot Search and Destroy and I never get spyware. I paid nothing for the OS and I can actually run modern software if I want to.
I don't much like Vista - XP or Windows 7 seem much quicker, but even Vista is far more useful than Ubuntu which I've actually got on another machine. Ubuntu is a pain to set up and Wine has no chance of running modern games. There's a lot of free software for Ubuntu but there is more for Windows and the standard is much higher.
Which is probably why, despite the heroic but unpaid efforts of evangelists like yourself Linux has been flatlining at less than 1% market share. Face it Linux had its chance a few years back and it blew it. Even if Linus finally gets his act together - e.g. by forcing all the distros to support one package format and allowing binary drivers it will still basically be irrelevant. MacOS has taken over the "desktop Unix" niche and in any case most people are happy with Windows.
Bleating about viruses and trojans to people who've solved that problem ages ago isn't going to convince people to switch.
Well, if what you want is a snappy machine (and a hard-core gamer probably does) why bother with XP at all? Just install Linux and get a faster more responsive machine that's immune to current viruses, trojans, malware and adware.
You can certainly put data into an image that can survive JPEG compression or my scheme. Doing that while keeping the data invisible seems harder.
Actually there's another limit. Let's suppose you could shade a barcode onto an image. I can accept this could be invisible if you don't look to carefully. However to make it invisible to humans and JPEG proof you need to compromise seriously on the amount of data you store. JPEG would miss a shaded barcode if the bars were bigger than the 8x8 DCT macroblocks for example. And humans might miss the shading if it is subtle. But a barcode with bars eight pixels wide can't hold much data.
So you can have pick any two of decent data storage capacity, invisibility to humans and JPEG immunity in a steganographic scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that NT has run on Risc architectures in the past an currently Windows on x86, x64, Itanium (and probably PPC for XBoxes) and Windows CE runs the GDI on ARM makes me think they could do it. The GDI code is probably quite portable, especially if it is shared between CE and the desktop.
Still they'd have to port Office. Office is x86 only but coming soon to x64. But that's not really the point - people run Windows because they have a bunch of CDs with x86 Win32 binaries on them. Those will run like ass on an x86 emulator running on ARM.
Even for native code I think that any shipping ARM is going to end up performing as fast or slower than an Atom. And desktop Windows, even XP or 7, is a bit slow on Atom for my tastes. Finally ARM is a cool chip with lots of clever addressing modes. Those clever addressing modes, if you believe Henessy and Patterson, have a cost in terms of maximum clock speed and building superscalar out of order chips, i.e. the sort of chips that get used even on notebooks these days. For a 500Mhz in order single chip in a cellphone that's no problem. For a 2+Ghz out of order dual issue chip, i.e. a Core2 class ARM I wonder if ARM is just a poor fit. Mind you you could get rid of the 32 bit instructions and run the MIPs like Thumb subset.
Still, I'm skeptical that ARM will end up replacing x64. Come to think of it that's another thing ARM doesn't do - 64 bit address spaces. Don't get me wrong - ARM is great if you want a small in order core in some embedded widget, but it's even less suited for the current desktop world than x64.
We have captured the freeloader Lance Davis. The reason is that Bud from QA got laid off yesterday and even the guys in Core Development are getting a bit scared of downsizing. We saw some poor dude getting his head sawed off on ogrish.com while having a few beers and a joint after work and we had a crazy idea.
We will behead Mr Davis unless all users of CentOS buy licenses for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Signed
The Mujaheddin of the Fedora
mujaheddin@redhat.com
NOT SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF RED HAT SOFTWARE.
With commercial entities, it's not about the seriousness of the issue, it's all about how many people complain in a given span of time, so if you're one of their few complainers, they'll write you off as a statistic and continue doing whatever it is they're doing (wrong) despite your better judgment.
I'm not sure this behaviour is irrational. Basically commercial companies tend to either fix the bugs everyone is complaining about or go bust. Of course there are lots of commercial companies that have picked the second option and just don't know it yet - they don't know how to pick the patterns out of customer complaints and prioritize their development, or the developers are totally out of control and working on the next version but one and ignoring bugs in what is shipping.
Still there are commercial companies out there that can ship code that most people will never have a problem with. Just not very many. The others are dieing slowly or have been born so recently it is not clear if they will learn enough to survive. Then again when people buy commerical software they do it based on reviews and word of mouth. These tend to help them mostly buy from the companies that work.
Capitalism and commercial pressures are not a panacea though - lots of companies burn through their startup capital without ever producing anything that is usable by anyone other than their developers.
WTF? I regularly post to slashdot while I'm driving to
I doubt that. I am very suave indeed.
I wonder if it is theoretically possible for Star Trek script writers to crash the brains of Trekkies with some impossible to rationalize plot hole?
I know viagra spam is sent out by Big Genitalia.
It's worse than what the Jews did to the Nazis.
It always reminds me of a write up of Lois and Clarke in the Guardian where the reviewer said "In this episode Lois and Clarke visit a doctor to see if Clarke can get Lois pregnant or whether his super sperm will rip through her like dum dum bullets at the speed of light"
But yeah, humans breeding with aliens - who are not just a different species but the product of a completely separate version of evolution - seems to me to be a really implausible idea.
(N. Korea's is harder to see, since there's not a ton of info that gets out, but they don't have prisons with political prisoners due to everyone toe-ing the party line).
The presence of political prisoners does not imply a resistance movement. Mao's China and Stalin's Russia had tens of millions of prisoners but no organised resistance movement.
1984 was never on your Kindles.
I think the GP is French. GET HIM!
KILL YORSELF
I was thinking not to give them any ideas for GPLv4.
That reminds me, I must email Stallman to lobby for forced collectivisation of all ideas in GPLv4. Idea-kulaks must be liquidated.
Maybe people use badnewseveryone to subvert the cliche of using goodneweveryone ironically. Or they are trolling. Or badnewseveryone is one of the famed steganographic tages used to transmit information about That Which Must Not Be Spoken Of.
IE has got much better at security and the browser process runs at a very low privilege - i.e. it only has write access to things like the temporary directory, called "protected mode". Also downloads of unsigned ActiveX controls are disabled.
Finally inside the OS, Data Execute prevention stops code from bring run from the stack and ASLR makes exploits harder to write by randomizing load addresses. And UAC can prevent processes from using their admin rights unless the user OKs the action.
Now I don't really like any browser but Opera, but sooner or later IE will end up being the most secure browser, because the NT kernel has lots of possibilities for security. Back before around XP SP2, Microsoft didn't care about this stuff. Now they do and sooner or later they will close all the holes.
Hmm, this is a bit like "No True Scotsman" isn't it?
Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
I dunno, at the moment it seems like people will be telling sagas of M'kell J'ackson in at least a thousand years time. How I came down from heaven and wrestled small evil dwarfs that attacked him in bed and so on. Rather like Beowulf.
"Woosh 192kHz 7.1 surround.wma" souds a lot better than the old WOOSH.WMA.
I think the scheme should allow you to specify
1) The style of the font
2) Whether it is sans or serif
3) The preferred supplier
E.g. "comic-sans-ms".
I don't just think there aren't any viruses out there that can infect Linux, I know it. I don't think there aren't any trojans out there that can damage my Linux box, I know it. I don't think that any site that tries to run a drive-by download on my box will fail, I know it. As long as the above statements are true for Linux out-of-the-box and aren't for a clean install of any version of Windows, I'll continue to consider Linux better than Windows.
If I have Vista with UAC turned on and Opera, how likely is a drive by download? I scan with a couple of (free) antivirus scanners every so often and I've never got a virus. I also scan with Spybot Search and Destroy and I never get spyware. I paid nothing for the OS and I can actually run modern software if I want to.
I don't much like Vista - XP or Windows 7 seem much quicker, but even Vista is far more useful than Ubuntu which I've actually got on another machine. Ubuntu is a pain to set up and Wine has no chance of running modern games. There's a lot of free software for Ubuntu but there is more for Windows and the standard is much higher.
Which is probably why, despite the heroic but unpaid efforts of evangelists like yourself Linux has been flatlining at less than 1% market share. Face it Linux had its chance a few years back and it blew it. Even if Linus finally gets his act together - e.g. by forcing all the distros to support one package format and allowing binary drivers it will still basically be irrelevant. MacOS has taken over the "desktop Unix" niche and in any case most people are happy with Windows.
Bleating about viruses and trojans to people who've solved that problem ages ago isn't going to convince people to switch.
Well, if what you want is a snappy machine (and a hard-core gamer probably does) why bother with XP at all? Just install Linux and get a faster more responsive machine that's immune to current viruses, trojans, malware and adware.
Why would a "hard-core gamer" use Linux?
Your friends have failed. Witness the selling power of this fully armed and operational release of Windows 7.
You can certainly put data into an image that can survive JPEG compression or my scheme. Doing that while keeping the data invisible seems harder.
Actually there's another limit. Let's suppose you could shade a barcode onto an image. I can accept this could be invisible if you don't look to carefully. However to make it invisible to humans and JPEG proof you need to compromise seriously on the amount of data you store. JPEG would miss a shaded barcode if the bars were bigger than the 8x8 DCT macroblocks for example. And humans might miss the shading if it is subtle. But a barcode with bars eight pixels wide can't hold much data.
So you can have pick any two of decent data storage capacity, invisibility to humans and JPEG immunity in a steganographic scheme.