Terrorism is the most obvious reason for ID cards, but it's actually not the main one from my point of view.
I've sat on a train in Sweden listening to two people talk about how it's easier to get 'unofficial' jobs in the UK because 'you don't need any papers'. Even stranger, I've gone to a NHS hospital in the UK and got very expensive medical treatment without showing any ID at all, whereas both Sweden and Germany demand at least some paperwork. In Sweden, there is no way to do anything, even renting a video tape unless you have a personal number, and that is tied to you registering for tax, but I could survive quite happily in the UK without notifying the authorities at all. I suspect that the UK pays a fairly heavy price for this.
So a relatively generous welfare state and no id cards is a bad combination. I guess the balance in the US is different though, since benefits tend to be more meagre. And whilst personally I think the UK should move toward the US model more, it's unlikely to happen. Hence the ID cards.
I think there probably is a link between having an unknown population of illegals and crime and terrorism, but terrorism is a pretty small risk compared to everything else. Al Quaida seem to be remarkably amateurish to me, so it's possible that ID cards may catch a few potential terrorists too.
Well it would be pretty hard to enable, unless they magically know who is buying the computer ahead of time,
But dude, the lizards who own Micro$oft and the Repub1iKKKKKKan party will just use the Patriot Act and the so called Department of Homeland Security (did you know that the Nazis set up a department of homeland security too?) to ship you off their secret base in Iran in a black helicopter where you'll be tortured, brainwashed and fingerprinted by the aliens and shipped back to the US with your memory blanked. The one day, you'll decide to buy a computer, and it will never occur to you that it's strange it knows your damn name and shoe size.
Hell you can't prove that's this hasn't already happened to you, can you?
Thumb code is pretty dense, and the core is pretty high performance at 60Mhz. Plus you can put the core in an ASIC with a hardcore if you have the volumes. And it's damn small too. The downside is that you don't have the resources to run a real OS.
ARM7s are probably overkill for some stuff, so you can get a microcontrollers down to a PIC at a few Mhz with a few hundred bytes of code space and integrated A-Ds.
Or if you want a TCP/IP stack, you're better off with a bigger procesor. We don't know what this box needs to do. Maybe it needs a TCP/IP stack for example. The point at which I'd switch to a BSD or uClinux kernel is fairly low, and that needs a more FLASH/RAM than you can fit on a microcontroller. At which point, you're in a very different price class.
Probably not. The Godson is a MIPS clone, and NT 4.0 worked on MIPS, but you need ARC firmware. My guess would be that this just runs Linux from flash, with not much in the way of firmware. Also, I'm not sure if Godson is a 100% MIPS clone, or if they left out the patented bits. It was described as "95% MIPS compatible", which makes me think that you probably need to tweak the compilers a bit to make it work.
More importantly, what's the point of running NT 4.0 these days?
Oh, sorry. I mean 'What a great idea for a series. I'm in the 35-40 age range with a $1M per year disposable income and I buy everything advertised on TV. I'd watch it, and so would all my rich friends'
I'm waiting for my man Twenty-six dollars in my hand Up to Lexington, 125 Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive I'm waiting for my man
Hey, geek boy, what you doin' online? Hey, geek boy, you hackin' our servers with third party addons? Oh pardon me sir, it's the furthest from my mind I'm just lookin' for a dear, dear friend of mine I'm waiting for my man
Here he comes, he's all dressed in black PR department and a big EULA He's never early, he's always late First thing you learn is you always gotta wait I'm waiting for my man
Up to a Brownstone, up three flights of stairs Everybody's pinned you, but nobody cares He's got the works, gives you sweet taste Ah then you gotta split because you got no time to waste I'm waiting for my man
Baby don't you holler, darlin' don't you bawl and shout I'm feeling good, you know I'm gonna work it on out I'm feeling good, I'm feeling oh so fine Until tomorrow, but that's just some other time I'm waiting for my man
Actually, I agree. I've got an old Nokia with mono screen. I send a lot of text messages, but that's about it.
But you're missing the point here. There's hundreds of millions of asian teenagers who use IM, picture messaging, mobile blogging and other half baked gimics. I write code for mobile phones, and this sort of thing basically feeds me. If everyone stuck to 5 year old phones, lots of people like me would have to get real jobs.
There are only nine of them, and you could probably figure out a cheap test to determine your type. You'd enter it into your cellphone, and it would use bluetooth to find other people in the bar who would likely sleep with you.
So you'd go to a website and order the test and a subscription to the service and it would send a Java applet to your phone. You'd need to enter your preference (men, women or both, ages ranges, income range and so on). The phone could use location based services (GPS or GSM triangulation) to display a frikken target radar, with the intensity of the radar dots proportional to MHC difference.
The targets would be people who've subscribed to the service and are thus interested in a partner, and the MHC stuff would tell you that they are 'compatible'
I read somewhere that in Asia, people choose partners based on star sign, so there you'd give the MHC types zodiac names. The above study should pull in people who are more scientificly minded.
So that 32GB NAND flash device should be $580 * ( 0.57 ^ 5 ) = $34. That's less than a small hard disk, and you can probably charge a premium based on the low power consumption / small form factor. My guess is that people will pay $100-$200 premium for a NAND flash laptop, so I'd expect to see 32GB NAND flash ultraportables in the next couple of years.
I checked the write rate to the Physical Disk on Windows in perfmon (this counts writes to the block device driver) on my work machine, and it's not too bad, about 100K/sec averaged over an hour of building a massive chunk of software. Mainstream desktop use should have a much lower rate. E.g the laptop I'm writing this on is writing at 3K-20K/sec average at the moment. Most of that is short 40K spikes, with a small duty cycle too, so an daily average should be lower.
Size of flash * Number of erase cycles * FS overhead / Bytes written per day.
Let's assume that the 32GB array is 8*32Gbit chips. Each chip is then 4GByte
Plugging in the figures, we get
4GB * 100,000 * 0.7 / 100KB * 24 * 60 * 60
I get 33981 days, or 93 years. This is mostly because with wear levelling, the lifetime is proportional to NAND flash array size, since wear levelling should spread erases evenly. If you could wear level over the whole 32GB, it would be 744 years!
It's actually pessimistic, since the fs overhead is lower on Inode based filesystem like NTFS or ext2/3. E.g in their example, the file needs 5000 clusters in the FAT, or 20K. On NTFS, file extents are stored as runs - i.e. a contiguous file will be one extent in the 1K Inode. Most of the time, file extents are not growing too.
At the moment, the fastest NAND has a per chip write speed of 10MB/sec, and reads about 100MB/sec. I think you could do some kind of RAID like approach, especially for reads. And since we're talking about a 8*32Gbit chips for this device the read speed should be 800MB/sec, neglecting speed ups from new interfaces and process shrinks. And bad blocks could be tracked on a finer granularity too, so you could continue to use a erase unit until all the blocks went bad. And 1 million erase cycles is probably not impossible to achieve in 5 years, since some NAND devices do that as you say.
People often quote pagefile writes as a reason for NAND being unusable, but I'm not really convinced. Even with a completely unmodified system, a worst case filesystem choice (FAT32 with small clusters), and an application which constantly grows files, and a NAND chip where every block has a 100% fail rate after 100K erases, the lifetime of a large NAND disk is still orders of magnitude greater than a hard disk, which is likely to die in 5-10 years or so at this level of usage, since it wears from both read and write.
NREL's research showed that one quad (7.5 billion gallons) of biodiesel could be produced from 200,000 hectares of desert land (200,000 hectares is equivalent to 780 square miles, roughly 500,000 acres), if the remaining challenges are solved (as they will be, with several research groups and companies working towards it, including ours at UNH). In the previous section, we found that to replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require a land mass of almost 15,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, consider that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles. Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in 15,000 square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area of the Sonora desert (note for clarification - I am not advocating putting 15,000 square miles of algae ponds in the Sonora desert. This hypothetical example is used strictly for the purpose of showing the scale of land required). That 15,000 square miles works out to roughly 9.5 million acres - far less than the 450 million acres currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over 500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals.
This sort of thing has more than a hint of obsessive self sufficiency about it. But it does show that you could produce biodiesel without tying up all your agricultural land, which is pretty important. I think in practice you'd probably tune taxes/subsidies a bit to create a market, and allow market mechanisms to build the farms all over the planet, rather than requisitioning $300billion from Congress to basically build ponds in a desert.
I wonder what the doubling time is for a Windows minimum install is?
The only problem to this is that I think ultra portable laptops will switch over to NAND flash in 5 years or so. E.g. by that point 32-64GB of NAND should be $50 to $100.
I wonder if they know that when that happens, capacity will probably drop from a couple of hundred GB on a 2.5" hard disk down to 32-64GB on a 1.8" NAND drive, so the current versions of Windows and Office had better be able to install in that size.
I think in the EU, the Common Agricultural Policy could be tweaked to encourage people to grow it, and you could remove all fuel tax on biodiesel and SVO for a five years or so.
I think the Neocons are probably wrong about a lot of important stuff, but they certainly argue for their ideas well. And the Realists like Kissinger and (maybe) Rice are certainly smart, even if they have a somewhat pessimistic world view. Economically, ideas like school vouchers and tax cuts are not a bad idea in themselves.
In fact, the Republican party reminds me a bit of the Tories in England when Thatcher was in power. They're not short of ideas, but that might not be a good thing for them in the long run, since tax cuts and a project to democratise the middle east are not mutually compatible if you want a stable economy.
I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you. I've got a feeling that Creation and Evolution might be two incomplete descriptions of the same process.
They seem different because Abrahmic religions have a personal, conscious God. If you believe in a Spinozan God, then Creation and Evolution aren't that different. Actually, a friend of mine who spoke Hebrew said that the old testament passage on Creation is in really wierd poetic language, and the normal translation of God creating the Earth in 7 days is bogus. Plus of course, the people that wrote it were Taliban types living in the desert.
Actually, you can see that there is an upper limit on what a single conscious entity can achieve, and that it is far short of the omniscient, omnipresent entity that Abrahamic religions believe in because an omniscient entity wouldn't be able to learn anything and omnipresence would require that information be transmitted faster than light.
A non conscious process like evolution can be as omnipresent as it needs to be, and pretty damn close to omniscience in practice though.
Biodiesel just means that you can run an umodified engine -
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel Sometimes even unrefined vegetable oil is incorrectly called "biodiesel". Unlike unrefined vegetable oil, biodiesel does not require fuel pre-heating and filtration due to issues with coagulation, and also require no or minimal modification to the fuel system.
Re:64bit ain't all it's cracked up to be..
on
Porting to 64-bit Linux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's because of the pagetables. AMD added another level to take the page tables to a 52bit physical address space. The page table entries are compatible with PAE, which most OS's already support. x86 is 3 level, x86-64 is 4 level.
There's space in the page table entries to handle 64 bits, but adding extra levels to the translation probably has a performance impact. There's still debate about the best way to do 64 bit address translation, and 52 bits is plenty for now. And when they change, it will only affect the bits of the OS that handle paging, user application and even device drives will always see a flat 64 bit virtual address space.
Like all of x86-64, it's a designed for a subtle mix of good performance in the short term and a painless upgrade path for current OS kernels, without really compromising anything in the long term.
The fear of a lawsuit / lost sales definitely affects Microsoft's behaviour. If you look at the Old New Thing, or the lists for beta release software, they clearly spend enormous resources keeping old, broken, third party applications alive.
That said, if I found an actual bug in Windows in my application, I'd just workaround it for much the same reason.
And it's interesting how if I talk to Open Source people, they think this is all wasted effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Or a pony.
Terrorism is the most obvious reason for ID cards, but it's actually not the main one from my point of view.
I've sat on a train in Sweden listening to two people talk about how it's easier to get 'unofficial' jobs in the UK because 'you don't need any papers'. Even stranger, I've gone to a NHS hospital in the UK and got very expensive medical treatment without showing any ID at all, whereas both Sweden and Germany demand at least some paperwork. In Sweden, there is no way to do anything, even renting a video tape unless you have a personal number, and that is tied to you registering for tax, but I could survive quite happily in the UK without notifying the authorities at all. I suspect that the UK pays a fairly heavy price for this.
So a relatively generous welfare state and no id cards is a bad combination. I guess the balance in the US is different though, since benefits tend to be more meagre. And whilst personally I think the UK should move toward the US model more, it's unlikely to happen. Hence the ID cards.
I think there probably is a link between having an unknown population of illegals and crime and terrorism, but terrorism is a pretty small risk compared to everything else. Al Quaida seem to be remarkably amateurish to me, so it's possible that ID cards may catch a few potential terrorists too.
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm
Well it would be pretty hard to enable, unless they magically know who is buying the computer ahead of time,
But dude, the lizards who own Micro$oft and the Repub1iKKKKKKan party will just use the Patriot Act and the so called Department of Homeland Security (did you know that the Nazis set up a department of homeland security too?) to ship you off their secret base in Iran in a black helicopter where you'll be tortured, brainwashed and fingerprinted by the aliens and shipped back to the US with your memory blanked. The one day, you'll decide to buy a computer, and it will never occur to you that it's strange it knows your damn name and shoe size.
Hell you can't prove that's this hasn't already happened to you, can you?
You can get some cheap ARM based processors theses days, e.g. with 64K of flash for a few bucks -
http://www.olimex.com/dev/sam7-p64.html
Thumb code is pretty dense, and the core is pretty high performance at 60Mhz.
Plus you can put the core in an ASIC with a hardcore if you have the volumes. And it's damn small too. The downside is that you don't have the resources to run a real OS.
ARM7s are probably overkill for some stuff, so you can get a microcontrollers down to a PIC at a few Mhz with a few hundred bytes of code space and integrated A-Ds.
Or if you want a TCP/IP stack, you're better off with a bigger procesor. We don't know what this box needs to do. Maybe it needs a TCP/IP stack for example. The point at which I'd switch to a BSD or uClinux kernel is fairly low, and that needs a more FLASH/RAM than you can fit on a microcontroller. At which point, you're in a very different price class.
Probably not. The Godson is a MIPS clone, and NT 4.0 worked on MIPS, but you need ARC firmware. My guess would be that this just runs Linux from flash, with not much in the way of firmware. Also, I'm not sure if Godson is a 100% MIPS clone, or if they left out the patented bits. It was described as "95% MIPS compatible", which makes me think that you probably need to tweak the compilers a bit to make it work.
More importantly, what's the point of running NT 4.0 these days?
You realise that would be the end of Fox right?
Oh, sorry. I mean 'What a great idea for a series. I'm in the 35-40 age range with a $1M per year disposable income and I buy everything advertised on TV. I'd watch it, and so would all my rich friends'
I, for one, peruse the blogosphere. On my Powerbook, wearing a black turtle neck and beret. Stroking my goatee thoughtfully. Sipping a latté in a café
If I could just find a way to recharge my PowerBook from your hatred, I could stop carrying this ugly power adaptor.
Yeah, Mac users will have to wait for Leopard's virtualisation layer to get a usable Windows.
That reminds me of a song,
I'm waiting for my man
Twenty-six dollars in my hand
Up to Lexington, 125
Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive
I'm waiting for my man
Hey, geek boy, what you doin' online?
Hey, geek boy, you hackin' our servers with third party addons?
Oh pardon me sir, it's the furthest from my mind
I'm just lookin' for a dear, dear friend of mine
I'm waiting for my man
Here he comes, he's all dressed in black
PR department and a big EULA
He's never early, he's always late
First thing you learn is you always gotta wait
I'm waiting for my man
Up to a Brownstone, up three flights of stairs
Everybody's pinned you, but nobody cares
He's got the works, gives you sweet taste
Ah then you gotta split because you got no time to waste
I'm waiting for my man
Baby don't you holler, darlin' don't you bawl and shout
I'm feeling good, you know I'm gonna work it on out
I'm feeling good, I'm feeling oh so fine
Until tomorrow, but that's just some other time
I'm waiting for my man
Even better, it's the ultimate get out.
Sure I'd like your phone number, can you put it in the phone?
(remove phone from pocket, press some buttons and point it at them. The phone starts beeping an obnoxious warning tone)
Oh wait, don't bother. My phone told me not to date your type before, and boy was it right. Jesus.
(cancel the warning tone,put phone back in pocket with a quiet 'thanks buddy', head back to group of friends)
Actually, I agree. I've got an old Nokia with mono screen. I send a lot of text messages, but that's about it.
But you're missing the point here. There's hundreds of millions of asian teenagers who use IM, picture messaging, mobile blogging and other half baked gimics. I write code for mobile phones, and this sort of thing basically feeds me. If everyone stuck to 5 year old phones, lots of people like me would have to get real jobs.
Yeah, now a "Ho down" is probably police crime number.
Whoa, your cellphone could store your MHC type.
l ity_complex#MHC_explanation_for_lay_people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibi
It's scientifically proven to predict lust.
There are only nine of them, and you could probably figure out a cheap test to determine your type. You'd enter it into your cellphone, and it would use bluetooth to find other people in the bar who would likely sleep with you.
So you'd go to a website and order the test and a subscription to the service and it would send a Java applet to your phone. You'd need to enter your preference (men, women or both, ages ranges, income range and so on). The phone could use location based services (GPS or GSM triangulation) to display a frikken target radar, with the intensity of the radar dots proportional to MHC difference.
The targets would be people who've subscribed to the service and are thus interested in a partner, and the MHC stuff would tell you that they are 'compatible'
I read somewhere that in Asia, people choose partners based on star sign, so there you'd give the MHC types zodiac names. The above study should pull in people who are more scientificly minded.
Killer app! Killer App!
At the moment, 32GB of NAND flash is about $580.
= 1&p=9615
/ 10122.pdf
http://www.dramexchange.com/
A 40GB hard disk is about $58. Which is a pretty bad price differential.
But the cost of NAND flash should drop 43% per year over the next 5 years
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/index.php?blogthis
So that 32GB NAND flash device should be $580 * ( 0.57 ^ 5 ) = $34. That's less than a small hard disk, and you can probably charge a premium based on the low power consumption / small form factor. My guess is that people will pay $100-$200 premium for a NAND flash laptop, so I'd expect to see 32GB NAND flash ultraportables in the next couple of years.
I checked the write rate to the Physical Disk on Windows in perfmon (this counts writes to the block device driver) on my work machine, and it's not too bad, about 100K/sec averaged over an hour of building a massive chunk of software. Mainstream desktop use should have a much lower rate. E.g the laptop I'm writing this on is writing at 3K-20K/sec average at the moment. Most of that is short 40K spikes, with a small duty cycle too, so an daily average should be lower.
This paper has a formula for disk lifetime
http://www.st.com/stonline/products/literature/an
i.e. lifetime in days is
Size of flash * Number of erase cycles * FS overhead
/
Bytes written per day.
Let's assume that the 32GB array is 8*32Gbit chips. Each chip is then 4GByte
Plugging in the figures, we get
4GB * 100,000 * 0.7
/
100KB * 24 * 60 * 60
I get 33981 days, or 93 years. This is mostly because with wear levelling, the lifetime is proportional to NAND flash array size, since wear levelling should spread erases evenly. If you could wear level over the whole 32GB, it would be 744 years!
It's actually pessimistic, since the fs overhead is lower on Inode based filesystem like NTFS or ext2/3. E.g in their example, the file needs 5000 clusters in the FAT, or 20K. On NTFS, file extents are stored as runs - i.e. a contiguous file will be one extent in the 1K Inode. Most of the time, file extents are not growing too.
At the moment, the fastest NAND has a per chip write speed of 10MB/sec, and reads about 100MB/sec. I think you could do some kind of RAID like approach, especially for reads. And since we're talking about a 8*32Gbit chips for this device the read speed should be 800MB/sec, neglecting speed ups from new interfaces and process shrinks. And bad blocks could be tracked on a finer granularity too, so you could continue to use a erase unit until all the blocks went bad. And 1 million erase cycles is probably not impossible to achieve in 5 years, since some NAND devices do that as you say.
People often quote pagefile writes as a reason for NAND being unusable, but I'm not really convinced. Even with a completely unmodified system, a worst case filesystem choice (FAT32 with small clusters), and an application which constantly grows files, and a NAND chip where every block has a 100% fail rate after 100K erases, the lifetime of a large NAND disk is still orders of magnitude greater than a hard disk, which is likely to die in 5-10 years or so at this level of usage, since it wears from both read and write.
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
This sort of thing has more than a hint of obsessive self sufficiency about it. But it does show that you could produce biodiesel without tying up all your agricultural land, which is pretty important. I think in practice you'd probably tune taxes/subsidies a bit to create a market, and allow market mechanisms to build the farms all over the planet, rather than requisitioning $300billion from Congress to basically build ponds in a desert.
Hard disk capacity doubles every 12 months.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryder's_law
I wonder what the doubling time is for a Windows minimum install is?
The only problem to this is that I think ultra portable laptops will switch over to NAND flash in 5 years or so. E.g. by that point 32-64GB of NAND should be $50 to $100.
I wonder if they know that when that happens, capacity will probably drop from a couple of hundred GB on a 2.5" hard disk down to 32-64GB on a 1.8" NAND drive, so the current versions of Windows and Office had better be able to install in that size.
Dear Steve Jobs,
If you want me to kill this guy I will. I have made a shank out by gnawing the
edge of my iPod nano.
Just issue the fatwa by the usual channels, i.e. pulse position modulated in
the beat of the next song I download from iTunes.
We should defintitely try to silence trolls who portray us users of the One
True OS as insane fanatics.
Hal.
Rapeseed oil needs to be rebranded I admit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed
Canola or SupriseSex! perhaps.
I think in the EU, the Common Agricultural Policy could be tweaked to encourage people to grow it, and you could remove all fuel tax on biodiesel and SVO for a five years or so.
I think the Neocons are probably wrong about a lot of important stuff, but they certainly argue for their ideas well. And the Realists like Kissinger and (maybe) Rice are certainly smart, even if they have a somewhat pessimistic world view. Economically, ideas like school vouchers and tax cuts are not a bad idea in themselves.
In fact, the Republican party reminds me a bit of the Tories in England when Thatcher was in power. They're not short of ideas, but that might not be a good thing for them in the long run, since tax cuts and a project to democratise the middle east are not mutually compatible if you want a stable economy.
I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you. I've got a feeling that Creation and Evolution might be two incomplete descriptions of the same process.
They seem different because Abrahmic religions have a personal, conscious God. If you believe in a Spinozan God, then Creation and Evolution aren't that different. Actually, a friend of mine who spoke Hebrew said that the old testament passage on Creation is in really wierd poetic language, and the normal translation of God creating the Earth in 7 days is bogus. Plus of course, the people that wrote it were Taliban types living in the desert.
Actually, you can see that there is an upper limit on what a single conscious entity can achieve, and that it is far short of the omniscient, omnipresent entity that Abrahamic religions believe in because an omniscient entity wouldn't be able to learn anything and omnipresence would require that information be transmitted faster than light.
A non conscious process like evolution can be as omnipresent as it needs to be, and pretty damn close to omniscience in practice though.
or people who watch the OC or people who read People Magazine or George Bush
But Mischa Barton is hot,
http://images.google.com/images?q=mischa+barton&h
and George Bush is a good read.
You can run diesel engines on unrefined rapeseed oil if you tweak them a bit
i l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_vegetable_o
In the UK drivers using SVO have been prosecuted for failure to pay duty to Customs and Excise.
Biodiesel just means that you can run an umodified engine -
from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
Sometimes even unrefined vegetable oil is incorrectly called "biodiesel". Unlike unrefined vegetable oil, biodiesel does not require fuel pre-heating and filtration due to issues with coagulation, and also require no or minimal modification to the fuel system.
It's because of the pagetables. AMD added another level to take the page tables to a 52bit physical address space. The page table entries are compatible with PAE, which most OS's already support. x86 is 3 level, x86-64 is 4 level.
There's space in the page table entries to handle 64 bits, but adding extra levels to the translation probably has a performance impact. There's still debate about the best way to do 64 bit address translation, and 52 bits is plenty for now. And when they change, it will only affect the bits of the OS that handle paging, user application and even device drives will always see a flat 64 bit virtual address space.
Like all of x86-64, it's a designed for a subtle mix of good performance in the short term and a painless upgrade path for current OS kernels, without really compromising anything in the long term.
The fear of a lawsuit / lost sales definitely affects Microsoft's behaviour. If you look at the Old New Thing, or the lists for beta release software, they clearly spend enormous resources keeping old, broken, third party applications alive.
That said, if I found an actual bug in Windows in my application, I'd just workaround it for much the same reason.
And it's interesting how if I talk to Open Source people, they think this is all wasted effort.