Careful! Maybe he's got a concealed carry permit and one physic in a shoulder holster and another strapped to his leg. The leg one is for close quarters rebutting/rebuking or for after the one in the shoulder holster has been handed over.
Suppose I want to make a portable game. iOS allows C/C++ and Objective C. Android allows Java, C/C++ and Flash. Windows Mobile allowed Flash, C#, C/C++ and Java. WP7 is managed C# only.
So the best way is to code the core stuff in C/C++. Maybe you'd need some third party libraries too - those are binaries i.e. unmanaged ARM code. The UI needs to be in Objective C for iPhone and Java for Android as far as I know. Though Pleco uses a library that allows them to do the UI in a portable way and keep the core C/C++ stuff the same on Android on iPhone. WP7 doesn't fit into this model at all. And it doesn't have the market share to justify writing everything (including the third party stuff) in C# code that will only work on it.
What's odd about it is that Microsoft must have known this. It's hard to imagine a restrictive model like WP7 working when Android and iOS are already so well entrenched and tools exist to allow code that works on both which is ~50% of the market compared to Microsoft's total (WinMo+WP7) share of 6.7%, down from 9% back when they only had WinMo. Even worse WinMo which is essentially dead is still outselling WP7. That's why you can still buy HD2s for example.
Even if they allowed C code for the guts of the application but demanded a C# UI layer it's not clear that software vendors would bother. In fact at this point I'm not even sure that allowing old WinMo applications to run unmodified is enough to save the platform.
I actually think WP7 will fail much worse than Vista. Vista was a bit sluggish but it run the old applications. WP7 can't, and that will be fatal. All the Windows Mobile users will move to Android where their apps already work. People who already have an Android or iOS device are very unlikely to switch to WP7. All the ISVs will end up on Android and/or iOS because it's easier to port an app to a platform where you can use C/C++ and native code than one where the whole thing needs to be in C# and Silverlight or XNA. Even Angry Birds needs a C physics library. In fact even if Microsoft allow C and native code I doubt the ISVs that used to support Windows Mobile will come back because the platforms already bad market share is dropping quickly.
E.g. Pleco - a Chinese dictionary - moved to iOS and (soon) to Android. They've dropped Windows Mobile and won't ever support WP7. When they dropped Windows Mobile the iOS version was outselling WinMo 10:1. They have core code in C/C++ which they can run on both iOS and Android (also on WinMo). No chance of it working on WP7 without rewriting in C#. And no chance of getting their handwriting and OCR libraries from third parties ported either.
Opera have dropped Windows Mobile and won't support WP7. Once again they have C/C++ code with a few third party libraries in native ARM. It would be almost impossible to port to WP7 and even if they did Microsoft have apparently said they won't allow alternative browsers in their app store.
In a sense WP7 is more like a console than a phone. Worse actually since XBoxes support native code as far as I know. Maybe they'll pick up games from the XBox ecosystem but I don't think that will make up for not having things like Opera and Pleco though. They've apparently offered Adobe the possibility of native code to get Flash ported and possibly will do the same for titles like Angry Birds. Still that's not really enough - Adobe haven't announced a ship date and Roxio, the Angry Birds publisher, have publicly contradicted Microsoft when Microsoft implied they had committed to porting. I.e. handing out native code passes for key applications is not enough to get people to support a platform which is obviously doomed.
Picture Vista with no back compatibility following on from XP which had 1/3 the market share of OSX. Imagine that all the software already worked on iOS. That's the situation WP7 is in - it's actually easier to run the apps you used on Windows Mobile on Android than on WP7. Even the IHVs like HTC prefer Android because it's free to them and there are no limits on things like the Sense UI. WP7 has ridiculous limits on how much value they can add and they need to rewrite all their WinMo software in C# to make it work.
I think the market share will drop rapidly and Microsoft will kill it. Just like Kin and Zune, both of which used the same software.
In the UK you could put a Pay As You go SIM in it. In fact if you programmed it to send an SMS every six months (cost £0.10) if a call had not been made in that time that would be enough to keep the account alive. Calls would cost £0.25 per minute, but it's not like you use an intercom very much.
So you could imagine loading the device up with £10 credit and having it last for years. You'd could have it send a text message when it was credit was below some limit or even top itself up automatically from a credit card. Intriguingly you can get unlimited data for £2 per week in the UK (e.g. Tesco Mobile). So if you loaded up a SIM card with £104 of credit you could have internet access for a whole year from pretty much anywhere in the UK. Which opens up all sorts of possibilities. E.g. you could send a text message to a device to make it start streaming audio of video. Or GPS coordinates.
Even in the cartel dominated US you have Pay As You go phones, right? In fact I've got an AT&T SIM card with $100 (i.e. £60) on it that is valid for a year. Of course for data (100MB limit on AT&T) I'd need to pay $20 per month or so. So a remote data logger would cost $240 (i.e. about £146) per year instead of £104. Of course if I shopped around a bit I bet I could find an MVNO in the US like Tesco Mobile that had cheaper data access. In fact if I were making data loggers I'd try and do a deal with AT&T. Either they could drop the prices or subsidize the purchase price.
Incidentally the reason American consumers get charged a lot for calls is because most of them have subsidized devices. So the sticker price is low or zero but the monthly bills are high.
I totally miss your point about why you would rather live in Taiwan than the UK or Sweden. Are you assuming you will have the same income in all three places and will live better in Taiwan?
Well in Taiwan I can run my own company. There's much less chance of doing that in Sweden or the UK. Also Taiwanese people rock and the Swedes have been made rather... unimaginative... by the crushing socialist system.
To clarify, our technical people are viewed by our customers as trusted advisors and when they see a opportunity for a complementary sale/network refresh/project they often involve our sales team, however when the customer sees the sales people, they always clam up because they're 'sales people' and customers think they are just interested in alleviating them of their money! I'm interested in what the Slashdot community thinks of how we should remunerate engineering teams for this 'sales' work (which would cost us commission to sales people anyway) but in a way that doesn't foster any animosity between sales and tech staff because in the end sales people live and die on commission.
"The fact that Ubuntu has poor performance in one area compared to Windows does not mean that Windows is better".
or perhaps the slightly stronger
"The fact that Ubuntu performs worse than Windows in the majority of benchmarks on Phoronix does not mean that Windows is better"
or even
"The fact that all modern Linux distributions perform worse than contemporary releases of Windows in the majority of benchmarks on Phoronix does not mean that Windows is better"
I'd say you're stating something equivalent to the first but you actually believe and aim to imply the last one. Not that I'd want to put words in your mouth or even thoughts in your head. Though in the latter case it's tempting to put the otherwise unused space to some use.
Taiwan has 21%. The US has 19.9%. Both are a lot less than the UK (50%) and Sweden (58%). And I'd much rather live in Taiwan than the UK and the UK than Sweden.
In fact looking at the table a small state seems to work well if the majority of your citizens speak Chinese.
The radiation from the sun is an excellent disinfectant too. Not good news for basement dwellers. You'd need to go outside in a black suit with a broad brimmed hat and gloves also sunglasses and a ski mask. Also SPF10000 cream to guard against specular reflections - in bright sunlight even they are strong enough to make a basement dweller COMBUST. The humans will become suspicious.
Frankly I prefer to run my laptop from the small reactor I built in my basement - it's much safer.
1) Windows 8 sucks and I should switch back to the OS I got for free with the machine which actually works.
2) I'll still be secure in the knowledge that I made the right choice of OS. After all, just because all my hardware performs poorly in the current version of Windows doesn't mean the platonic ideal of Windows is in any way besmirched.
Now furthermore consider if the laptop came with a pre-installed, totally free copy of XP where all my hardware performed well and instead of Windows 8 I'd upgraded to Ubuntu where all my hardware performed badly. Would that mean Ubuntu sucks or not?
If I was Best Buy I'd have Mac Genii, Linux Zealots and Microsoft Sales Rep. I'd attach spurs their ankles and stage a cockfight for the customer's amusement.
It was funny when the nutters tried to blow up Glasgow Airport. They tried to ram an SUV full of propane and petrol into the building but got stuck between concrete bollards designed to stop ram raiders. Then set fire to themselves but were attacked by a baggage handler who gave some funny interviews. Incidentally these guys were NHS doctors which makes you wonder how competent they actually were at treating people.
There was much talk of failed terrorist attacks and they even had some American terrorism expert saying "these guys must have taken the short bus to terrorism school". Someone else said "maybe we're entering an era when people on fire in cars on fire get drive around and everyone just considers it normal".
The whole terrorism thing isn't viable if people laugh at you - it will be hard to recruit people if the last lot died horribly and become a national joke.
Keep in mind that porting, in this case, is just a recompile away, since all APIs remain the same, and most architecture assumptions like sizeof(void*) are identical to x86; the only difference is in unaligned pointer access, and even that can be trapped/emulated by OS.
All that was true for Mips, Alpha and PPC. And yet very few people bothered to port because few people bought the machines. And few people bought the machines because there was no native software and emulation sucked. Actually emulation didn't suck on Alpha - they had a very cool emulator called FX!32
DIGITAL FX!32 had two primary goals: transparent execution of 32-bit x86 applications, and performance that was roughly equal to a high-end x86 platform when running the same applications on a high-performance Alpha system. Both objectives have been meet.
Transparency is provided by the DIGITAL FX!32 agent and a runtime environment which will load and execute an x86 application without a translation step. Applications launch and execute on an Alpha running DIGITAL FX!32 just like they do on an x86.
DIGITAL FX!32 also meet its performance objectives. Figure 1 shows the relative performance on the Byte Benchmark of a 200Mz Pentium Pro and a 500 Mz Alpha running DIGITAL FX!32. For this benchmark, the Alpha running DIGITAL FX!32 provides about the same performance as a 200Mz Pentium Pro. Figure 1 also shows that the Alpha native version of the benchmark runs twice as fast as the Pentium Pro.
A top of the range 500Mhz Alpha got about the same performance running x86 code via FX!32 as a top of the range 200Mhz Pentium Pro got running it natively. If you recompiled things got 2x faster.
So any app for which there is active development would likely do just that - and that's a huge chunk of applications being used on Windows desktops today (Photoshop, various tax/accounting software etc).
Well there's a question if Photoshop would be much use on an Arm netbook or tablet. Bear in mind people who run it tend to have very fast x86 machines. Most Arm chips are probably slower than an Atom. People don't run Photoshop on Atom machines and especially not on tablets.
In fact the situation is much worse than it was for Alpha. Alpha machines were about 2x faster than the fastest x86 at one point. They tended to have more and faster Ram and bigger caches. Arm ones are likely to be at the same speed or slower than the slowest one and have smaller caches and slow memory. A top end x86 is much, much faster than a top end Arm. Of course you can fry eggs on a high end x86 and a high end Arm is low power. But low power tends to mean low performance. Alpha was hotter than x86 and higher performance - it had enough of a lead for emulation to be viable and was much better running native code. That's not the case for Arm.
Frankly you'd be better off running Android on a high end Arm tablet. The apps there was designed for a much slower machine and would fly. Photoshop and the like were designed for a much faster machine and will be horrid even if ported. And even worse in emulation.
Windows Phone 7 is for mobile phone devices and Windows 8 is for mobile non-phone devices?
Maybe it works like this. Windows Phone 7 - consumer phones. Very locked down - evil US carriers like AT&T like this because they can sell subsidised but very locked down phones and charge people $20 per month for tethering. E.g. iPhones are subsidized by $480 at purchase but you have to sign up for a two year contract that will be much, much more than $20 per month. Can't run old Windows Mobile apps.
Windows 8 - business phones. Not subsidized. Not locked down. Can run old Windows Mobile apps.
Though actually I think Microsoft will manage to alienate the old Windows Mobile users and ISVs and fail to get people to switch from Android or iPhone to WP7. Windows 8 will have ridiculous hardware requirements on ARM. About as many desktop ISVs will recompile for ARM as did for Mips, Alpha, PPC, i.e. none. So both Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 will be killed off on ARM due to poor sales.
Of course those poor sales will mysteriously not affect Android - all the WinMo users and ISVs will end up there and/or on iPhone.
So as is traditional Windows will dominate on x86/x64 PCs and fail miserably on other architectures or devices. Well except that Microsoft used to have 6.8% of the smartphone market and is likely to end up with zero.
Then again maybe all the XNA games on XBox will get ported over to WP7 and that and heavily subsidized handsets will keep it viable and Windows 8 will take over as their Win32/Arm platform. But I doubt it.
It's a bit of an odd situation really. Windows CE aka Windows Mobile had a lot of applications people use - I like Pleco and Opera for example. Not to mention all the bespoke stuff - e.g. delivery drivers often have Windows CE or Windows Mobile Devices.
Now Windows Phone 7 won't actually run any Win32/Arm applications - only C#/Silverlight or XNA ones. Also it's too dumbed down for most Windows Mobile users I suspect. Right now Windows sold 3.6 million smartphones in 1Q11. Unfortunately 2 million of those were Windows Mobile and only 1.6 million were Windows Phone 7. In the same time frame 36 million Android devices were sold, 27 million Symbian and 16 million iPhones. Even RIM sold 13 million.
Windows Mobile used to have 6.8% of the market in 1Q10. Now the combined share of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 is only 3.6%. And of that Windows Phone 7 is only 1.6%. A huge number of people seem to have moved to Android - it's share has gone from 9.6% to 36%.
In a sense Microsoft have done what a lot of people on Slashdot have been suggesting for ages - drop back compatibility and do something radically new. And frankly it's a disaster. People with Windows Mobile are buying the few remaining Windows Mobile handsets - notably the excellent HD2 instead of the Windows Phone 7 ones. Or switching to Android. Not a lot of people are switching from Android or iPhone to Windows Phone 7. In fact the two competitor OSs are completely different. Android is very open but a bit of a mess like WinMo. iPhone is very closed but slick. The open one - Android - is growing really fast.
I personally got an HD2 rather than an HD7. I can flash custom Roms and it runs the old applications.
It's very unlikely that Pleco or Opera will ever run on Windows Phone 7. Pleco has ported to iPhone and is porting to Android - they have a system to run the same core code on both but have different UI layers. Opera Mobile runs on Android. The iPhone only has Opera Mini. But in general iPhone has lots of software - it's easily the most profitable platform to develop for.
If things stay the way they are my next phone will be Android - most of the applications I like will work there by the time I upgrade my HD2 and I can get an HTC handset which is not at all locked down.
So Microsoft have a problem - the ISVs have all decided that rewriting their C/C++ code which runs on Windows Mobile, desktop Windows, iPhone and Android in C# to run purely on Windows Phone 7 is not a viable idea. In fact I suspect even if they allowed native C internals but required a C# UI layer (Android is like this I think - the UI needs to be in Java but the core can be in native C) - it's by no means certain ISVs will support the platform if it sells less than Windows Mobile and looks like it will sink. Opera stopped doing Windows Mobile builds when Windows Phone 7's lack of back compatibility was announced. Similarly Pleco have claimed that the iPhone version of the software was outselling Windows Mobile version ten to one - their Windows Mobile version is still available but it will not be updated and they won't do a Windows Phone 7 port.
Now Windows 8 will run on both ARM and x86. It also runs the old Win32 applications - unlike Windows Phone 7. It's not like desktop ISVs will rush to port their ancient Win32/x86 applications to ARM. I'm very sceptical that any ARM chip will be fast enough to emulate x86 code as fast as a lowly Atom chip can run it natively.
So Windows on ARM at the moment is in desperate need of software. The stuff that used to run on Windows Mobile has the advantage of being designed to run on low CPU power devices too.
So just maybe Windows 8 on ARM will be the platform for people who want old applications to work will end up on. I predict Windows Phone 7 will sink just like Zune and Kin. It would be a shame if Microsoft completely killed off their Win32/ARM ISVs in the process. But to be hon
I personally find the lord_pwnalot app store much more trustworthy. If you use Lookout you'll need to ignore the false positives when you install Dancing Pigs, Super Security Toolbars or Natalie Portman Naked And Petrified.
This would be an excellent anti car jacking technology. When you brake at the lights the external door handles would be charged. And you could fire charged darts at people who look like they might be thinking of becoming squeegee merchants - the car would track what you are looking at and if you gave them a look of disapproval it would fire a charged dart to incapacitate them.
I would argue that Germany is not ruled by committee. Hitler rules by fiat. It does not matter how many countries have German troops. All German SS Divisions are produced are exactly as Hitler has envisioned them to be. Thus far, Hitler has done a very good job at defeating Judeo-Bolshevism.
England is ruled by a committee of elected Jews. Even with one country, what Sturmabteilung England has produced (called ze Home Guard. HA HA HA) is 2 to 3 years behind Germany. Which hardly makes for a good military. Soon that drunken fool Churchill vill be crushed beneath ze victorious Nordic armies! Heil Hitler! Heil Godwin!
FTFY. That would explain why there are so few minority customers in Apple Stores.
Slashdot Mirror
You used 0 physics to rebuke his claim.
Careful! Maybe he's got a concealed carry permit and one physic in a shoulder holster and another strapped to his leg. The leg one is for close quarters rebutting/rebuking or for after the one in the shoulder holster has been handed over.
Suppose I want to make a portable game. iOS allows C/C++ and Objective C. Android allows Java, C/C++ and Flash. Windows Mobile allowed Flash, C#, C/C++ and Java. WP7 is managed C# only.
So the best way is to code the core stuff in C/C++. Maybe you'd need some third party libraries too - those are binaries i.e. unmanaged ARM code. The UI needs to be in Objective C for iPhone and Java for Android as far as I know. Though Pleco uses a library that allows them to do the UI in a portable way and keep the core C/C++ stuff the same on Android on iPhone. WP7 doesn't fit into this model at all. And it doesn't have the market share to justify writing everything (including the third party stuff) in C# code that will only work on it.
What's odd about it is that Microsoft must have known this. It's hard to imagine a restrictive model like WP7 working when Android and iOS are already so well entrenched and tools exist to allow code that works on both which is ~50% of the market compared to Microsoft's total (WinMo+WP7) share of 6.7%, down from 9% back when they only had WinMo. Even worse WinMo which is essentially dead is still outselling WP7. That's why you can still buy HD2s for example.
Even if they allowed C code for the guts of the application but demanded a C# UI layer it's not clear that software vendors would bother. In fact at this point I'm not even sure that allowing old WinMo applications to run unmodified is enough to save the platform.
My last two phones were Windows Mobile. In fact my HD2 is excellent running this custom Rom
http://www.jayceooi.com/2010/08/12/download-htc-hd2-cookie-energy-windows-mobile-6-5-x-custom-rom/
I can drag and drop AVI files to it and watch them in the gym in TCPMP. I have a bunch of applications I use all the time.
All of that works on Android. None of it works on WP7. Guess what I'm buying next?
I actually think WP7 will fail much worse than Vista. Vista was a bit sluggish but it run the old applications. WP7 can't, and that will be fatal. All the Windows Mobile users will move to Android where their apps already work. People who already have an Android or iOS device are very unlikely to switch to WP7. All the ISVs will end up on Android and/or iOS because it's easier to port an app to a platform where you can use C/C++ and native code than one where the whole thing needs to be in C# and Silverlight or XNA. Even Angry Birds needs a C physics library. In fact even if Microsoft allow C and native code I doubt the ISVs that used to support Windows Mobile will come back because the platforms already bad market share is dropping quickly.
E.g. Pleco - a Chinese dictionary - moved to iOS and (soon) to Android. They've dropped Windows Mobile and won't ever support WP7. When they dropped Windows Mobile the iOS version was outselling WinMo 10:1. They have core code in C/C++ which they can run on both iOS and Android (also on WinMo). No chance of it working on WP7 without rewriting in C#. And no chance of getting their handwriting and OCR libraries from third parties ported either.
Opera have dropped Windows Mobile and won't support WP7. Once again they have C/C++ code with a few third party libraries in native ARM. It would be almost impossible to port to WP7 and even if they did Microsoft have apparently said they won't allow alternative browsers in their app store.
In a sense WP7 is more like a console than a phone. Worse actually since XBoxes support native code as far as I know. Maybe they'll pick up games from the XBox ecosystem but I don't think that will make up for not having things like Opera and Pleco though. They've apparently offered Adobe the possibility of native code to get Flash ported and possibly will do the same for titles like Angry Birds. Still that's not really enough - Adobe haven't announced a ship date and Roxio, the Angry Birds publisher, have publicly contradicted Microsoft when Microsoft implied they had committed to porting. I.e. handing out native code passes for key applications is not enough to get people to support a platform which is obviously doomed.
Picture Vista with no back compatibility following on from XP which had 1/3 the market share of OSX. Imagine that all the software already worked on iOS. That's the situation WP7 is in - it's actually easier to run the apps you used on Windows Mobile on Android than on WP7. Even the IHVs like HTC prefer Android because it's free to them and there are no limits on things like the Sense UI. WP7 has ridiculous limits on how much value they can add and they need to rewrite all their WinMo software in C# to make it work.
I think the market share will drop rapidly and Microsoft will kill it. Just like Kin and Zune, both of which used the same software.
In the UK you could put a Pay As You go SIM in it. In fact if you programmed it to send an SMS every six months (cost £0.10) if a call had not been made in that time that would be enough to keep the account alive. Calls would cost £0.25 per minute, but it's not like you use an intercom very much.
So you could imagine loading the device up with £10 credit and having it last for years. You'd could have it send a text message when it was credit was below some limit or even top itself up automatically from a credit card. Intriguingly you can get unlimited data for £2 per week in the UK (e.g. Tesco Mobile). So if you loaded up a SIM card with £104 of credit you could have internet access for a whole year from pretty much anywhere in the UK. Which opens up all sorts of possibilities. E.g. you could send a text message to a device to make it start streaming audio of video. Or GPS coordinates.
Even in the cartel dominated US you have Pay As You go phones, right? In fact I've got an AT&T SIM card with $100 (i.e. £60) on it that is valid for a year. Of course for data (100MB limit on AT&T) I'd need to pay $20 per month or so. So a remote data logger would cost $240 (i.e. about £146) per year instead of £104. Of course if I shopped around a bit I bet I could find an MVNO in the US like Tesco Mobile that had cheaper data access. In fact if I were making data loggers I'd try and do a deal with AT&T. Either they could drop the prices or subsidize the purchase price.
Incidentally the reason American consumers get charged a lot for calls is because most of them have subsidized devices. So the sticker price is low or zero but the monthly bills are high.
Usually my dog chews 'em up so bad I have to get rid of them after a couple of weeks.
That story may be a little hard to find, unless you're a criminal who knows how to use torrents . . .
Not that hard to find
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/15-WhentheTideRisesCD/WhentheTideRisesCD/Grimmer%20Than%20Hell/0743435907__13.htm
I totally miss your point about why you would rather live in Taiwan than the UK or Sweden. Are you assuming you will have the same income in all three places and will live better in Taiwan?
Well in Taiwan I can run my own company. There's much less chance of doing that in Sweden or the UK. Also Taiwanese people rock and the Swedes have been made rather ... unimaginative ... by the crushing socialist system.
To clarify, our technical people are viewed by our customers as trusted advisors and when they see a opportunity for a complementary sale/network refresh/project they often involve our sales team, however when the customer sees the sales people, they always clam up because they're 'sales people' and customers think they are just interested in alleviating them of their money! I'm interested in what the Slashdot community thinks of how we should remunerate engineering teams for this 'sales' work (which would cost us commission to sales people anyway) but in a way that doesn't foster any animosity between sales and tech staff because in the end sales people live and die on commission.
Thirty pieces of silver?
So your claim is limited to something like this
"The fact that Ubuntu has poor performance in one area compared to Windows does not mean that Windows is better".
or perhaps the slightly stronger
"The fact that Ubuntu performs worse than Windows in the majority of benchmarks on Phoronix does not mean that Windows is better"
or even
"The fact that all modern Linux distributions perform worse than contemporary releases of Windows in the majority of benchmarks on Phoronix does not mean that Windows is better"
I'd say you're stating something equivalent to the first but you actually believe and aim to imply the last one. Not that I'd want to put words in your mouth or even thoughts in your head. Though in the latter case it's tempting to put the otherwise unused space to some use.
That's bullshit. There are places where public spending is a low percentage of GDP that are very pleasant to live in. E.g. from here
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2008/03/government-spending-as-percentage-of.html
Taiwan has 21%. The US has 19.9%. Both are a lot less than the UK (50%) and Sweden (58%). And I'd much rather live in Taiwan than the UK and the UK than Sweden.
In fact looking at the table a small state seems to work well if the majority of your citizens speak Chinese.
The radiation from the sun is an excellent disinfectant too. Not good news for basement dwellers. You'd need to go outside in a black suit with a broad brimmed hat and gloves also sunglasses and a ski mask. Also SPF10000 cream to guard against specular reflections - in bright sunlight even they are strong enough to make a basement dweller COMBUST. The humans will become suspicious.
Frankly I prefer to run my laptop from the small reactor I built in my basement - it's much safer.
First, Ubuntu 10.10 is based on Linux but it is not Linux any more than any other distribution built on top of a linux kernel is Linux.
So you're saying Ubuntu 10.10 isn't the true Linux because Linux works better than Windows. That sounds a bit like the No True Scotsman fallacy to me.
Consider the following Gedankenexperiment.
I upgrade my notebook to Windows 8. Suppose if my network card/graphics card/power management on my laptop starts behaving like like something from the 1990s performance-wise in Windows 8. I.e. the network card is slow (according to you), the graphics poorly accelerated (actually this applies to Ubuntu compared to Windows - see here http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_windows_part1&num=11) and the battery life much poorer (actually this applies to Ubuntu 10.10 compared to earlier versions - see here http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_maverick_netbook&num=1).
Would that mean
1) Windows 8 sucks and I should switch back to the OS I got for free with the machine which actually works.
2) I'll still be secure in the knowledge that I made the right choice of OS. After all, just because all my hardware performs poorly in the current version of Windows doesn't mean the platonic ideal of Windows is in any way besmirched.
Now furthermore consider if the laptop came with a pre-installed, totally free copy of XP where all my hardware performed well and instead of Windows 8 I'd upgraded to Ubuntu where all my hardware performed badly. Would that mean Ubuntu sucks or not?
It's ironic you call it 'Windoze' at the same time you're making it clear that it actually works better than Lunix.
If I was Best Buy I'd have Mac Genii, Linux Zealots and Microsoft Sales Rep. I'd attach spurs their ankles and stage a cockfight for the customer's amusement.
It's Unix
Not it's not. The correct name is GNU/Linux. Gnu stands for "Gnu is not Unix".
QED.
It was funny when the nutters tried to blow up Glasgow Airport. They tried to ram an SUV full of propane and petrol into the building but got stuck between concrete bollards designed to stop ram raiders. Then set fire to themselves but were attacked by a baggage handler who gave some funny interviews. Incidentally these guys were NHS doctors which makes you wonder how competent they actually were at treating people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smeaton_(born_1976)#Television_interviews
There was much talk of failed terrorist attacks and they even had some American terrorism expert saying "these guys must have taken the short bus to terrorism school". Someone else said "maybe we're entering an era when people on fire in cars on fire get drive around and everyone just considers it normal".
The whole terrorism thing isn't viable if people laugh at you - it will be hard to recruit people if the last lot died horribly and become a national joke.
It also sold a less than the platform it was replacing, which wasn't particularly successful.
Keep in mind that porting, in this case, is just a recompile away, since all APIs remain the same, and most architecture assumptions like sizeof(void*) are identical to x86; the only difference is in unaligned pointer access, and even that can be trapped/emulated by OS.
All that was true for Mips, Alpha and PPC. And yet very few people bothered to port because few people bought the machines. And few people bought the machines because there was no native software and emulation sucked. Actually emulation didn't suck on Alpha - they had a very cool emulator called FX!32
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix-nt97/full_papers/chernoff/chernoff.pdf
DIGITAL FX!32 had two primary goals: transparent execution of 32-bit x86 applications, and performance that was roughly equal to a high-end x86 platform when running the same applications on a high-performance Alpha system. Both objectives have been meet.
Transparency is provided by the DIGITAL FX!32 agent and a runtime environment which will load and execute an x86 application without a translation step. Applications launch and execute on an Alpha running DIGITAL FX!32 just like they do on an x86.
DIGITAL FX!32 also meet its performance objectives. Figure 1 shows the relative performance on the Byte Benchmark of a 200Mz Pentium Pro and a 500 Mz Alpha running DIGITAL FX!32. For this benchmark, the Alpha running DIGITAL FX!32 provides about the same performance as a 200Mz Pentium Pro. Figure 1 also shows that the Alpha native version of the benchmark runs twice as fast as the Pentium Pro.
A top of the range 500Mhz Alpha got about the same performance running x86 code via FX!32 as a top of the range 200Mhz Pentium Pro got running it natively. If you recompiled things got 2x faster.
So any app for which there is active development would likely do just that - and that's a huge chunk of applications being used on Windows desktops today (Photoshop, various tax/accounting software etc).
Well there's a question if Photoshop would be much use on an Arm netbook or tablet. Bear in mind people who run it tend to have very fast x86 machines. Most Arm chips are probably slower than an Atom. People don't run Photoshop on Atom machines and especially not on tablets.
In fact the situation is much worse than it was for Alpha. Alpha machines were about 2x faster than the fastest x86 at one point. They tended to have more and faster Ram and bigger caches. Arm ones are likely to be at the same speed or slower than the slowest one and have smaller caches and slow memory. A top end x86 is much, much faster than a top end Arm. Of course you can fry eggs on a high end x86 and a high end Arm is low power. But low power tends to mean low performance. Alpha was hotter than x86 and higher performance - it had enough of a lead for emulation to be viable and was much better running native code. That's not the case for Arm.
Frankly you'd be better off running Android on a high end Arm tablet. The apps there was designed for a much slower machine and would fly. Photoshop and the like were designed for a much faster machine and will be horrid even if ported. And even worse in emulation.
I have a policy in my office, you can point at the screen but if you touch it, I will break one of your fingers, you get to decide which one.
What's the matter? Has someone put your stapler in jelly again?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/clips/p0074577/the_office_stapler_in_the_jelly/
Windows Phone 7 is for mobile phone devices and Windows 8 is for mobile non-phone devices?
Maybe it works like this. Windows Phone 7 - consumer phones. Very locked down - evil US carriers like AT&T like this because they can sell subsidised but very locked down phones and charge people $20 per month for tethering. E.g. iPhones are subsidized by $480 at purchase but you have to sign up for a two year contract that will be much, much more than $20 per month. Can't run old Windows Mobile apps.
Windows 8 - business phones. Not subsidized. Not locked down. Can run old Windows Mobile apps.
Though actually I think Microsoft will manage to alienate the old Windows Mobile users and ISVs and fail to get people to switch from Android or iPhone to WP7. Windows 8 will have ridiculous hardware requirements on ARM. About as many desktop ISVs will recompile for ARM as did for Mips, Alpha, PPC, i.e. none. So both Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 will be killed off on ARM due to poor sales.
Of course those poor sales will mysteriously not affect Android - all the WinMo users and ISVs will end up there and/or on iPhone.
So as is traditional Windows will dominate on x86/x64 PCs and fail miserably on other architectures or devices. Well except that Microsoft used to have 6.8% of the smartphone market and is likely to end up with zero.
Then again maybe all the XNA games on XBox will get ported over to WP7 and that and heavily subsidized handsets will keep it viable and Windows 8 will take over as their Win32/Arm platform. But I doubt it.
It's a bit of an odd situation really. Windows CE aka Windows Mobile had a lot of applications people use - I like Pleco and Opera for example. Not to mention all the bespoke stuff - e.g. delivery drivers often have Windows CE or Windows Mobile Devices.
Now Windows Phone 7 won't actually run any Win32/Arm applications - only C#/Silverlight or XNA ones. Also it's too dumbed down for most Windows Mobile users I suspect. Right now Windows sold 3.6 million smartphones in 1Q11. Unfortunately 2 million of those were Windows Mobile and only 1.6 million were Windows Phone 7. In the same time frame 36 million Android devices were sold, 27 million Symbian and 16 million iPhones. Even RIM sold 13 million.
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1689814
Windows Mobile used to have 6.8% of the market in 1Q10. Now the combined share of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 is only 3.6%. And of that Windows Phone 7 is only 1.6%. A huge number of people seem to have moved to Android - it's share has gone from 9.6% to 36%.
In a sense Microsoft have done what a lot of people on Slashdot have been suggesting for ages - drop back compatibility and do something radically new. And frankly it's a disaster. People with Windows Mobile are buying the few remaining Windows Mobile handsets - notably the excellent HD2 instead of the Windows Phone 7 ones. Or switching to Android. Not a lot of people are switching from Android or iPhone to Windows Phone 7. In fact the two competitor OSs are completely different. Android is very open but a bit of a mess like WinMo. iPhone is very closed but slick. The open one - Android - is growing really fast.
I personally got an HD2 rather than an HD7. I can flash custom Roms and it runs the old applications.
It's very unlikely that Pleco or Opera will ever run on Windows Phone 7. Pleco has ported to iPhone and is porting to Android - they have a system to run the same core code on both but have different UI layers. Opera Mobile runs on Android. The iPhone only has Opera Mini. But in general iPhone has lots of software - it's easily the most profitable platform to develop for.
If things stay the way they are my next phone will be Android - most of the applications I like will work there by the time I upgrade my HD2 and I can get an HTC handset which is not at all locked down.
So Microsoft have a problem - the ISVs have all decided that rewriting their C/C++ code which runs on Windows Mobile, desktop Windows, iPhone and Android in C# to run purely on Windows Phone 7 is not a viable idea. In fact I suspect even if they allowed native C internals but required a C# UI layer (Android is like this I think - the UI needs to be in Java but the core can be in native C) - it's by no means certain ISVs will support the platform if it sells less than Windows Mobile and looks like it will sink. Opera stopped doing Windows Mobile builds when Windows Phone 7's lack of back compatibility was announced. Similarly Pleco have claimed that the iPhone version of the software was outselling Windows Mobile version ten to one - their Windows Mobile version is still available but it will not be updated and they won't do a Windows Phone 7 port.
Now Windows 8 will run on both ARM and x86. It also runs the old Win32 applications - unlike Windows Phone 7. It's not like desktop ISVs will rush to port their ancient Win32/x86 applications to ARM. I'm very sceptical that any ARM chip will be fast enough to emulate x86 code as fast as a lowly Atom chip can run it natively.
So Windows on ARM at the moment is in desperate need of software. The stuff that used to run on Windows Mobile has the advantage of being designed to run on low CPU power devices too.
So just maybe Windows 8 on ARM will be the platform for people who want old applications to work will end up on. I predict Windows Phone 7 will sink just like Zune and Kin. It would be a shame if Microsoft completely killed off their Win32/ARM ISVs in the process. But to be hon
I personally find the lord_pwnalot app store much more trustworthy. If you use Lookout you'll need to ignore the false positives when you install Dancing Pigs, Super Security Toolbars or Natalie Portman Naked And Petrified.
This would be an excellent anti car jacking technology. When you brake at the lights the external door handles would be charged. And you could fire charged darts at people who look like they might be thinking of becoming squeegee merchants - the car would track what you are looking at and if you gave them a look of disapproval it would fire a charged dart to incapacitate them.
I would argue that Germany is not ruled by committee. Hitler rules by fiat. It does not matter how many countries have German troops. All German SS Divisions are produced are exactly as Hitler has envisioned them to be. Thus far, Hitler has done a very good job at defeating Judeo-Bolshevism.
England is ruled by a committee of elected Jews. Even with one country, what Sturmabteilung England has produced (called ze Home Guard. HA HA HA) is 2 to 3 years behind Germany. Which hardly makes for a good military. Soon that drunken fool Churchill vill be crushed beneath ze victorious Nordic armies! Heil Hitler! Heil Godwin!
FTFY. That would explain why there are so few minority customers in Apple Stores.