I have read a few L. R. Hubbard books -- always found them pretty schlocky. Thus, only the few, while I have read most if not everything from others of that era: Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, Zelazny, Ellison, etc.
As far as Scientology goes, there are plenty of rumors. It's pretty clear that Hubbard started with Dianetics. He lost control of Dianetics when he had to sell out interest in the business to pay back taxes. Oops. So why not turn it into a religion? That way, there are no taxes to pay, and as the figurehead, Hubbard couldn't be ousted from control.
Personally, I accept Ellison's account of the origins, since he's actually discussed it:
Scientology is bullshit! Man, I was there the night L. Ron Hubbard invented it, for Christ's sakes!... We were sitting around one night... who else was there? Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Lester del Rey, and Ron Hubbard, who was making a penny a word, and had been for years. And he said "This bullshit's got to stop!" He says, "I gotta get money." He says, "I want to get rich". And somebody said, "why don't you invent a new religion? They're always big." We were clowning! You know, "Become Elmer Gantry! You'll make a fortune!" He says, "I'm going to do it." Full transcript here: http://www.islets.net/faq.html#Anchor-Was-47857
Well, back in the day, I had to walk to work, uphill, in BOTH DIRECTION!!! Ok, but on topic... we had the SVr4 version of AmigaUNIX happy to not only run, but run with X and everything, in 4MB of RAM. The earlier version, with Rico Tudor's far more efficient windowing system, was happy in 2MB.
Not to suggest there's a huge reason to want to run with such small amounts of RAM. Just that, historically, *NIX itself wasn't all THAT bloated.
There have been a whole history of multimedia-friendly possible enhancements to Linux that have been rejected, as they caused server performance to drop by 0.01% or some-such. Ok, maybe an exaggeration.. but remember back when nearly the entire kernel was locked against preemptive interrupts, just a few tiny windows to recognize such when in kernel mode? The fixes had been around for some years, but only got rolled in as part of the update to get SMP working properly (or at all... it's been some decades). Quite a bit of what made BeOS/Haiku great involve relatively huge numbers of preemptive, lightweight threads. In fact, a "process" in Linux speak is called a Team in BeOS... that's a Team of Threads, of course. Very much the opposite of how Linux/UNIX have worked through most of their history... Linux didn't even have preemptive lightweight threads throughout most of its existence. The last time I tried to do asynchronous I/O (kind of a built-in in AmigaOS and commonplace in BeOS), it was a real headache in Linux (ok, this was 2008, maybe it's better supported today).
I'm not sure you can make Linux much like BeOS and still keep it Linux. And that's before you even get to the relatively nice and (for the day) innovative C++ framework for everything.
The Amiga was at least a bit of inspiration to the original BeOS team (not to mention a few programmers who had worked on some Amiga projects). The purpose in the Amiga's day was pretty basic: the limits of graphic chips required trade-offs between color depth and color resolution.
Of course, that goes away with modern graphics devices, which were at least on the way when Be was introduced in 1985. There are other considerations, though. For example, in video, you have an advantage if you match your display to the actual video mode (for editing purposes), rather than resampling via a frame buffer (which can hide things). But it's definitely less useful in modern times than it once was. And of course, you can kinda-sorta so this in Windows since DirectX, at least per app if not per virtual screen.
One big one in BeOS that's kind of the opposite of UNIX/Linux -- BeOS is MASSIVELY multithreaded. Like the AmigaOS that to an extent inspired it, only moreso. Pre-emptive threads (which didn't even exist in Linux until relatively recently) were an everyday programming construct, like "function" or "loop", and used everywhere. This tied in with BeOS being intended primarily for multithreaded systems -- the original BeBox was a dual processor PPC603 machine.
The original Be file system was very interesting -- it was basically a database, not a filesystem. Performance was pretty bad, though, so this was replaced by the attribute-heavy file system that's in the current HaikuOS. Not quite as elegant, but way more functionally practical.
Another very cool aspect was a unified timing architecture, which made BeOS the very best OS for multimedia work in its day. Sadly, this and various other things were evolving, and while a number of major players, particularly in music software, had been working on Be applications, there was a big wait for some of these things to be finished in R5. Which they were -- pretty much at the same time Be, Inc. announced BeIA (which was never going to function, simply because x86 wasn't useful in many embedded platforms at the time) and committed Seppuku.
You can hurt the market all you want, as long as you're small enough to not to any serious damage. Apple at 10% (US.... 5% globally) certainly isn't large enough to cause industry-wide problems, at least in the PC market. They have a large but not commanding piece of the smartphone market, and a very large piece of the "big smartphone without a voice modem" market... if that's really a different thing, the tablet.
They don't have a recognized monopoly on anything, so they run under a different set of rules. Doesn't mean they never will be judged a monopoly, but it does take awhile for legal watchdogs to recognize the emergence of new markets. And some wisdom to decide if they're actually the same, or different, markets. Does the use of an ARM processor versus an x86 really make the iPad NOT a personal computer, but something totally different? If so, maybe Apple's closer to a monopoly than they were, but still not large enough to have full on monopoly powers. If ARM vs. x86 doesn't matter, then Apple's only managed to perhaps un-monopoly Microsoft.
And of course, that's precisely what Microsoft is banking on, in the ARM market. They're very aware that the various restrictions and monopoly pronouncements all mention "x86".... that's how the judges ruled it. So they have the "be evil" lever set to Apple mode, and beyond, when it comes to ARM products. And it's hard to imagine they won't get away with it.... though there's that whole issue of actually selling any they still have to deal with.
Actually, that's kind of the trick that lets Microsoft treat ARM differently. Despite the major competition (Apple) not being on x86 PCs at the time Microsoft was judged to be a monopoly, the judge limited all or most of the restrictions on Microsoft to x86 PCs. So they have to play "nice" on the x86 market. That means still supporting the PC as something more or less open (sure, locked-down UEFI BIOS by default, but they _allow_ OEMs to offer a disable function).
On ARM, it's a different story. The OS only goes to the OEM, not to the end user. Period. No way to disable secure boot. Hidden APIs out the wazoo (everyone but Microsoft is required to only use WinRT API calls on ARM; Microsoft gets to use all of Win32 as well). Bundled web browser (IE) with no possible replacement (3rd party web browsers are either built on top of IE components, or they don't fully function -- you can't write a working Javascript JIT, apparently, in WinRT-only). And it's anyone guess if any Windows RT/Windows 8 Phone devices will be upgradeable to Windows 9... probably not, based on recent historical behavior.
All of this happens just dandy without even considering Apple. Now, of course, even without considering Apple, Microsoft may still be seen as abusing monopoly powers. They got called on the web browser thing -- the crime of using monopoly powers in one market (x86 PCs) to conquer another (web browsers), but it was only after-the-fact... they had all but killed Netscape before anything was done about it. I assume they're looking at that same issue being alive as they take on the ARM/mobile market.
Of course, it might well be reasonable to believe that there's no important distinction between "x86" and "ARM" as far as markets are considered.... particularly since ARM netbooks and maybe even desktops are pretty inevitable, in time (which may be "right this moment", though not yet on a meaningful scale). But THAT would more than likely end Microsoft's judgement as a monopoly, given Apple's strong presence on the tablet and both Google and Apple on the smartphone. So that's not a risk to MS in pushing the full evil lever as they move into mobile (ok, move again into mobile, but this time they're serious about it, not just trying to kill off guys like Palm).
They're also doing the full Apple on software sales for ARM -- you can only buy ARM software through the Don't-Call-Me-Zune store. True of desktop Windows RT apps, too, but the "legacy" stuff (eg, the only actual reason for using Windows) remains as before, direct sales, developer/retailer to user.
It would be awfully nice for Linux to jump on this power grab. But the problem is simple... there is no "Linux", in the way there's an Apple, a Microsoft, an Amazon, a Google, etc. You need someone like Google to actually establish a common Linux platform... which, of course, they have: Android, the world's most popular Linux Distro. Google might stand a chance pushing for the desktop/laptop, but it's not clear they'd see any reason to do that. The TPTB in Linux are too established in their various distro wars, rallying against close source, or whatever, to ever establish a unified front that's attractive to Windows/Apple/Android scale application development.
Intel really wants to be in the mobile market. They aren't really competitive yet, but Intel has proven, repeatedly, that they have the cash, design, and process knowledge to eventually do anything they're interested in doing, even with x86.
The x86 phones out now are single core Atom, not really competitive with the better ARM phones on peak processing power. But they're more than adequate for the average user (they initial units were for the India market), and they actually do compare on power consumption running Android. A big part of that is the simple fact that the CPU isn't the place most phones burn most of their CPU -- it's the display. Eventually, they'll get their Atoms dual or quad core and competitive with ARM (which, of course, as the world's most popular CPU, isn't sitting still either).
The real question will be why any manufacturer wants to deal with a single x86 supplier versus a bunch (Qualcomm, TI, Samsung, Marvell, nVidia, Broadcomm, etc) on ARM, all competing against one another on price and features (even Samsung uses other companies' SOCs from device to device, despite making their own in-house chips). Intel would have to make it a pretty sweet deal, or find a vendor, as they occasionally have with the desktop (once Dell, currently Apple) who will agree to only use x86 chips in return for some special treatment.
Of course, we've seen how well Nokia's similar agreement with Microsoft on OS support has done them.
All of those Gingerbread phones will run new applications just dandy, even those written with ICS or Jelly Bean in mind, in most cases. No Windows 8 Phone applications will run on Windows 7 Phone, even on 7.8. That's the problem.
They can't really call 7.8 "WP8 Light"... it's going to look more like WP8, but it won't run WP8 applications. That's the critical problem here, and the main reason users aren't buying WP7 phones much anymore. Once Windows 8 ships, developers aren't going to be spending time looking at WP7 applications any longer.. not that they've done a great job of delivering and, even more, updating WP7 apps to date.
The VideoCore IV GPU in the Raspberry Pi is only about twice as fast as the PowerVR SGX543x2 GPU in the iPhone 4S. Intel's GMA3600/3650 GPUs (used only in Atom SOCs) are based on the slightly faster PowerVR SGX545. Their HD4000 and other desktop GPUs are substantially faster still. Sure, they're slow compared to AMD or nVidia desktop processors, but the VideoCore IV isn't close. Then again, the Raspberry Pi isn't supposed to be taking on either of those.... it's creating a new market.
Don't forget that the XScale ARM stuff (former StrongARM) was sold off to Marvell. Intel thus formally adopting the idea that x86 was the only answer to any computing problem (heck, they even tried to make it a GPU for awhile).
First product is the Lava Xolo X900, sold in India.
The problem with making this general: the x86 is still too power hungry for a dual-core phone, and most of the Android competition is moving to either quad core or to higher performance cores (QualComm Krait or ARM A15) which outperform the Atom, clock for clock, and yet still draw less power.
But Intel's clearly in the game, at least, with these latest Atoms. It's probably only another generation or two before they can tweak Android and the silicon to match performance against ARMs, at least well enough to sell in the USA. Then the only problem is selling major manufacturers on why they should pay twice as much for an x86 SOC versus an ARM. Will be fun to watch....
iPhone 5 rumored announcement date is September 12, with sales about ten days later. But that's just rumor until it's not, and these things have slipped before. The iPhone has lots of catching up to do. And it'll be interesting if, again, Apple's main hardware focus is on gaming, or whether they offer more general advances, like all those Android devices have been doing.
Well, actually, Elop very much did affect what's going on now. He's the one who chose to announce that Nokia was going Windows Phone only, nearly a year before they had any Windows Phone hardware to offer. That more than anything is what killed off their SymbianOS business so fast, and it was entirely unnecessary. At least from Nokia's business position... perhaps that's what Microsoft demanded in order to give Nokia their "special" position as Microsoft's partner in Windows 7 Phone. But it's not as if there were others lining up for that slot, anyway.
Nokia was sitting on about 4.9 billion euros at the end of 2011. Most analysts expect this to fall to 2.5-2.8 billion by the end of 2012, thanks to the total free fall of SymbianOS sales, restructuring costs, plus the lack of any real Windows 7 Phone market emerging to replace this. Yeah, that's still some real cash, but it's clear that, even with their various austerity measures, they aren't going to last at that rate.
It's not Nokia's fault that Windows Phone hasn't taken off. It is, however, Nokia's fault that they decided to kill off Linux and SymbianOS phones as a future business, by announcing their death nearly a full year before Nokia had any Windows 7 Phones to sell. And perhaps without even fully understanding that Microsoft wouldn't allow Windows 7 Phone to run on modern hardware. Sure, the Lumias are nicely made phones. They would have done pretty well if introduced in 2009 or early 2010. And sure, Microsoft's announcement that they wouldn't be upgradeable to Windows 8 Phone, and that Windows 8 Phone apps wouldn't run on Windows 7 Phone.. that certainly didn't do Nokia (or any other Windows 7 Phone business) any good.
But that's Microsoft for you. And something any company should have had the sense to think about before throwing the whole company down that particular rabbit hole.
Which slower CPUs have you run Windows 8 phone on so far?
Sure, Windows 7 Phone runs pretty snappy on the limited set of older CPUs (single core ARM) that it's allowed to run upon. But that's entirely because it's based on the ancient WinCE kernel -- it's actually a somewhat scaled down Windows Mobile with the updated Metro interface that ran well enough on Zunes.
Since end users won't be able to put Windows RT/Phone on anything, it's only going to be tested on devices it ships on. And the only developer system I've yet seen is based on a nVidia Tegra 3 SOC, about 4x faster than today's Windows 7 Phone hardware. This is pretty much the same thing running on the desktop, and I'm not convinced of the performance. Sure, given the UI is so dumbed down vs. iOS or Android, it may be snappy when unloaded. But it's still much the same Windows underneath... that same Windows that's right now barely acceptable on faster Netbooks (the ARM Cortex A9 and the Intel Atom cores have been roughly the same performance per clock, but the Atoms are clocked faster, and Windows has so far been more x86 optimized).
The PET was a much better design. And back then, it was all good... in fact, Chuck Peddle (inventor of the PET and the MOS 6502) actually helped Woz on some critical issues to get the Apple I up and running. But Peddle had a whole system approach, thus, all the other chips Commodore made to support the 6502. If you look at the Apple I/][ or may of the other early personal computers, you usually see a Microprocessor, some memory chips, and a vast sea of SSI and MSI parts from the TTL databook. If you look at early Commodore machines, you find all sorts of integration.
But there's a vast difference between "inspired by" and "copied". And even then, in layers. Steve Jobs saw the Xerox Alto and got inspired. Apple didn't really copy the UI, they actually left out some of the good stuff. And of course, the OS they created was vastly inferior, and the internals had nothing to do with the Xerox system. Microsoft did actually borrow some of Apple's stuff, but they's because they actually did exchange code. Most of Windows had nothing to do with MacOS, and the OS design was not something any experienced OS designer would have some up with (eg, the OS treating an application as a series of callbacks)... and that's not even counting all of the serialization Windows did in Win32 to prevent real multitasking.
Windows NT, on the other hand, was directly inspired by VAX/VMS (via Dave Cutler), but also ran a POSIX API layer from the get-go. But that was a standard by then, so no really a "copy" of UNIX anymore.
Well, hey, not always. Some companies, like Google, have realized correctly that you don't have any money. So they don't want your money, they want the information about you they can sell to someone who actually has money.
In theory, yeah, the government IS us, in a Democracy. But in practice, not so much. Your elected representative doesn't have to necessarily represent your interests, particularly when s/he's dependent on millions in campaign funds coming from somewhere else. All this person really needs to do to be re-elected is convince enough people s/he's doing a better job than the [usually lone] opponent. And otherwise stay out of trouble, keep away from sex with interns, that sort of thing. And even that seems fairly difficult for many professional politicos. But voters, as a class, are stupid... and that's even just counting those who do vote.
Bottom line is, with all this non-individual money in politics, don't expect politics to represent the individual. And while We the People in theory have the ability to completely stop all Corporate spending in politics, stop all Lobbying, reclassify non-individual donations as bribery, pretty much whatever we want... we're just not that organized. They are. Do the math.
Apple is big on gaming, yup. Casual gaming. They haven't taken on console or PC gamers yet, but they destroyed the portable market created by the PSP and the various Nintendos. They have a gaming center in the iTunes store, for X-Box/Sony style coordinated play, and they're adding Macs to this with the new MacOS release, even though no one plays games on the Mac, either:-)
This was all very intentional, and well followed up. The iPod Touch -- every kid has one, and that's where they all go in mobile gaming after the GameBoy, and Apple's way of hooking them into the iTunes infrastructure before anyone will pay for their smartphone. Look at the 3GS -- they boosted the CPU a bit, but the main improvement was a faster GPU... a good bit faster than this years' Windows 7 Phone flagship model, the Nokia Lumia 900. iPhone 4 comes along, a little bit faster CPU, nicer screen, big jump in GPU. The iPhone 4 comes along... they go dual core on the GPU, making it the fastest GPU on any smartphone. Again. Only for gaming.
So sure, fewer casual gamers go to Android, or maybe just more are sucked in by Apple's first class support of gaming on the platform. As well, there's only one new model at any given time, making the iPhone behave far more as a console would, than a PC-like environment like Android, where all sorts of different models co-exist as "new".
Hell with trackballs... I have one of those Spinner devices (a clone of the one in the "Tempest" game). With hardware counters, too, so it's good for as fast as you are. That's how all UIs should be controlled!
The problem isn't getting it to "just work" on any specific version of Linux. The problem with regular commercial development on Linux is getting a binary to run on every version of Linux. It's hard enough to take a non-trivial program at the source level and, knowing Linux, always get it to build correctly, without having to track down a dozen missing components. How to you deal with closed-source, and in such a way that your mom or grandpa could use it?
Until those questions become really silly ones to even ask, Microsoft doesn't need to fear Linux on the desktop.
I think you're right about Microsoft noticing it. They announced a price of $40 for most upgrades... that's cheap, by Microsoft standards, if not meeting Apple's latest at $20. Then again, Apple upgrades every year or so. They want to make it up in Metro app sales... the cheapest price will be $1.49, none of the $0.50 or $0.99 stuff that gets by in Google Play or iTunes.
What do OEMs do, though? Include Windows 8, which may not be wanted? Will they get to offer a Windows 7 upgrade, like the XP upgrades that often shipped as an optional setting in Windows 7? I just upgraded both kids' computers, and my Mom's, so no personal concerns here -- I'll be Windows 8 free, forever. We'll worry about the Windows 9 release in 2015. Which they'll probably push up if Windows 8 tanks.
Would be wonderful if the Linux Universe gets their act together to cease these years and make Linux a real commercial alternative. But I don't see that happening -- no central organization, and too many FOSS-or-die purists to ever see that happen. Unless Google got interested.... they seem to know a little about selling Linux to consumers:-)
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I have read a few L. R. Hubbard books -- always found them pretty schlocky. Thus, only the few, while I have read most if not everything from others of that era: Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, Zelazny, Ellison, etc.
As far as Scientology goes, there are plenty of rumors. It's pretty clear that Hubbard started with Dianetics. He lost control of Dianetics when he had to sell out interest in the business to pay back taxes. Oops. So why not turn it into a religion? That way, there are no taxes to pay, and as the figurehead, Hubbard couldn't be ousted from control.
Personally, I accept Ellison's account of the origins, since he's actually discussed it:
Scientology is bullshit! Man, I was there the night L. Ron Hubbard invented it, for Christ's sakes! ... We were sitting around one night... who else was there? Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Lester del Rey, and Ron Hubbard, who was making a penny a word, and had been for years. And he said "This bullshit's got to stop!" He says, "I gotta get money." He says, "I want to get rich". And somebody said, "why don't you invent a new religion? They're always big." We were clowning! You know, "Become Elmer Gantry! You'll make a fortune!" He says, "I'm going to do it." Full transcript here: http://www.islets.net/faq.html#Anchor-Was-47857
Well, back in the day, I had to walk to work, uphill, in BOTH DIRECTION!!! Ok, but on topic... we had the SVr4 version of AmigaUNIX happy to not only run, but run with X and everything, in 4MB of RAM. The earlier version, with Rico Tudor's far more efficient windowing system, was happy in 2MB.
Not to suggest there's a huge reason to want to run with such small amounts of RAM. Just that, historically, *NIX itself wasn't all THAT bloated.
There have been a whole history of multimedia-friendly possible enhancements to Linux that have been rejected, as they caused server performance to drop by 0.01% or some-such. Ok, maybe an exaggeration.. but remember back when nearly the entire kernel was locked against preemptive interrupts, just a few tiny windows to recognize such when in kernel mode? The fixes had been around for some years, but only got rolled in as part of the update to get SMP working properly (or at all... it's been some decades). Quite a bit of what made BeOS/Haiku great involve relatively huge numbers of preemptive, lightweight threads. In fact, a "process" in Linux speak is called a Team in BeOS... that's a Team of Threads, of course. Very much the opposite of how Linux/UNIX have worked through most of their history... Linux didn't even have preemptive lightweight threads throughout most of its existence. The last time I tried to do asynchronous I/O (kind of a built-in in AmigaOS and commonplace in BeOS), it was a real headache in Linux (ok, this was 2008, maybe it's better supported today).
I'm not sure you can make Linux much like BeOS and still keep it Linux. And that's before you even get to the relatively nice and (for the day) innovative C++ framework for everything.
The Amiga was at least a bit of inspiration to the original BeOS team (not to mention a few programmers who had worked on some Amiga projects). The purpose in the Amiga's day was pretty basic: the limits of graphic chips required trade-offs between color depth and color resolution.
Of course, that goes away with modern graphics devices, which were at least on the way when Be was introduced in 1985. There are other considerations, though. For example, in video, you have an advantage if you match your display to the actual video mode (for editing purposes), rather than resampling via a frame buffer (which can hide things). But it's definitely less useful in modern times than it once was. And of course, you can kinda-sorta so this in Windows since DirectX, at least per app if not per virtual screen.
Right.
One big one in BeOS that's kind of the opposite of UNIX/Linux -- BeOS is MASSIVELY multithreaded. Like the AmigaOS that to an extent inspired it, only moreso. Pre-emptive threads (which didn't even exist in Linux until relatively recently) were an everyday programming construct, like "function" or "loop", and used everywhere. This tied in with BeOS being intended primarily for multithreaded systems -- the original BeBox was a dual processor PPC603 machine.
The original Be file system was very interesting -- it was basically a database, not a filesystem. Performance was pretty bad, though, so this was replaced by the attribute-heavy file system that's in the current HaikuOS. Not quite as elegant, but way more functionally practical.
Another very cool aspect was a unified timing architecture, which made BeOS the very best OS for multimedia work in its day. Sadly, this and various other things were evolving, and while a number of major players, particularly in music software, had been working on Be applications, there was a big wait for some of these things to be finished in R5. Which they were -- pretty much at the same time Be, Inc. announced BeIA (which was never going to function, simply because x86 wasn't useful in many embedded platforms at the time) and committed Seppuku.
The cellular baseband runs on an separate, smaller, locked-down ARM processor. Not on the application processor.
You can hurt the market all you want, as long as you're small enough to not to any serious damage. Apple at 10% (US.... 5% globally) certainly isn't large enough to cause industry-wide problems, at least in the PC market. They have a large but not commanding piece of the smartphone market, and a very large piece of the "big smartphone without a voice modem" market... if that's really a different thing, the tablet.
They don't have a recognized monopoly on anything, so they run under a different set of rules. Doesn't mean they never will be judged a monopoly, but it does take awhile for legal watchdogs to recognize the emergence of new markets. And some wisdom to decide if they're actually the same, or different, markets. Does the use of an ARM processor versus an x86 really make the iPad NOT a personal computer, but something totally different? If so, maybe Apple's closer to a monopoly than they were, but still not large enough to have full on monopoly powers. If ARM vs. x86 doesn't matter, then Apple's only managed to perhaps un-monopoly Microsoft.
And of course, that's precisely what Microsoft is banking on, in the ARM market. They're very aware that the various restrictions and monopoly pronouncements all mention "x86".... that's how the judges ruled it. So they have the "be evil" lever set to Apple mode, and beyond, when it comes to ARM products. And it's hard to imagine they won't get away with it.... though there's that whole issue of actually selling any they still have to deal with.
Actually, that's kind of the trick that lets Microsoft treat ARM differently. Despite the major competition (Apple) not being on x86 PCs at the time Microsoft was judged to be a monopoly, the judge limited all or most of the restrictions on Microsoft to x86 PCs. So they have to play "nice" on the x86 market. That means still supporting the PC as something more or less open (sure, locked-down UEFI BIOS by default, but they _allow_ OEMs to offer a disable function).
On ARM, it's a different story. The OS only goes to the OEM, not to the end user. Period. No way to disable secure boot. Hidden APIs out the wazoo (everyone but Microsoft is required to only use WinRT API calls on ARM; Microsoft gets to use all of Win32 as well). Bundled web browser (IE) with no possible replacement (3rd party web browsers are either built on top of IE components, or they don't fully function -- you can't write a working Javascript JIT, apparently, in WinRT-only). And it's anyone guess if any Windows RT/Windows 8 Phone devices will be upgradeable to Windows 9... probably not, based on recent historical behavior.
All of this happens just dandy without even considering Apple. Now, of course, even without considering Apple, Microsoft may still be seen as abusing monopoly powers. They got called on the web browser thing -- the crime of using monopoly powers in one market (x86 PCs) to conquer another (web browsers), but it was only after-the-fact... they had all but killed Netscape before anything was done about it. I assume they're looking at that same issue being alive as they take on the ARM/mobile market.
Of course, it might well be reasonable to believe that there's no important distinction between "x86" and "ARM" as far as markets are considered.... particularly since ARM netbooks and maybe even desktops are pretty inevitable, in time (which may be "right this moment", though not yet on a meaningful scale). But THAT would more than likely end Microsoft's judgement as a monopoly, given Apple's strong presence on the tablet and both Google and Apple on the smartphone. So that's not a risk to MS in pushing the full evil lever as they move into mobile (ok, move again into mobile, but this time they're serious about it, not just trying to kill off guys like Palm).
They're also doing the full Apple on software sales for ARM -- you can only buy ARM software through the Don't-Call-Me-Zune store. True of desktop Windows RT apps, too, but the "legacy" stuff (eg, the only actual reason for using Windows) remains as before, direct sales, developer/retailer to user.
It would be awfully nice for Linux to jump on this power grab. But the problem is simple... there is no "Linux", in the way there's an Apple, a Microsoft, an Amazon, a Google, etc. You need someone like Google to actually establish a common Linux platform... which, of course, they have: Android, the world's most popular Linux Distro. Google might stand a chance pushing for the desktop/laptop, but it's not clear they'd see any reason to do that. The TPTB in Linux are too established in their various distro wars, rallying against close source, or whatever, to ever establish a unified front that's attractive to Windows/Apple/Android scale application development.
Intel really wants to be in the mobile market. They aren't really competitive yet, but Intel has proven, repeatedly, that they have the cash, design, and process knowledge to eventually do anything they're interested in doing, even with x86.
The x86 phones out now are single core Atom, not really competitive with the better ARM phones on peak processing power. But they're more than adequate for the average user (they initial units were for the India market), and they actually do compare on power consumption running Android. A big part of that is the simple fact that the CPU isn't the place most phones burn most of their CPU -- it's the display. Eventually, they'll get their Atoms dual or quad core and competitive with ARM (which, of course, as the world's most popular CPU, isn't sitting still either).
The real question will be why any manufacturer wants to deal with a single x86 supplier versus a bunch (Qualcomm, TI, Samsung, Marvell, nVidia, Broadcomm, etc) on ARM, all competing against one another on price and features (even Samsung uses other companies' SOCs from device to device, despite making their own in-house chips). Intel would have to make it a pretty sweet deal, or find a vendor, as they occasionally have with the desktop (once Dell, currently Apple) who will agree to only use x86 chips in return for some special treatment.
Of course, we've seen how well Nokia's similar agreement with Microsoft on OS support has done them.
All of those Gingerbread phones will run new applications just dandy, even those written with ICS or Jelly Bean in mind, in most cases. No Windows 8 Phone applications will run on Windows 7 Phone, even on 7.8. That's the problem.
They can't really call 7.8 "WP8 Light"... it's going to look more like WP8, but it won't run WP8 applications. That's the critical problem here, and the main reason users aren't buying WP7 phones much anymore. Once Windows 8 ships, developers aren't going to be spending time looking at WP7 applications any longer.. not that they've done a great job of delivering and, even more, updating WP7 apps to date.
The VideoCore IV GPU in the Raspberry Pi is only about twice as fast as the PowerVR SGX543x2 GPU in the iPhone 4S. Intel's GMA3600/3650 GPUs (used only in Atom SOCs) are based on the slightly faster PowerVR SGX545. Their HD4000 and other desktop GPUs are substantially faster still. Sure, they're slow compared to AMD or nVidia desktop processors, but the VideoCore IV isn't close. Then again, the Raspberry Pi isn't supposed to be taking on either of those.... it's creating a new market.
Don't forget that the XScale ARM stuff (former StrongARM) was sold off to Marvell. Intel thus formally adopting the idea that x86 was the only answer to any computing problem (heck, they even tried to make it a GPU for awhile).
Huh.... Android has always run on x86. At my previous job, we routinely ran it on netbooks as development platforms. Intel has their own resource page about it, of course: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-atom-x86-image-for-android-ice-cream-sandwich-installation-instructions-manually/
First product is the Lava Xolo X900, sold in India.
The problem with making this general: the x86 is still too power hungry for a dual-core phone, and most of the Android competition is moving to either quad core or to higher performance cores (QualComm Krait or ARM A15) which outperform the Atom, clock for clock, and yet still draw less power.
But Intel's clearly in the game, at least, with these latest Atoms. It's probably only another generation or two before they can tweak Android and the silicon to match performance against ARMs, at least well enough to sell in the USA. Then the only problem is selling major manufacturers on why they should pay twice as much for an x86 SOC versus an ARM. Will be fun to watch....
iPhone 5 rumored announcement date is September 12, with sales about ten days later. But that's just rumor until it's not, and these things have slipped before. The iPhone has lots of catching up to do. And it'll be interesting if, again, Apple's main hardware focus is on gaming, or whether they offer more general advances, like all those Android devices have been doing.
Well, actually, Elop very much did affect what's going on now. He's the one who chose to announce that Nokia was going Windows Phone only, nearly a year before they had any Windows Phone hardware to offer. That more than anything is what killed off their SymbianOS business so fast, and it was entirely unnecessary. At least from Nokia's business position... perhaps that's what Microsoft demanded in order to give Nokia their "special" position as Microsoft's partner in Windows 7 Phone. But it's not as if there were others lining up for that slot, anyway.
Nokia was sitting on about 4.9 billion euros at the end of 2011. Most analysts expect this to fall to 2.5-2.8 billion by the end of 2012, thanks to the total free fall of SymbianOS sales, restructuring costs, plus the lack of any real Windows 7 Phone market emerging to replace this. Yeah, that's still some real cash, but it's clear that, even with their various austerity measures, they aren't going to last at that rate.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/us-nokia-cash-idUSBRE84H0BD20120518
http://www.zdnet.com/fitch-downgrades-nokia-debt-rating-as-cash-becomes-focus-7000001305/
It's not Nokia's fault that Windows Phone hasn't taken off. It is, however, Nokia's fault that they decided to kill off Linux and SymbianOS phones as a future business, by announcing their death nearly a full year before Nokia had any Windows 7 Phones to sell. And perhaps without even fully understanding that Microsoft wouldn't allow Windows 7 Phone to run on modern hardware. Sure, the Lumias are nicely made phones. They would have done pretty well if introduced in 2009 or early 2010. And sure, Microsoft's announcement that they wouldn't be upgradeable to Windows 8 Phone, and that Windows 8 Phone apps wouldn't run on Windows 7 Phone.. that certainly didn't do Nokia (or any other Windows 7 Phone business) any good.
But that's Microsoft for you. And something any company should have had the sense to think about before throwing the whole company down that particular rabbit hole.
Which slower CPUs have you run Windows 8 phone on so far?
Sure, Windows 7 Phone runs pretty snappy on the limited set of older CPUs (single core ARM) that it's allowed to run upon. But that's entirely because it's based on the ancient WinCE kernel -- it's actually a somewhat scaled down Windows Mobile with the updated Metro interface that ran well enough on Zunes.
Since end users won't be able to put Windows RT/Phone on anything, it's only going to be tested on devices it ships on. And the only developer system I've yet seen is based on a nVidia Tegra 3 SOC, about 4x faster than today's Windows 7 Phone hardware. This is pretty much the same thing running on the desktop, and I'm not convinced of the performance. Sure, given the UI is so dumbed down vs. iOS or Android, it may be snappy when unloaded. But it's still much the same Windows underneath... that same Windows that's right now barely acceptable on faster Netbooks (the ARM Cortex A9 and the Intel Atom cores have been roughly the same performance per clock, but the Atoms are clocked faster, and Windows has so far been more x86 optimized).
The PET was a much better design. And back then, it was all good... in fact, Chuck Peddle (inventor of the PET and the MOS 6502) actually helped Woz on some critical issues to get the Apple I up and running. But Peddle had a whole system approach, thus, all the other chips Commodore made to support the 6502. If you look at the Apple I/][ or may of the other early personal computers, you usually see a Microprocessor, some memory chips, and a vast sea of SSI and MSI parts from the TTL databook. If you look at early Commodore machines, you find all sorts of integration.
But there's a vast difference between "inspired by" and "copied". And even then, in layers. Steve Jobs saw the Xerox Alto and got inspired. Apple didn't really copy the UI, they actually left out some of the good stuff. And of course, the OS they created was vastly inferior, and the internals had nothing to do with the Xerox system. Microsoft did actually borrow some of Apple's stuff, but they's because they actually did exchange code. Most of Windows had nothing to do with MacOS, and the OS design was not something any experienced OS designer would have some up with (eg, the OS treating an application as a series of callbacks)... and that's not even counting all of the serialization Windows did in Win32 to prevent real multitasking.
Windows NT, on the other hand, was directly inspired by VAX/VMS (via Dave Cutler), but also ran a POSIX API layer from the get-go. But that was a standard by then, so no really a "copy" of UNIX anymore.
Well, hey, not always. Some companies, like Google, have realized correctly that you don't have any money. So they don't want your money, they want the information about you they can sell to someone who actually has money.
In theory, yeah, the government IS us, in a Democracy. But in practice, not so much. Your elected representative doesn't have to necessarily represent your interests, particularly when s/he's dependent on millions in campaign funds coming from somewhere else. All this person really needs to do to be re-elected is convince enough people s/he's doing a better job than the [usually lone] opponent. And otherwise stay out of trouble, keep away from sex with interns, that sort of thing. And even that seems fairly difficult for many professional politicos. But voters, as a class, are stupid... and that's even just counting those who do vote.
Bottom line is, with all this non-individual money in politics, don't expect politics to represent the individual. And while We the People in theory have the ability to completely stop all Corporate spending in politics, stop all Lobbying, reclassify non-individual donations as bribery, pretty much whatever we want ... we're just not that organized. They are. Do the math.
Apple is big on gaming, yup. Casual gaming. They haven't taken on console or PC gamers yet, but they destroyed the portable market created by the PSP and the various Nintendos. They have a gaming center in the iTunes store, for X-Box/Sony style coordinated play, and they're adding Macs to this with the new MacOS release, even though no one plays games on the Mac, either :-)
This was all very intentional, and well followed up. The iPod Touch -- every kid has one, and that's where they all go in mobile gaming after the GameBoy, and Apple's way of hooking them into the iTunes infrastructure before anyone will pay for their smartphone. Look at the 3GS -- they boosted the CPU a bit, but the main improvement was a faster GPU... a good bit faster than this years' Windows 7 Phone flagship model, the Nokia Lumia 900. iPhone 4 comes along, a little bit faster CPU, nicer screen, big jump in GPU. The iPhone 4 comes along... they go dual core on the GPU, making it the fastest GPU on any smartphone. Again. Only for gaming.
So sure, fewer casual gamers go to Android, or maybe just more are sucked in by Apple's first class support of gaming on the platform. As well, there's only one new model at any given time, making the iPhone behave far more as a console would, than a PC-like environment like Android, where all sorts of different models co-exist as "new".
Hell with trackballs... I have one of those Spinner devices (a clone of the one in the "Tempest" game). With hardware counters, too, so it's good for as fast as you are. That's how all UIs should be controlled!
The problem isn't getting it to "just work" on any specific version of Linux. The problem with regular commercial development on Linux is getting a binary to run on every version of Linux. It's hard enough to take a non-trivial program at the source level and, knowing Linux, always get it to build correctly, without having to track down a dozen missing components. How to you deal with closed-source, and in such a way that your mom or grandpa could use it?
Until those questions become really silly ones to even ask, Microsoft doesn't need to fear Linux on the desktop.
I think you're right about Microsoft noticing it. They announced a price of $40 for most upgrades... that's cheap, by Microsoft standards, if not meeting Apple's latest at $20. Then again, Apple upgrades every year or so. They want to make it up in Metro app sales... the cheapest price will be $1.49, none of the $0.50 or $0.99 stuff that gets by in Google Play or iTunes.
What do OEMs do, though? Include Windows 8, which may not be wanted? Will they get to offer a Windows 7 upgrade, like the XP upgrades that often shipped as an optional setting in Windows 7? I just upgraded both kids' computers, and my Mom's, so no personal concerns here -- I'll be Windows 8 free, forever. We'll worry about the Windows 9 release in 2015. Which they'll probably push up if Windows 8 tanks.
Would be wonderful if the Linux Universe gets their act together to cease these years and make Linux a real commercial alternative. But I don't see that happening -- no central organization, and too many FOSS-or-die purists to ever see that happen. Unless Google got interested.... they seem to know a little about selling Linux to consumers :-)