Yes porting to the new platform is easier than it was back in WinCE days. But it is still a new platform. From firsthand experience I can tell you that the X86 to AMD64 switch on Windows was not zero work. Code had to be modified to work on the new 64 bit Windows, and the transition STILL isn't fully done now over a decade later. For some, it will be a simple recompile, but not everyone. From an IT department standpoint, you have to track it as a separate platform for your vendors to support, basically the same as WinCE, which kills its usefulness.
It usually not as dry cut as you suggest. Usually this type of software acts as glue bridging two or more 3rd party databases. For example, grabbing data from a SAP database and loading it to Peoplesoft to calculate payroll, maybe with an Excel export thrown in for good measure. Typically this involves invoking 3rd party APIs through COM or something. Unless every single one of those 3rd party components is recompiled you have to run the whole stack on x86 emulation.
These "64 bit apps" are not the same 64 bit apps that CIOs are asking MSFT about. The 64 bit apps that everyone cares about are the AMD64 ones. The fact that you can recompile to ARM64 is nice I guess but it's basically as useful as WinCE was back in the day. You don't get the broad ecosystem of custom made business process automation software that makes Windows legendary.
It is bad that the first thing I thought of while reading the headline was teenagers skipping out of their first class after lunch to go eat at Subway the restaurant?
In Economics, this problem is often referred to as the tragedy of the commons. The fact that only a fixed amount of bitcoin is released regardless of the amount of work done creates this problem by design. It is one of the fundamental problems with the design of cryptocurrencies.
Indeed, no one asked for this except Larry Ellison. Make no mistake, Oracle doesn't do a damn thing unless it serves as a way to screw their customers harder than they did before. You can be sure that these every 6 month releases introduce many more frequent opportunities to add small subtle "bugs" that just so happen to break popular enterprise software packages. This is nothing more than a shameless attempt to charge you through the teeth for the JRE. The LTS JRE that is actually able to run your software will come with one of the infamous mandatory support contracts and exorbitant license fees. Java and the JRE should be considered harmful by everyone ever since the Android lawsuit.
Keep in mind that the only thing that is really happening here is that only a fixed amount of electricity is available each month at subsidized pricing rates. The only change here is that crypto miners get lowest priority of subsidized power. For example, lets say that every month the city gets 40 gWh of subsidized electricity from their contract with the power company that permitted the construction of a hydro dam within city limits. On a given month, lets say the residential and non-crypto mining industrial buildings in the city use 35 gWh of power, and the miners use 15 gWh. In this scenario, the miners will get 5 gWh at the subsidized rates, but will have to pay regular price on the remaining 10 gWh past the city's quota of subsidized power.
Seems pretty reasonable to me... the miners still get access to some cheap power, so its better than what they would get elsewhere, but at the same time the consequences of their excessive power consumption doesn't end up forcing the residential customers of the city to buy a percentage of their power at full price, which was what happened previously.
So what happens when someone who is using VoIP telephone service attempts to contact emergency medical, fire, or police services? Your SOL that day I guess? This is the problem with trying to legislate morality.
The casino is still open everyone! Bitcoin's valuation is still swinging by 10% every week, guess which way it goes next week and you too can be a winner! Now, we've put a poker table in your traditional brokerage account, it's never been so convenient to get rich quick!
The smartphone industry is starting to mature. Smartphones have gotten to the point where the delta between a 4 year old smartphone and a brand new one isn't very big anymore. The same was not the case 4 years ago. In a way, the smartphone is going the the way of the PC, 4 year old models are "good enough" so the 2 year upgrade cycle is going away, becoming more like every 6 years.
The natural consequence that is a smaller number of higher quality, higher end, and more expensive phones will be made, and will be used for 6 years before replacement. The same thing is happening with the PC, where slim metal cases and $1000+ prices are now the norm, the cheap glossy plastic $400 PC that gets thrown out every 3 years isn't selling anymore. Overall I think its a good thing that smartphones are starting to see longer refresh cycles, it will be better for the environment, and hopefully they won't depreciate quite so quickly.
I would be surprised if X64 support ever sees the light of day. I'm sure both Intel and AMD have many patents that make implementation of X64 emulators impossible without running afowl and infringing. AMD might be willing to license to MSFT but given Intel's post, Intel is definitely not and is ready to sue. They are lucky that the 386 and older are not patented, that the only reason 32 bit support is possible. The patents start at MMX.
Agreed that Uber Greyball is a legit example, unfortunately Gates is talking about encryption. From TFA: "When I said he seemed to be referring to being able to unlock an iPhone, Gates replied: "There's no question of ability; it's the question of willingness.""
This is nothing more than Gates taking pot shots at Apple, Microsoft's main rival. Hoping he can gall some prosecutor somewhere in to giving Apple the gift of an anti-trust lawsuit, just like he experienced long ago. Good to see that Gate's colors have not changed.
Supporting and doing quality assurance on multiple OS targets is totally free from an engineering and testing standpoint.
... except for the fact that Office 365 subscribers will be able to run Office 2019 on Win7. Since MSFT is already doing that engineering work for Office 365 this comes down to nothing more than an artificial limitation; intended to herd their customers in the direction that MSFT wants them to go.
Sure the DoD has the money, but even if they did fund a CPU design they never, ever would release it as open source. It would remain a classified component of one of the DoDs weapons systems. In fact, the DoD has funded specialized ASIC development, typically for stuff only they would ever need... stuff like ultra high frequency ADC's that can digitize the signal from an enemy radar or other things they can't buy commercially.
ARM (and AMD) may be susceptible to the lesser of the two [evil] exploits... but the impact for that second one is considerably less than Meltdown (which is specific to Intel only).
That's incorrect. Per Apple's statement, all of Apple's ARM designs except the watch are vulnerable to meltdown. Also, the Cortex-A75 is vulnerable to meltdown. I agree that the initial PR spin from Intel was pretty ridiculous, but the good news is it looks like some engineers at Intel released a actual technical response. Reading through the whitepaper, it looks like Intel has figured out how to patch both meltdown and spectre on existing chips using a combination of microcode updates and OS updates.
Considering that Win7 only has 2 more years of security patches, I suspect most people like myself are just migrating because it will be mandatory pretty soon and don't want to wait until the last minute.
Combine that with a lot of new systems are incapable of booting Win 7 (Win 7 can't boot from NVMe SSDs, and even with UEFI boot Win 7 needs legacy BIOS/CSM because it uses INT10 VGA BIOS calls... a lot of new systems don't have this in firmware anymore.) And even if it would work MSFT won't allow Win7 to be used on any new systems and don't forget their dubious upgrade tactics.
Batteries are one of those things that Microsoft has a tough time getting right in their hardware products. The Xbox One Controller "Play and Charge Kit" absolutely sucks. The rechargeable battery it comes with doesn't charge after about 3 months, giving you ~20min of play time before the controller dies. Might as well keep using AA batteries and not waste the money. Same issue with the Xbox 360 play and charge kits. Back in the day the Zune had battery issues as well. I guess we can add the Surface Book 2 to the rooster of Microsoft doing batteries wrong.
I agree that sand boxing of USB driver is a good thing... but libusb already implements this in a cross platform way. Doing it in the web browser is unnecessary. The only reason to put this in the browser is because you are Google and trying to push the ChromeOS thing.
No doubt about it, wasm has all the problems that all other prior attempts at sand-boxing binary blobs of code in the web browser have had. You hit the major ones.
Here's the thing though, the web circa 10 years ago had 3 competing mechanisms to implement sand-boxed binary blobs:
1. Adobe Flash
2. Java
3. Silverlight
Prototypes for Google NaCl were starting to show up around this time too.
All of these had their own sand-box implementation, and they were not sand-boxed themselves, so the surface area for attack was much higher. So HTML 5 tried to do away with that, but then PNaCl and asm.js show us that no matter how hard we try to get rid of binary blobs of code on the web, someone implements it anyway. So, given that there have been persistent attempts by the various large web players for the past 20 years to build binary code blobs in to web pages, and that there is no sign of it slowing down, the most sensible compromise to me is basically what wasm has become... a standardized mechanism for building those binary blobs that can be directly integrated in to the browser.
It does have its problems like you note, but its better that we only have 1 standardized sand-box implementation, and that sand-box implementation is bundled in with a bunch of other high risk code as part of the browser package, which is easy to keep vigilantly updated. Even before wasm, gone were the days of the web browser being a simple document layout renderer. The web browser is basically a visualized operating system... Google has taken this to IHMO a very dangerous extreme, see the Javascript USB API for example. The web browser is basically a run time for USB device drivers at this point. To me wasm seems like the inevitable end result of the path that HTML 5 started us down.
Why? Until wasm showed up, the only language that browsers supported was Javascript, which has a GC. Wasm runs in the same browser sandbox as JavaScript, so there is already a GC present. In the web browser, you are relying on a GC whether you like it or not.
In general, yes you can. One important thing to keep in mind is that not all libraries are available in wasm. Obviously win32 won't work, and most C++ GUI toolkits have not been posted to render to a HTML 5 canvas yet.
Another big hole IMHO is there is no native support for garbage collected languages yet. The thing that excites me the most about this is once GC is enabled we could potentially see a Python implementation that runs in the browser (without having to recompile CPython to wasm, which would be huge and slow.) You could also do stuff like compile Java/C#/Adobe Flash directly to wasm and completely eliminate the terrible Flash/Silverlight/Java plugins.
Yeah the stock market is full of rampant speculation, but I think Wall Street is probably has it right. I know I will be modded down for pointing this out but Coffee Lakeissoldouteverywhere, Ryzenisnot. Although Ryzen has made AMD competitive, most PC builders are still buying Intel.
Given that it took Intel 8 months to add Coffee Lake in between Kaby Lake and Cannon Lake and it took AMD 5 years to develop Ryzen... the situation that happened between 2003-2006 when AMD was the technically superior choice is unlikely to ever happen again. The good news is that Ryzen has made AMD just slightly profitable again, so at least they are no longer in danger of imminent bankruptcy.
The PC numbers on Gartner's website look more rosy for the PC than the ones in ZDNet's article. Also, here is an important snippet from Gartner's website that ZDNet conveniently did not include in their screenshot:
Note: The Ultramobile (Premium) category includes devices such as Microsoft Windows 10 Intel x86 products and Apple MacBook Air.
The Ultramobile (Premium) category is growing 11% this year. I would count x86 devices running Win10 or macOS as part of the PC market. Combine the "Traditional PC" category with the "Ultramobile (Premium)" category and suddenly the PC market looks flat in total volume shipments year over year. Combine that with the fact that the average selling price for the "Ultramobile (Premium)" category is probably higher than the stuff they count as "Traditional PC" and 2017 is actually looking like a pretty good year for PC OEMs.
A better headline would be "Cheap glossy plastic laptops decline, thin and light metal body laptops on the rise."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes porting to the new platform is easier than it was back in WinCE days. But it is still a new platform. From firsthand experience I can tell you that the X86 to AMD64 switch on Windows was not zero work. Code had to be modified to work on the new 64 bit Windows, and the transition STILL isn't fully done now over a decade later. For some, it will be a simple recompile, but not everyone. From an IT department standpoint, you have to track it as a separate platform for your vendors to support, basically the same as WinCE, which kills its usefulness.
It usually not as dry cut as you suggest. Usually this type of software acts as glue bridging two or more 3rd party databases. For example, grabbing data from a SAP database and loading it to Peoplesoft to calculate payroll, maybe with an Excel export thrown in for good measure. Typically this involves invoking 3rd party APIs through COM or something. Unless every single one of those 3rd party components is recompiled you have to run the whole stack on x86 emulation.
These "64 bit apps" are not the same 64 bit apps that CIOs are asking MSFT about. The 64 bit apps that everyone cares about are the AMD64 ones. The fact that you can recompile to ARM64 is nice I guess but it's basically as useful as WinCE was back in the day. You don't get the broad ecosystem of custom made business process automation software that makes Windows legendary.
It is bad that the first thing I thought of while reading the headline was teenagers skipping out of their first class after lunch to go eat at Subway the restaurant?
In Economics, this problem is often referred to as the tragedy of the commons. The fact that only a fixed amount of bitcoin is released regardless of the amount of work done creates this problem by design. It is one of the fundamental problems with the design of cryptocurrencies.
Indeed, no one asked for this except Larry Ellison. Make no mistake, Oracle doesn't do a damn thing unless it serves as a way to screw their customers harder than they did before. You can be sure that these every 6 month releases introduce many more frequent opportunities to add small subtle "bugs" that just so happen to break popular enterprise software packages. This is nothing more than a shameless attempt to charge you through the teeth for the JRE. The LTS JRE that is actually able to run your software will come with one of the infamous mandatory support contracts and exorbitant license fees. Java and the JRE should be considered harmful by everyone ever since the Android lawsuit.
Anyone want to bet that Dorsey bought a bunch of Bitcoin before releasing this statement hoping to make a quick buck?
Keep in mind that the only thing that is really happening here is that only a fixed amount of electricity is available each month at subsidized pricing rates. The only change here is that crypto miners get lowest priority of subsidized power. For example, lets say that every month the city gets 40 gWh of subsidized electricity from their contract with the power company that permitted the construction of a hydro dam within city limits. On a given month, lets say the residential and non-crypto mining industrial buildings in the city use 35 gWh of power, and the miners use 15 gWh. In this scenario, the miners will get 5 gWh at the subsidized rates, but will have to pay regular price on the remaining 10 gWh past the city's quota of subsidized power.
Seems pretty reasonable to me... the miners still get access to some cheap power, so its better than what they would get elsewhere, but at the same time the consequences of their excessive power consumption doesn't end up forcing the residential customers of the city to buy a percentage of their power at full price, which was what happened previously.
So what happens when someone who is using VoIP telephone service attempts to contact emergency medical, fire, or police services? Your SOL that day I guess? This is the problem with trying to legislate morality.
The casino is still open everyone! Bitcoin's valuation is still swinging by 10% every week, guess which way it goes next week and you too can be a winner! Now, we've put a poker table in your traditional brokerage account, it's never been so convenient to get rich quick!
The smartphone industry is starting to mature. Smartphones have gotten to the point where the delta between a 4 year old smartphone and a brand new one isn't very big anymore. The same was not the case 4 years ago. In a way, the smartphone is going the the way of the PC, 4 year old models are "good enough" so the 2 year upgrade cycle is going away, becoming more like every 6 years.
The natural consequence that is a smaller number of higher quality, higher end, and more expensive phones will be made, and will be used for 6 years before replacement. The same thing is happening with the PC, where slim metal cases and $1000+ prices are now the norm, the cheap glossy plastic $400 PC that gets thrown out every 3 years isn't selling anymore. Overall I think its a good thing that smartphones are starting to see longer refresh cycles, it will be better for the environment, and hopefully they won't depreciate quite so quickly.
I would be surprised if X64 support ever sees the light of day. I'm sure both Intel and AMD have many patents that make implementation of X64 emulators impossible without running afowl and infringing. AMD might be willing to license to MSFT but given Intel's post, Intel is definitely not and is ready to sue. They are lucky that the 386 and older are not patented, that the only reason 32 bit support is possible. The patents start at MMX.
Agreed that Uber Greyball is a legit example, unfortunately Gates is talking about encryption. From TFA: "When I said he seemed to be referring to being able to unlock an iPhone, Gates replied: "There's no question of ability; it's the question of willingness.""
This is nothing more than Gates taking pot shots at Apple, Microsoft's main rival. Hoping he can gall some prosecutor somewhere in to giving Apple the gift of an anti-trust lawsuit, just like he experienced long ago. Good to see that Gate's colors have not changed.
Supporting and doing quality assurance on multiple OS targets is totally free from an engineering and testing standpoint.
... except for the fact that Office 365 subscribers will be able to run Office 2019 on Win7. Since MSFT is already doing that engineering work for Office 365 this comes down to nothing more than an artificial limitation; intended to herd their customers in the direction that MSFT wants them to go.
Sure the DoD has the money, but even if they did fund a CPU design they never, ever would release it as open source. It would remain a classified component of one of the DoDs weapons systems. In fact, the DoD has funded specialized ASIC development, typically for stuff only they would ever need... stuff like ultra high frequency ADC's that can digitize the signal from an enemy radar or other things they can't buy commercially.
ARM (and AMD) may be susceptible to the lesser of the two [evil] exploits... but the impact for that second one is considerably less than Meltdown (which is specific to Intel only).
That's incorrect. Per Apple's statement, all of Apple's ARM designs except the watch are vulnerable to meltdown. Also, the Cortex-A75 is vulnerable to meltdown. I agree that the initial PR spin from Intel was pretty ridiculous, but the good news is it looks like some engineers at Intel released a actual technical response. Reading through the whitepaper, it looks like Intel has figured out how to patch both meltdown and spectre on existing chips using a combination of microcode updates and OS updates.
Considering that Win7 only has 2 more years of security patches, I suspect most people like myself are just migrating because it will be mandatory pretty soon and don't want to wait until the last minute.
Combine that with a lot of new systems are incapable of booting Win 7 (Win 7 can't boot from NVMe SSDs, and even with UEFI boot Win 7 needs legacy BIOS/CSM because it uses INT10 VGA BIOS calls... a lot of new systems don't have this in firmware anymore.) And even if it would work MSFT won't allow Win7 to be used on any new systems and don't forget their dubious upgrade tactics.
Batteries are one of those things that Microsoft has a tough time getting right in their hardware products. The Xbox One Controller "Play and Charge Kit" absolutely sucks. The rechargeable battery it comes with doesn't charge after about 3 months, giving you ~20min of play time before the controller dies. Might as well keep using AA batteries and not waste the money. Same issue with the Xbox 360 play and charge kits. Back in the day the Zune had battery issues as well. I guess we can add the Surface Book 2 to the rooster of Microsoft doing batteries wrong.
I agree that sand boxing of USB driver is a good thing... but libusb already implements this in a cross platform way. Doing it in the web browser is unnecessary. The only reason to put this in the browser is because you are Google and trying to push the ChromeOS thing.
No doubt about it, wasm has all the problems that all other prior attempts at sand-boxing binary blobs of code in the web browser have had. You hit the major ones.
Here's the thing though, the web circa 10 years ago had 3 competing mechanisms to implement sand-boxed binary blobs:
1. Adobe Flash
2. Java
3. Silverlight
Prototypes for Google NaCl were starting to show up around this time too.
All of these had their own sand-box implementation, and they were not sand-boxed themselves, so the surface area for attack was much higher. So HTML 5 tried to do away with that, but then PNaCl and asm.js show us that no matter how hard we try to get rid of binary blobs of code on the web, someone implements it anyway. So, given that there have been persistent attempts by the various large web players for the past 20 years to build binary code blobs in to web pages, and that there is no sign of it slowing down, the most sensible compromise to me is basically what wasm has become... a standardized mechanism for building those binary blobs that can be directly integrated in to the browser.
It does have its problems like you note, but its better that we only have 1 standardized sand-box implementation, and that sand-box implementation is bundled in with a bunch of other high risk code as part of the browser package, which is easy to keep vigilantly updated. Even before wasm, gone were the days of the web browser being a simple document layout renderer. The web browser is basically a visualized operating system... Google has taken this to IHMO a very dangerous extreme, see the Javascript USB API for example. The web browser is basically a run time for USB device drivers at this point. To me wasm seems like the inevitable end result of the path that HTML 5 started us down.
LMAO! relying on GC is foolishness for sure.
Why? Until wasm showed up, the only language that browsers supported was Javascript, which has a GC. Wasm runs in the same browser sandbox as JavaScript, so there is already a GC present. In the web browser, you are relying on a GC whether you like it or not.
In general, yes you can. One important thing to keep in mind is that not all libraries are available in wasm. Obviously win32 won't work, and most C++ GUI toolkits have not been posted to render to a HTML 5 canvas yet.
Another big hole IMHO is there is no native support for garbage collected languages yet. The thing that excites me the most about this is once GC is enabled we could potentially see a Python implementation that runs in the browser (without having to recompile CPython to wasm, which would be huge and slow.) You could also do stuff like compile Java/C#/Adobe Flash directly to wasm and completely eliminate the terrible Flash/Silverlight/Java plugins.
Yeah the stock market is full of rampant speculation, but I think Wall Street is probably has it right. I know I will be modded down for pointing this out but Coffee Lake is sold out everywhere, Ryzen is not. Although Ryzen has made AMD competitive, most PC builders are still buying Intel.
Given that it took Intel 8 months to add Coffee Lake in between Kaby Lake and Cannon Lake and it took AMD 5 years to develop Ryzen... the situation that happened between 2003-2006 when AMD was the technically superior choice is unlikely to ever happen again. The good news is that Ryzen has made AMD just slightly profitable again, so at least they are no longer in danger of imminent bankruptcy.
I guess you haven't heard of the nuclear triad or mutually assured destruction? That's why we still have bombers.
First of all, the table that ZDNet has in TFA is outdated from the newest table available on Gartner's actual website:
https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3560517
The PC numbers on Gartner's website look more rosy for the PC than the ones in ZDNet's article. Also, here is an important snippet from Gartner's website that ZDNet conveniently did not include in their screenshot:
Note: The Ultramobile (Premium) category includes devices such as Microsoft Windows 10 Intel x86 products and Apple MacBook Air.
The Ultramobile (Premium) category is growing 11% this year. I would count x86 devices running Win10 or macOS as part of the PC market. Combine the "Traditional PC" category with the "Ultramobile (Premium)" category and suddenly the PC market looks flat in total volume shipments year over year. Combine that with the fact that the average selling price for the "Ultramobile (Premium)" category is probably higher than the stuff they count as "Traditional PC" and 2017 is actually looking like a pretty good year for PC OEMs.
A better headline would be "Cheap glossy plastic laptops decline, thin and light metal body laptops on the rise."