More like the US doesn't like having its agents arrested for the commission of heinous acts on innocent civillians of allied nations...
Frankly, I really hope that was just PR and the people involved are enjoying a lovely prison cell somewhere. It's still a miscarriage of justice and a fairly disgusting double-standard, and I doubt anything happened to the people who gave the inital orders, but it beats them getting away clean.
You talk about compatibility, then you talk about replacing the CPU and GPU, then you talk about compatibility again. With consoles, it's sadly one or the other. Unlike PC games, console games aren't written to an abstraction layer that assumes a minimum hardware spec and tries to get the best performance it can above that. Instead, console games are written/compiled for very specific hardware, and get the maximum that hardware could ever provide (which is higher than it could provide if going through the abstraction layers of a PC game). The advantage: good looking games even on outdated GPUs. The disadvantage: if you want to improve parts like the CPU and GPU, you have to either still include the old one (original PS3's compatibility with PS2 was via this) or you have to use software emulation (Xbox 360 does this).
Neither of these routes is easy. The first one adds to the cost and size of the console, and means you usually can't do nifty things like upscale to a higher output resolution. The second one adds developer cost, risks glitches, and leads to emulator compatibility lists where only games above a certain popularity threshold are worth the effort of ensuring they run. In either case, this is *NOT* something you do for a hardware refresh or "half-generation" upgrade. You might improve the manufacturing of the hardware - Microsoft did this multiple times, the most obvious being the Xbox 360 S - but it has to perform exactly the same, or the games won't work right.
There's a very specific reason why consoles don't let you upgrade the GPU, and it's the same reason why even the badly outdated (by PC gaming standards) GPUs of the Xbox 360 and PS3 can still produce pretty good graphics. Unlike on commodity PCs, games for a console are written *exactly* to the hardware intended. No abstraction API like DirectX or OpenGL is used (at runtime, at least) and there's no need to compile shaders at runtime either. Furthermore, you know exactly what clock speed the GPU runs at, and exactly how much RAM, cache, and bus bandwidth it has. You can fine-tune the performance very specifically. Then, you can test it on a system that is *identical* to the one every single customer will use.
Stripping away all that abstraction allows console games to get very impressive performance out of their hardware. However, it also means they have great trouble handling even the smallest change in that hardware. This is (part of the reason) why software emulation of older consoles is tricky and often has minor glitches. This is also why hardware updates ("Slim" models, for example) perform exactly the same as the original despite using much newer hardware: if they didn't, existing games would run.
While I agree that adding an accusation of torture is uncalled-for without further evidence, given the circumstances it's not an unreasonable possibility. Why take him to Afganistan? For that matter, why take him out of Germany at all, especially to anywhere that isn't US territory?
I'm not saying he was tortured. I'm saying that given everything else that happened to him, torture doesn't seem far-fetched. This just goes to show how ridiculous the things we have evidence of are.
Actually, if you don't mind paying me for the ink, paper, and time you can go right ahead. I probably value my time higher than the copy shop employees, and my printer is a home model with relatively expensive ink, but it's your choice.
Of course, it's also my choice to offer you that option in the first place. However, if my printer were the only one in the city and I chose to prohibit you from printing (or distributing, I also own the mailboxes and its illegal to just hand out fliers door-to-door) content of any sort (such as about another city without these ridiculous restrictions) then that would certainly be censorship. It might be legal, but that doesn't make it ethical.
The above example sounds ridiculous, until you replace me with Apple and "live in [my] city" with "use [my] smartphone." Sure, it's a voluntary effort on the part of the residents/users - they didn't *have* to move here - but that doesn't make what I'm doing any more reasonable.
Tons of smartphone apps are just a way to present content in a better form than using a web browser on such a small screen. Some also offer extra functionality or value to people who pay.
I see nothing wrong with DRM in a subscription model. I don't personally subscribe to any such things (Netflix streaming would be a good example) but it's a perfect application of DRM - it makes enforcement of copyright on otherwise easily copied material possible, and thereby makes production of such material profitable. There are certainly concerns that need to be addressed, but I'd rather have the option of paying a little for some interesting content that I can't make copies of than have that content not exist (in collected, formatted, edited, and generally quality fashion) because producing it is economically inviable. I think a magazine is a questionable line, since it's possible you'd like to read it again after your subscription ends, but overall it doesn't seem unreasonable.
Mind you, I do have an issue with DRM on things I "buy" and avoid doing that whenever possible. I still have a Steam account but haven't bought any games on it in a year or so, maybe longer. My music, movies, and ebooks are DRM-free (modulo the trivially bypassed CSS on video DVDs).
Do you block ads and only allow whitelisted JavaScript? If not, I guarantee you've executed some malicious (if only to the "track your browsing history without your knowledge" extent) code. If you don't block ads and have Flash installed, there's an excellent chance you've executed a malicious applet that, on an insufficiently patched Flashplayer, would have compromised your system.
If your work computer only visits intranet sites, then maybe it hasn't been attacked yet. If it visits external sites, even completely legitimate ones that happen to use a third-party ad provider (nearly all sites do, which makes them conveniently easy to block) then the odds are against you unless you proactively block executable content (scripts, applets, etc.)
It's not the number of years you've been safe that count - it's what happens when you visit a site that somebody's injected a 0-day exploit into.
Funny, they seem to be sold out in all the storeas around here. Mind you, I'm in Seattle so maybe this isn't a surprise, but even the HTC Surround is selling almost immediately when it arrives now (it was slow at first) and the Focus is very hard to find. The Venue Pro supply is beling limited by manufacturer issues, but T-Mobile reps claim they're getting a ton of questions about it.
Or another form of flamebait. This kind of BS, even though it based MS, would earn a couple of such moderations if it were posted in a comment. If it were bashing anybody other than MS, it would sit solidly at -1. Tag approrpriately (I set: liesdamnliesstatistics, fud, flamebait) and click the minus on the article voting.
I came here already knowing the article was BS just to gauge Slashdot's reaction. I'm actually fairly impressed how thoroughly people are picking apart an anti-MS "article".
I think that's a little pedantic - "running" software of any kind, including malware, usually implies an intent to run it - but if you want to take that definition then go ahead.
However, it makes your post completely pointless, because there is absolutely no way to know ahead of time if the website you're visiting has been compromised. There's no way to know that the commercially-pressed CD you're inserting into your drive doesn't ahve malware installed (see Sony). There's no way of knowing whether I snuck into your office and installed auto-running malware while you were asleep, just to provide a back-door for later attacks.
Basically, if you include all of the unintentional ways that malicious code might execute on your system, then it's literally impossible to use a computer and "know everything you run is malware free."
I'm always amused by people suggesting that config files are in any way more secure than the registry. The registry has fine-grained permissions (each key has ACLs). It's type-safe; the type and usually size of the data is known during read and verified during write.
There are other downsides to the registry, and it doesn't guarantee security - no applicaiton that accepts input of any type can do that - but it's certainly not *less* secure than parsing scattered text files.
You sound more like a technology ignoramus than athiest (as a side note, that word does not mean what you think it means). First of all, if porting OS X to x86 "speaks volumes" for Apple, then you should be far more impressed with Microsoft - NT has been ported to MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and Itanium (also x86_64, if you care to count that). Porting an OS written in C is relatively simple.
Also, MS *did* throw out the old and develop a new OS from the ground up; that's what NT was, and it's pretty damn impressive that it can still run software originally written and compiled for Windows 95 (which was completely different under-the-hood). Keeping binary compatibility for that long is damn impressive, and that compatibility is the bread-and-butter of Microsoft's business.
Now, maybe they could scrap the NT codebase and come up with something completely new. Since the ostensible reason is security, it would make sense to use a provably secure language, like C#. Perhaps something like Midori is what you're thinking of. OK, great - they've got a kernel, and even some code that runs on it. Now, how do you propose that they allow users to run the massive library of x86 native Windows code written in C/C++ on top of that managed-code-only OS? If you can answer that, I'm sure MS would love to speak with you.
As long as everything you run is *vulnerability* free, you mean. Actively running malware (Trojans) is certainly a major problem, but in general running Firefox as admin is more dangerous than running IE as a standard user (the fact that there's a local EoP vulnerability just announced notwithstanding).
Most (not all, but most) of the recent remote exploits for Windows are through third-party code present on OS X and Linux as well (Adobe Reader, Flashplayer, and Java are the big three recently). Those programs are vulnerable on other platforms too, but weaponizing and deploying an exploit is expensive, and they're not worth the return on investment.
In situations where return on investment is equal for each platform, or where OS X or Linux are dominant, there have certainly been exploits. See the Pwn2Own contests for an example of how easily OS X can be compromised, even before Windows was. See the smartphone market, in particular iPhone jailbreaks (which are no more or less than remote root exploits), for what happens when people actually bother to find and exploit vulnerabilities in Apple's code.
As for the inevitability, that's dead easy. Malware is business, and has been for years. For each platform, there are two relevant numbers: cost to produce a useful exploit, and value (income) from releasing that exploit. Currently, the former number is relatively high for Windows - it's been picked over pretty hard, and a lot of security hardening has gone into it. Again, see things like Pwn2Own.
However, the latter number - the money you can make with a good Windows exploit - is far, FAR higher. Many millions of dollars higher. The difference between that value on Windows and that value on other desktop operating systems is such that it's not worth developing malware for them if you could do it for free (i.e. be compensated for your time). If you're going to spend the time writing malware for desktop operating systems, there just isn't any target that makes sense other than Windows.
To answer your question more directly, try a few hundred million. That's how many you need to come close to the number of Windows installations. Depending on the value-difficulty equation, it might not take a number equal to that of Windows - for example, the untapped market may be easier to monetize, increasing the income - but it will require that market shares become roughly equivalent.
For the record: IE9 public Beta: 80 failures. Puts it back in league with the others, although one would need to test against other beta browsers for a fair comparison.
Also, a lot of the failures looked like the kind of thing that the dead code optimizer might be removing. Not sure about that, though. Will be interesting to see when the RC comes out, or even the current platform preview (which I don't have).
As a kid, I had Erector Sets, not K'nex, but I agree with the general principle of giving them something they can build with. Gear ratios, sturdy geometry, and more are all just part of that package.
When I was 8, my parents got me a basic electronics kit (a breadboard, some switches and buttons, an electromagnet and some fixed magnets, some lights, and a bunch of wires). Building everything from a simple electronic candle to a open-chassis electric motor was great fun. Later kits I got included speakers, capacitors and resistors (fixed and variable for both), inductors, transformers, transistors, and even basic ICs. One had computer software that would guide you through making everything from blinking LEDs to FM radio transmitters.
There are lots of people on here that remember Xenix and SCO UNIX, from the days before Caldera bought SCO's UNIX IP and went on a litigation rampage. What few of them mention is that until 1987, MS owned and sold Xenix. SCO ported the OS to Intel's early x86 chips, and licensed the right to sell it, but they didn't own it until 8 years after the company was founded.
Of course, the MS of the 80s was a very different company from the giant it has become.
That's mostly true. However, OS/2 was 16-bit until LONG after 32-bit chips were available. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2):
OS/2 1.x targeted the 80286 processor: IBM insisted on supporting the Intel 80286 processor, with its 16-bit segmented memory mode, due to commitments made to customers who had purchased many 80286-based PS/2's because of IBM's promises surrounding OS/2.[15] Until release 2.0 in April 1992, OS/2 ran in 16-bit protected mode and therefore could not benefit from the Intel 80386's much simpler 32-bit flat memory model and virtual 8086 mode features. This was especially painful in providing support for DOS applications. While, in 1988, Windows/386 2.1 could run several cooperatively multitasked DOS applications, including expanded memory (EMS) emulation, OS/2 1.3, released in 1991, was still limited to one 640KB "DOS box".
By comparison, Windows 3.0 (came out in 1990) supported the 386's "Enhanced" Protected Mode and Virtual 8086 Mode. On the other hand, NT came out in 1993, so there was a one year gap where OS/2 was 32-bit and Windows wasn't.
That's why I said servers, specifically. If MS produces an ARM port of NT, they'll port over IIS, Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint, and all the rest - everything that they need to tell people "you can run our software on your servers, no matter the architecture!" Third-party proprietary software will be slower, of course, but open-source stuff should also be ported quickly. In the end, the ecosystem for server software is actually a lot more architecture-flexible anyhow.
The thought of an ARM server hosting IE6-only ActiveX controls in x86 binary makes me several kinds of sad, but there's no reason it couldn't happen. IIS doesn't care what instruction set the bits it serves are intended for.
Um... WTF? Compression is a performance *improvement* and a massive one, at that. The trivial cost in CPU time is offset by the massive reduction in IO time, which is more expensive by far. This has been true since 2000 or even earlier. Modern multi-core CPUs just take the CPU penalty from negligible to nonexistent. Unless your CPU cores are all running at 100%, and possibly even if they are, compression will improve performance.
Note that this is true on a wide variety of filesystems; it's nothing special to these particular ones. Hell, NTFS has had built-in compression for a decade or more. You can improve performance on a Windows system by right-clicking the C: drive and selecting Properties -> Compress this drive. You can do it from the command line using
compact.exe/C/S:C:\/A
This will compress all files in or under the root of the C drive, including hidden or system files (requires admin, of course) and marks all the directories so that any files written to them will also get compressed.
I was going to mention a few, but then I realized that almost all of them are.NET based. MS already has a.NET implementation on ARM (for their mobile devices) and I believe Mono also works on ARM.
The remaining ones are MS Office (ported to x64 and PPC), Visual Studio (partially.NET and hopefully somewhat portable), Opera (portable), Foxit (there are other PDF apps even if it's not portable), and probably a few more.
Of course, you can't just ignore games. Relatively few of those are portable, and I happen to care about them quite a bit.
Mind you, if ARM ever gets there, there will be a Windows version almost immediately. NT is actually quite portable. Historically, it's been on MIPS, Alpha, and PPC, in addition to x86, x64, and Itanium (the currently available ports). There's no reason Microsoft couldn't port it to ARM, and if they see a reason to do so (such as a servers-running-ARM market) they will certainly do so.
That example may be over the top, but stuff like this does happen. Teenage girls over the age of consent (in many states this is less than 18) have been charged with *manufacturing* child porn because they voluntarily took pictures of themselves. The legal system is completely screwed up on this subject, much like it is on airline security. While I'd prefer to resolve both screwups in a sane way, barring that I'd accept using the one to stop the other.
You realize you're one of the very small portion of users who actually use those features that everybody else on Slashdot is constantly yelling about Adobe bloating up their reader with, right?
Fix your plugin so that it works in a Low Integrity sandbox - there are MSDN articles on how to do this - or don't, but don't act so self-rightous about it. For the vast majority of Adobe's consumer base, this is a huge step forward.
Slashdot Mirror
More like the US doesn't like having its agents arrested for the commission of heinous acts on innocent civillians of allied nations...
Frankly, I really hope that was just PR and the people involved are enjoying a lovely prison cell somewhere. It's still a miscarriage of justice and a fairly disgusting double-standard, and I doubt anything happened to the people who gave the inital orders, but it beats them getting away clean.
You talk about compatibility, then you talk about replacing the CPU and GPU, then you talk about compatibility again. With consoles, it's sadly one or the other. Unlike PC games, console games aren't written to an abstraction layer that assumes a minimum hardware spec and tries to get the best performance it can above that. Instead, console games are written/compiled for very specific hardware, and get the maximum that hardware could ever provide (which is higher than it could provide if going through the abstraction layers of a PC game). The advantage: good looking games even on outdated GPUs. The disadvantage: if you want to improve parts like the CPU and GPU, you have to either still include the old one (original PS3's compatibility with PS2 was via this) or you have to use software emulation (Xbox 360 does this).
Neither of these routes is easy. The first one adds to the cost and size of the console, and means you usually can't do nifty things like upscale to a higher output resolution. The second one adds developer cost, risks glitches, and leads to emulator compatibility lists where only games above a certain popularity threshold are worth the effort of ensuring they run. In either case, this is *NOT* something you do for a hardware refresh or "half-generation" upgrade. You might improve the manufacturing of the hardware - Microsoft did this multiple times, the most obvious being the Xbox 360 S - but it has to perform exactly the same, or the games won't work right.
There's a very specific reason why consoles don't let you upgrade the GPU, and it's the same reason why even the badly outdated (by PC gaming standards) GPUs of the Xbox 360 and PS3 can still produce pretty good graphics. Unlike on commodity PCs, games for a console are written *exactly* to the hardware intended. No abstraction API like DirectX or OpenGL is used (at runtime, at least) and there's no need to compile shaders at runtime either. Furthermore, you know exactly what clock speed the GPU runs at, and exactly how much RAM, cache, and bus bandwidth it has. You can fine-tune the performance very specifically. Then, you can test it on a system that is *identical* to the one every single customer will use.
Stripping away all that abstraction allows console games to get very impressive performance out of their hardware. However, it also means they have great trouble handling even the smallest change in that hardware. This is (part of the reason) why software emulation of older consoles is tricky and often has minor glitches. This is also why hardware updates ("Slim" models, for example) perform exactly the same as the original despite using much newer hardware: if they didn't, existing games would run.
While I agree that adding an accusation of torture is uncalled-for without further evidence, given the circumstances it's not an unreasonable possibility. Why take him to Afganistan? For that matter, why take him out of Germany at all, especially to anywhere that isn't US territory?
I'm not saying he was tortured. I'm saying that given everything else that happened to him, torture doesn't seem far-fetched. This just goes to show how ridiculous the things we have evidence of are.
Actually, if you don't mind paying me for the ink, paper, and time you can go right ahead. I probably value my time higher than the copy shop employees, and my printer is a home model with relatively expensive ink, but it's your choice.
Of course, it's also my choice to offer you that option in the first place. However, if my printer were the only one in the city and I chose to prohibit you from printing (or distributing, I also own the mailboxes and its illegal to just hand out fliers door-to-door) content of any sort (such as about another city without these ridiculous restrictions) then that would certainly be censorship. It might be legal, but that doesn't make it ethical.
The above example sounds ridiculous, until you replace me with Apple and "live in [my] city" with "use [my] smartphone." Sure, it's a voluntary effort on the part of the residents/users - they didn't *have* to move here - but that doesn't make what I'm doing any more reasonable.
Tons of smartphone apps are just a way to present content in a better form than using a web browser on such a small screen. Some also offer extra functionality or value to people who pay.
I see nothing wrong with DRM in a subscription model. I don't personally subscribe to any such things (Netflix streaming would be a good example) but it's a perfect application of DRM - it makes enforcement of copyright on otherwise easily copied material possible, and thereby makes production of such material profitable. There are certainly concerns that need to be addressed, but I'd rather have the option of paying a little for some interesting content that I can't make copies of than have that content not exist (in collected, formatted, edited, and generally quality fashion) because producing it is economically inviable. I think a magazine is a questionable line, since it's possible you'd like to read it again after your subscription ends, but overall it doesn't seem unreasonable.
Mind you, I do have an issue with DRM on things I "buy" and avoid doing that whenever possible. I still have a Steam account but haven't bought any games on it in a year or so, maybe longer. My music, movies, and ebooks are DRM-free (modulo the trivially bypassed CSS on video DVDs).
Do you block ads and only allow whitelisted JavaScript? If not, I guarantee you've executed some malicious (if only to the "track your browsing history without your knowledge" extent) code. If you don't block ads and have Flash installed, there's an excellent chance you've executed a malicious applet that, on an insufficiently patched Flashplayer, would have compromised your system.
If your work computer only visits intranet sites, then maybe it hasn't been attacked yet. If it visits external sites, even completely legitimate ones that happen to use a third-party ad provider (nearly all sites do, which makes them conveniently easy to block) then the odds are against you unless you proactively block executable content (scripts, applets, etc.)
It's not the number of years you've been safe that count - it's what happens when you visit a site that somebody's injected a 0-day exploit into.
Funny, they seem to be sold out in all the storeas around here. Mind you, I'm in Seattle so maybe this isn't a surprise, but even the HTC Surround is selling almost immediately when it arrives now (it was slow at first) and the Focus is very hard to find. The Venue Pro supply is beling limited by manufacturer issues, but T-Mobile reps claim they're getting a ton of questions about it.
Or another form of flamebait. This kind of BS, even though it based MS, would earn a couple of such moderations if it were posted in a comment. If it were bashing anybody other than MS, it would sit solidly at -1. Tag approrpriately (I set: liesdamnliesstatistics, fud, flamebait) and click the minus on the article voting.
I came here already knowing the article was BS just to gauge Slashdot's reaction. I'm actually fairly impressed how thoroughly people are picking apart an anti-MS "article".
I think that's a little pedantic - "running" software of any kind, including malware, usually implies an intent to run it - but if you want to take that definition then go ahead.
However, it makes your post completely pointless, because there is absolutely no way to know ahead of time if the website you're visiting has been compromised. There's no way to know that the commercially-pressed CD you're inserting into your drive doesn't ahve malware installed (see Sony). There's no way of knowing whether I snuck into your office and installed auto-running malware while you were asleep, just to provide a back-door for later attacks.
Basically, if you include all of the unintentional ways that malicious code might execute on your system, then it's literally impossible to use a computer and "know everything you run is malware free."
I'm always amused by people suggesting that config files are in any way more secure than the registry. The registry has fine-grained permissions (each key has ACLs). It's type-safe; the type and usually size of the data is known during read and verified during write.
There are other downsides to the registry, and it doesn't guarantee security - no applicaiton that accepts input of any type can do that - but it's certainly not *less* secure than parsing scattered text files.
You sound more like a technology ignoramus than athiest (as a side note, that word does not mean what you think it means). First of all, if porting OS X to x86 "speaks volumes" for Apple, then you should be far more impressed with Microsoft - NT has been ported to MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and Itanium (also x86_64, if you care to count that). Porting an OS written in C is relatively simple.
Also, MS *did* throw out the old and develop a new OS from the ground up; that's what NT was, and it's pretty damn impressive that it can still run software originally written and compiled for Windows 95 (which was completely different under-the-hood). Keeping binary compatibility for that long is damn impressive, and that compatibility is the bread-and-butter of Microsoft's business.
Now, maybe they could scrap the NT codebase and come up with something completely new. Since the ostensible reason is security, it would make sense to use a provably secure language, like C#. Perhaps something like Midori is what you're thinking of. OK, great - they've got a kernel, and even some code that runs on it. Now, how do you propose that they allow users to run the massive library of x86 native Windows code written in C/C++ on top of that managed-code-only OS? If you can answer that, I'm sure MS would love to speak with you.
As long as everything you run is *vulnerability* free, you mean. Actively running malware (Trojans) is certainly a major problem, but in general running Firefox as admin is more dangerous than running IE as a standard user (the fact that there's a local EoP vulnerability just announced notwithstanding).
Most (not all, but most) of the recent remote exploits for Windows are through third-party code present on OS X and Linux as well (Adobe Reader, Flashplayer, and Java are the big three recently). Those programs are vulnerable on other platforms too, but weaponizing and deploying an exploit is expensive, and they're not worth the return on investment.
In situations where return on investment is equal for each platform, or where OS X or Linux are dominant, there have certainly been exploits. See the Pwn2Own contests for an example of how easily OS X can be compromised, even before Windows was. See the smartphone market, in particular iPhone jailbreaks (which are no more or less than remote root exploits), for what happens when people actually bother to find and exploit vulnerabilities in Apple's code.
As for the inevitability, that's dead easy. Malware is business, and has been for years. For each platform, there are two relevant numbers: cost to produce a useful exploit, and value (income) from releasing that exploit. Currently, the former number is relatively high for Windows - it's been picked over pretty hard, and a lot of security hardening has gone into it. Again, see things like Pwn2Own.
However, the latter number - the money you can make with a good Windows exploit - is far, FAR higher. Many millions of dollars higher. The difference between that value on Windows and that value on other desktop operating systems is such that it's not worth developing malware for them if you could do it for free (i.e. be compensated for your time). If you're going to spend the time writing malware for desktop operating systems, there just isn't any target that makes sense other than Windows.
To answer your question more directly, try a few hundred million. That's how many you need to come close to the number of Windows installations. Depending on the value-difficulty equation, it might not take a number equal to that of Windows - for example, the untapped market may be easier to monetize, increasing the income - but it will require that market shares become roughly equivalent.
For the record: IE9 public Beta: 80 failures. Puts it back in league with the others, although one would need to test against other beta browsers for a fair comparison.
Also, a lot of the failures looked like the kind of thing that the dead code optimizer might be removing. Not sure about that, though. Will be interesting to see when the RC comes out, or even the current platform preview (which I don't have).
As a kid, I had Erector Sets, not K'nex, but I agree with the general principle of giving them something they can build with. Gear ratios, sturdy geometry, and more are all just part of that package.
When I was 8, my parents got me a basic electronics kit (a breadboard, some switches and buttons, an electromagnet and some fixed magnets, some lights, and a bunch of wires). Building everything from a simple electronic candle to a open-chassis electric motor was great fun. Later kits I got included speakers, capacitors and resistors (fixed and variable for both), inductors, transformers, transistors, and even basic ICs. One had computer software that would guide you through making everything from blinking LEDs to FM radio transmitters.
Actually, there was a time (2.5 decades ago) when Microsoft sold a very popular (for a period, the most widely installed) Unix variant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
There are lots of people on here that remember Xenix and SCO UNIX, from the days before Caldera bought SCO's UNIX IP and went on a litigation rampage. What few of them mention is that until 1987, MS owned and sold Xenix. SCO ported the OS to Intel's early x86 chips, and licensed the right to sell it, but they didn't own it until 8 years after the company was founded.
Of course, the MS of the 80s was a very different company from the giant it has become.
NT came out in 1993 and was true 32-bit with full pre-emptive multitasking. It wasn't the first OS with those features, but it handily beat Win95.
That's mostly true. However, OS/2 was 16-bit until LONG after 32-bit chips were available. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2):
By comparison, Windows 3.0 (came out in 1990) supported the 386's "Enhanced" Protected Mode and Virtual 8086 Mode. On the other hand, NT came out in 1993, so there was a one year gap where OS/2 was 32-bit and Windows wasn't.
That's why I said servers, specifically. If MS produces an ARM port of NT, they'll port over IIS, Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint, and all the rest - everything that they need to tell people "you can run our software on your servers, no matter the architecture!" Third-party proprietary software will be slower, of course, but open-source stuff should also be ported quickly. In the end, the ecosystem for server software is actually a lot more architecture-flexible anyhow.
The thought of an ARM server hosting IE6-only ActiveX controls in x86 binary makes me several kinds of sad, but there's no reason it couldn't happen. IIS doesn't care what instruction set the bits it serves are intended for.
Um... WTF? Compression is a performance *improvement* and a massive one, at that. The trivial cost in CPU time is offset by the massive reduction in IO time, which is more expensive by far. This has been true since 2000 or even earlier. Modern multi-core CPUs just take the CPU penalty from negligible to nonexistent. Unless your CPU cores are all running at 100%, and possibly even if they are, compression will improve performance.
Note that this is true on a wide variety of filesystems; it's nothing special to these particular ones. Hell, NTFS has had built-in compression for a decade or more. You can improve performance on a Windows system by right-clicking the C: drive and selecting Properties -> Compress this drive. You can do it from the command line using
compact.exe /C /S:C:\ /A
This will compress all files in or under the root of the C drive, including hidden or system files (requires admin, of course) and marks all the directories so that any files written to them will also get compressed.
I was going to mention a few, but then I realized that almost all of them are .NET based. MS already has a .NET implementation on ARM (for their mobile devices) and I believe Mono also works on ARM.
The remaining ones are MS Office (ported to x64 and PPC), Visual Studio (partially .NET and hopefully somewhat portable), Opera (portable), Foxit (there are other PDF apps even if it's not portable), and probably a few more.
Of course, you can't just ignore games. Relatively few of those are portable, and I happen to care about them quite a bit.
Mind you, if ARM ever gets there, there will be a Windows version almost immediately. NT is actually quite portable. Historically, it's been on MIPS, Alpha, and PPC, in addition to x86, x64, and Itanium (the currently available ports). There's no reason Microsoft couldn't port it to ARM, and if they see a reason to do so (such as a servers-running-ARM market) they will certainly do so.
That example may be over the top, but stuff like this does happen. Teenage girls over the age of consent (in many states this is less than 18) have been charged with *manufacturing* child porn because they voluntarily took pictures of themselves. The legal system is completely screwed up on this subject, much like it is on airline security. While I'd prefer to resolve both screwups in a sane way, barring that I'd accept using the one to stop the other.
You realize you're one of the very small portion of users who actually use those features that everybody else on Slashdot is constantly yelling about Adobe bloating up their reader with, right?
Fix your plugin so that it works in a Low Integrity sandbox - there are MSDN articles on how to do this - or don't, but don't act so self-rightous about it. For the vast majority of Adobe's consumer base, this is a huge step forward.