Indeed. According to this nice pretty $20 bill I have here, it is a "LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE" and is signed by the Treasurer of the United States and the Secretary of the Treasury. I'm pretty sure that, in matters of currency, their authority thoroughly trumps that of the Louisiana legislators.
No conventional rocketetry we have today could lift something the size of a Project Orion starship. Did you read the weight mentioned above? That's orders of magnitude larger than the heaviest rockets we can lift today - and those have to be almost all fuel, with very little payload capacity.
If you want to get a Project Orion craft into space without using its nuclear pulse drive, the only way with currently forseeable technology is to build it there. Even a space elevator (under the currently considered designs) won't have that kind of lift capacity, although having one would prabably make it a lot easier to orbit the parts.
They're both speculative fiction. Most sci-fi is just futuristic fantasy anyhow, and some of what I'd call fantasy is or was taken as truth by a lot of people (the commonly accepted terms for that being "mythology" and "religious texts".
Seriously though, there's a huge overlap between the readers of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, because both are a great way to explore stories that can't exist in the world we know. Besides, outside of "very hard sci-fi set no more than 20 years in the future" the line gets awfully blurry anyhow. Sufficiently advanced technology and all that.
It's been possible to side-load apps on WP7 since launch, but you needed a developer account ($100). Within a few weeks, the ChevronWP7 Unlock hack was available, and let anybody do it for free. Notably, this didn't actually require an exploit in the phone's code the way iPhone jailbreaks do; you just installed a cert on the phone (trivially easy) and ran the software on your PC (also very easy). The original Chevron unlock doesn't work anymore, but there's an "official" Chevron unlock from the same guys that apparently costs $9.
The WP7 homebrew community is smaller than the Android or iOS ones, obviously - it's newer and the user base is smaller. It certainly exists and is quite active, though. Poke around XDA-Devs for a while (they also do Android phones, incidentally) and see what the community is up to. It sure as hell doesn't take a PhD, either.
Yeah, but MS actually works with their partners (OEMs and carriers) to make sure the update gets pushed to all their phones. At least, that's what they did with the most recent one. The first one was a bit of a boondoggle, but they claim they learned from it.
Googld doesn't seem to give any care at all to whether phones running "its" operating system ever get any updates made available.
So you're saying that everybody in the world should abandon money that is traded internationally?
Massive value loss is not a property inherent to bitcoins, though. It can happen with real-world currencies, too. Consider the Zimbabwe Dollar, which over the course of a few weeks was devalued far worse than Bitcoin in a few months.
Now, maybe bitcoins are more likely to experience such drops, and certainly the government of Zimbabwe is a complete fuck-up (though their currency was perfectly good when I visited 13 years ago). The point remains that you're mking a foolishly broad and inaccurate statement. I don't have the economics background to tell you why bitcoins are or are not viable currency, but I'm sufficiently aware of world events to tell you that tying wealth to "real-world" money is not necessarily safe either.
A) The service is still active and going strong. The licenses will still renew. B) Most Zune music is DRM-free, except for the subscription service (Zune Pass). C) Zune DRM can still be played on the PC and on Windows phones.
You could, in theory, recompile them (with some tweaks) since both WP7 and Zune use XNA, but in practice the ZuneHD app selection is very small. It has some useful apps, and some great games (hell, I wish I could run Audiosurf Tilt on a phone...), and a browser that was pretty good a few years ago... and that's it for non-multimedia stuff. OK, the dev tools are also available and you don't need any kind of "account" or "developer unlock" so I suppose you can work on addressing that lack, but.. yeah. There are a few unofficial apps too, but we're still probably shy of 4 digits even if you scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Now, in the media space it's a fantastic device. Great audio and video quality, lots of capacity, good battery life, very smooth and logical UI, and it can download or stream music anywhere it has WiFi. On the other hand, where the iPod Touch is a PDA with a really good media player, the Zune HD is a really good media player with some PDA functionality.
You're welcome to take a shot at mine. First step: get past the BitLocker drive encryption. Even if you guess the PIN you still can't boot anything but the installed OS - if you want to boot another OS you either have to first log into Windows and suspend the BitLocker protection, enter a ridiculously long recovery key, or have the full hard drive be encrypted. The last case isn't terribly useful for your goal, unless your plan is to wipe the OS entirely and install a new one on there.
Actually, that's not true. My laptop has BitLocker applies (required by work, but if you have a TPM you may as well use it). The whole drive, including the credential store, is encrypted. Explain to me how you're going to change the credentials on that, please?
Also, my local Administrator account is password-protected, so Safe Mode isn't going to help you here even if you get that far.
Once I've logged out, it shouldn't be possible to tie my computer to my Facebook account. Deleting the cookies is an optional (but very simple and reliable) way to achieve this. Otherwise, you need to make sure that all of Facebook's cookies completley "forget" your user account.
Alternatively, take the approach I do: block cross-site requests to Facebook.com. When I browse the web I can be signed into facebook one tab over, but all the rest of the Internet is unaware that I even have an account. There are various tools for doing this, but the one I prefer is actually the Tracking Protection (formerly known as InPrivate Filtering) feature built into IE9.
You would typicaly need to manually launch the other app and paste the content in there, but in a generalized sense, yeah, that's what this is. The difference is that it provides a way for an app to say "Share with me, and I will with it." For example, a Facebook app could say "Share Text with me, and I will do a Status Update with it" and "Share An Image with me, and I will Add It To An Album for you".
The ability for either the user or the developer to do things like this is not new at all. What is new is creating a standard way for developers to do it, and and an easy/quick/straightforward way for users to do it.
What's your point? That's already totally possible, assuming the user leaves their browser logged in (equivalent to storing credentials in one of these Social Netowrking apps). Seriously, I realize MS-bashing is popular around here, but stop and thing for a couple seconds before you post.
It doesn't really. Mango (WP7.5) has something like it, but it's search- or media-oriented. An app can hook into search or into the media hub, but those are native parts of the OS. There's no way for one app to directly call into another app, even through an OS-defined channel.
The SUA community has been hoping for a while now that Microsoft just open-sources the stack - everything about the NT kernel - and lets the community maintain it rather than actually killing it. Ideally they would open-source it but continue to maintain and update the code, but the truth is that SUA has gotten fairly little love since Vista came out. They add features and fix bugs, but slowly - 64-bit shared libraries from GCC has been in the works for a while, now. The Win7-update of Interix (the SUA "OS" environment) didn't ship until well after Win7 itself was generally available (although you can install Interix 6.0 on SUA 6.1 just fine).
It's actually really interesting what it does and doesn't have. It's available in 64-bit, including utilities, libraries, and build toolchain, but if you're running on 32-bit it still doesn't have the 64-bit extensions that enable things like working with files more than 4GB in size. There's still no support for clone(), which makes a lot of Linux source code not compile on Interix. There's no direct access to physical block devices, which means you can't use Unix disk utilities, and no audio support (though you can use a network-connected sound server that runs on Win32).
Open-sourcing SUA would allow people to fix many of these issues (seriously, how hard can block devices be? Map \\.\PhysicalDisk0 to/dev/sda, and you're much of the way). It would allow resolving the silly little issues, like the poll() implementation being half-baked and therefore requiring a portability library that implements it using select() instead.
Seriously, this is a win-win. MS doesn't have to support it anymore, the people who use it can continue using the MS version or the new community version (or modify the community version for their own purposes), those who want to tinker and hack on it can make improvements, and MS can get some good press for open-sourcing a (fairly low-level, even if rarely used) component of the NT software stack.
I believe OpenSuse is much closer to SLE[S|D] than Fedora is to RHEL, though I could be mistaken. I've certainly seen "trial" SLED DVDs floating around, which will prompt (but not require) you to buy a support contract and such when installed.
There are advantages to SUA that you don't get with virtualization. The ability to run tools side-by-side, even calling from POSIX programs into Win32 DLLs in the most recent version. The ability to enable Windows to use NFS. The ability to SSH *into* a Windows box and do remote administration using familiar tools. The ability to Remote Desktop into a server that also needs to run a Perl program in a Unix environment.
Basically, anywhere that you *would* use something POSIX-based, but need to also use Windows. Even if they don't *need* to be on the same logical machine, you can save hardware resources by running them that way.
I'm sure you've made an exhaustive study of the subject...
17171 registered users on the SUACommunity forums would beg to differ. Not a *huge* user base by any means, but definitely relevant, especially since quite a few of them *are* supporting projects running on SUA (or its old name, SFU) in business environments.
There are a number of public SUA-based projects, though they're typically small. One active member of the SUACommunity forum has a semi-working Debian port to SUA (certain operations that are quick on Linux are still really slow and a few things may not work yet, but it's just getting started and is already quite impressive).
Privately, however, it's a different story. Many businesses use SUA internally. Hell, Microsoft themselves used an earlier version of it to host Hotmail for a while (they wanted to run it on NT, but it was written for Apache which wasn't yet available on NT except through the POSIX subsystem). I don't know of anything mission-critical that my employer is currently using it for, but there are a few small internal projects - heck, I have it on my dev box just so I can use bash instead of cmd. If you poke around the SUACommunity forum, you'll see posts from people at a handful of companies who have internal SUA projects.
Heck, as a student I used it for subversion, ssh, and similar (my university had a lot of Linux boxes, and I don't like the Windows apps for accessing them nearly as much). I even developed an application in C (that was to run on Linux) using SUA for a class project; it had 4 #ifdef checks in 5KLoC and I could have worked around at least two of them if I hadn't been lazy (easy way on Windows and easy way on Linux, or hard way that works on both). I still run sshd on my home box; it's a simpler (and low-bandwidth-friendly) way to access it remotely than Remote Desktop, and it works whether I'm booted into Windows or Linux.
Ironically, Windows *Mobile* 6.x had this feature. It was intended for meetings (sinlence ringer while your calendar says you're busy) but could easily be used for classes too. But... MS didn't include it in WP7. The platform needed its reboot, but some stuff was lost along the way too.
Note: I don't and didn't ever have a WinMo device; this is just reports from friends and acquiantences who did (living in the Seattle area and working in the software industry, there's lot of such people).
Windows has supported handwriting recognition for years, and still does in Win8 (assuming you have a digitizer that can recognize a stylus). Whether Word will support handwriting recognition within a doc directly, I don't know. OneNote already does, though.
I haven't seen any of these problems. TMO in the Seattle the area is still fast and reliable, and I have more coverage (first-party, not roaming) than I did last year. The month-to-month plans are harder to find now, but they still exist. I've only had to call support once, but it was easy. The response was quick, the guy spoke English with an American accent, and he fixed one problem immediately and helped find the cause of the other.
I'm going to be very upset if TMO-US no longer exists independently when my contract is up. (I was going to go contract-free, but a discount from my employer that only applied to contract plans made the two-year plan the cheapest option all up.)
WTF... How did this get nodded up?!? You're not replacing apps because of the OS, you're replacing them because of the architecture. Did you also expect that all OS X apps would run on iOS? That's exactly equivalent to what you're asking for here.
Anybody with even a basic understanding of hardware architectures will tell you that trying to run x86 apps on Arm would be both a significant development effort (emulating a very complex ISA) and horribly slow. It's technically possible, and I'm sure you'll be able to install emulators (DOSBox already runs - after a fashion - on Arm) but that doesn't make it a worthwhile business expenditure for Microsoft.
Win8 on x86 or x86_64 will continue running all the apps that Win7 runs today, which in many cases means back compatibility down to Win95. Unless you're planning to replace all your x86 machines with Arm machines at the same time you replace your Win7 installs with Win8 ones, you've got nothing to worry.
Seriously, stop it with the retarded FUD. I wouldn't even have bothered responding except somebody nodded this idiocy over my threshold.
Good point... Except for the obvious problem that in each previous example where emulation was used for backward compatibility, the new processor was, generally speaking, more powerful. The Mac PPC to x86 transition is probably the closest to that *not* being true, and it showed; Rosetta couldn't run apps anywhere near as fast as even a PPC chip from a few years previous. Arm, by comparison, is far less powerful less than the x86 chips you're asking it to emulate. The performance would be atrocious.
Microsoft is no stranger to software emulation. Virtual PC for Mac used it for years (and perf sucked going that direction too). The Xbox 360 uses software emulation for backward compatibility with games written for the original Xbox, but it uses a triple-core (and hyperthreaded) 3.2 GHz PPC chip to emulate a 500 MHz single-core x86 chip. When you've got a disparity like that - 6x the clock speed and 6x the hardware threads - real-time emulation is possible.
The best Arm chips available today are comparable in clock speed and hardware threads to a netbook CPU. When the best CPU of class X is as powerful as the worst from class Y, emulating Y on X is just completely unreasonable.
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Indeed. According to this nice pretty $20 bill I have here, it is a "LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE" and is signed by the Treasurer of the United States and the Secretary of the Treasury. I'm pretty sure that, in matters of currency, their authority thoroughly trumps that of the Louisiana legislators.
How the hell did they even think this would work?
No conventional rocketetry we have today could lift something the size of a Project Orion starship. Did you read the weight mentioned above? That's orders of magnitude larger than the heaviest rockets we can lift today - and those have to be almost all fuel, with very little payload capacity.
If you want to get a Project Orion craft into space without using its nuclear pulse drive, the only way with currently forseeable technology is to build it there. Even a space elevator (under the currently considered designs) won't have that kind of lift capacity, although having one would prabably make it a lot easier to orbit the parts.
They're both speculative fiction. Most sci-fi is just futuristic fantasy anyhow, and some of what I'd call fantasy is or was taken as truth by a lot of people (the commonly accepted terms for that being "mythology" and "religious texts".
Seriously though, there's a huge overlap between the readers of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, because both are a great way to explore stories that can't exist in the world we know. Besides, outside of "very hard sci-fi set no more than 20 years in the future" the line gets awfully blurry anyhow. Sufficiently advanced technology and all that.
Wow, I can tell you did a *lot* of research. http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=606
It's been possible to side-load apps on WP7 since launch, but you needed a developer account ($100).
Within a few weeks, the ChevronWP7 Unlock hack was available, and let anybody do it for free. Notably, this didn't actually require an exploit in the phone's code the way iPhone jailbreaks do; you just installed a cert on the phone (trivially easy) and ran the software on your PC (also very easy).
The original Chevron unlock doesn't work anymore, but there's an "official" Chevron unlock from the same guys that apparently costs $9.
The WP7 homebrew community is smaller than the Android or iOS ones, obviously - it's newer and the user base is smaller. It certainly exists and is quite active, though. Poke around XDA-Devs for a while (they also do Android phones, incidentally) and see what the community is up to. It sure as hell doesn't take a PhD, either.
Yeah, but MS actually works with their partners (OEMs and carriers) to make sure the update gets pushed to all their phones. At least, that's what they did with the most recent one. The first one was a bit of a boondoggle, but they claim they learned from it.
Googld doesn't seem to give any care at all to whether phones running "its" operating system ever get any updates made available.
So you're saying that everybody in the world should abandon money that is traded internationally?
Massive value loss is not a property inherent to bitcoins, though. It can happen with real-world currencies, too. Consider the Zimbabwe Dollar, which over the course of a few weeks was devalued far worse than Bitcoin in a few months.
Now, maybe bitcoins are more likely to experience such drops, and certainly the government of Zimbabwe is a complete fuck-up (though their currency was perfectly good when I visited 13 years ago). The point remains that you're mking a foolishly broad and inaccurate statement. I don't have the economics background to tell you why bitcoins are or are not viable currency, but I'm sufficiently aware of world events to tell you that tying wealth to "real-world" money is not necessarily safe either.
It means you lack reading comprehension?
A) The service is still active and going strong. The licenses will still renew.
B) Most Zune music is DRM-free, except for the subscription service (Zune Pass).
C) Zune DRM can still be played on the PC and on Windows phones.
No, you can't run the apps directly.
You could, in theory, recompile them (with some tweaks) since both WP7 and Zune use XNA, but in practice the ZuneHD app selection is very small. It has some useful apps, and some great games (hell, I wish I could run Audiosurf Tilt on a phone...), and a browser that was pretty good a few years ago... and that's it for non-multimedia stuff. OK, the dev tools are also available and you don't need any kind of "account" or "developer unlock" so I suppose you can work on addressing that lack, but.. yeah. There are a few unofficial apps too, but we're still probably shy of 4 digits even if you scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Now, in the media space it's a fantastic device. Great audio and video quality, lots of capacity, good battery life, very smooth and logical UI, and it can download or stream music anywhere it has WiFi. On the other hand, where the iPod Touch is a PDA with a really good media player, the Zune HD is a really good media player with some PDA functionality.
You're welcome to take a shot at mine. First step: get past the BitLocker drive encryption. Even if you guess the PIN you still can't boot anything but the installed OS - if you want to boot another OS you either have to first log into Windows and suspend the BitLocker protection, enter a ridiculously long recovery key, or have the full hard drive be encrypted. The last case isn't terribly useful for your goal, unless your plan is to wipe the OS entirely and install a new one on there.
Actually, that's not true. My laptop has BitLocker applies (required by work, but if you have a TPM you may as well use it). The whole drive, including the credential store, is encrypted. Explain to me how you're going to change the credentials on that, please?
Also, my local Administrator account is password-protected, so Safe Mode isn't going to help you here even if you get that far.
Once I've logged out, it shouldn't be possible to tie my computer to my Facebook account. Deleting the cookies is an optional (but very simple and reliable) way to achieve this. Otherwise, you need to make sure that all of Facebook's cookies completley "forget" your user account.
Alternatively, take the approach I do: block cross-site requests to Facebook.com. When I browse the web I can be signed into facebook one tab over, but all the rest of the Internet is unaware that I even have an account. There are various tools for doing this, but the one I prefer is actually the Tracking Protection (formerly known as InPrivate Filtering) feature built into IE9.
You would typicaly need to manually launch the other app and paste the content in there, but in a generalized sense, yeah, that's what this is. The difference is that it provides a way for an app to say "Share with me, and I will with it." For example, a Facebook app could say "Share Text with me, and I will do a Status Update with it" and "Share An Image with me, and I will Add It To An Album for you".
The ability for either the user or the developer to do things like this is not new at all. What is new is creating a standard way for developers to do it, and and an easy/quick/straightforward way for users to do it.
What's your point? That's already totally possible, assuming the user leaves their browser logged in (equivalent to storing credentials in one of these Social Netowrking apps). Seriously, I realize MS-bashing is popular around here, but stop and thing for a couple seconds before you post.
It doesn't really. Mango (WP7.5) has something like it, but it's search- or media-oriented. An app can hook into search or into the media hub, but those are native parts of the OS. There's no way for one app to directly call into another app, even through an OS-defined channel.
The SUA community has been hoping for a while now that Microsoft just open-sources the stack - everything about the NT kernel - and lets the community maintain it rather than actually killing it. Ideally they would open-source it but continue to maintain and update the code, but the truth is that SUA has gotten fairly little love since Vista came out. They add features and fix bugs, but slowly - 64-bit shared libraries from GCC has been in the works for a while, now. The Win7-update of Interix (the SUA "OS" environment) didn't ship until well after Win7 itself was generally available (although you can install Interix 6.0 on SUA 6.1 just fine).
It's actually really interesting what it does and doesn't have. It's available in 64-bit, including utilities, libraries, and build toolchain, but if you're running on 32-bit it still doesn't have the 64-bit extensions that enable things like working with files more than 4GB in size. There's still no support for clone(), which makes a lot of Linux source code not compile on Interix. There's no direct access to physical block devices, which means you can't use Unix disk utilities, and no audio support (though you can use a network-connected sound server that runs on Win32).
Open-sourcing SUA would allow people to fix many of these issues (seriously, how hard can block devices be? Map \\.\PhysicalDisk0 to /dev/sda, and you're much of the way). It would allow resolving the silly little issues, like the poll() implementation being half-baked and therefore requiring a portability library that implements it using select() instead.
Seriously, this is a win-win. MS doesn't have to support it anymore, the people who use it can continue using the MS version or the new community version (or modify the community version for their own purposes), those who want to tinker and hack on it can make improvements, and MS can get some good press for open-sourcing a (fairly low-level, even if rarely used) component of the NT software stack.
I believe OpenSuse is much closer to SLE[S|D] than Fedora is to RHEL, though I could be mistaken. I've certainly seen "trial" SLED DVDs floating around, which will prompt (but not require) you to buy a support contract and such when installed.
There are advantages to SUA that you don't get with virtualization. The ability to run tools side-by-side, even calling from POSIX programs into Win32 DLLs in the most recent version. The ability to enable Windows to use NFS. The ability to SSH *into* a Windows box and do remote administration using familiar tools. The ability to Remote Desktop into a server that also needs to run a Perl program in a Unix environment.
Basically, anywhere that you *would* use something POSIX-based, but need to also use Windows. Even if they don't *need* to be on the same logical machine, you can save hardware resources by running them that way.
I'm sure you've made an exhaustive study of the subject...
17171 registered users on the SUACommunity forums would beg to differ. Not a *huge* user base by any means, but definitely relevant, especially since quite a few of them *are* supporting projects running on SUA (or its old name, SFU) in business environments.
There are a number of public SUA-based projects, though they're typically small. One active member of the SUACommunity forum has a semi-working Debian port to SUA (certain operations that are quick on Linux are still really slow and a few things may not work yet, but it's just getting started and is already quite impressive).
Privately, however, it's a different story. Many businesses use SUA internally. Hell, Microsoft themselves used an earlier version of it to host Hotmail for a while (they wanted to run it on NT, but it was written for Apache which wasn't yet available on NT except through the POSIX subsystem). I don't know of anything mission-critical that my employer is currently using it for, but there are a few small internal projects - heck, I have it on my dev box just so I can use bash instead of cmd. If you poke around the SUACommunity forum, you'll see posts from people at a handful of companies who have internal SUA projects.
Heck, as a student I used it for subversion, ssh, and similar (my university had a lot of Linux boxes, and I don't like the Windows apps for accessing them nearly as much). I even developed an application in C (that was to run on Linux) using SUA for a class project; it had 4 #ifdef checks in 5KLoC and I could have worked around at least two of them if I hadn't been lazy (easy way on Windows and easy way on Linux, or hard way that works on both). I still run sshd on my home box; it's a simpler (and low-bandwidth-friendly) way to access it remotely than Remote Desktop, and it works whether I'm booted into Windows or Linux.
Ironically, Windows *Mobile* 6.x had this feature. It was intended for meetings (sinlence ringer while your calendar says you're busy) but could easily be used for classes too. But... MS didn't include it in WP7. The platform needed its reboot, but some stuff was lost along the way too.
Note: I don't and didn't ever have a WinMo device; this is just reports from friends and acquiantences who did (living in the Seattle area and working in the software industry, there's lot of such people).
They'll just use desktop apps. Seriously, did you even read the summary?
Windows has supported handwriting recognition for years, and still does in Win8 (assuming you have a digitizer that can recognize a stylus). Whether Word will support handwriting recognition within a doc directly, I don't know. OneNote already does, though.
I haven't seen any of these problems. TMO in the Seattle the area is still fast and reliable, and I have more coverage (first-party, not roaming) than I did last year. The month-to-month plans are harder to find now, but they still exist. I've only had to call support once, but it was easy. The response was quick, the guy spoke English with an American accent, and he fixed one problem immediately and helped find the cause of the other.
I'm going to be very upset if TMO-US no longer exists independently when my contract is up. (I was going to go contract-free, but a discount from my employer that only applied to contract plans made the two-year plan the cheapest option all up.)
WTF... How did this get nodded up?!? You're not replacing apps because of the OS, you're replacing them because of the architecture. Did you also expect that all OS X apps would run on iOS? That's exactly equivalent to what you're asking for here.
Anybody with even a basic understanding of hardware architectures will tell you that trying to run x86 apps on Arm would be both a significant development effort (emulating a very complex ISA) and horribly slow. It's technically possible, and I'm sure you'll be able to install emulators (DOSBox already runs - after a fashion - on Arm) but that doesn't make it a worthwhile business expenditure for Microsoft.
Win8 on x86 or x86_64 will continue running all the apps that Win7 runs today, which in many cases means back compatibility down to Win95. Unless you're planning to replace all your x86 machines with Arm machines at the same time you replace your Win7 installs with Win8 ones, you've got nothing to worry.
Seriously, stop it with the retarded FUD. I wouldn't even have bothered responding except somebody nodded this idiocy over my threshold.
Good point... Except for the obvious problem that in each previous example where emulation was used for backward compatibility, the new processor was, generally speaking, more powerful. The Mac PPC to x86 transition is probably the closest to that *not* being true, and it showed; Rosetta couldn't run apps anywhere near as fast as even a PPC chip from a few years previous. Arm, by comparison, is far less powerful less than the x86 chips you're asking it to emulate. The performance would be atrocious.
Microsoft is no stranger to software emulation. Virtual PC for Mac used it for years (and perf sucked going that direction too). The Xbox 360 uses software emulation for backward compatibility with games written for the original Xbox, but it uses a triple-core (and hyperthreaded) 3.2 GHz PPC chip to emulate a 500 MHz single-core x86 chip. When you've got a disparity like that - 6x the clock speed and 6x the hardware threads - real-time emulation is possible.
The best Arm chips available today are comparable in clock speed and hardware threads to a netbook CPU. When the best CPU of class X is as powerful as the worst from class Y, emulating Y on X is just completely unreasonable.