Linked by Tony Steidler-Dennison on Mon 28th Jul 2008 18:42 UTC, submitted by Dan Warne
Business PC buyers are still overwhelmingly opting for XP, computer giant HP has revealed. Yet at the same time, Microsoft is claiming that Vista is selling faster than XP ever did ... so where's the truth? HP, which is the world's number one computer maker, has explained how Microsoft comes up with these dubious statistics.
Thread beginning with comment 324906
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[2]: I do not understand what Balmer thinks...
by luzr on Tue 29th Jul 2008 16:36
in reply to "RE: I do not understand what Balmer thinks..."
Member since:2005-11-20
3) If Microsoft had a bit of vision and could swallow their pride, they could find a way out by going the Apple route...dump both XP and Vista and go for emulation -- none of this virtualization stuff that adds yet more bulk with little benefit -- virtualization should be the focus of the new cleaned up API. All future work is on a lean, cleaned up API over a stable kernel. They could go with a F/OSS kernel, but knowing Microsoft, buying QNX might be a better bet and would allow them to break into markets where they have no credibility.
I keep hearing this argument again and again, and I think it is flawed.
First, you assume that Microsoft problems are due to bad API. Well, more specifically, you seem to assume that XP had serious problems. Well, for business, not so much. XP was extremely successful product.
Now the for the API. Well, Win32 is not great, but if you compare it to e.g. what we have in X11, it is still a relatively good API.
Anyway, the most important problem is that this is API used by majority of world's software. Do you think that it makes a sense for business to rewrite everything? And if they do, would not be better for them to consider abandoning Microsoft altogether and go different path? (either OSX or FOSS).
Of course, everybody touts virtualization, but that will just make existing software second-class citizens.
The reality is that XP and Win32 API works quite well. Throwing everything away does not make sense.
RE[3]: I do not understand what Balmer thinks...
by g2devi on Tue 29th Jul 2008 18:03
in reply to "RE[2]: I do not understand what Balmer thinks..."
Member since:2005-07-09
The key problem is, if you stay with XP and abandon Vista, you have to add Vista capabilities to XP and maintain all the 1000s of configurations kept inside of XP to preserve backwards compatibility.
In essense, XP would become incredibly bloated. Eventually, Microsoft has to abandon its backwards compatibility. It's not without precident. It gave up DOS, in favour of the less close to the metal NT-DOS. This resulted in thousands of DOS applications failing to work, but they gave DOS enough time to survive. Microsoft can't do this now, but they can clean up Win32 to get rid of all the backwards compatibility kludges and build it on a lean kernel. Then the Windows XP and Windows Vista APIs can be built, WINE-like
on top of the Win32-clean API.
This approach has several benefits:
(1) The Vista libraries would only need to be
loaded if you have Vista apps.
(2) The XP libraries would only need to be
loaded if you have Vista apps.
(3) If you only have Win32-clean apps, your machine would be a lot faster and your kernel will be a lot smaller (idealfor the embedded market).
(4) Porting apps from XP and Vista would simply be a matter of replacing obsoleted APIs with new ones. Code analysis software can catch most of these cases.
I don't see the down-side, other than Microsoft possibly regaining its leadership (which is, Roman empire-like, slowly in decline).
RE[3]: I do not understand what Balmer thinks...
by renox on Tue 29th Jul 2008 21:37
in reply to "RE[2]: I do not understand what Balmer thinks..."
Member since:2005-07-06
Now the for the API. Well, Win32 is not great, but if you compare it to e.g. what we have in X11, it is still a relatively good API.
X11 is a low level API, I'm not a Windows export but isn't this comparing Apple and Orange?
To compare 'identical purpose API' I think that it would be more fair to compare X11 to GDI and Win32 to Qt or GTK, no?
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
Sponsored Links
Member since:
2005-07-09
Three reasons come to mind.
1) Most people are generally unable to accept "sink cost". Gamblers who lose their house, keep thinking that they can make it all back, if they keep increasing the stakes. Addicts aren't the only one affected. In the dot-com bust, many companies went bankrupt and many companies fell from highs that any sane person would see would not be regained within the next 20 years, assuming the companies survive that long. It made sense long before the bust was in full swing. Still people refused to accept it. I know some people in Nortel who, when it went down to 40 dollars, honestly thought it was a bargain and made a mortgage on their stocks so they could become rich. Vista is a "sink cost", but Microsoft keeps thinking that it'll recover once XP is out of the picture. They're counting on their monopoly and people's complacency to make Vista what people expect.
2) Vista was a major rewrite that included some new technologies. If they kill Vista, those technologies have to be ported to XP or they have to take a lot of flack for abandoning their technical partners. If they do that, they may never recover.
3) If Microsoft had a bit of vision and could swallow their pride, they could find a way out by going the Apple route...dump both XP and Vista and go for emulation -- none of this virtualization stuff that adds yet more bulk with little benefit -- virtualization should be the focus of the new cleaned up API. All future work is on a lean, cleaned up API over a stable kernel. They could go with a F/OSS kernel, but knowing Microsoft, buying QNX might be a better bet and would allow them to break into markets where they have no credibility.
So hope and fear and lack of imagination/humility keep Vista alive. In essense, Vista for Microsoft is like riding a mechanical bull. You know you're going to fall off, and you're too proud to ask to turn it off, so you hang on for dear life, hoping against hope for a blackout so you don't have to fall.