Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 10th Feb 2012 00:09 UTC, submitted by moondevil
As you all know, Windows 8 will be the first release of Windows NT which supports the ARM architecture. Microsoft hasn't been particularly forthcoming about this new Windows variant, but that's changing today. The company has posted a long and in-depth blog post about Windows 8 on ARM.
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Member since:2005-07-08
That being said, couldn't MS provide an updated subset of the older windows APIs? This would be a cleaned up API that allows for easy porting, but forces app designers to make sure that their desktop apps are touch friendly, don't require admin privileges to install or run, have portable installations, and play nice with power management.
WinRT is already possible to use from the desktop side, although the set of available APIs is limited.
I guess it is a question of resources, as even for Microsoft it would be too hard to fully provide a complete Win32 replacement in Windows 8.
In the future there might be more WinRT integration in the desktop side, but this is just a guess on my side.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:33 UTC
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
Linked by Anonymous on 06/18/13 22:26 UTC
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:25 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:45 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:32 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:58 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:52 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 21:03 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 20:46 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 17:32 UTC
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.More News »
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2006-03-18
So I get that the issue with the old Windows API stack is that if you allow unrestricted installation of even ARM compiled "desktop" binaries, eventually something is going to be installed that doesn't work well with power management, runs processes in the background that don't place nice, or runs stuff in the foreground that eats your battery alive.
WinRT is carefully crafted to make it very very hard to do any of these things. Whereas the older windows APIs allow just about anything - this is why MS had to carefully port Office to WOA, to make sure that these desktop apps behaved properly on more limited devices.
That being said, couldn't MS provide an updated subset of the older windows APIs? This would be a cleaned up API that allows for easy porting, but forces app designers to make sure that their desktop apps are touch friendly, don't require admin privileges to install or run, have portable installations, and play nice with power management.