No, Windows 8 needs to be *more like* windows phone

My Windows phone 7.8 has a 4in screen with room for 8 full size “live tiles”. My Windows 8 PC has 28in screen with tiles pretty much the same size as the phone. If it was more like the phone, the “tiles” could be VGA sized.. but at that scale they’d be big enough for a full display and not just a “live tile”

.. so if W-Eight was more like WinPhone, the widows would be resizable dockable, and only “tiled” when minimised to the tilebar!

Start's a start

The next bit in the puzzle is Metro apps that you can run a window or maxamise on a multi-display rig, just like ModernMix allows you to do.

The Watch to watch is open

MS (bill) was well ahead of the curve with a smart watch, but the killer app for a smart watch is not yet-another twitter reader or iPod, but things like NFC links to embedded glucose monitors for diabetics & athletes and heart-rate monitors. Health/Stress management might be small niche now, but they are the apps that work better on a wrist than in the pocket.

The key is very open simple interfaces

times running out

"wants to help reinvigorate the PC market".. If Windows Blue doesn't reverse the mistakes go Wi-Eight they face the prospect of IDC, Gartner etc Producing a graph showing Apple taking over PC as well as tables by 2016, its all downhill from there.. Goodbye.

Is there nobody in Microsoft who cares for the company Bill made?

What takes so long

So it’s going to take the largest software company in the world longer to do a “skin” for iOS & Android than it took them to write the whole (first version) of MacWord & Excel, & with 100 times the resources. Given that they’ll both be based on Office 365.. how difficult can it be to write an app to host a web browser?

No ideological vision lead to BT privatisation

The Post Office wanted a huge wodge of money to switchover all the exchanges to a digital network and Mr T wouldn’t splash the cash while she was slashing expenditure. Privatisation was a vehicle to get private money into the investment; the creative stuff was leveraging investment in Cable & Wireless to get them to compete with BT and avoid the cries of “monopoly”

Privatisation was validated when BT “found” they could incrementally upgrade exchanges using revenue, and didn’t need the wodge after all.. could a change of management have done the job? .. that’s what she did with the Coal Board, where two years of overtime to build stockpiles at power stations provided the buffer needed endure a miners’ strike without power cuts.

won't happen!

for the same reason TIFKAM was "called" WindowsRT.. MS senior management are gutless, and they don't have A compelling story to say, because Windows7 is "obsolete" and Wi-Eight is "imature".

It'll take just a few major customers to threaten to go OSX or Linux and MS will fold.. It all hangs on Windows Blue, and that won't leave time for 2014.. Just like the 2007 announcement, it won't happen!

Windows People tile is the only facebook reader i use

I only use the Facebook for distant family & friends, preferring LinkedIn for work, twitter for travel updates and Skype for person-2-person messaging so I really like the people tile because it pulls all the updates together, and with a flick I can see all their comments, and flick again to phone them, or send a private text or Skype message.

I've got the {Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, Skype} apps but rarely use them.

I went for a Windows phone 'cus I'm old enough to use HoTMaiL, and took the view that "a smart phone is one you can read an email on with a Word attachment".. But stayed because my cheap Dell-phone has a slightly curved glass that never crack when I drop it, and despite being 3 years old, its had two major OS updates (7.5 & 7.8).

I guess that makes me a fan, but no, I'm just cheap.. that's why I don't have a MS Surface.. but I did type this on the phone's slide-out keyboard

Cullinet moment...

Microsoft still think that MS-is-forever, and people will adjust to its inconsistent interfaces like an armchair that doubles as a wheelbarrow, they won't.. Unless they come up with something that actually works consistently they'll be as dead as one dominate Cullinet.

the secret source is.. er.. windows.. specifically windowed TIFKAM applications.. and a start button

So Sparc T5 beats a 3-yr old x86 using a int vector instruction that nothing uses

So Oracle adds a vector search instruction to Sparc T5 that enables it to write a really fast “SPECint_rate 2006” benchmark, and promises that “some time soon” a version of Oracle DBMS & Java will use this instruction for fast scans, and maybe this instruction will be used enough not just to justify its addition to every instruction decode, but to run faster than a three year old Xeon.

Fortunately for Oracle SPECint does not need complex multithreaded locking (like er, a database or a JVM GC), which might have suggested that (Power & Xeon) Transactional Memory instructions might be more useful.

Fortunately for Oracle “mainframe” kinda excludes GPGPU/MIC for int vector search handling, but misses on FPGA (which is the modern equivalent of mainframe microcode programming) that makes the IBM Netezza so fast.. but then Netezza is a DBMS appliance and Oracle chose a SPECint benchmark.

I guess “leadership” of the Oracle engineers implementing int vector search with Sparc will not have the time to do some coding to use the Intel Xeon Phi MIC 80-core x86 which spanks all-comers on int vector work, which is a shame because Intel’s BCD support would be more useful with Oracle’s BCD “NUMBER” types.

Or 25% of the annual budget cut "agreed" by heads of government

Just need to find a few more monopolistic transgressors, and there’ll be no need to make any budget cuts in the commission

I'm pretty sure this is about the iPhone6

Apple didn’t dump google maps out of spite; it did it because it wanted to get into turn-by-turn navigation. I’m pretty sure Nokia are pitching to replace Apples woeful maps application, rather than entering the Android market

time for microsoft to do what google did...

And add an exchange email client to the app-store.

Distributed Denial Of Service?

Maybe the aerial problem is flooding the network with connect messages …

Given that the emergency services use Vodafone, maybe its time to do what ISPs do with DDOS attacks, and blacklist offending IMEA address!

If you can't own the market..

..then buy it! a 60% cut for a windows rt tablet looks like a good price point to compete with Android.. worked for HP

not just Cutomers that have a vested interest.

If outfit Y runs a big expensive consultancy around product YY, the implementation manager could be using the references as a way to get a consultancy role, even if he knew it wasn't right for his employer. Which is better, the $2m product or the $1m product that requires $1m to "customise"/"integrate"?

Looks like an epic fail

“already need to build separate modules for 32-bit and 64-bit Intel processors” is not true: NaCl is 32-bit only for a very specific reason.. it uses Intel segment registers to provide the sandbox (Newlib functions are the only ones allowed to change segment register values to access memory outside the sandbox). When the AMD/Intel CPU is in AMD64 mode, those segment registers are aliased to provide additional general purpose registers.

Leaving aside the dependence on a deprecated feature of a legacy mode, NaCl was quite a neat solution to a complex problem, but the move to AMD64 (or ARM5/6/7 or PowerPC or Mips or …you get the idea) required a smarter approach. Portable NaCl (featuring LLVM) was billed as the future solution because an enhanced LLVM backend could add in the a software equivalent to the NaCl hardware sandbox.. but there was a problem: PnaCl bitcode was slower than V8 Javascript code for common tasks!

So NaCl for ARM looks like an admission that Google just couldn’t get Portable NaCl to be fast enough to bother with! So NaCl developers face the prospect of providing different binaries for every different processor from every different manufacture (NB Snapdragon ARM may not be the same as Tegra ARM).. but that OK ‘cus even Google knows they are the only ones ever to use it, because they’re the only ones with an interest in Chromebook.. epic fail!

Pricing for the devices hasn't changed: NOT TRUE!

When the Surface kit was announced, the “Pro” version was billed as coming with a “Type Cover”.. so removing a £100 item from the spec is effectively a price increase.

My guess is that the “pro” version is being re-positioned more as a desktop replacement (where the touch keyboard just doesn’t cut it) than a hybrid tablet, and will be followed up with a docking station

price is the only issue

It is hard to imagine how Microsoft positioning could be more dumb about Surface, but the only problem with it is price, if you want to buy market share they need to fight android on price, iPad on quality, then win on functionality.

Win RT is not DOA because Microsoft will [1]bring surface pro in at RT price point [2] reduce RT Surface price [3] win RT is the ultimate VDI platform.. Expect to see RemoteFX terminals, embedded TV controls & Xbox 720.

MS are running out of time to regain hegemony, & need to start playing to win like 1980 Bill Gates

Most Emerging markets don’t need hand-warmers!

The main “advantage” an Intel CPU has over a ARM CPU is that it can double-up as hand-warmer.. so that pretty much limits it to Russia!

Win Phone 8 could run Android & iOS apps

Given that almost nobody (but Apple) makes money from phone apps, there is little incentive to migrate them over to HTML5 or WinPhone. Now that the Windows phone has a proper protected kernel, it would be relatively easy to build a sandbox for running Android Java apps or even Objective-C apps on a Windows phone.

Microsoft has failed to get app-dev mindshare, so it makes sense to do what RIM are going to do with their QNX kernel and provide an Android player.. maybe Elop is nudging that one along

Clearly never worked on one of my projects!

The comment “nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no software out in the wild is,” goes to the root of the problem.. because it is just not true text-books often have coding errors & many examples are banal.

Students that are taught to ignore {transactions, Exceptions, Recovery, Logging, instrumentation, performance, scalability, maintainability} are not being taught to “focus on the algorithm” they are being taught to be sloppy. Poor coding tuition is compounded by poor design tuition (e.g. Manager is a specialization of Employee, or GoF state-pattern). The problem is that whilst the quality of tuition is variable, different institutions are variable in different ways.. and students think they’re brilliant.

Many systems (particularly in finance) are so woeful because trainees (in the art of software engineering) have no real training in quality engineering; and resort to hacks to get through. Meanwhile an earlier generation who didn’t graduate to quality professional before moved into management are directing, but are afraid to tell sponsors how long development really takes.. because they don’t know. You only need to do 1 or 2 well engineered systems to know that good design saves time & modeling really is free.

There is hope: some practitioners are excellent; tools are getting better; frameworks are getting better; platforms are standardizing.

Sure an awful lot of real world code sucks, but some of it is quite beautiful!

gallium arsenide used to be used in IBM mainframe processors

IBM took a hit and for a while HDS made the fastest S/390 mainframes. The rational then was that more CMOS cores packed close together would provide higher performance at lower lost with greater MTBF.

gallium arsenide might be faster for high-frequency-trading, but unless they address the heat problem, you won't be able to co-locate in exchanges.

Better than the current process

Currently the bulk of medical research goes into the “treating” (as in not “curing”) ailments suffered by Rich Americans & insurance companies already profile you by where you live, gender, claim history together with fuzzy info from marketing sources.

As more and more information is digitised and more and more of us give away data to social media sites, the profiles will get more precise, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

The biggest threat from a DNA database is that the government will underestimate the value and flog access cheaply. Mapping DNA sequence to medical conditions through large-scale data analysis is much much much more valuable than the few quid you’d get from Insurance companies.

Whilst the police would love to trawl a DNA database for criminals, the huge value of the database should ensure that it cant be used in that way

Ironic but many Security “consultant” prefer NTLM + SSL over Kerberos + IPSec

Having to set a SPN in AD for impersonation (re-vend Kerberos tickets to apply end-user access rules in n-tier scenarios) is seen as an “unacceptable risk”… but those same “consultants” were stumped by “all content is encrypted using a zero-shift Cesar cipher”

Hell no! need to focus on Customers, Customers Customers

They need to fix the shit that is -8 before focusing on anything else WinPhone included. Windows -8 is the first desktop OS to require a keyboard simply because ideological purism & fragrant disregard for customer experience.

TIFKAM is a neat interface, but if the hardware doesn’t have “windows button” on the screen, you need to add one.. and the desktop needs a “start”/”home” button

Time for plan A (Loss Leader)

I’m pretty sure plan-A was for the MS Surface to seed the market with some cheap ($199) kit to get the ball rolling to kick-start app development and OEM build-out. Plan-B is Plan-A knobbled by the hardware vendors to protect their margins.

there is no market for ANOTHER premium tablet.. it’s commit or walk time! Commit means price cuts; Walk means sacrificing the flank & strategic oblivion.

… so Mr Ballmer, listen to the {Chairman; Marketing; Analysts; Partners; Customers}, and give us a price cut in time for Christmas!

I'm looking foreward to SP1

You know, the version where they introduce the “Home” (“start”) button on the desktop, and “Home” icon onto TIFKAM.. ‘til then -8 looks too much like its emoticon

Yes, Yes, Yes... but maybe without the Pi

Sure Python is better than BASIC and easier for teaching than C for Ardunio, but then so is Java. Back in the 80s you could strap a marker pen to a robot to draw turtle graphics from Logo, or navigate a maze.

The functional equivalent of that 80s rig is not a cut-down PC without a case, but a cut-up Android phone with additional sensors/controls.. you can get ARM chip, camera, GPS, motion sensors, Wifi, screen & battery pretty cheap.. so why lock the kids to a screen when they can build robots.

OS/2 was not that great

Not quite right about [NAME] finding a way to trick DOS into running in the 286 Protected mode; the trick was finding a way to address 4Mb without entering protected mode. The 8086 processor had 16-bits to address the 64Kb in each segment plus 4-bits in the segment registers to give a total of 1Mb (10 segments for memory 640k, & six segments for adaptors/graphics).

Although all the Intel documentation said that real mode was confided to 1Mb (bottom 4-bits of segment register) the registers were 8-bit wide and a bug meant you could set a 6-bit value.. giving 4Mb of addressable memory!

By this time Intel was already pushing the i386 and had no plans fix the bug so Windows was safe to exploit it… Had IBM hacked around with the 286 they never would have been dumb enough to build for the 286 protected mode that required a slow processor reset to switch from protected to real mode.. It is entirely inaccurate to call OS/2 1.x solid because any interrupt fired during the P->R switch would be lost and potentially hanging.

Not quite right about EBCDIC either (both ASCII & EBCDIC are standardised). ASCII was popular on small machines because it was a 7-bit code (1-bit for parity check) instead of 8-bit. A EBCDIC byte could either be a character, a 2-digit BCD number or a control code… BCD meant there was little space for currency codes.. hence the proliferation.. and Intel supported EBCDIC with BCD opcodes.

Not quite right about SAA & SNA either, the best TCP/IP stack for PCs in the 80’s used 300k and would not run with Lotus 1-2-3 & OSI was a non-starter. TCP/IP only got viable with QEMM, Windows or OS/2.

OS/2 only got viable at v2.0 on i386, but still had i286 hacks, only getting clean with OS/2 Warp (which IBM had locked MS out of).. renaming OS/2 3.0 to Windows NT was a no brainer for MS..

It is worth noting that when NT debuted, it was one of only four multi-processor OS (MVS,VMS & SunOS being the others).. without the IBM OS/2 adventure, we’d have switched to MS Xenix in the 80’s

OS/2 was doomed at the whiteboard

From what I remember the two big failings in the design of OS/2 were graphics point-of-origin and supporting the brain-damaged 80286 processor.

Going for the GDDM point-of-origin (bottom left of screen) instead of the Windows poo (top-left) meant that Windows programs could not be easily ported to OS/2 (the simple transform need to check which of the VGA modes the graphics was in to convert poo -> which was unacceptably slow). The irony being that mainframe GDDM applications worked much better with IBM’s existing 3278 emulation cards & PCDOS than with OS/2.

Supporting the Intel 80286 was a mistake because while switching from real (8086) to protected (286) mode was simple, doing the other way required you to reset the processor and catch it as it restarted.. making task switching very slow. Windows never supported protected mode, cooperatively switching in real mode or extended mode in Win/386 (Win 2.1 for 386 processors). In hindsight IBM should simply have printed upgrade vouchers for the PC-AT customers.

OS/2 Extended edition was promised at the get-go because OS/2 communications manager with shared SNA connection was seen as the best way to displace 3270 terminals & database manager was no threat to big iron because it did not even include transactions at first.

No review of OS/2 is complete without looking at its role in bank cash-machines (where 3270 datastream to Stratus boxes was the norm).

Had it not been for IBM, we’d all have switched to Microsoft Xenix (the Unix OS MS originally pitched to IBM for the PC), and wouldn’t have had to wait so long of a decent UI on a *nix OS

Utter utter shite!

Sure there are lots of guides and tools to make Windows -8 look like Windows7, and sure underneath it is quite neat, I even quite like the “start screen” on my Windows 2012 server, but on a touch-screen it is shite!

“on a touch-screen it is shite!” sounds a bit strong, but unless the touch-screen is a capacitive screen with flat sides (no bump border) and a “designed for Windows -8” button (i.e. a tablet), it doesn’t work because you have to revert to the keyboard for a “start” key.. it’s not just the desktop where the start-key is missing, it’s also the TIFKAM “-8” applications.

Windows -8 is not the bolded MS OS since Win95, it is the boldest since DOS; and the UI is the first to combine screen and keyboard since the IBM 3270E terminal with light-pen from the 1960s..

So we’re obliged to suffer a broken interface because Steve Balmer hasn’t got the balls to launch a new OS.. and wont get the screen start-button back until SP1 (in response to a cheeky Oracle Java web-start option)..

crunch time will come whe the iPad batteries start to fail.

with tablets usage skewed so much to the web a five year old iPad would still be viable, except when the battery has gone & can't be replaced.. Its then that Apple can become so far from cool that few people will want it.

the mainframe was never that secure

The first recorded email-virus was a Christmas Tree REXX script that rendered a twinkling tree on 3270 terminals, with the addition that it sent itself to everybody on you Profs contact list.. seized-up IBM for weeks and only purged by an emergency fix that that filtered-out Christmas.

On MVS JES enabled you to run a job on another mainframe (e.g. cataloguing a tape for another job to use), and running a job that spawned another was as simple as writing to a DD mapped to the intrdr.

Who needed a USB drive when you could use ftp & tcp/ip to move files around and optionally submit jobs through ftp with a “quote address intrdr”.. and yes those TN3270 telnet sessions had clear-text passwords.. and there was always RJE for those without TCP/IP FEP.

No, the mainframe was no more secure, but it was : secure-by-obscurity; what security there was, was on by default; everything was audited; the price for hacking was terminal.

x86 holds a special place in long-term Intel executives’ hearts?

You mean the processor architecture that Intel has been trying to kill for the last thirty five years!

Long before the Itanic adventure, and even before the IBM PC, Intel’s cunning plan was a new ADA machine iAPX 432. If Intel thought there was a future in x86 chip series they never would have licensed it to AMD and others.