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How Windows Everywhere finally happened

arstechnica.com

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Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#121

Post by ourmandave »

joosters wrote: post #97
LionessLover wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the feeling. My mother's approach to computing is infuriating: If she would just READ the often perfectly simple message on the screen she could solve 90% of her problems. For the same reason as your parents ending up with Windows 10 my mother managed to install the pay-version of the free anti-virus software I had installed - when it asked here if she wanted to upgrade to the non-free version she clicked on "…

One other difficult problem I find with my parents, and with others of a similar age, is trying to persuade them to experiment with using their computer. They often find some convoluted way of doing something and stick with it. For example, for a long time my Mum would return to google's homepage by quitting and restarting firefox. I had to explain how the home & back buttons worked several times. My parents were afr…

My parents were afraid to even try pressing unfamiliar icons in a program...

That's because it might force upgrade to Windows 10 if they hit the wrong button.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#122

Post by nacs »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #117
userbinator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long-time Win32 programmer (over a decade), I can safely say that the vast majority of existing applications still remain (for the time being) forward-compatible. Here's some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOj-bAZBhnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfn4M5DXTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqFWuNmWbHk The reasons people hold off on "upgrading" Windows versions is not mainly because of compatibility…

> the increased data-collection intrusiveness The irony of this common complaint is that most people voicing it carry iPhones or Android phones, which are heavily instrumented to collect data by the operating system provider, the hardware manufacturer, and the carrier. Unlike a desktop PC, it knows where you are at all times because of its onboard sensors and has access the content of any communication you make with…

> Unlike a desktop PC, it knows where you are at all times

A single web-API call can return an accurate geolocation based on IP address alone for the majority of users (there are a few exceptions like VPNs or a small subset of IPs where the location is not good). If the desktop has Wifi, then geolocation becomes even more accurate as you can use known Wifi SSIDs to cross-reference. If the user has set a time-zone for their clock, then again more accurate location data.

> Most of the collected data is, of course, benign. Just like the data collected by Windows 10.

Source? Have you been able to analyze all the data Windows data-collection/"telemetry" sends up to MS?

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#123

Post by dragontamer »

bad_user wrote: post #44
dragontamer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps running on each of them to be different. But why should they be programmed different? You can create XAML forms that are optimized for each platform. But why would you want to rewrite your code to adapt to the different GUIs? Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to…

Your assumptions hold for OS X and iOS even though they are not the same OS and never claimed to be. > Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to create a singular platform with two XAML (one for small screens, one for large screens) that share the same codebase? In theory yes, in practice changing the UI isn't the only problem. The problem is that a phone is much more limited, both in hardware and in what it is all…

But why _force_ it with different APIs?

Is it impossible to imagine a set of applications (ie: generic Bank of America banking app: take pictures of checks and send them in sorta thing) where the UWP model doesn't help?

If you need a 2nd application for your task, then write two different UWP applications. If you don't, then write one application with two XAMLs. If you want a very cheap program, write one application with a "responsive" XAML that works on all systems.

By unifying the code base, you have the flexibility to do whatever code you need. Different code paths if the applications are grossly different, or the same code path if you need to save some money.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#124

Post by DrPizza »

mwcampbell wrote: post #115

I wonder why the Windows Phone team decided to remove USER and GDI. After all, they ran fine on PCs in the 90s, so surely performance wouldn't be a problem on smartphones.

Modern graphics hardware isn't optimized for drawing bitmapped lines. It's optimized for drawing textured triangles. This means that it's not actually a good fit for GDI any more. Given that Windows Phone was, as far as apps were concerned, a clean slate, there was little reason to retain USER and GDI.

win32k.sys is also rife with security flaws, so scrapping it has arguably reliability benefits too.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#125

Post by DrPizza »

zxcvcxz wrote: post #75
pjmlp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is a kernel. I cannot run GNU/Linux applications on Android/Linux nor on ChromeOS/Linux.

You can if the applications are packaged properly.

Sure, if you install a GNU stack (glibc, for example, being an important part) you can run typical Linux software on Android. It's not the default, however. While the Linux kernel has proliferated, the userlands are more varied; Android/Bionic on phones and tablets, uClibc on routers and other embedded roles, GNU/Linux for most servers and desktops--though even in that final category, we see substantial variation such as systemd versus init.

Sometimes this is to Linux's advantage; it underscores its flexibility, and the ability to use, for example, busybox uClibc on small systems is definitely an advantage. But other times, like having no standard UI toolkit that works across desktop, tablet, and phone, or having different approaches to managing services/daemons, the advantages are less clear.

Canonical was heading hard in this unified direction, but I'm not sure what their current phone/tablet plans are. Their stupidly implausible kickstarter seems to have disrupted these efforts.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#126

Post by Const-me »

mwcampbell wrote: post #115

I wonder why the Windows Phone team decided to remove USER and GDI. After all, they ran fine on PCs in the 90s, so surely performance wouldn't be a problem on smartphones.

I think you’re right about the performance: on WP7 hardware, mobile ARM CPUs should be able to run native Win32 GUI, and the code was already here.

GDI is just too old.

GDI was created long before multi-core CPUs gained traction, so it paints everything on the single thread. XAML uses two cores, rendering and animations run on a separate thread called “composition thread”.

GDI was designed long before GPUs gained traction, so it paints everything on the CPU. XAML manipulate textures on the GPU: it’s faster because GPUs are massively parallel, it uses less energy because custom hardware is more energy efficient than a general-purpose CPU. Here’s more about that: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff7... It’s for D2D API, but both WinRT/XAML and WinPhone/SL platforms use GPU in the similar fashion to D2D.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#127

Post by Spivak »

Const-me wrote: post #32
sidawson wrote: post #7

First immediate thought: Can you get virus/malware scanners for XBox? Otherwise, it seems an immediate easy target for a new botnet.

Windows Azure datacenters have more than 1 million servers combined. They all run Windows, and unlike those cheap XBoxes, they are powered on 24/7 and connected to very fast fiber optics. If you think Windows is an immediate easy target, why don’t you run your botnet on Azure?

Because, I would hope, the people running boxes on Azure are run by IT people who are about security. Not the case for consumer hardware.

Taking control of a few Azure accounts might be worth a few hundred Xbones but which one is easier and more likely to go unnoticed?

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#128

Post by pjmlp »

userbinator wrote: post #112
pjmlp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Windows coding experience goes back to Windows 3.0 and I am looking forward to the day Win32 and Hungary notation are nothing more than plain maintenance coding, replaced by a proper type safe OO ABI like WinRT.

My past experience with others "OO-ifying" APIs (e.g. MFC) makes me think that'll just end up being worse because it tends to add a lot of complexity that gets in the way and obfuscates the flow of the code. Besides, Win32 is implicitly quite OO already and can be used from a variety of languages because it's based on C. Not everyone wants to use C++.

MFC is not a good example. OWL, VCL are much better approaches to Windows frameworks.

Not everyone wants C to stay around.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#129

Post by T-A »

0x6c6f6c wrote: post #86
dvdcxn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with that, HTML/CSS/Js is by far the most widely understood paradigm for building user interfaces. There's nothing stopping apps built with these technologies looking native other than the stylistic choices of the designers.

Someone should have created a Windows.css framework for easy native design..

https://metroui.org.ua/

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#130

Post by SahAssar »

0x6c6f6c wrote: post #86
dvdcxn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with that, HTML/CSS/Js is by far the most widely understood paradigm for building user interfaces. There's nothing stopping apps built with these technologies looking native other than the stylistic choices of the designers.

Someone should have created a Windows.css framework for easy native design..

That's WinJS. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/develop/winjs
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