How Windows Everywhere finally happened • Hacker News Board

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#131

Post by pjmlp » Mon, May 23, 2016, 8:33 PM UTC

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #107

pjmlp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of ObjC sessions at last WWDC 2015 and the upcoming WWDC 2016 send another message.

ObjC will be around much longer than 3 years. It can't be deprecated until most of OS X is rewritten. Remember how long it took them to get rid of the Carbon Finder?

Sure, but the way it is being handled is a sure signal were things are going.

Apple even mentions Swift as a C and Objective-C replacement on their documentation.

Of course, it doesn't make business sense to stop the engines and rewrite all the stuff.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#132

Post by fleitz » Mon, May 23, 2016, 8:40 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #104

pjmlp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of ObjC sessions at last WWDC 2015 and the upcoming WWDC 2016 send another message.

Yup. The Standard Apple Deprecation Cycle works something like this: 1. New shiny thing is announced 2. Old busted thing starts getting talked about less 3. New shiny thing becomes the default, old busted thing hidden away 4. Official deprecation warnings issued 5. Old busted thing stops being supported. Apple being Apple, this quickly leads to 6. Old busted thing stops working altogether after something like an OS u…

ObjC is dead when swift no longer spends most of its time calling in to ObjC for the typical iOS/OSX app.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#133

Post by StevePerkins » Mon, May 23, 2016, 11:19 PM UTC

SahAssar wrote: post #130

0x6c6f6c wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

That's Windows 10 Universal look-and-feel, which kinda goes back to the original parent comment. You're basically using a web library to emulate a native library that emulates a web library!

At that point, I'd rather just pull the eject handle and use Twitter Bootstrap or something.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#134

Post by pjmlp » Tue, May 24, 2016, 5:39 AM UTC

fleitz wrote: post #132

Karunamon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. The Standard Apple Deprecation Cycle works something like this: 1. New shiny thing is announced 2. Old busted thing starts getting talked about less 3. New shiny thing becomes the default, old busted thing hidden away 4. Official deprecation warnings issued 5. Old busted thing stops being supported. Apple being Apple, this quickly leads to 6. Old busted thing stops working altogether after something like an OS u…

ObjC is dead when swift no longer spends most of its time calling in to ObjC for the typical iOS/OSX app.

In case you didn't got the memo, GDC and XTest are being re-written in Swift, it will eventually happen to other frameworks when it makes business sense to do so.

Let's see what else gets announced at WWDC 2016 and how many talks do show Objective-C code.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#135

Post by Const-me » Tue, May 24, 2016, 8:38 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #127

Const-me wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> run by IT people who are about security

People who are about security can secure 10 servers. Manually securing 1 million of them is prohibitively expensive.

MS have the technology to secure them by default. Key part of this technology is hardware-assisted virtualization + hypervisor.

The same architecture runs MS XBox one, MS Azure, and many other products like Amazon EC2.

> Taking control of a few Azure accounts

Accounts? How about actual, hardware servers?

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#136

Post by josteink » Tue, May 24, 2016, 9:27 AM UTC

piyush_soni wrote: post #39

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…

That's great! I didn't know about it. Would anyone happen to know how does it compare with the applications on Linux? Are they similarly forward compatible?

Absolutely not, at least not on compiled form.

It's not all black though: this problem is usually offset by the fact that most Linux software is open source and can be recompiled against the new platform source.

You take some, you give some. The result is quite different but looks the same to the end user.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#137

Post by digi_owl » Tue, May 24, 2016, 2:42 PM UTC

DrPizza wrote: post #125

zxcvcxz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suc…

Frankly the UI toolkit is a lesser issue.

The bigger issue is that the big desktop toolkits, GTK in particular, can't keep their APIs straight. Every other release or so they change some behavior or remove/replace something.

This in contrast to the kernel where once something is in, its in, and stays in that shape.

Thus you can run a CLI binary from the early 90s against a modern kernel. But you can't run a GTK binary from a year or two ago against a current lib version.

Edit: hve you taken to defending your own articles on third party sites now? Dueling in the Arstechnica comments not enough?

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#138

Post by Grishnakh » Tue, May 24, 2016, 4:49 PM UTC

willtim wrote: post #71

ekianjo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to consider an OS change maybe?

If only it were that simple. Even if we restrict ourselves to open cross platform software, hardware support remains a big issue. I have a Skylake laptop with which I daisy chain two external monitors via displayport. Linux doesn't even support Skylake properly, let alone my dual monitor configuration.

>I have a Skylake laptop with which I daisy chain two external monitors via displayport. Linux doesn't even support Skylake properly, let alone my dual monitor configuration.

And how many normal users actually do stuff like this?

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#139

Post by Grishnakh » Tue, May 24, 2016, 4:51 PM UTC

scholia wrote: post #110

ekianjo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to consider an OS change maybe?

Given the number of large organizations that appear to have been paralyzed for much of a decade by the problems of switching from XP/IE6 to Windows 7/IE11, a whole new OS might be a bit of a challenge.....

What's really weird is that these same large organizations didn't have that much trouble migrating computing platforms in the past: MS-DOS, Win3.x, Win95, Win98, Win2000, etc. Then they got to XP and suddenly they were stuck.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#140

Post by cpeterso » Tue, May 24, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

Grishnakh wrote: post #139

scholia wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the number of large organizations that appear to have been paralyzed for much of a decade by the problems of switching from XP/IE6 to Windows 7/IE11, a whole new OS might be a bit of a challenge.....

What's really weird is that these same large organizations didn't have that much trouble migrating computing platforms in the past: MS-DOS, Win3.x, Win95, Win98, Win2000, etc. Then they got to XP and suddenly they were stuck.

They probably saw diminish returns upgrading from XP to Windows 7, whereas the past upgrades you list add a lot of new functionality and applications. Windows was pretty much "feature complete" with XP.