281–290 of 418 posts
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No, it's patent-law, not copyright law. Interestingly while the US has Fair Use (which is an open-ended legal defence), I don't think any countries in the EU (or "Western Europe" if Brexit happens) have anything beyond the closed and enumerated "Fair Dealing" defence).
>or "Western Europe" if Brexit happens Wait a second, one of us is behind the times. I thought Brexit happened earlier this year?
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>or "Western Europe" if Brexit happens Wait a second, one of us is behind the times. I thought Brexit happened earlier this year?
Brexit is in a constant state of happening and not happening. You can think of it like a qubit.
>The United Kingdom (UK) left the European Union (EU) on 31 January 2020. A transition period is now in place until 31 December 2020.
As far as I can tell from my distant vantage point on the west coast of North America, there is very little doubt left. Brexit has already happened and most of the fallout will be settled by the end of this month. I supposed you could say that it's still in a constant state of happening, but it's well past the point of "not happening" as far as I can tell.
[0]: https://www.government.nl/topics/brexit/brexit-where-do-we-s...
I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC. Standardized parts and a well defined firmware interface (and thus "standard" bootloaders instead of a multitude like on ARM) is what makes the PC truly special. Moving to a world where you can't install Linux or where every single machine has incompatible firmware would be disastrous, IMHO. Curren…
As for the broader trend towards closed: open standards naturally flourished in a world where one company wasn't huge enough to do everything themselves (except maybe IBM, but they dropped the ball to everyone else's benefit). Companies were forced to cooperate if they wanted to succeed.
That's no longer the case, and that's why open standards are dying. Just one of the many ramifications of corporate consolidation. Just one more reason for megacorps to be broken-up.
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>I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC I think that ship has long sailed as we failed to treat smartphones as handheld computers and subject the smartphone/OS manufacturers to the same scrutiny as computer/OS manufacturers. This is a missed opportunity especially to those countries where smartphones are the first computer to majority of…
We had that in the form of Windows CE based smartphones. As open as a PC, no walled garden, no app stores, just load your app and launch it. The market spoke decisively in rejecting it in favor of the iPhone and Android devices.
Back in 2005, an open source Linux based phone was a hippie pipe dream, and carriers were FIRMLY against allowing anything open source on their networks. Android blew all of that wide open, and now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS. This is what we were all dreaming about back then. I feel like this is an incredibly underappreciated fact.
Yes, some carriers lock down their Android phones, because it's an open platform, so carriers can do what they want with it, but since the dawn of Android there have always been high end Android phones that were trivial to put into developer mode and install whatever wacky OS mods you want.
It seems like Apple and Microsoft are picking up the ball that Transmeta dropped >10 years ago.
This makes Windows on Apple M1 devices more attractive. I wonder when Microsoft will take up Apple on their offer to create a bootable OS for their hardware.
With Intel based CPUs, Windows support was an important feature and selling point so Apple created Bootcamp. Windows ARM is far less appealing that its x86 counterpart was 15 years ago, so Apple didn't add Bootcamp. With their hypervisor it seems like Windows will run just fine in a VM instead.
I'm not sure Microsoft is interested in selling a version of Windows that runs atop MacOS as a child OS. As things currently stand, Windows running on the Mac embarrasses the heck out of the Surface Pro X. That's without decent driver support. How would Microsoft look if the fastest way to run Windows on ARM was as a child OS on a Mac?
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We had that in the form of Windows CE based smartphones. As open as a PC, no walled garden, no app stores, just load your app and launch it. The market spoke decisively in rejecting it in favor of the iPhone and Android devices.
The market rejected it because it had crappy UX. Those smartphones were marketed for balding dads in white shirts, working in cubicles. Steve Ballmer types. The iPhone had 60 fps smooth animations, a built-in iPod, a huge capacitive touchscreen, and most importantly none of the baggage of being associated with balding managers in their 40s. It was sexy. It was a fashion statement. There wasn’t even an AppStore on iOS…
I owned two of these devices as a personal information manager (contacts calendar ...). They were not comfortable and the data plans then were so prohibitive expensive that modern usage was far away.
I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC. Standardized parts and a well defined firmware interface (and thus "standard" bootloaders instead of a multitude like on ARM) is what makes the PC truly special. Moving to a world where you can't install Linux or where every single machine has incompatible firmware would be disastrous, IMHO. Curren…
Wait so a standardized system is more flexible? Experimenting with new ideas would be too rigid? That seems entirely contradictory.
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I do not understand why ARM is considered lesser technology. RISC was always considered to be better then CISC in many academic circles.
Well, two main reasons: 1. Innovator's dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma ARM in this case is the underdog, attacking the incumbent x86. It is the lesser tech because it started from "below" (lower value niches not taken by the incumbent which prefers higher profit margins). 2. RISC vs CISC has never been settled. Until Apple (and Amazon super recently) produced their super recent archit…
The big performance gap between Mac and Windows Intel support seems to boil down to translation versus emulation. Since Windows 64 bit support still uses emulation, I expect performance of Intel 64 bit apps is still going to be pretty slow.