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NT stands for New Technology!!!

2011-09-16T00:23:00.001+07:00

I got this interesting discussion and hopefully you can it usefull.

fehu said,

ok it's only curiosity
i always thinked that ce is the microsoft take on reliability performance and flessibility on arm, if win8 will not even be compatible with well everything, why brother to port a full nt kernel?

thenetavenger, 18 May 2011 - 19:56
Well there are a lot reasons known and unknown. The reasons known is that NT offers a lot of kernel and architectural features that WinCE is not capbable of providing. WinCE was designed based on some of NT's design, but was written very specifically to do things as fast and light as possible. (This is why WP7 is significantly faster than Android and iOS on comparable hardware.)

Windows Compact 7 (Windows Ce 7)

NT is a rather 'smart' OS architecture, that has brilliance in the kernel and the general OS model that makes it highly flexible and powerful, as it deals with higher level concepts and structures than WinCE or even iOS/OSX or Linux does. This is how they can morph it and add on new stacks, video subsystems, new schedulers, etc without having to rewrite or deal with the cascading issues that the other OSes would have to rewrite to make the same modifications work properly.

So NT is powerful, and it also can be fairly light, lighter than even Linux, which is something people don't realize. Microsoft just hasn't ever focused on making NT 'tiny' as it is a desktop and server OS, and they had WinCE to fill in the device and light OS market needs.

Windows NT 4.0

As far as ARM is concerned, there are things beyond what the 'misinformation' people at Intel throw out. Just like when they dismissed AMD64 technology as worthless, and then after realizing the world was paying attention and knew better, they brought out EMT64, and stopped the misinformation campaign.

So here are things to consider that we don't know:
• Running x86 code on ARM is not easy, but could in theory be done. And Microsoft has done technologies like this before going back to the VDM in NT that runs DOS/Win16 as well as realtime recompiling technologies like they helped DEC design for x86 code on Alpha versions of NT in the mid 90s, and to current VM and other virtualization technologies that could be used.

• Has anyone considered dual CPU designs, with both ARM and x86 CPUs in the computer, NT can easily handle this type of concept seamlessly - giving users the light features needed for ARM and then flipping on the x86 CPU as needed. A lot like the hybrid video concepts using the lower powered integrated GPU and flipping to the higher end GPU when needed.

• Microsoft has talked about puting Win8 on a 'chip', this could mean a lot of things beyond what is basically known. For example, it could be a custom chip designed by Microsoft that handles the x86 translation without the need for a x86 CPU, and be very light on resources and fast.

Maybe they are working towards a new level of portability that is beyond code portability, and provided by an OS on a chip concept. (Microsoft has some brilliant chip/CPU/GPU engineers, just look at the Xeon in the XBox and the whole designs that are standard in computers today based on Microsoft's unified shader and other post processing technologies that they designed for the XBox 360.)

Windows 8

• Eventually WinCE will be replaced, as hardware will be so fast, that it will be relegated to a small market of devices that need an OS this light. Right now Microsoft is showing Windows 8 (NT) running on iPad level hardware, and shoving web pages and graphics many times faster than the iPad can do with iOS. So this shift is coming faster than people realize, and Microsoft seems to be preparing for it.

• As for Applications, WP7 is the first major step in moving to a full .NET based OS platform, and all the Apps written for WP7 are not locked to any hardware or CPU, just as .NET applications on Windows 7 or the XBox 360 are not locked to the hardware either. They wanted to make this shift with Vista originally, but had to back off, as .NET was not mature enough at the time to provide everything Microsoft wanted Vista to do. If this happens, it could be the runs anywhere anytime concept that Java and other technologies have tried to make happen, actually happen, as .NET is not hindered by the performance and compatibility issues that are now a part of Java and other similar technologies.

If you go look up NT vs WinCE (even WinCE 7.x) there is a lot of difference in what NT can provide that is just not inherent to WinCE or will ever be. (NT is a true Object Based OS model, which in the early 90s gave it 'bulk' when compared to the UNIX model, but as hardware and applications have evolved in the last 20 years, NT's nature makes it faster and lighter, as it is not having to use 'alternative/bandaid/ducktape' that now adds overhead to the UNIX type models to utilize the hardware and application technologies. (Yes Linux and OS X are victim of the 'simplistic' nature of the UNIX model they adhere use.)

Microsoft talked years ago about NT replace the DOS/x86 OSes, and also talked about NT replacing WinCE someday as technology and computing power allowed. One has already happened with the death of Win9x/ME, and WinCE is running towards the end of use as well.

(Microsoft under-estimated the first NT replacement cycle, as NT 4.0 could have replaced Win95. They didn't realize that the NT developers working with a much 'heavier' architecture and portable C based OS could pull off making NT 4.0 faster than Win95. As Win95 could had no rules, no security, no overhead, and could even use fully optimized hand coded x86 assembly. -Which is also why many of the Win9X OS developers didn't make it to WinXP team, whoops.)

So this is them preparing at the very least to happen as needed instead of at a future date.

Next Windows version will support ARM, WOW!!

2011-02-23T12:54:00.001+07:00

A few years ago Apple announced their operating system migration from PowerPC (RISC processor architecture) to Intel x86 (CISC processor architecture), and I start to think, will RISC processor architecture will fade from the world of PC processor? "Hmmm .. there will be Apple's OS piracy", I thought immediately when I read the news. Another thing is running the program that I created using Visual Basic on an Apple computer by installing a copy of windows via bootcamp. Some people feel happy with Apple's move from the PowerPC platform to Intel platforms, especially and of course, Intel's company. Many people praise Steve Jobs on the steps he did.

And before too long Apple make a new breaking again. This time Apple released its new product: the iPhone. When the first iPhone came out, Apple did not mention the operating system they used, except mentioning that the iPhone run OS X. Later Apple named the operating system with the IOS. IOS runs on ARM processor (RISC processor architecture).

RISC processor architecture had faded several years earlier because of the PDA and the Playstation 3 is the less desirable, but the popularity of RISC processor (ARM) is raised once again as the popularity of the iPhone. ARM), mulai menggeliat lagi. Then Android appears! Since the appearing of Android, the smart phone producers appear like mushrooms grow in the rainy season. This raised the popularity of the ARM to a higher level. Most of the smart phone uses the ARM as a processor because of its power consumption is very low.

The popularity of the ARM makes Microsoft considered it as new platforms for Windows. At CES 2011, Microsoft announced their plan for Windows in the upcoming version, that Windows will run natively on ARM processor. The following link is a Microsoft press release about the direction of Windows development:
Microsoft Announces Support of System on a Chip Architectures From Intel, AMD, and ARM for Next Version of Windows

Compared to Apple, it turns out that Microsoft took steps contrary. Previously, Microsoft has made mobile operating system for ARM processor, with the name of the Windows CE and Windows Mobile (latest version is Windows Mobile 7). But in the future, there will be no new windows mobile because Windows 8 (if the upcoming version of Windows will called as Windows 8 hehehe..) will runs on any type of processor. So if Microsoft starts with 2 types of OS (Desktop - x86 and Mobile - ARM) and become a single OS (which supports 2 types of processors architecture). While Apple starts with one type of OS (PowerPC) become 2 OS (OS X - x86 and IOS - ARM)

I don't know what people would prefer, Microsoft or Apple or even Linux, but one thing is for sure, that with the Microsoft's next steps, I just had to maintain my VB source code and when Windows is already available on the ARM platform, all I need is to recompile my source code with the target ARM processor if necessary. May be all of my programs that currently running on Windows x86, can run on ARM without the need to recompile at all. This is because I create applications using Visual Basic 2010 with. NET Framework which is a cross platform framework.

Also, I had thoughts to re-flash existing Android tablet pc with a Windows 8, but it may be illegal because Windows 8 also will be sold already installed on a chip such as Android. So if I flash an Android device to a Windows 8 device, the possibility of the files that I'm using would comes from the Internet or pirated one.

Finally, let's have some fun with Windows and Android.

About Operating System

2011-02-23T10:46:00.002+07:00

I still remember when it was in college (1997), in a Computer and Human Interaction subject test, there is one question: "In your opinion, what is the best operating system for the PC in the future?"

At that time, the most operating system widely used are Windows 95/DOS. My answer was BeOS because it looks intuitive, feature completeness, and BeOS is an OS that is most advanced at that time. Where BeOS already have all the applications needed for only once install, ranging from multimedia applications to application servers such as PoorMan (Web Server).

Although my answer is considered correct at the time, but lately I feel ashamed too, because there is no BeOS we can see these days hahaha:). BeOS is still developed with a new name that is Haiku.

Now a lot of alternative operating systems can run on x86 (intel, amd and the like), namely:
1. Windows 7 (Windows Vista, Windows XP, etc.)
2. Linux (Ubuntu, Google Chrome, Fedora, Debian, etc.)
3. MacOS (Leopard, Tiger)
4. Android
5. MeeGo
6. Haiku
7. BSD
8. etc

So, we are no longer need to depend on just one type of operating system, especially that so far has been so ingrained like Microsoft Windows. If you have a lot of disk space, you can install all those operating system on your computer. So you can taste different operating systems every day.