Maybe Windows Phone 10 will be the version for Surface RT toys?

I think that by non cross-platform development, GP means that Microsoft forced their own developers to focus only on Wintel. For the time that they were available, Microsoft could have released complete versions of Office on the MIPS and the Alpha.

MIPS and Alpha failed due to a lack of native applications. Now, remember, Microsoft writes a few of those - like Office, and they could have given it a start. Like Office, Visual Studio, Money, and a few others. But they didn't. The only Office that ever saw it to the Alpha was Word and Excel: Access, which could have benefited, didn't get it. Nor were all Alphas expensive: there were Alpha clonemakers like DeskStation, Carrera, Microway, Aspen, et al selling Alphastations. Similarly, NeTpower and DeskStation sold MIPS workstations as well running NT.

The thing that enabled Intel to succeed was the fact that NT is, in addition to being ported to all these CPUs, also multi-processing. So Intel, once it got a big process advantage over others like DEC, HP, NEC, et al, could start throwing multiple cores at the CPU, and NT would have no issues supporting it. So on a price level, even a quad core would be equivalent to a PA-RISC, and when you toss in the overall cost of systems, it's a no-brainer. The main reason to buy an Alpha over an Intel was performance, but SMP enabled Intel to catch up. On top of that, companies like HP, SGI, Compaq (after it had digested DEC) all jumped on the Itanic bandwagon and abandoned PA-RISC, MIPS and Alpha, so that those architectures were abandoned, even though the Itanic never proved worthy of replacing them. The Intel Core architecture won by default as a result.

NT multi-architecture might be a good thing, but the time for that had come & gone once the Alpha went under. They could still resurrect it for the MIPS or the Power architecture (the same one that they made the Xbox 360s) and go there. But the opportunity to go multi-architecture for Microsoft existed in the 90s, and they blew it. Had they made a separate win64 based OS (like we have today) then for just the Alpha & the MIPS, they'd have had time to test & refine it, and had alternatives to 64-bit Wintel when it surfaced. But they never made any serious attempts to support these platforms.

I think now, the wars are b/w platforms, rather than just OSs or just CPUs. The only thing you'll get iOS on will be the A series of processors from Apple. Android comes on a variety of platforms, but Windows Phone 8.x seems to come on just the Cortex.

That makes sense. RT - Windows on ARM - made even less sense than other NT on RISC platforms in the past. At that time, there was at least a rationale of running NT on more powerful CPUs than Pentiums, or getting Silicon Graphics software on the platform via that route.

But Windows on ARM never made sense. As it is, for the tablet market, both iOS and Android are well entrenched, and for anyone to even consider Windows there, it would have to offer a strong reason to do it. That strong reason would be the ability to run Wintel apps, which one can do on any of the Surface Pro lines. But this line hardly offers that advantage. Good of Microsoft to have finally recognized this reality.

Now, if anybody could install Cyanogenmod/Replicant on these Surface 2s, they'd be in business.

EISA was also used in the earliest RISC workstations that supported Windows NT 3.1. There was the MIPS Magnum R4000, and the DECpc AXP 150, both of which had EISA buses for NT, and equivalent Turbochannel based workstations for UNIX (Irix/RISC-OS for the Magnum R3000 and Ultrix for the DEC 3000 AXP). MIPS abandoned the model after its foray into the NT market ended quickly, while DEC replaced both the above models w/ the PCI based AlphaStations and AlphaServers.

Wasn't EISA a substitute for ISA on servers, where presumably 32-bit instead of 16-bit buses were needed?

I had that problem once, and got solved by XP-mode in Windows 7

You could remove tiles, but I was talking about there being instead lists of the files/applications in their place. Since one has dozens of those, it would make a better use of the space.

Somebody who makes such a big deal over TiVo that he coined a term out of it - 'TiVoization' - which is simply locking a flash memory in which the set top box firmware is embedded - doesn't sound like someone who's agnostic about hardware. I'd have granted your point about that had Tivoization not been a big reason for GPLv3.

So within a few days of Windows 10 being released, I should be able to upgrade any Windows 8.x PCs that I have automatically? Same for my Lumia Ikon?

As others mentioned, I think after day 365, it'll cost something other than $0.00. Nothing to do w/ paying for it. Windows has never been bricked - just that if an OS is old enough, it won't get security updates. One thing I do wonder - how much will the full version be? At any rate, I'm not buying another Windows device until Windows 10 is out

Are you referring to UEFI support for the non-MS OS?

Should be fine. Debian's sin is making non-free available in the first place, and telling the great unwashed that it exists, instead of hiding it and pretending that it doesn't. At least that's what the FSF a.k.a. RMS hold against them

Well, there are quite a few possible reasons:

1. Price was not the #1 factor in their plan to put this together

2. They picked premium parts - going w/ quality, after their requirement of open documented parts had been met

3. As a previous poster noted, they did only a 500 unit run, as opposed to millions by Quanta, Arima, Compal, et al. As a result, got more of a disti pricing rather than volume pricing on parts

4. Their margins have to be far higher than that of a Dell or Lenovo given their operating expenses, and given that they're not an established company that have these things already covered

Since when is Safari and Opera 'partially open source'? I thought they were always closed source. Unless they're just talking about webkit

NT 3.1 was very stable, but slow. 3.5 got faster, and improved support for RISC platforms. 4 got the Windows 98 UI, but was still good. 2000 was a major improvement, but dropped RISC support. Finally, went over to XP