Some time ago I remember reading about a proposal to building an aquaduct from the Snake River in Idaho to Southern California. It reminded me of the metaphor that when a cancerous tumor grows unchecked it will commadeer local blood vessels for its own use.
If there are any other government agencies out there looking for a new IT system, I can fail to deliver for $100 million.
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Sure. Here's a transcript of the earnings call. (You may need to register to read it.)
Nadella does say, early on in his prepared comments, that, "We will streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system for screens of all sizes."
Later during the Q&A session, however, he was asked about how this "one version for all devices" would change the number of Windows SKUs that are available, and he said this:
Yes. My statement Heather was more to do with just even the engineering approach. The reality is that we actually did not have one Windows; we had multiple Windows operating systems inside of Microsoft. We had one for phone, one for tablets and PCs, one for Xbox, one for even embedded. So we had many, many of these efforts. So now we have one team with the layered architecture that enables us to in fact one for developers bring that collective opportunity with one store, one commerce system, one discoverability mechanism. It also allows us to scale the UI across all screen sizes; it allows us to create this notion of universal Windows apps and being coherent there.
So that’s what more I was referencing and our SKU strategy will remain by segment, we will have multiple SKUs for enterprises, we will have for OEM, we will have for end-users. And so we will – be disclosing and talking about our SKUs as we get further along, but this my statement was more to do with how we are bringing teams together to approach Windows as one ecosystem very differently than we ourselves have done in the past.
Lots of hedging in there. You don't need a single, converged OS to give developers "one store, one commerce system, one discoverability system." Those are all ancillary functions. A "team with the layered architecture" doesn't sound like every version of Windows is going to share the same layers. And clearly nothing about Windows is going to be simplified from the customer's perspective; there will still be six or eight SKUs, with each offering different benefits.
Rather, I take Nadella's comments to mean he's streamlining the OS engineering group so that the people working on each Windows platform work in tandem with the others and they all have similar goals, milestones, etc (good).
I also take it to mean that Microsoft will offer developers who are building so-called Modern apps a common set of APIs that will be available on the various form factors, so they eventually should only have to write their apps once and they will run on every kind of device. That sounds OK, but it's only going to be true for Windows Store apps -- and to achieve that, you don't need every device to be running an identical OS.
In other words, no Holy Grail here, but Microsoft is streamlining and rationalizing its OS engineering efforts, which makes good sense at this juncture.
Soon, every desktop in the world will be running it!
Next year, actually.
I assumed it was a joke. Nobody who has ever spent time in a US prison or spoken with someone who has would refer to the problem as 'an urban legend'.
Now how is Michio Kaku going to portray black holes as marauding monsters that travel around like itinerant serial killers, gobbling up everything in their path?
I suggest bringing in a robot sidekick named Maximillian to improve ratings.
That's cute...
They're not talking about the interface. They're talking about the underlying nuts-and-bolts stuff.
No, they're really more talking about the interface. The underlying nuts and bolts are already pretty much the same, in that Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone all share the same NT kernel. But above that there is plenty that's different from platform to platform. What Nadella wants to do is unify the development model and allow developers to create apps with UIs that react and readjust depending on the screen size of the device they're running on, much like how modern websites can support multiple screen sizes. All this talk about "one version of Windows" stems from a single, oversimplified comment Nadella made on the earnings call. When asked about it later, he completely backtracked and said there would not be any such thing.
I would hope this unification means that there will be suffice emulation built into windows that it will pick the kernel/libs/drivers required by the CPU arch, and userland apps can run in emulation (even if slowly) if they are compiled for the wrong proc. This would be a unified windows, that allows x86 and 64 bit apps run on ARM and vice versa (although the other direction is likely not as useful).
Unfortunately for you, the actual article says the exact opposite of the summary (so what else is new on
Joe Biden is a bit of a buffoon, but that thing about firing a shotgun through a front door is taken out of context. He was referring to someone's question about hypothetical end of days where target ID rules likely aren't such a big deal.
Biden did actually advocated firing a warning shot through a window, which is illegal and presumably not during the end of days. Not very clever, Uncle Joe.
It's kind of like the Al Gore Internet stuff. I am not Al's biggest fan, but the guy never said anything about inventing the Internet. Al Gore was instrumental in getting the Federal Government to begin using the networks, particularly for check processing. He saved the taxpayers quite a bit of money by doing this. Gore was one of the first elected officials to really get what the Internet was going to do for society.
Feminist hypocrites? First time for everything I suppose.
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
