A quarter of new US PCs are 64-bit
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, operating systems, Futures, Hardware, Windows, Microsoft on
When Bill Gates said that there were no more 32-bit operating systems in Microsoft’s future, he was only talking about server operating systems and Windows Server 2008 R2 will indeed only be 64-bit. Windows 7 will definitely come in 32-bit versions, but consumer PCs in the US are increasingly 64-bit according to Steven Sinofsky.
We asked the director of Microsoft’s hardware ecosystem, Gary Schare, to walk us through the numbers behind that claim. A quarter of all new US PCs connecting to Windows Update in October were running the 64-bit edition of Vista, up from 18% in September and just 1% in January.
This is driven by the falling price of memory and the number of PCs shipping with 4GB of RAM, which are increasingly supplied with 64-bit Vista in the US - Costco only sells 64-bit PCs now. That’s a trend he expects to continue with Windows 7. But as well as persuading hardware manufacturers to develop 64-bit drivers, Schare acknowledges there’s another hurdle: “we need to convince technology enthusiasts that their experience with 64-bit is not what you get when you buy a 64-bit PC from a retailer - it comes with all the drivers and everything works”.
–Mary
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WinHEC 2008: Offload media for fun and profit.
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Processors, Windows, Microsoft on
Windows 7’s library-aware Media Player is only one small part of a big change in the way Windows handles media. Elements Microsoft hinted at last week in PDC sessions and at the Windows 7 reviewers workshop are coming into focus here at WinHEC.
One interesting snippet from this morning’s keynote was the fact that Windows 7 would be able to offload media codecs to hardware. While the keynote referred to it as a way of transcoding media streams for delivery to network media players and other devices, it turns out to be part of a whole new way of handling media in Windows – one that more than just Media Player will be able to use.
The key is what Microsoft is calling Windows Media Foundation, a low level layer that links to device drivers and hardware. It’s this new layer that handles dynamically switching media streams from device to device when you plug in new hardware (and when you unplug it again – great for using your Bluetooth stereo headset when you want a little privacy in the office), and it’s also the layer that makes sure Windows sound schemes aren’t routed to communications devices and applications – so no more IM bings and bongs when you’re talking to a colleague on a Bluetooth headset using Skype.
One important function for the Windows Media Foundation is handling hardware codecs. The latest generation of graphics hardware contains support for H.264, along with AAC and other sound schemes. In Windows 7 hardware will have priority over software – so if your graphics card or motherboard will do the work for you, your CPU won’t need to take the strain. It’ll even work with USB offload processors. The real trick comes in when you’re transcoding existing media for streaming to a remote player. If it supports DLNA 1.5 profiles and reports the media formats it supports, Windows 7 will use the Windows Media Foundation to handle converting your media to the appropriate format while it streams.
You can transcode in software, but it adds latency – so if you’re hardware supports it, Windows will divert your streams to the hardware, and just deliver the result to the client device. It’s a sensible response to a tricky problem, and one that also means you can handle all aspects of a conversion in the hardware, without needing a CPU at all…
Specialised hardware will always have an edge over the general purpose CPU, so it’s important for operating systems to take advantage of them. Microsoft isn’t alone in doing this – Apple will be doing much the same with Snow Leopard (and is using a Quicktime plug-in to take advantage of NVIDIA’s hardware H.264 support on the latest MacBooks). This is a trend that’s going to end up everywhere, from desktop PCs to servers, to phones – and it’s one that’s going to save you time, power and embarrassing pauses. What’s not to like?
–Simon
Rated: 60% (2 votes)
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What do you want to do where today?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Beta, smartphone, operating systems, Web browser, Futures, Google, Windows, Hardware, Windows Mobile, Microsoft on
Or Windows 7, let’s hear it for the hardware; looking forward to WinHEC.
This is the only Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference before Windows 7 ships: unless the next WinHEC returns to its usual May timing that gives Microsoft another year to get it right. I’m expecting to hear positive things from the OEMs who’ve been playing with Windows 7 for much longer than we have; 7 is leaner than Vista and it literally puts devices ‘on stage’ with the Device Stage ‘experience’ (a task-oriented alternative to the AutoPlay dialog). And Ray Ozzie was very careful to frame Microsoft’s cloud play in a way that doesn’t ignore hardware.Google doesn’t give the hardware manufacturers much love, because it doesn’t have to, but for the first time since Paul Maritz left (and he’s now playing ‘who blinks first’ with server manufacturers at VMware over whether virtualisation will sell more servers rather than fewer in the long run) Microsoft has remembered how much the OEMs matter. The lack of drivers when Vista launched and the willingness to ship Linux on netbooks may have refreshed the Microsoft memory here.What’s good about the PC? Copy and paste, as I say whenever anyone asks me why I’m not packing an iPhone. And hardware. “Both Windows and the apps are sitting right next to the hardware, the processor, memory, graphics, and disk.” You can take advantage of a big screen in a browser app, but you’re wasting a lot of the power of the PC by not taking advantage of what Windows can do on the CPU. And storage is still much more efficient in the OS, as Ozzie notes there’s “immense value in the storage on PCs for confidentiality and mobility, for speed of access and local convenience for documents and rich media, photos, videos, music, and more”. Yes, Google Gears would like to work with USB drives and GPS directly, but as long as the Gears team are saying that “everything in the browser is inherently safe”, I won’t be installing Gears.Cloud, said Ozzie, plays to the strengths of the Internet: remember, this is someone old enough to remember the Internet before the Web and to appreciate the range of services online for communicating with companies and people. Rich Internet Applications? “Yes, the browser as universal run time is cool and it’s really useful” admits Ozzie, “but this is not the core of the Web’s sustainable uniqueness. The Web’s unique value is in its ability to assemble the world’s people, the world’s organizations, its public information, its services and devices, enabling us to connect, to communicate, to transact, and to share. ” And the phone is somewhere in between, says Ozzie. Yes, you can write software that uses the hardware on the phone - in fact, with the slower processor and limited storage you have to. But what the phone really gives you is context - something Microsoft is trying to add to the PC with the sensor framework in Windows 7 but is unlikely to match. “The truly unique advantage of a phone-based app is that it’s always with you and it’s ready for your spontaneous action. The phone knows where you are, what time it is, so it can tag your location on something. With its camera, you can snap a picture in the context of what you’re doing. You can record a quick idea or use text or ink to jot down a note. There’s no better way than a phone for you to immediately comprehend that something that you care about is suddenly in need of your attention.”We use Microsoft’s Live Mesh service to share documents peer-to-peer on the road. It’s very effective - in fact it’s changed the way we work. It’s handy to have it available through a browser but we’ve never used that because where we need the files is on the PC (or often two, three or four PCs between use) that we’re working on. Live Mesh has just come out for Windows Mobile and the Mac (for a limited number of users while Microsoft ramps up the service). We probably won’t look at many PC files from a phone, but if we need to it’s going to be much more convenient than hauling out a laptop at the hotel front desk or in the rental car agency. And all those to-do lists I jot down on the phone; they’d be a lot more useful if they showed up on my desktop when I could do something about them. That’s almost exactly the three scenarios Ozzie defined last week, and they need the balance of hardware and software to work. Last week we saw the new software that’s on the way; this week it’s what the hardware brings to the party and whether the manufacturers are as positive as Microsoft has predicted. -Mary
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Wubi Tuesday
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows Vista, ubuntu, linux on
“The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things: of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages - and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - and whether pigs have wings.”
Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry may have come straight from the shores of North East England, but it’s inspired much of the language -and grammar - of IT. There’s nothing more through the looking glass than writing complex pattern recognition statements in awk. There’s also nothing quite as much fun as rolling your own Linux distribution from scratch.
It used to be that you’d have to tweak your kernel for your hardware, recompiling and reloading just to make sure everything worked just fine. Then there was scripting the bootloader, making sure that all your OSes worked together.Perhaps you needed to hack together an appropriate driver for some obscure piece of hardware, before shutting down and rebooting all over again. It was a detective novel and a multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle all rolled into one.
I have a sneaking feeling that after having done all that back in the days of the 0.8 kernel and with more than a handful of Gentoo installs, I really should I be feeling a little guilty as to just how easy it was to get a dual-boot Linux install working on my main desktop PC.
I’d decided quite early on that I’d go the way of the mainstream, and try out Canonical’s Ubuntu. It’s become one of the most popular Linuxes out there, and I figured it would make a change from my usual SUSE or Fedora installs. The latest version has received plenty of good reviews, and it’s also become one of the more talked about OSes amongst my open source friends.
In the past I’d have downloaded an ISO image, burning it to CD, and booting from the resulting disk. This time, however, I decided to try out Wubi, an installer that promised to let me run Ubuntu without having to re-partition my hard drive.
The Wubi download is quick and easy, and once it’s down and installed, all you have to do is run the Wubi Windows application. It then goes off and downloads an Ubuntu install, and builds a virtual file system on top of your existing Windows partition, before adding a boot link in the Windows bootloader - and it’ll cope happily with the newer format introduced with Vista. The whole process took less than an hour, including the download!
Once it’s in place, all you need to do is reboot, choose Ubuntu from the list displayed at start-up, and you’re ready to run. There are a couple of caveats - as it’s running from a virtual disk on another file system you can’t hibernate, and if you have a power outage you stand a higher chance of getting corruption. Even so, it’s still a great way of getting started with a non-Windows OS with out the performance hit of virtualisation - and it’s easy to migrate your new install to its own real file system.
Well worth a look, if you’re curious to see just what Linux can offer you.
–Simon
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