On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 14:03:31 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> The way I think of it is that Xeon's get all the newest and greatest features, with them slowly trickling down to the i-series. Invest in the Xeon production line one generation and in next use it for i7's ext. Basically R&D cost go all on the Xeon's and then eventually once its paid off it goes straight to the consumers.

I see that some features, like instructions, are tested out on some Xeons first, but others are really only on Xeons and not on all Xeons either. So I think the Xeons primarily are used as a tool for differentiating in the high end to maximize profits (turning on/off different feature sets, possibly from the same die). I think this largely is the case because AMD isn't competitive in that segment.

The CPU-architecture generations follow a tic-toc pattern where the tics mean you have a new architecture and the toc means you have an improved manufacturing process. I don't think that has something to do with Xeon.

> Looks like they are changing tactic after the last 10 years or so. I do wonder if you're on the right track and turning a Xeon into an i9 is just a firmware upgrade...

I imagine that they would try to not use too much die space for the i9s, and the Xeons seem to require stuff that aren't needed, so perhaps not likely, but who knows?

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 14:43:14 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>
> The CPU-architecture generations follow a tic-toc pattern where the tics mean you have a new architecture and the toc means you have an improved manufacturing process. I don't think that has something to do with Xeon.
>

They actually changed this last year. Now it's Process (tick) -> Architecture (tock) -> Optimization. Kaby Lake was the first "optimization" step. People were kind of like it's not THAT much better than Skylake.

I think of Xeon as Intel's brand for servers (though this may not be entirely accurate). The above processor families (Skylake, Kabylake, etc.) include Xeon and i7, etc. within them. Xeon is usually similar to what you'd buy on the consumer side, but has more features. My FreeNAS box at home has a Xeon in it so that I can use ECC memory. Other people might use Xeon because it has more cache or something.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 14:33:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Hopefully that means we'll see more competition in
> mobile than just android/iOS in the future.

Watch out for the MINIX3/NetBSD combo...a microkernel coupled with a BSD-unix that can run on pretty much anything.

It may well be the future of the consumer mobile platforms, as well as server/cloud platforms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS4UWgHtRDw

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 14:33:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> similarity of APIs between macOS and iOS, but obviously there are significant developer and IDE differences in targeting a mobile OS versus a desktop OS, even if iOS was initially forked from macOS.

Not in my experience… There are some things programmers have to be aware of, because some features are not available on iOS, but overall the same deal. Not too surprising as the iOS simulator compiles to X86, so by keeping the code bases similar they make it easier to simulate it on the Mac. So yeah, you kinda run iOS apps on your mac natively. (Not emulated as such.) Only when you go low level (ARM intrinsics) will this be a real problem.

So it goes without saying that iOS and OS-X have to be reasonably similar for this to be feasible.

> Let me correct that for you: there are many more iOS developers now, because it is a _much_ bigger market.

Yes, but that does not mean that your original core business is no longer important.

> Just a couple responses above, you say the iPhone UI will keep those users around.  I'd say the Mac is actually easier to commoditize, because the iPhone is such a larger market that you can use that scale to pound the Mac apps, _once_ you can drive a multi-window, large-screen GUI with your iPhone, on a monitor or 13" Sentio-like laptop shell.

By commoditise I mean that you have many competitors in the market because the building blocks are available from many manufacturers (like radios).

However, I think "laptop shell" is perceived as clunky. People didn't seem to be very fond of docking-stations for laptops. Quite a few went for impractically large screens on their laptops instead.

> I agree that very few apps are used on phones, and that they aren't as sticky as desktop apps as a result.  Hopefully that means we'll see more competition in mobile than just android/iOS in the future.

iPhones are easier to displace because the UI is not so intrusive compared to a desktop and the apps people depend on are not so complicated. That might change of course… As people get used to the platform Apple can make things more complicated (less to learn, so you can introduce more features one by one).

There are things about modern iOS that I don't find intuitive, but since so many have iPhones they probably get help from people nearby when they run into those issues. Scale matters in many strange ways…

> Lack of competition at the high end certainly played a role, but as I noted to codephantom above, consumers not needing the performance played a much larger role, which is why Samsung, with their much weaker SoCs, just passed Intel as the largest semiconductor vendor:

I assume those aren't used in desktop computers? Samsung need a lot of SoCs as they manifacture lots of household items…


> Yes, but would that be in 2020 or 2050?  Would people who never had a cellphone get a smartphone, driving that market even larger, as is happening today in developing markets?

Ok, I think it was fairly obvious that smart phones would at least for a while be a thing as it was already then fashionable in the high end. What wasn't all that obvious was that people would be willing to carry rather clunky iPhones and Android devices with bad battery life compared to the Symbian phones… Which I think was to a large extent driven by social norms, fashion and the press pushing the story on frontpages over and over…

Also, when I think of it, I wonder if Apple would have succeeded if the press had not played them up as an underdog against Microsoft in the preceding decade. The underdog Apple rising from the dust and beating out Microsoft and Nokia made for a good story to push… (in terms of narrative/narratology)

> Jobs certainly wasn't, almost nobody was.  If there were a few making wild-eyed claims, how many millions of dollars did they actually bet on it, as Jobs did?  Nobody else did that, which shows you how much they believed it.

Apple had worked on this for a long time and had also already failed at it, but they decided to pushed it again when touch screen technologies made it possible.

> I'm not sure how the starting point matters, google funded Android from nothing and it now ships on the most smartphones.

I don't think Android came from nothing, and it was significantly more clunky than iOS, but Google did this to have an option if other giants would try to block their revenue stream from ads… So it was more passive-aggressive than a business.

> But even the google guys never bet the company on it, just gave it away for free for others to build on, which is why they never made as much money as Apple either.

Well, it was to proctect their business, not to develop their business, so I am not sure if Android is a good example.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 13:59:26 UTC, codephantom wrote:

> But I think what really made it take off so fast and unexpectadly, was the convergence of mobile devices, mobile communication technology (i.e wifi, gps and stuff), and of course the internet... as well as the ability to find cheap labour overseas to build the produces on mass.

The thing is apple combined (at the right time) the various things which made it very succesfull.
- they learned from napstar, people are interessted in (buying) a single song => iPod + iTunes
- they 'copied' that concept over to the iPhone with appstore

For both they enabled not only business for themselfes but created platforms on which many parties external to apple were able to create succesfull business on.

iaw its not the device itself what made it succesfull, its because it is part of a 'platform'....

On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 at 18:59:21 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 at 18:42:07 UTC, Bo wrote:
>> There is a issue with Windows. The whole attacking the messenger, the whole idiotic argumentation's that Windows is dying, it is all pure useless trolling the people who ask a simple questions: How to solve the D 64bit issue so that like on the Linux or OSx platform, the users can have the SAME level of consistency.
>
> Windows 32 bit is the special one - it is the ONLY platform where D works out of the box without additional downloads. That's one reason why I advocate it for just playing around - it just works.
>

Yes i works when toying around, but as soon as you want to write actual software then you can't write 32 bit anymore, because OPTLINK is just too buggy and will end up not being able to link your code correctly.

A good example is that mysql-native currently don't link properly with OPTLINK. It might link for some, but at least for me; I'm forced to either use an older compiler or compile to 64 bit.

See:
https://github.com/mysql-d/mysql-native/issues/100

There's also reported issues like this one:
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15183

I'm aware that issues like these should be reported more often and as soon as they're discovered, but they're also hard to report, because you get virtually no information about what's wrong and you can only guess by commenting out sections of your code until it will link.

That's not ideal.

I'm sure many other similar issues exists.

Yes, 32 bit development with D is easy on Windows, but only for toying around; which is no reason to defend it.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 15:09:05 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 14:33:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> Hopefully that means we'll see more competition in
>> mobile than just android/iOS in the future.
>
> Watch out for the MINIX3/NetBSD combo...a microkernel coupled with a BSD-unix that can run on pretty much anything.
>
> It may well be the future of the consumer mobile platforms, as well as server/cloud platforms.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS4UWgHtRDw

That'd be great but given how long MINIX has languished, I'm doubtful.  Maybe Fuchsia, a google skunkworks OS with a new microkernel called Magenta, has a better shot:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smartphone-os-dumps-linux-has-a-wild-new-ui/

Whatever it is, I don't think the current mobile OS duopoly is as unassailable as people seem to think.  You'll need some unique angle though to cover up for the lack of apps initially, as Jolla found.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 15:21:20 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 14:33:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> similarity of APIs between macOS and iOS, but obviously there are significant developer and IDE differences in targeting a mobile OS versus a desktop OS, even if iOS was initially forked from macOS.
>
> Not in my experience… There are some things programmers have to be aware of, because some features are not available on iOS, but overall the same deal. Not too surprising as the iOS simulator compiles to X86, so by keeping the code bases similar they make it easier to simulate it on the Mac. So yeah, you kinda run iOS apps on your mac natively. (Not emulated as such.) Only when you go low level (ARM intrinsics) will this be a real problem.
>
> So it goes without saying that iOS and OS-X have to be reasonably similar for this to be feasible.

Not at all, it makes things easier certainly, but there's a reason why mobile devs always test on the actual devices, because there are real differences.

>> Let me correct that for you: there are many more iOS developers now, because it is a _much_ bigger market.
>
> Yes, but that does not mean that your original core business is no longer important.

When you're making almost 5-10X as much from your new mobile business, of course it isn't:

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/02/earnings-4q-2017/

Now, they're not going to dump 10-15% of sales because the Mac's a fading business, they'll just keep milking it till it doesn't make any sense, as I already said.

>> Just a couple responses above, you say the iPhone UI will keep those users around.  I'd say the Mac is actually easier to commoditize, because the iPhone is such a larger market that you can use that scale to pound the Mac apps, _once_ you can drive a multi-window, large-screen GUI with your iPhone, on a monitor or 13" Sentio-like laptop shell.
>
> By commoditise I mean that you have many competitors in the market because the building blocks are available from many manufacturers (like radios).

Yes, that's what I was referring to also, the hundreds of millions of Android 7.0 smartphones now shipping with built-in multiwindow capability, ie the same building blocks as macOS.

> However, I think "laptop shell" is perceived as clunky. People didn't seem to be very fond of docking-stations for laptops. Quite a few went for impractically large screens on their laptops instead.

There are all kinds of perceptions out there, but cost and "good enough" functionality rule the day, and that's what the mobile laptop shells and docks will provide.

I agree that people usually have concerns that lead to large-screened laptops, as I worried that the 15" display on my Powerbook might be too small when I was getting it a decade ago, but I got by just fine.  Wondered the same when I got my 13" 1080p Win7 ultrabook five years ago, but ended up thinking that was the perfect size and resolution after using it.  I was skeptical that my 8.4" 359 ppi tablet would suffice when I started using it, but haven't had much of an issue over the last two years of daily use.

Maybe I'm just very adaptable, but I've increasingly come to the conclusion that smaller works fine, especially with the extremely high ppi on mobile displays these days.

>> I agree that very few apps are used on phones, and that they aren't as sticky as desktop apps as a result.  Hopefully that means we'll see more competition in mobile than just android/iOS in the future.
>
> iPhones are easier to displace because the UI is not so intrusive compared to a desktop and the apps people depend on are not so complicated. That might change of course… As people get used to the platform Apple can make things more complicated (less to learn, so you can introduce more features one by one).
>
> There are things about modern iOS that I don't find intuitive, but since so many have iPhones they probably get help from people nearby when they run into those issues. Scale matters in many strange ways…

I agree that the simplicity of mobile UIs makes it easier for new mobile entrants, but the much greater demand for mobile and the resulting scale means that desktop OSs will _eventually_ be easier to displace by mobile platforms.  That'll happen once all mobile devices ship with easily accessible, desktop-style multi-window UIs built in, which as I said before is starting to happen with Android 7.0 Nougat.

Interestingly, this complexity of multi-window UIs might provide mobile platforms the stickiness they've been missing, that they gin up by tricking their users into platform-exclusive apps like iMessage or Facetime.

>> Lack of competition at the high end certainly played a role, but as I noted to codephantom above, consumers not needing the performance played a much larger role, which is why Samsung, with their much weaker SoCs, just passed Intel as the largest semiconductor vendor:
>
> I assume those aren't used in desktop computers? Samsung need a lot of SoCs as they manifacture lots of household items…

They're used mostly in mobile devices, that consumers are replacing their desktop, Intel-Inside PCs with but mostly putting to new uses that PCs could never be put to.

>> Yes, but would that be in 2020 or 2050?  Would people who never had a cellphone get a smartphone, driving that market even larger, as is happening today in developing markets?
>
> Ok, I think it was fairly obvious that smart phones would at least for a while be a thing as it was already then fashionable in the high end. What wasn't all that obvious was that people would be willing to carry rather clunky iPhones and Android devices with bad battery life compared to the Symbian phones… Which I think was to a large extent driven by social norms, fashion and the press pushing the story on frontpages over and over…
>
> Also, when I think of it, I wonder if Apple would have succeeded if the press had not played them up as an underdog against Microsoft in the preceding decade. The underdog Apple rising from the dust and beating out Microsoft and Nokia made for a good story to push… (in terms of narrative/narratology)

You're not tracking my point, that nebulous claims 15 years ago about how mobile would be "a thing" are irrelevant compared to a projection of a billion mobiles sold in 2013, which is what happened.  MS, Nokia, and others linked in this thread clearly thought as you did about mobile, yet they completely missed the boat.  Clearly they misjudged the scale, scope, and timing of that coming mobile tidal wave.

>> Jobs certainly wasn't, almost nobody was.  If there were a few making wild-eyed claims, how many millions of dollars did they actually bet on it, as Jobs did?  Nobody else did that, which shows you how much they believed it.
>
> Apple had worked on this for a long time and had also already failed at it, but they decided to pushed it again when touch screen technologies made it possible.

Yes, Apple made a big push, _at the right time_, while everybody else didn't.  Google and Samsung followed fast, to their credit, while everybody else fell to the wayside.

>> I'm not sure how the starting point matters, google funded Android from nothing and it now ships on the most smartphones.
>
> I don't think Android came from nothing, and it was significantly more clunky than iOS, but Google did this to have an option if other giants would try to block their revenue stream from ads… So it was more passive-aggressive than a business.

I see, please tell me how much market share Android came from then.  It was a startup that never released a product before being bought and grown inside google.

>> But even the google guys never bet the company on it, just gave it away for free for others to build on, which is why they never made as much money as Apple either.
>
> Well, it was to proctect their business, not to develop their business, so I am not sure if Android is a good example.

A good example for what?  They started a mobile OS from nothing and grew it to two billion-plus users today, which you implied only those with a "starting point" could do.  Their motivations for doing so are irrelevant to that fact, but yeah, that's part of why they gave it away for free and didn't make as much money off it as Apple did, which they're now starting to backtrack with their in-house, high-priced Pixel line.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 19:10:50 UTC, bauss wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 at 18:59:21 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 at 18:42:07 UTC, Bo wrote:
>>> There is a issue with Windows. The whole attacking the messenger, the whole idiotic argumentation's that Windows is dying, it is all pure useless trolling the people who ask a simple questions: How to solve the D 64bit issue so that like on the Linux or OSx platform, the users can have the SAME level of consistency.
>>
>> Windows 32 bit is the special one - it is the ONLY platform where D works out of the box without additional downloads. That's one reason why I advocate it for just playing around - it just works.
>>
>
> Yes i works when toying around, but as soon as you want to write actual software then you can't write 32 bit anymore, because OPTLINK is just too buggy and will end up not being able to link your code correctly.
>
> A good example is that mysql-native currently don't link properly with OPTLINK. It might link for some, but at least for me; I'm forced to either use an older compiler or compile to 64 bit.
>
> See:
> https://github.com/mysql-d/mysql-native/issues/100
>
> There's also reported issues like this one:
> https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15183
>
> I'm aware that issues like these should be reported more often and as soon as they're discovered, but they're also hard to report, because you get virtually no information about what's wrong and you can only guess by commenting out sections of your code until it will link.
>
> That's not ideal.
>
> I'm sure many other similar issues exists.
>
> Yes, 32 bit development with D is easy on Windows, but only for toying around; which is no reason to defend it.

You can use -m32mscoff for 32-bit, which uses Visual Studio like the 64-bit version. I've been saying OPTLINK should be removed. Even if you report a bug for optlink, it's never going to get fixed. No one's stupid enough to go digging through that spaghetti code dump. If you're luck, some limitation might introduced to DMD that won't cause the bug in OPTLINK to trigger. That's why it shouldn't be supported anymore, it's hindering DMD, not making it better.

It's amazing how many people are so lazy to download Visual Studio, and some of the stupidest reason for not wanting to download it to boot.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 20:44:57 UTC, Jerry wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 19:10:50 UTC, bauss wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 at 18:59:21 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 at 18:42:07 UTC, Bo wrote:
>>>> There is a issue with Windows. The whole attacking the messenger, the whole idiotic argumentation's that Windows is dying, it is all pure useless trolling the people who ask a simple questions: How to solve the D 64bit issue so that like on the Linux or OSx platform, the users can have the SAME level of consistency.
>>>
>>> Windows 32 bit is the special one - it is the ONLY platform where D works out of the box without additional downloads. That's one reason why I advocate it for just playing around - it just works.
>>>
>>
>> Yes i works when toying around, but as soon as you want to write actual software then you can't write 32 bit anymore, because OPTLINK is just too buggy and will end up not being able to link your code correctly.
>>
>> A good example is that mysql-native currently don't link properly with OPTLINK. It might link for some, but at least for me; I'm forced to either use an older compiler or compile to 64 bit.
>>
>> See:
>> https://github.com/mysql-d/mysql-native/issues/100
>>
>> There's also reported issues like this one:
>> https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15183
>>
>> I'm aware that issues like these should be reported more often and as soon as they're discovered, but they're also hard to report, because you get virtually no information about what's wrong and you can only guess by commenting out sections of your code until it will link.
>>
>> That's not ideal.
>>
>> I'm sure many other similar issues exists.
>>
>> Yes, 32 bit development with D is easy on Windows, but only for toying around; which is no reason to defend it.
>
> You can use -m32mscoff for 32-bit, which uses Visual Studio like the 64-bit version. I've been saying OPTLINK should be removed. Even if you report a bug for optlink, it's never going to get fixed. No one's stupid enough to go digging through that spaghetti code dump. If you're luck, some limitation might introduced to DMD that won't cause the bug in OPTLINK to trigger. That's why it shouldn't be supported anymore, it's hindering DMD, not making it better.
>
> It's amazing how many people are so lazy to download Visual Studio, and some of the stupidest reason for not wanting to download it to boot.

It's not that people don't want to get Visual Studio, but some people have limited space.

Ex. until a few months ago I was actually developing all my stuff on a Windows tablet which only had 30gb of space (The OS etc. also took of those 30 gb.) It would have been impossible for me to get Visual Studio on it, at least if I wanted to use it for anything else.

Of course it's not a problem for me at the moment as I have a laptop, but at the time it was the only thing I had. At least I didn't get by any bugs in OPTLINK back then, else it would have been impossible for me to actually write D code.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 19:46:04 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Not at all, it makes things easier certainly, but there's a reason why mobile devs always test on the actual devices, because there are real differences.

Mostly with low level stuff in my experience.

> Now, they're not going to dump 10-15% of sales because the Mac's a fading business, they'll just keep milking it till it doesn't make any sense, as I already said.

Heh, it would be very bad management to take focus off Macs. I doubt Jobs would have allowed that to happen, but as I said, I don't really trust the current management at Apple. So who knows what they will do?

You are thinking too much short term here IMHO. The mobile sector is rather volatile.

> Maybe I'm just very adaptable, but I've increasingly come to the conclusion that smaller works fine, especially with the extremely high ppi on mobile displays these days.

Small tablets are ok, for reading, but programming really requires more screen space. Although I guess one external + the builtin one is ok too.

I guess it would be possible to create a docking station for phones that was able to transfer heat away from the device so that you could run at higher speed when docked, but then the phone calls and you have to unplug it or use a headset…

> multi-window UIs built in, which as I said before is starting to happen with Android 7.0 Nougat.

I should take a closer look on modern Android… Sounds interesting.

> happened.  MS, Nokia, and others linked in this thread clearly thought as you did about mobile, yet they completely missed the boat.  Clearly they misjudged the scale, scope, and timing of that coming mobile tidal wave.

Yes, but as I said, not many players could have countered this. Microsoft certainly if they had bought up Nokia right away. Nokia alone… probably not. HP or Sony? On a lucky day…

> Yes, Apple made a big push, _at the right time_, while everybody else didn't.  Google and Samsung followed fast, to their credit, while everybody else fell to the wayside.

Well, but Android units did get a bad reputation in beginning.

> A good example for what?  They started a mobile OS from nothing and grew it to two billion-plus users today, which you implied only those with a "starting point" could do.

The Android makers had a real problem with quality and making a profit. Samsung managed to make a profit, but many others struggled. And it took a long time before Android's reputation caught up with iOS. Most businesses would not have been willing to make that software investment and sustain it until the OS platform would reach a competitive level.

So I don't think many could have followed Apple there. Apple recycled a lot of their prior work and experiences. Microsoft could have, sure, and I am sure they regret getting in late. But, they were late with embracing Internet too, so they have always followed their own mindset… and only reluctantly follow new trends.

But frankly, I don't think many giants would start with a GPL code base like Linux.