I once decided to cut cord to the vanity light in my car (long story why). Even though the car was off I was able to get quick a scare. Lesson, electricity in a car is not off when the key is out. I was close to winning one of those Darwin awards.
The voltage in car circuits is usually 12V, not enough to do you real harm.
Yup, the sparks when you short circuit can be spectacular (the car battery can provide quite a current), but the voltage can't kill you. It would suck if it could - high voltage cables all around you would make accidents very dangerous. The worst that could happen to you is burns from the wires getting hot.
Shorts in a car can generate an awful lot of heat and smoke - within the confined space of a car this can be pretty alarming.
I've been in a passenger in a car that had a short in the facia while driving - the car immediately filled with dense choking smoke and we nearly crashed. Scary stuff. This wasn't recently though - I hope the standards for in-car wiring have improved a lot over the years!
I don't even think you need to call them jerks. Just say something like, "Our new licensing deals have us moving to a model where we are charged, not for how often you stream video, but for everyone who could potentially stream video. This means that if you're not watching our instant streaming at all today, but only using the DVD service, we still have to count you as a head. So we decided that the best way to handle this was to separate our DVD from streaming service. This way we, and you, pay for the services you use, and not what you don't.
Now you may then ask, 'why the fee hike?' Simply put, the math doesn't add up otherwise. To keep $9.99 pricing we'd have to do something like $4.99 for DVD rental and $4.99 for video streaming. Compare our DVD pricing to Blockbuster -- even at $7.99/month we're still cheaper. $4.99 for video streaming would only barely cover our licensing costs. We found a reasonable price point that allows us to offer great DVD and streaming services going forward."
* People forget that Microsoft is used to selling Windows that runs on multiple architectures. They had(have?) Itanium, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS in the past. Of course those were targeted at professionals, not consumers.
* I don't think MS really cares that much about x86 native apps running on ARM. They care about desktop managed apps running on ARM. Why? LOB apps. LOB apps are managed and they want to support ARM tablet users having access to these.
* Related to the above point, there are actually few native x86 apps that really matter. Look at the Amazon top 20 selling SW list. It's basically: Office, Windows, Intuit, Adobe, and antivirus. Microsoft ships half of the top 20. They'll be shipping antivirus, so effectively shipping 2/3rd of the top 20. The only apps in the top 20 they'd need to get are Intuit (Quickbooks/Quicken/TurboTax) and Adobe Premiere XYZ. MS can probably have at launch 95% of the cycles consumed by native x86 apps on ARM.
With that said, for once, I do think Gruber is generally correct.
WRT your first point, Microsoft used to sell Windows on multiple architectures. They abandoned Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS in 1999. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms A big part of the problem was that software vendors did not make non-x86 versions of their software and subsequently users were confused and disappointed that the software that they wanted to run on their (e.g. Alpha) computer either wouldn't run or had to run in an emulator and thus ran slower than on an x86 machine.
Microsoft supports two architectures currently: x86/Itanium and ARM with WinCE/WinMobile/WP7. There is no real synergy between the two currently, e.g. the "Office" apps that run on ARM are totally different beasts than what run on x86. The primary crossover is "mindshare" - i.e. users recognize the names.
"Android and iOS are covered tons in the media, and Windows Phone—surprisingly for a Microsoft product—seems to have missed the boat on brand awareness. An embarrassing 45 percent of consumers surveyed by NPD said they were unaware of Windows Phone 7.
And among the 50 percent of consumers who said they will be buying a smartphone, but didn’t want to buy a Windows Phone, the biggest reason, accounting for 46 percent of respondents, was because they didn’t know enough about the Windows Phone OS."
Basically if you know about WP then you'd consider it. But nearly as many people don't know about it at all as those that have heard of it.
A lot of people wondered why in the world would MS endorse a 4'7" phone (the HTC Titan). From people I know who work retail, including a cousin who works for ATT retail, people come into stores wanting either an iPhone or a smartphone.
The iPhone users are pretty set. Their kids have it, or they had one before, or their wife has one, or everyone tells them it is the best.
For people not set on iPhone, it sounds like the decision is often made in the store. And apparently big screens and thin phones area big deal. Android has dominated the retail presence. If WP can match the retail presence, it can probably start splitting some sales with Android.
OK. And Windows on ARM won't run Amiga apps either. You and I both know that's not really related to what the poster stated. The poster said that ARM will only run Metro apps. You can not run x86 apps and still run non-Metro apps. And you can run x86 apps, but not run non-Metro apps. It's a completely orthogonal statement.
I took it as saying there were two types of apps - Win32 x86 apps and Metro apps, and that ARM would only run one of them.
If he'd said "ARM will not run x86 apps, so you'll need to recompile" then that would have been different, but without any kind of assurance there it sounded very much like they were ruling out running any existing apps on ARM tablets.
Actually there is no good reason Microsoft didn't write an X86 virtual machine so that their tablets could run the old programs.
The instructions set is obviously different, but Android does that with Java (on an ARM processor too) and Microsoft has enough smart people who could make sure that the performance would be great.
> Actually there is no good reason Microsoft didn't write an X86 virtual machine so that their tablets could run the old programs.
There is. You'd be looking at something very much like Apple Rosetta. Now, the first Intel Macs were substantially faster than the PPC Macs that most people had at the time, but even then Rosetta felt painful. All current and near-future ARM chips will be slower than most current Intel chips; you'd expect it to be even more painful. Worse, for lightweight apps it would involve far more CPU usage, which would hurt battery life. People wouldn't _care_ that their Windows 8 tablet was getting two hours battery life while their friend's iPad was getting 10 because they were running a legacy app which was hogging the processor doing instruction translation; they'd just blame Microsoft.
The case of Java is a little different; both Dalvik and JVM are designed to be JIT compiled relatively efficiently to multiple common architectures. Architectures like x86 and PPC are generally _not_, and things like Rosetta suffer as a result.
I don't mind having both worlds, in fact I like it, I just don't want them so intermingled.
When coding, doing a research paper, or going through my finances, I want classic desktop mode. I'm probably at my laptop, and mostly typing, searching files, etc... I don't want to see Metro.
But I'd love to be able to take that laptop and sit on the couch or in bed and either convert it to a tablet or treat it as one (with a touchscreen) and go into Metro mode.
The thing I like about the two worlds is that I like the ability to get disrupted while on my tablet, due to some work email, and be able to quickly address it on the same machine. I like the fact that I could get a link to a Flash site, and drop out of Metro and check it out. I like being in classic desktop and get hankering to play a game and drop into the Metro app store to get some .99 cent game to kill an hour.
But most of the time I don't want the two worlds to collide. And when they do I want to explicitly choose to do so.
And it seems like everyone has this feedback. I can't help but believe MS is going this direction.
