Microsoft Windows 11 confirmed exclusive to 64-bit CPUs.

[Dark Pulse]

41 minutes ago, NoXion said:

I've never used Vista, thank fuck.

But you almost certainly used 7 unless you somehow avoided a Windows system from about 2008 to 2015.

[Maes]

Well, turns out there might be a way out of TPM 2.0 after all. I'm hardly surprised, anyone else remembers other unenforceable/ridiculously crippled limitations like e.g. the "maximum 6 system changes" policy of Windows XP? Or "maximum of 3 applications" in some home/consumer editions? AFAIK those were taken out by crackers on Day Zero, or quietly by M$ themselves with some unassuming update 

[NoXion]

19 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

But you almost certainly used 7 unless you somehow avoided a Windows system from about 2008 to 2015.

Indeed I did. I just don't remember anything particularly Apple-y about the experience.

[Dark Pulse]

8 minutes ago, Maes said:

Well, turns out there might be a way out of TPM 2.0 after all. I'm hardly surprised, anyone else remembers other unenforceable/ridiculously crippled limitations like e.g. the "maximum 6 system changes" policy of Windows XP? Or "maximum of 3 applications" in some home/consumer editions? AFAIK those were taken out by crackers on Day Zero, or quietly by M$ themselves with some unassuming update 

It basically amounts to "Live in Russia or China where TPM isn't allowed by authorities." MS will probably build a whole other SKU just for that (they already do this for China).

[OpenRift]

On 6/27/2021 at 10:19 PM, Doomkid said:

Very true, and you know all that ancient hardware has gotta be close to dying at some point - so emulation of older OSes is actually super important if they want to salvage their existing data and/or transition to newer machines, which they will simply have to at some point.

I think this should be done through virtual machines or even a compatibility layer in versions going forward. We can't keep native 32-bit processor compatibility forever. If we had some sort of integrated emulation or wrapper for running older programs, then that would be the best possible approach. That's what I'd push for.

[roadworx]

4 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Er, uh, Windows Vista and 7 say "Hello."

tbf those had a built-in classic theme, and were very distinct from macos with their transparent window thingies

Edited June 29, 2021 by roadworx

[ketmar]

10 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Acting like an elitist

so fun.

me: wasting other people's time and money to save your own is wrong. pushing people to use overhyped tech they don't really need is wrong. keeping silence about that is wrong. i have alot of expirience, and it tells me that wrong things are wrong.

you: you're acting like an elitist.

so be it.

 

10 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

they obviously aren't aware of how business works

...and they should STFU, even if they don't like it. because keeping silence is the best way to change things, it always worked.

 

yeah, being vocal may not change anything. but not being vocal definitely won't change anything.

[Dark Pulse]

8 hours ago, roadworx said:

tbf those had a built-in classic theme, and were very distinct from macos with their transparent window thingies

Yeah, was mostly the whole "rounded corners" thing and him acting like it was a ripoff of MacOS.

 

Like MacOS has a patent on rounded corners, or something. :P

[Gez]

2 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Like MacOS has a patent on rounded corners, or something. :P

Spelling out the joke.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

2 hours ago, ketmar said:

so fun.

me: wasting other people's time and money to save your own is wrong. pushing people to use overhyped tech they don't really need is wrong. keeping silence about that is wrong. i have alot of expirience, and it tells me that wrong things are wrong.

you: you're acting like an elitist.

so be it.

 

...and they should STFU, even if they don't like it. because keeping silence is the best way to change things, it always worked.

 

yeah, being vocal may not change anything. but not being vocal definitely won't change anything.

You're acting like an elitist by saying things like "enjoy your sub-par operating system, I guess", after people like Edward have refuted many of your points. Not because of anything you wrote in this post^. It might not be intentional on your part, but that is how you're coming across. I'm not saying that I doubt your experience or that you should be quiet.

 

I agree with you that people should be vocal about things they aren't happy about, but when people expect unreasonable things like continued support for processors that are becoming dinosaurs, they should realize by that point that the world is moving on without them whether they're with the program or not. Part of working in any tech field is being aware that the industry is going to continue to move forward, and that some of the things you learned and the software and hardware you became accustomed to will eventually become outdated or rendered obsolete by modern standards.

[NoXion]

1 hour ago, Dark Pulse said:

Yeah, was mostly the whole "rounded corners" thing and him acting like it was a ripoff of MacOS.

 

Like MacOS has a patent on rounded corners, or something. :P

 

It's a shit aesthetic, and I don't think it's unreasonable to blame Apple for popularising it.

[Maes]

27 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Part of working in any tech field is being aware that the industry is going to continue to move forward, and that some of the things you learned and the software and hardware you became accustomed to will eventually become outdated or rendered obsolete by modern standards.

 

...then again there's a living to be had also by keeping such dinosaurs working & roaming the Earth, even in the computer field. Some systems/machines are just like annoying cockroaches that refuse to die and just keep plogging along, working just barely within the "adequate" or "tolerable" zone, while their users keep working them to the bone/bare metal.

Edited June 30, 2021 by Maes

[Dark Pulse]

9 minutes ago, NoXion said:

It's a shit aesthetic, and I don't think it's unreasonable to blame Apple for popularising it.

I mean, I'd rather hold a DualShock than an original NES controller for a long period of time.

 

Granted, there's a bit of a difference between a GUI and an actual physical thing in your hands, but I digress.

 

It basically plays on that "comfort" psychology in our brains. Something that fits in our hands feels good. Something that pokes and jabs them, not so good. Curves fit, sharp points don't.

Edited June 30, 2021 by Dark Pulse

[NoXion]

3 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

I mean, I'd rather hold a DualShock than an original NES controller for a long period of time.

 

Granted, there's a bit of a difference between a GUI and an actual physical thing in your hands, but I digress.

 

It basically plays on that "comfort" psychology in our brains. Something that fits in our hands feels good. Something that pokes and jabs them, not so good.

 

Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but to my eyes the whole rounded corners, simple design and soft colours aesthetic comes across as flabby and sexless. It's trying so hard to be inoffensive that it comes off as insincere. I try to offset that with UI customisation, but that has its limits. The cutesy bluescreen that Windows 10 has with the massive :( face is just... why? Just give me a summary of what went wrong and an error code I can look up, please.

[ketmar]

2 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Part of working in any tech field is being aware that the industry is going to continue to move forward

...and being able to tell moving forward from running in circles and hiding that fact with smoke and mirrors. also, knowing some boring theory helps to realize that alot of "modern things" were invented decades ago, and there is nothing really new there. which, in turn, means that most of the time there is no need to "learn new things", it is enough to check how some old thing was applied this time.

 

the whole "tech progress" topic is important for me for many reasons, and this is not the first time i'm trying to die on this hill. but i'm not trying to convert people to my views (no, really!), and it is hard to continue on this topic without me going personal (much more than i already did), so i guess i will stop here.

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, NoXion said:

Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but to my eyes the whole rounded corners, simple design and soft colours aesthetic comes across as flabby and sexless. It's trying so hard to be inoffensive that it comes off as insincere. I try to offset that with UI customisation, but that has its limits. The cutesy bluescreen that Windows 10 has with the massive :( face is just... why? Just give me a summary of what went wrong and an error code I can look up, please.

To be honest, it's not like the bluescreens of yore were much better, especially if it was in something system-critical like, say, ntoskrnl.exe.

 

Anyway, if you hate it that much, there's always stuff like Windowblinds. I'm sure someone will come out with a skin that banishes the rounded corners, just like there were Win10 skins that put them back in. (One's featured right on that very page in their screenshots, in fact.)

[ReaperAA]

56 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

To be honest, it's not like the bluescreens of yore were much better, especially if it was in something system-critical like, say, ntoskrnl.exe.

 

Anyway, if you hate it that much, there's always stuff like Windowblinds. I'm sure someone will come out with a skin that banishes the rounded corners, just like there were Win10 skins that put them back in. (One's featured right on that very page in their screenshots, in fact.)

 

WTF, why didn't I knew about Windowsblinds. Gonna try this soon.

[Dark Pulse]

17 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

WTF, why didn't I knew about Windowsblinds. Gonna try this soon.

It's the absolute bomb.

 

Add in Deskscapes along with it and you can have animated wallpapers, too. :)

 

Humble Bundle occasionally runs bundles of Stardock Software. They most recently did it about a year ago. So once my new PC parts finish arriving (the last three of which should be coming today and Friday) and I get my new PC set up, I'll be all set with Deskscapes, Windowblinds, Start10... you name it.

 

They've got a bunch of good software, and it's all actually pretty damn reasonably priced. You can basically get pretty much everything you'd need to reskin Windows like crazy via getting Object Desktop for $50, or individual bits and pieces for $5-10 each.

 

(And they're having a sale right now, so it's a good time to buy. That $50 for Object Desktop is a mere $30 right now, for example.)

Edited June 30, 2021 by Dark Pulse

[Maes]

To keep things OT, M$ is kinda the victim of its own success: it capitalised so much on backwards compatibility, that it cannot just pull an Apple/OSX on its users overnight and get away with it. This helped them secure and hold the marketplace captive to the Wintel platfom for decades (so much in fact, that their worst -and in fact, only - adversary, nominally Apple, even had to bend over backwards and moved, of all things, to Intel hardware.

 

On the other hand, this same success prevents M$ from making too radical changes. Apple may get away with e.g. ditching 680x0 or PowerPC CPUs overnight and telling their users to use an emulator, upgrade, or "to ask their apps' devs to provide up-to-date versions". Since their userbase consists of approximately 99.9999% die-hard fans, nobody is gonna call them on their bullshit for that (or worse).

 

The fact that a native 32-bit version of their OS will no longer be made is secondary, for the reasons I exposed above, but I'll glady repeat here: in practice, only very few 32-bit systems were able to run Windows 8 and 10 natively, and those who could were also 64-bit capable, so it was less about supporting aging systems, and more about supporting special applications that could not use a 64-bit environment for whatever reason (e.g. drivers). A much more cautious step from what e.g. Apple has done several times in the past.

 

The TRM requirement sounds odd TBH -since when did M$ care about computer security, of all things? It kinda reminds me of the Clipper chip fiasco from the mid 1990s (heh, anyone else remember that shit?) and quite frankly, not on the same league as CPU architecture or GPU capabilities.

Edited June 30, 2021 by Maes

[Wadmodder Shalton]

I know that Microsoft ditched many of their ill-fated Internet Explorer APIs from the late-1990s to the late-2000s. First they've ditched the Active Desktop & Active Channel stuff from IE versions 4, 4.01, 5, 5.5 & 6 that was only designed to work with Windows 9x (95, 98, 98SE & ME), Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 & Windows XP with the release of IE 7 & Windows Vista. They've ditched their incompatible Java Virtual Machine in 2003 due to a legal dispute with Sun Microsystems over Java-related standards, but kept it supported until 2007. They later ditched their ill-fated Silverlight plugin in favor of HTML5, due to the overall lack of popularity compared with Adobe Flash. Lastly, they've ditched any development of the old ActiveX & Browser Helper Objects APIs from their Edge browser, which ended any developments of both technologies from Microsoft's web browser development.

 

To this day, Microsoft still hasn't ditched development of Windows Media Player 12 despite it's deprecated nature, but the program itself still introduces more bugs after the initial release of Windows 10. I might want to make a video in the style of decino's "Doom Challenges Deemed Impossible" video (and it's updated counterpart), probably titled "Wine Reverse-Engineer Challenges Deemed Impossible" mostly regarding APIs related to the Windows operating system that are deemed to be impossible by the Wine developers to reverse-engineer or implement in future Wine releases.

 

We also need to ask game developers to ditch the outdated & buggy Windows Media Player APIs in favor of the more open & more stable FFmpeg, libavcodec, libsndfile, GStreamer, JACK Audio Connection Kit, Snack Sound Toolkit, FMOD, Audiokinetic Wwise, Miles Sound System, Sound Object (SndObj) Library, PortAudio/PortMedia/PortMidi, Raylib, Open Sound System (OSS), CLAM (C++ Library for Audio and Music), OpenSL ES, SFML & SDL instead, all of which have native Windows support.

Edited July 29, 2021 by Wadmodder Shalton

[LexiMax]

I actually believe there isn't really a good reason to abandon 32-bit application support per se.

 

32-bit x86 is not the wild west, it's not like a 8086 PC, C64 or NES where you're directly screwing with memory addresses in a way that can only be reasonably run with an emulator.  Many of the programs you're running on Windows are 32-bit and you don't realize it, and when you have that level of interoperability, I see no reason to throw it away carelessly.  It's only the OS - the thing that's designed to run programs and interface with the hardware - where I find the continued existence of 32-bit of dubious value.

Edited July 3, 2021 by AlexMax

[Maes]

2 hours ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Miles Sound System

 

Wow. There's a name I haven't heard of in a long time. Are these guys still around? And used for actual games? I thought they had died out with DOS, as most of these libraries/APIs existed precisely to provide something over, well, absolutely nothing that DOS provided (and as for the APIs of sound card makers themselves....yeah, the less said about those, the better. I doubt anything beyond e.g. the Creative Labs demo programs themselves used their own drivers and APIs, and the same for pretty much for other OEMs, too).

 

@AlexMax: I thought that killing support for 32-bit apps was not on the table. At least on Intel, it seems possible to seamlessly mix 32- and 64-bit code even on other OSes (e.g. Linux), without resorting to emulation, switching CPU modes or other similar trickery (however, you cannot mix 64-bit and 16-bit code), so why even considering it? For other CPU architectures, I'm not so sure it's possible.

 

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Apple killed of 32-bit applications in macOS since Catalina, but fortunately Microsoft will never do the same, because there's a large number of games that are only 32-bit. Sadly this is not the case with 16-bit Windows 3.1 games, as they have been permanently killed off in Windows 11 Out-of-the-Box, unless your using OTVDM/WineVDM.

 

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Apple killed of 32-bit applications in macOS since Catalina, but fortunately Microsoft will never do the same, because there's a large number of games that are only 32-bit.

While indeed Microsoft are quite unlikely to ever remove 32bit support for as long as they have the Win32 API, it has absolutely nothing to do with games at all. It's because of their business partners and Windows Server contractees who will continually depend on older 32bit software that is is critical to their business and is very complicated to replace.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

1 hour ago, Edward850 said:

While indeed Microsoft are quite unlikely to ever remove 32bit support for as long as they have the Win32 API, it has absolutely nothing to do with games at all. It's because of their business partners and Windows Server contractees who will continually depend on older 32bit software that is is critical to their business and is very complicated to replace.

Maybe enterprise companies, and any of Microsoft's business partners & Windows Server contractees can adapt the use of OTVDM/WineVDM to go around the loophole of Windows 11 lacking a 32-bit edition.

[Edward850]

27 minutes ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Maybe enterprise companies, and any of Microsoft's business partners & Windows Server contractees can adapt the use of OTVDM/WineVDM to go around the loophole of Windows 11 lacking a 32-bit edition.

They won't. They ask Microsoft to support it, so Microsoft supports it. Hence also why 16bit software never got support in 64bit, it had practically no use in modern enterprise solutions, so there was no push to solve its security issues, and thus was deprecated and now dropped completely.

Edited July 3, 2021 by Edward850

[Quasar]

On 6/28/2021 at 4:06 PM, Edward850 said:

We haven't had a single glitch caused by compiler optimisations over the course of every game developed.

Hate to have to remind you, but that is wrong. We did hit something one time that I determined was a code generation error and changing the code nearby would cause it to go away. It had something to do with SSE2 instructions in fact.

[Quasar]

On 6/30/2021 at 8:08 AM, Maes said:

The TRM requirement sounds odd TBH -since when did M$ care about computer security, of all things? It kinda reminds me of the Clipper chip fiasco from the mid 1990s (heh, anyone else remember that shit?) and quite frankly, not on the same league as CPU architecture or GPU capabilities.

I don't believe they actually do care about it enough to be excluding whole market segments in the way they are. What actually makes infinitely more sense is the fact that the TPM is first and foremost a DRM device. With Xbox Live and Gamepass for PC being larger by the moment and making literal billions of dollars, what Microsoft is really looking for is to harden the PC in a way similar to their modifications to the x64 platform made for the Xbox One - it contains a TPM-like module built into its CPU called the Pluton, and it is virtually unhackable by modern standards. The newer TPM will afford them more protection for keeping system-locked, enclave-stored license keys in a place where the local user cannot reach them, neither by elevation (even to ring 0) nor by installing a different operating system ("secure" boot + TPM can ensure that if the bootchain is compromised, keys can be purged out of the machine before you even have a chance to TRY looking at them).

 

People have forgotten that the original reason the TPM was designed was as part of the TCPA initiative, later rebranded TCG (Trusted Computing Group). Its mission was to redefine the PC, and general computing devices in general, to make them locked down, to give publishers and software companies control over what can and cannot run, to implement remote kill switches, and to introduce nigh-unbreakable DRM schemes. That it has legitimate security applications is just a nice side effect - because of course you can use something that's good for hiding keys to protect your own passwords and prevent malware from compromising your BIOS. But the negative potential applications are enormous.

 

Microsoft is in fact currently working with Intel and AMD to implement the Pluton module itself into desktop PC CPUs. I think TPM 2.0 is just a hold-over until they can get that rammed in, and then we'll see Windows 12 eventually requiring a Pluton-enabled processor instead.

Edited July 3, 2021 by Quasar

[Edward850]

59 minutes ago, Quasar said:

Hate to have to remind you, but that is wrong. We did hit something one time that I determined was a code generation error and changing the code nearby would cause it to go away. It had something to do with SSE2 instructions in fact.

Ah, right I forgot about that incident. Still, though, given that's a singular anecdote I don't think that warrants ejecting complier optimisations, decrying them lazy, firing any programmer who uses them and writing all the intrinsics ourselves for every architecture we need to support. :V

[Blzut3]

9 hours ago, Maes said:

@AlexMax: I thought that killing support for 32-bit apps was not on the table. At least on Intel, it seems possible to seamlessly mix 32- and 64-bit code even on other OSes (e.g. Linux), without resorting to emulation, switching CPU modes or other similar trickery (however, you cannot mix 64-bit and 16-bit code), so why even considering it? For other CPU architectures, I'm not so sure it's possible.

Microsoft is unlikely to kill 32-bit apps for some time simply because a lot of people are still making 32-bit exclusive software and thus people are still running it.  But having support for multi-arch does come at the cost of needing to distribute every library twice, both on disk and in RAM.  Plus development/testing effort of new libraries/changes to old ones that would be reduced if they could assume 64-bit apps only.  There are definitely reasons for Microsoft to do it should the time come that people are in large not reliant on it anymore, so i wouldn't count on it never happening but we're certainly a long ways off from that being feasible still.