Posts by dharmOS 46 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Oct 2018
Hi Liam
Running a sometimes sluggish Qualcomm 7c ARM64 PC (Apcsilmic Dot 1), and the Win 11 task manager does tell you which code path is running. I cannot paste screenshots inline images but on the "Details" tab, you need to select , or show the Architecture column and it will tell you x86, x64 or Arm64 or even for MS Office, Foobar 2000, ARM64 EC [as Arm64 (x64 compatible)].
A minor correction. 286 had 24-bit addressing with 16MB memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80286). But thank you for the reminder.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish ended with Windows Mobile/Phone, and I think having had the trauma of that, MS have moved on with the departure of Steve Ballmer, who must have been around the OS/2, Win NT transition, and departed with the Nokia merger.
Had OS/2 2.1 and 3
Also Windows Phone 7, 8 and 10 so equally backed the wrong horse every time.
Sadly it is very difficult for a hospital to migrate off an electronic healthcare record (EHR) to a rival product. The main alternative is EPIC, and that would be a “frying pan to fire” alternative. I have used Cerner in the past, and still use EPIC now.
The data is locked away in a proprietary format (done somewhat deliberately) and changing product often involves running both EHRs in parallel with new data entered in the new EHR and the old one run to access previous data for a patient.
An Integration Engine can decrease some of the human user burden (for doctor, nurse etc) to have to load both products to look at a patient’s health record for old and new information. Either way, costs increase over sticking with just the one product.
Hi Liam
In the MS Store app, if you scroll down to the "System Requirements" drop down arrow, it will tell you which ISA it is natively compiled in.
e.g. Amazon Prime Video for Windows
OS: Windows 10 or greater
Architecture: x86, x64, Arm, Arm64
Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS
Architecture: x64, Arm64
etc etc
I use a Snapdragon 7c Win 11 PC as my main driver at work. Definitely not a machine that you would consider for all computing duties, but does work well enough if you stick to Win ARM64 software religiously.
www.apcsilmic.com/products/dot-mini-pc (about the size of a Mac Mini or NUC, no screen, keyboard, mouse etc)
To find ARM64 software, you often have to download beta versions tucked away on the developer's website rather than the MS Store (which often delivers the x86/X64 version!). I have managed to find Win ARM64 versions of Spotify, Signal Desktop, 7-Zip, DOSBox-X, Office 365 (obviously), MS OpenJDK 11, MS Keyboard and Mouse Center, MS Teams, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 17, Firefox, Notepad ++, OpenVPN and Wireguard, Powertoys, VLC, Winmerge and from the MS Store: Debian for WSL, and Pengwin for WSL, fedora Remix for WSL, WSL itself and WSLg, Xbox app with integrated xCloud streaming, Minecraft, Leonardo, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Disney+. Sadly this list is probably comprehensive for ARM64 versions.
For the rest of software need, it involves using the x86 or X64 versions, which run noticeably slower (e.g. screen/GUI interactions sluggish, slow to load, slow to perform in application processing).
For the cost of ~£300, the DOT 1 Mini PC is fine, runs silently (passive heatsink case). Sadly £1300 for the ThinkPad is just a bit too pricey...
Because the NHS Clinicians have had to curate it into an accurate data set as part of their clinical job to record medical, nursing notes for patients, i.e. we give them high quality human-curated supervised data sets without any of the reward.
Palantir have to clean it up a bit, but not as much as they would have to do otherwise.
I think part of the problem is that the ancient software (Cerner in your case, EMIS for mine) was designed in an era when everyone had to use a ethernet-attached |Windows OS desktop with a horrid native exe designed to Win 95 era GUI/UX. Any NHS smartcard-based logins meant that for that one session, you had the machine to yourself and could tolerate a 5-7min from login screen to working desktop as it was a once-only occurrence.
So designed by someone who does not have a clue how health care workers actually work! Computer-on-wheels connected via Wi-Fi are an update too far for the software. Having the chance to look at the backend, the database (Oracle, MS SQL, GTM Mumps) where the data is recorded could be driven by an HTML5 web app run on a wi-fi connected tablet. But the big companies making the software (Cerner, EPIC, EMIS, TPP) do not seem interested enough to do this.
John Hennessy founded MIPS.
David Patterson created the Berkely RISC processor that became SPARC, (RAID) and now the RISC-V CPU.
As long-term collaborators, they have the seminal textbook on CPUs: Computer Organization and Design MIPS Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface.
Perhaps Hennessy's creation has realised that its own v2 is the RISC-V, hence dumping the v1 stuff.
The aim here is not to own the consumer market but to grab the clinical (and possibly legal) dictation market. These have corporations/hospitals who will fund the monthly cloud subscriptions and potentially saves the cost of medical transcription secretary (woefully underpaid in the NHS ~£20K for the work they do).
Dragon’s products for medical dictation is fantastic from experience and every big IT player is trying to grab a chunk of healthcare (e.g. Oracle and Cerner, IBM’s Watson etc). It may also to buy into the raw voice data used to train the AI to lock others out of the market.
I have an ASUS ChromeBook that uses the OP1 ARM CPU. Specific part authorised by Google for CBs for a laptop type format rather than smartphone (but based on a rebadged Rockchip RK3399). Still surprisingly capable after its purchase in 2017.
So hopefully an in-house Google custom design might/will be better than existing ARM designs from QC, Mediatek, Rockchip etc.
https://laptopmedia.com/processor/rockchip-rk3399-op1/
We are on a BT VDSL connection in a rural area. When our broadband died in the village for two weeks in the middle of last year’s lockdown and home schooling, BT sent us a mobile router. Taking the SIM out of this and putting it into my ASUS VDSL modem&router demonstrated speeds of 50Mb down /50Mb uplink. Faster than the VDSL at 30/8. It was almost a pity to go back to VDSL when they switched it back on, particularly on the upload part.
Any news as to what level of x86-64 is supported, just the core spec SSE2 or more recent stuff like SSE4 and AVX? I can guess AVX-512 is not, but how far down the pecking order does the Microsoft emulator support (compared with Rosetta 2 which excludes all AVX instructions)?
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/about_the_rosetta_translation_environment
I think AMD patented the x86-64 bit extensions back in 2000, so along with the Intel SSE, SSE2 etc extensions, only expire this year. So till now, MS could only have a x86-32 bit emulator to run legacy Windows programs. Rosetta2 released in 2020 neatly steps around this limitation by precisely only being released this year. Note that Rosetta2 does not support any of the newer Intel extensions such as AVX etc. I guess MS x86-64 bit emulator will follow Apple’s lead in which instructions are emulated.
Thank you for these. Instead of ammonia (NH3), what about the Sabatier reaction and methane (CH4) or even methanol (CH3OH). I am sure burning ammonia produces nitrogen oxides. Methanol has the decency to be a liquid at room temp and pressure. Probably as hazardous to humans as drinking petrol (or sniffing petrol) which we aware not to do.
Some of my early CDs from the last 90s and early 2000s have already oxidised their Aluminium layer (visible blackness from the outer rim) and when I tried to re-rip them recently to FLAC/ALAC using dBPoweramp, failed on the later tracks that are arranged on the outer parts of the disc. These discs were always kept pristine in their cases in a centrally heated place, so no obvious causes for physical deterioration apart from the lacquer failed to keep atmospheric oxygen out.
So CDs don't last forever, and ripping them to a hard drive (and cloud upload or multiple backups) is the only way to keep them going. At least USB DACs that sound fantastic (and better than any Marantz CD player I had) and have dropped in price.
Some industries have restrictions as to who can buy controlling shares etc placed by the UK Government. These are often Defence companies and are not primarily owned by the Govt either (British Aerospace, Chobham, Rolls-Royce). The pity is that ARM and Imagination Technologies should also have been on that strategic list.
Instead ARM went to Softbank in Japan and IMGtec went to a Chinese-owned consortium. Even European supercomputer efforts hinged on ARM as the European CPU ISA of choice, which may now pivot to RISC-V. Now ARM is "Japanese" and the fastest supercomputer is the Fugaku A64FX.
We have no industrial strategy. As this pandemic demonstrates, services-based economy only gets you so far...
Obsoleting an Ivy Bridge Core laptop for no real reason, if that means not updatIng to MacOS Big Sur and no back ports of security updates to the current OS is a crime against the environment.
I have an Ivy Bridge Alienware laptop (probably similar price at the time) that still works perfectly well and is updated by the Microsoft Win 10 updates (originally came with Win 7). I know why Apple does this planned obsolescence but treating expensive electronics as junk should not be tolerated.
Any reason why it has been obsoleted? Does it not run some fancy Intel SSE or AVX extension that is now “essential” to Big Sur? Bearing in mind that Mac ARMs will only emulate x86-64 up to SSE2...
AMD owns its own AMD-64 bit instruction set (x86-64) obviously, with MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 etc owned by Intel. I remember those things from the Opteron and P4 days, so may well be that patents are expiring. The x86-32 bit stuff from i386,486 and Pentium must definitely be out of patent protection, which probably explains why the Windows on Arm emulator is 32-bit only at present.
However which new instructions still have patents protecting them: AVX, AVX-2, DLNB etc?
However, in the UK, Epic has been implemented at University College London Hospital, Great Ormond Street and Addenbrookes, Cambridge. All university teaching hospitals, and one is a major trauma centre. There were lessons to be learnt (and indeed Addenbrookes was put in special measures by CQC, in part due to its EHR).
However, those bugs seem to have been worked out, and as an occasional user of the UCLH Epic, it is miles better than the rubbish they had before. I think Manchester and NI will pay handsomely, but it will be something that works.
If you want something that does not work and costs a fortune, try L*renzo by DXC. Developement funded by the UK taxpayer and then sold back to the NHS to use.
By all means, have a secondary care EHR developed that uses OpenEHR standards throughout (https://openehr.org/), but then you have to go to small vendors with fragile company stability.
Dave Cutler was lead on VMS/VAX when at DEC, lead on Win NT kernel after moving to MS, and now leads development on the hypervisor on Xbox One.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler
Fanboy comments about Linux (or OS/2 etc, which I was a zealot for in former days) are just that.
By all accounts, US Special Forces are using Signal and VPN app on their military issued phones.
https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2020/01/23/deployed-82nd-airborne-unit-told-to-use-these-encrypted-messaging-apps-on-government-cellphones/
The most useful app to communicate is the one the most employees have already installed on their personal phones.
My work "NHS" computer with 6th gen Core i5, Win 7 Enterprise, 8GB RAM and SSD takes 15min on a bad day to get a working EMIS screen where I can review patient notes or record what they say.
Security software takes the fastest machine and slows it down interminably. Plus most GP SoC software data is remote hosted with a Win32 fat client (or RDP in my case) connecting to it rather than run locally. So no point comparing it to your overclocked games machines without centrally installed and controlled locked down "security" software.
I am saddened that the President of the GP Royal College takes even longer than I do to get a working desktop! The issue is so bad that you dare not log out and move rooms for the time it will take to get up and running again.
Methanol has more grams of hydrogen per litre than even liquid hydrogen (100g per litre compared with 71g/l according to www.methanol.org). It is more stable at room temperature and easily handled in current fuel pumping and storing teach. So direct methanol fuel cells would be a more promising R&D approach than H2 fuel cells that need massive pressures to compress or cryogenic tanks. H2 also slowly leaks out of metals with embrittlement etc.
Might explain why the the only H2 fuel cell cars such as the Mirai are leased rather than owned.
Devices like the Surface GO with LTE seem to be the future. Why does Microsoft just not add the W10M telephony stack to regular x86-64 Win 10 and let the future Win x86/ARM laptops with 4G make phone calls?
Not convenient to carry in your pocket but with voice calls less and less these days, would be the evolution of MS telephone aspirations. It might even be successful.
Microsoft is one of the biggest fans of PWA. Mainly to make up for the lack of native apps on Windows 10 and its now dead W10 Mobile. UWP is dying or dead, and programmers never really bothered with it.
I have tried some of the PWAs downloaded from the Win10 store and they were underwhelming with ads that could not be blocked.
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