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Originally Posted by aximbigfan
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Originally Posted by karhill
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Talk about moving the goal posts....
The question was: is Windows designed to be portable. The answer is yes. Is portability a black and white issue? No. It's grey. Some processors are going to be easier to port to than others. As you rightly pointed out, decisions are made all the time about how much effort should be expended to achieve a given level of portability.
A good example is big endian versus little endian. During the inital development of Windows NT, a decision had to be made about whether the development team should go the extra mile to make sure the code was big endian/little endian neutral. Since the x86 was little endian, and since the original target process (beyond the x86) was the Intel i960, also an Intel product that defaulted to little endian, it was decided that to support little endian processors only. That's one reason (political being another) that the Sparc and Motorola architectures, which are big endian, were not initially ported to.
The PowerPC port was interesting. Apple, coming from the Motorola world, was a big endian centric operating system. When Apple ported to the PowerPC, they ran big endian. However, the PowerPC can be run backwards or forwards (it supports running either as a big endian processor or a little endian processor). So when Windows was ported to the PowerPC, Microsoft ran it little endian.
[edited for spelling]
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uh excus me. windows xp was NEVER NEVER NEVER!! desgined to be a mobile os. it was desgined fro a laptop or a desktop not a ppc.
chris
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Dude! I'm having problems parsing your comments again. I think agreement exists here. Windows XP design goals did not include running it on a PDA. (In other words, in the context of this discussion, portable != mobile. Portable means capable of being ported to a different architecture.)
But, really on with the spirit of this thread....
You guys are all lamers. I've got VMWARE running on my Axim. It's usually partioned into 2 virtual machines. One is running OS X. Most of the time in OS X I'm running a classic Mac emulator, and when I need to do Windows stuff I run WINE inside that. Performance is not too bad if I'm running off the flash memory as opposed to the SD card.
The other virtual machine hosts the call center CRM application for our company (an S&P 500 company that shall remain unamed).