Slashdot Mirror

This (usually baseless) need to have more and more power on a laptop - and to pay top dollar for it - has to be the marketing triumph of the century (well, maybe after bottled water). My old 400MHz IBM still does everything I ask of it, and if I had the choice I'd rather double the battery life than the processor speed.

I said the same thing about my old 300mhz Celeron IBM Thinkpad until about a month ago, when I finally realized I was deluding myself, as you probably are. No offense, but to an extent I think this is a case of not really knowing what you're missing, and it's been true of public perception of every incremental speed increase in PC land in general, not just in laptops.

No doubt you think of your laptop as being the perfect machine for a certain task or tasks. And at 400mhz, it does those tasks well. Maybe you use it for programming, or word processing, email and web browsing. Maybe you even store your pictures and play your mp3's on it (though I doubt a 400mhz laptop has a very big hard drive). I did these things on my 300mhz machine too. Eventually it got to the point where even web browsing was ridiculously slow compared to my desktop, so I upgraded.

And with a faster laptop, especially a dramatically faster laptop, you are able to do many more things that you wouldn't have considered a laptop suitable for before. My new laptop has become my primary PC - I do everything on it, from photo and video editing to gaming to watching DVD's, dual-booting Linux and Windows (couldn't before; hard drive was too small) plus all the things I used to use my laptop for. Simply being a laptop is not the limiting factor that you probably think it is with an older machine.

Oh, and you will likely get better battery life with a new machine. Mine gets around 4 hours and it's not even a Pentium-M.

While I'm at it here, I want to say something about the following in the original article posting: It'd make me feel guilty, having that much power in a small package while other people can't even get it in a PC tower.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Is this a swipe at PC (in this case meaning non-Mac) users, or is it some kinship with fellow Mac users (including Macs in the term "PC" as it technically should be)? If it's a swipe at PC users, it's at worst inaccurate and at best debateable, as test after test has shown common x86-based CPU's to be at least as capable as the fastest G5 chips on a variety of real-world tasks and in synthetic benchmarks. Even a Mac-biased site such as this one shows older, slower x86 compatible chips to be neck and neck with the fastest G5 Apple still sells (and faster if you move to the games page) - and there are faster x86 chips out now (Here is a slightly more up to date comparison that focuses on 64 bit chips.) In laptops, a 1.7ghz Pentium-M runs neck and neck on most tests with a P4-3.2 desktop chip which would probably put it about on par with a single-CPU 2.0ghz G5 (I don't believe anyone has made this comparison yet, since you can't get a G5 in a laptop). And most Pentium-M laptops trump any Apple laptop in battery life. The Pentium-M is truly a revolutionary mobile chip - far more important by almost any measure than the 1.4ghz G4 being talked about here (sure wish I had one - I went on the cheap with a P4-M).

I know I burn through karma like a wildfire every time I post something like this but it needs to be said, as there are a lot of assumptions made by people out there, along with plain old myths, that just are not supported by any real-world evidence. The equivalent of PC urban legends (and yes, I do post about real UL's too!).

you mean like this one? Too bad it never saw the light of day afaik.

By the time this ships maybe the mouse pad will be a power pad.

About a year ago I purchased a wireless mouse, and I eventually threw it out. Not only was the mouse substantially heavier but constantly replacing the batteries was expensive and annoying. I think wireliess mice would be much more practical if the mouse-pad doubled as a charging pad.

So, were you the $29,500 man?

Actually, they passed a law making "virtual" child porn just as bad as the real thing. The original got struck down by the Supreme Court, but it will come back again.

I happened to see this story which quotes Intel CEO Scott Barrett as saying "Intel's 64-bit extension technology will be software-compatible with AMD's 64-bit extension technology." It also quotes one analyst saying "Intel will be a uniter rather than a divider, and that's very positive news."

Whether Apple innovates in the hardware department is debatable. But they are pretty good fortune tellers. Let me count the tools they brought first to the home PC user.
1. 64 bit computing
2. Bluetooth
3. Firewire
4. 802.11b/g
5. USB
6. DVD/CD Writeable [got tired of linking]
.
.
.
100,000,000. SCSI

PCWorld Review

Compaq Project

Source code is pre-compiled code in the form of lines of text, usually with comments. It can be compiled into code that can run but can't be read. The Windows code on users' PCs is all compiled code.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,114771,p g,1,00.asp

Firebird, or whatever they choose to name it, is a great browser. Everyone I introduced it to liked it, including MSIE users. And that's not a big surprise, seeing how MSIE is all but EOL-ed Explorer. It's obvious how Microsoft sees it as a waste of money to keep maintaining their flagship browser - it's not sold for money and it doesn't create new markets for them. So there is a big opportunity here for open source. It seems like an appropriate marketing campaign should really widen the userbase. How can this be done? A paypal account to pay for banner ads (popups too :) )? Free CDs in public libraries? Post it as explorer.crack.exe to file sharing networks?

For those who don't want to hunt and find the SCO reference on the slow server

83 How to win friends and influence software sales.
"Terrorists do things designed to intimidate people, and we see a lot of that going on all the time--people trying to attack us or people that we're associated with."--SCO Group CEO Darl McBride, complaining about the backlash from hundreds of thousands of Linux users after the former Linux software vendor sued IBM, a major Linux proponent, for allegedly violating its intellectual-property rights.

Darl really did say that! - i know it is hard to believe.

Talk about the kettle calling the pot...

ReplayTV does not run on linux. It runs on an OS called VxWorks. See this review from PC World from a while back or here.

I mean, Senators seem to be much Cheaper these days.
I'd take 2 or 3 of those over a President any day....

So says this PC World article

Which is good, because (as I whinged in another comment) I had a horrible experience with TaxCut last year.

I would, but I could just get the PCWorld Athlon FX-51@2.2GHz (almost identical to an Opteron 148) vs. 2xOpteron 246 (2.0GHz) vs. Athlon 64 3200+ vs. P4 3.2 vs. 1.8 G5 vs 2x2.0 G5 benchmarks, and see that in all benchmarks except Photoshop (on the dual G5), Quake III on the A64 and O246 (probably the SMP), and Word on the O246, the x86 CPUs *MURDERED* the Macs. Yes, even the P4. BTW, the AMD CPUs did well against the P4, except in the Quake III and Word benchmarks (Intel optimized code, maybe - Q3 is definitely Intel-optimized, but WORD?)

Broadband Over Powerlines?

Broadband Power!

Broadband Over Powerlines hits a Snag

I agree that the law is poorly writen. Here is an article from PCWorld where this law is comented. But at least, it is fun to figure out cruel and unusual tortures for spammers.
I propose to be hanged by their fingers.

I hope SCO spends itself out of existence on legal fees.

That would be awful both for Red Hat and IBM (who should otherwise be getting some amount of reparations in their countersuits) and for SCO's current investors, some of whom probably imagine that the US has a swift justice system that wouldn't allow SCO to make outright lies without sanction.

Reserve your ire for SCO's current leaders, particularly the ones whose insider trades (filing to buy stock options and sell shares after SCO's internal discussion of the IBM litigation but before that litigation became public knowledge) and deception have earned them millions of dollars so far. These guys are next to the Enron executives in the United States' ongoing experiment: "How hard is it to profit from million dollar lies and escape punishment?"

Er. You're getting the 94xx series processors and 97x-series processors confused. Yes, the Opteron runs neck and neck with G4 servers.

Err. No, I'm not. And Opteron (or any other current generation x86'ish chip) does not run anywhere near neck and neck with G4 servers, they run way faster.

The G5 has a massively different system architecture, and you cannot say "because it beats G4s it'll beat G5s".

I'm well aware of the fact that G5 is a new system and haven't drawn that kind of conclusions.

Real-world tests of Opteron servers has shown them to be very strange beasts. Freakishly fast as some tasks, very slow at others.

From anything I've seen this far, more like: freakishly fast on most tasks, pretty average on others, and by no means slow on anything.

I'd accuse AMD of pulling the old graphic card scam - benchmarks run very fast even though real world differences are minimal - but dear lord, that would be a hellishly expensive scam to pull off.

Graphics card scams are done on drivers or by "optimizing" the benchmark software in question. And usually they get faster results by leaving out some computations that are not visible, that's impossible on general purpose CPU. And you don't have any "drivers" to do it either, nor can you make benchmarkers use your own optimized software.

No, there's no scam here.

I run an AthlonXP and steer people towards AMD systems left and right, but the Opteron is proving to be a very odd design.

How, and why exactly? Opteron is a rather conservative incremental design on Athlon core, nothing radically new except for the 64-bitness.

And as thus, it's not really even "version 1.0"

BTW, when calling someone to the mat for making blanket untrue statements, just contradicting their statement for not providing references isn't enough, unless you provide them yourself. It's a case of he-said she-said, and frankly, your word amounts to a hill of beans to me (as does the other guy).

I've got better things to do than try to prove someone like grandparent who has already made up his mind and won't listen to anyone, no matter the truth. Especially as it really is damn hard to find trustworthy results, any credible sources haven't touched this debate with a 10-foot pole.

But if you wish. Let's start with some SPECmark tests, you know the same Apple used to claim G5 was faster than anything else at the launch (Opteron scores were mysteriously missing, and they've later been accused of tampering with P4 scores as well).

SPECint_base 2000:
Dual G5 2.0GHz - 800
Opteron 148 (2.2GHz) - 1304
Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) - 1115

SPECint_rate_base 2000:
Dual G5 2.0GHz - 17.2
Opteron 148 (2.2GHz) - 15.1
Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) - 12.9

SPECfp_base 2000:
Dual G5 2.0GHz - 840
Opteron 148 (2.2GHz) - 1505
Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) - 1217

SPECfp_rate_base 2000:
Dual G5 2.0GHz - 15.7
Opteron 148 (2.2GHz) - 17.5
Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) - 13.6

So lookee what we have here. Dual G5 can barely hold it's own against single Opteron at rate tests and is completely decimated in base tests. I won't bother with dual opteron numbers, but they scale well and leave G5 behind every time. They're at spec.org for everyone to see.

So... ok, now you're probably yeah, sure, nice set of numbers but what about real world applications? Well. The fact still stands there aren't many, or any benchmarks out there that I trust but let's dig some of the trash anyway.

(mostly) favoring opteron:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1274637,00.as p
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112749,p g,8,00.asp

vastly favoring G5:
http://www.barefeats

Maybe the Li-Ion batteries exploded...

(brief explanation)

according to them:

Athlon 64 vs. Apple G5 Systems: Not Even Close

Now i can't say whether these tests are any less or more objective, but they do draw a completely different conclusion.

-Jon

The PDA market is the place to look for alternative input methods - there is certainly some development in virtual keyboards.

Have a look at this.

Wow, thanks for the tip, that was really interesting.

I like this quote:

One issue is the Unix roots in Mac OS X, which is based on the BSD operating system. "This Unix component is working against them," Enderle said. "It's basically Unix with an Apple front end, but from the administrators' point of view, all they see is Unix."

and this is pretty damning too.

Windows has a native 64-bit version but Intel have prompted MS to delay the release until they can come up with a competitive processor.

I was so interested that I dug up some more links here, here and here.

I often get customers coming up to me and asking what they can do to reduce or stop those annoying pop-up's. Sometimes I'll have to stop and think for a few seconds to understand/remember what they're talking about since Mozilla has spoiled me.

The first thing I always do is recommend that they download Mozilla and give that a try while explaining to them that I haven't seen a pop-up in over a year.

Unfortunately, though, most folks (~ 95%) will just tell me that they like/are happy with Internet Explorer, despite its bugs and holes. After another attempt at explaining to them the benefits of switching, I'll just tell them about products such as pop-up stopper and popup defender. It's sad, really, as they have no idea what they're missing out on.

Note the 3.2 GHz. P4 at the bottom. I doubt seriously that RDRAM will make up for the 53%, 41% and 46% performance deficits the P4 demonstrated on the three benchmarks that took long enough to be a valid test (Quicktime, 50 MB Image, and 150 MB Image). You'll also note that the P4 won exactly zero of the benchmarks.

Now you know the reason for the P4 Emergency Edition. ;-)

Cheers, Ian

Touche. I'm actually a G5 fan myself, and will own one as soon as I can afford it.

Let's face it though, a lot of people (especially Linux people!) are committed to x86. Opteron/Athlon64 looks like the most future-proof route there, by far.

I've also seen some performance comparisons where AMD64 trounces the G5. Not that there aren't examples in the other direction, but clock-for-clock Opteron seems a bit faster. It'll be worth keeping an eye on things as compilers improve and applications are updated. We'll also see if new G5 speed grades up to 2.6 GHz. really appear this spring...if G5 can get ahead on the clockspeed front it could prevail in real-world performance.

According to some of those benchmarks, though, it has a lot of ground to make up...

They didn't even tackle the the Green Celeron. After all, Celeron is derived from the latin word 'celer', meaning speed. Of course, celery is the fastest of all vegetables.

On a serious note, people, including myself, are starting to worry about power consumption. I'd like to pick up a low power device for a BSD gateway.

To support your theory, read up about MS's plans for the upcoming Longhorn operating system.
It's supposed to have WinFS (Windows Future Storage). This filesystem is based on 'Yukon', a future release of MS SQL server.

Here's a free tip. Never attack anyone personally. If you have a valid point, state it. Name calling is something that people revert to when they feel the point they're trying to make can't stand its ground on its own, and needs an intimidating muscle-showoff to help others get convinced. It screams at the reader that you yourself aren't buying into whatever it is you're saying. Here on /. it won't cut you any slack.

Now all you had to do was ask. Microsoft announced and revealed Palladium, and quite plainly As MS Employee states [Palladium] "is to be included in a future version of Windows, possibly in Windows XP successor Longhorn, scheduled for release in 2005".
Taking an educated guess based on the fact that their interest does lie there, that they announced it, that they're well underway developing it and that the DMCA was legislated, I'd dare say it will show up in Windows sooner or later. Sooner if they have anything to do with it.

If you do not yet realize the extent of the problem this poses, I strongly suggest you spend 10 minutes reading up .

Cheers mate.

Yeah, I know people who do that. I just have a pile of computers plugged through a KVM switch into a 21" monitor - but that's a different story. (My main computer is still my laptop.) I don't really want all the accessories, though. I like my desk space. I don't want to spend the money. I want the same ergonomics at home as I have in the office. IBM has built some prototypes that pretty much capture what I'd love to have.

I've actually seen a 640K Amstrad PC clone... no HDD, either. Of course, Compaq and HP are now at the bottom of the PC World reliability charts (interestingly, Dell is at the top, even though eMachines looks better from the chart)...

OK, before we start, let's be clear that you're completely wrong about that, on both counts.

Are you certain? Do you have a link to back that up?

This PC World Article contradicts your assertion. In addition, the SonicBlue Replay TV had a "send show" option that allowed the owner to send a recorded TV program to one other user (presumably a family member or friend). While this feature is being challenged in court, current law appears to allow this as "fair use". (There's an article here.)

There is a Wired news article here that indicates the lawsuit is still undecided.

I will modify vehicles such that the on-board microphones and the GPS antenna are tied to two devices - a switch, and an airbag deployment system. Unless I hit the switch, the microphones and on-board GPS are disabled. The switch is superceded only when the airbag deployment is detected, and at that time the microphones and GPS are effectively reactivated.

Considering that GM was planning to put OnStar on every vehicle eventually I think my business could only grow in the future.

Sony is actively pushing the Blu-Ray format. There is already the HD BDZ-S77 Blu-Ray HD recorder/player devices being sold in Japan.

Blu-Ray can hold 23GB on a disk, but more importantly it can have very high-speed data transfers, and the pro Blu-Ray devices even have two heads for faster transfer.

DIY for Mac, as an example

Otherwise, there are commercial choices from Philips, HP, Sony, Kenwood, Hauppauge ($100) and Turtle Beach ($300).

...read this for more...

All of them are. When you buy a laptop, you're usually buying a design from a Taiwanese ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) that Dell, Gateway, etc. decided to stamp their name on. ODMs design a lot of concepts; American companies round out the specs and provide sales and "support" for them. The co-branded printers, cameras, etc. all work on this model. Dell and Gateway have been introducing a lot of new products because PC margins are razor-thin and most families who have a PC are not very inclined to replace it.

Incidentally, Gateway's plasma TV was so successful that more companies are jumping onto the bandwagon.

Ghost Enterprise and Retail are very different, apparently.

Here's a review of Ghost 2003 in PC World: Skip Norton Ghost 2003. The review says:

"The program is saddled with a confusing manual, lousy Web support, and phone support that costs $30 per incident."

Here's another quote: "I found its new 'intuitive Windows interface' inconsistent. And Ghost 2003 crashed one test PC and refused to clone the drive on another..."

The article summarizes, saying that Ghost 2003 is "... hard to use, buggy, and poorly documented."

People learn to work around the faults of software, and they don't notice the faults after that. So they may not give accurate assessments. Software is often much worse than those who work with it notice.

Caution: Ghost 2003 is apparently not at all like Ghost Enterprise:

A few hours ago, I was trying to make a clone of a drive I had carefully prepared. Ghost 2003 said that the destination drive label was "New Volume", a hard drive I had just formatted so that it could be identified. But instead, Ghost used the destination drive as the source drive, and destroyed all my work.

Here's a review of Ghost 2003 in PC World: Skip Norton Ghost 2003. The review says:

"The program is saddled with a confusing manual, lousy Web support, and phone support that costs $30 per incident."

Here's another quote: "I found its new 'intuitive Windows interface' inconsistent. And Ghost 2003 crashed one test PC and refused to clone the drive on another..."

The article summarizes, saying that Ghost 2003 is "... hard to use, buggy, and poorly documented."

People learn to work around the faults of software, and they don't notice the faults after that. So they may not give accurate assessments. Software is often much worse than those who work with it notice.

From the parent comment: "Ghost occasionally fails in wierd ways, which sometimes don't get noticed right away (this is really bad)."

My experience is that Ghost is much worse than those who have commented here say.

A few hours ago, I was trying to make a clone of a drive I had carefully prepared. Ghost 2003 said that the destination drive label was "New Volume", a hard drive I had just formatted so that it could be identified. But instead, Ghost used the destination drive as the source drive, and destroyed all my work.

Here's a review of Ghost 2003 in PC World: Skip Norton Ghost 2003. The review says:

"The program is saddled with a confusing manual, lousy Web support, and phone support that costs $30 per incident."

Here's another quote: "I found its new 'intuitive Windows interface' inconsistent. And Ghost 2003 crashed one test PC and refused to clone the drive on another..."

The article summarizes, saying that Ghost 2003 is "... hard to use, buggy, and poorly documented."

People learn to work around the faults of software, and they don't notice the faults after that. So they may not give accurate assessments. Software is often much worse than those who work with it notice.

When blasting someone, check your facts before fireing to reduce damage to toes/feet/extremities.

From this site

Static Control Components ... makes computer chips for third-party ink cartridges. The chips enable manufacturers to create clones of the cartridges used in Lexmark printers.

So your post Static Control is a cartridge remanufacturer. They don't make their own....they replace drums, wipers, etc. and refill them.
is a "[n]ice point. Too bad it's blatantly wrong." :)

They are not cartridge remanufactures. They don't replace drums,wiper, etc. They don't refill them (cartridges). They make chips FOR OTHER COMPANIES so the other companies can do those things.

The parent poster you quote is also partially wrong, in that SCC never "sold their own compatible toner carts." that I can see. They are correct, though that "[t]he Lexmark case is about how a laserprinter toner cartridge manufacturer (SCC) reverse-engineered the circuitry on the Lexmark toner carts" - specifically the chip Lexmark started using that "communicates with the company's printers and verifies that the cartridge is from Lexmark. Without that verification, the cartridge won't work. SCC's Smartek chips mimic the Lexmark chips so third-party cartridges can pose as official ones." (same site as above link.)

Not quite.

From this site

Last year Lexmark began using a chip in some of its cartridges that communicates with the company's printers and verifies that the cartridge is from Lexmark. Without that verification, the cartridge won't work. SCC's Smartek chips mimic the Lexmark chips so third-party cartridges can pose as official ones.

Like these?

Sure about that? If so, click here.

Some time ago, the news media began reporting that McDonald's was to going to provide wireless access in their restauraunts. That service, according to McDonald's itself, would in some places be for pay.

McDonald's giveaway will promote its for-pay WiFi access. iTMS is the market leader of downloaded music with, according to a 5 November analyst conference call held by Apple, over 80% market share. McDonald's will be able to "give away" US $0.99 tracks to, in some cases, sell US $2.99/day WiFi access.

I wonder if some of those Happy Meal freebies will include a day's worth of free WiFi.

I don't know whether M$ had bad legal representation, Gates was just too freaked out about "turning into IBM", or both. The result is that people trot out the "monopoly" argument constantly, w/o accounting for the political factors. The reality is that Intel is most likely a greater "monopoly", but no one questions that because there is no official sanction. Linux also runs on x86, so therefore Intel is OK. Something about cake and eating comes to mind...

"shipments of PlayStation 2 consoles in its fiscal year 2002, ending March 2003, totaled 22.5 million units."

That many people disagreed already, and they never even RTFA!

You could even have a personal Google on your computer.

Sure. Assuming that your computer is a 10,000 machine cluster and you have exabytes of storage space.