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Windows Laptops Ship With Linux Media Player
hqm writes "Maybe this is the real way Windows will be made irrelevant, not by a Linux desktop, but by Linux embedded software. LinuxDevices has an article stating 'NEC is the latest vendor to announce a laptop with a built-in embedded Linux based media player option. The NEC Versa S3000 will use InterVideo's InstantOn technology to enable users to listen to music, watch DVDs, and more without having to wait for Windows to load. Another major laptop vendor, Toshiba, in July launched its Qosmio laptop, which also includes a Linux-based media player environment. NEC will market the S3000 in Hong Kong and China. The laptop also includes InterVideo's popular WinDVD DVD playing software, which is also available for Linux.'"
The NEC Versa S3000 will use InterVideo's InstantOn technology to enable users to listen to music, watch DVDs, and more without having to wait for Windows to load.
Could this signal the end of traditional operating systems? My thoughts on the subject are that eventually programs will come with their own OSes and load from a kind of GUI BIOS. And why wouldn't they? Put all the conflicts on hold for a second and think about it. If programmers could select the OS that works best with their application, they would stand to profit. Subsystem patches could batch patch each application's common files intuitively, without the need of expensive Microsoft licenses. Sure right now, we're looking at all the space that would likley be required to do this, but if you gut Windows, for example, and only use the required systems, that would be a savings of about 99% of what 99% of us use regularly. Turn that power over to the applications designers and you get better (open source) components, custom built to suit each program. Yes I do see a small problem with this, in that you have to worry about identifying the end users' system specs to make sure the programs will function properly, but with the rise of web based updating systems, it would be possible to select only the necessary components to wrap with the software, reducing the overall waste on each system and making for a much more stable environment than traditional OSes.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Great idea! Think of all the RAM you'd save...If only more hi-mem apps would do this, rather than run in RAM-hungry Windows.
I look forward to this in more laptops so I can squeeze more movie time out of my battery. Letting the OS drain a lot of power reduces me to 1.5 hours on a single charge.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
the user will eventually turn the machine on, and then what? does this technology work after the machine has already booted into windows? people generally dont buy a computer to only listen to music or watch DVDs...And furthermore, this isnt really making windows obsolete, its just adding functionality to the system.
Bye bye Windows XP Media Center Edition!!! Honestly, are people going to wait for all that crap to load or get something much sooner, with Linux? Providing a good interface, this could very well be a big problem for Microsoft (not that Linux isn't already...)
Cross-platform software is a great idea in my opinion. The release of iTunes for Windows, I must speculate, has surely won the hearts of many MS fans. Even the smallest sway can help - getting a small amount of added respect for Linux and its software will lead some to try dual-booting or even a total reformat.
This can only help...unless of course the software sucks hardcore. Has anyone used it?
What a waste of money to have to buy all that extra crap when the notebook is easily able to do it in software. It's an even bigger waste in a notebook where space for internal peripherals is at a huge premium.
All that so you can watch DVDs or listen to MP3s without waiting to boot? My Powerbook has a 74 day uptime now; I just put it in sleep mode and take it with. It takes it about 1 second to wake up and then it's ready to play movies or music.
Even if a windows machine can't do that, You're still a lot better off buying a standalone portable mp3 player than having to pay to include it in your notebook. You can take an mp3 player a lot of places you can't take a notebook.
Jason
ProfQuotes
>Maybe this is the real way Windows will be made irrelevant
Phew! "Irrelevant"!
And straight to the point - it's not about a nice (cost-effective, elegant, etc.) way to meet user requirement, it's about the demise of Windows, right in the first sentence.
Give me a break and learn to write articles without trolling!
The only thing that will be made irrelevant is Slashdot.org, thanks to highly insightful articles like this.
``Unless Windows Media Player is *not* included as the default player, i don't think this bundling will actually help much.''
Which is exactly what is happening in Europe.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So does this imply that that there is finally a legal way to play a DVD on Linux? Granted it's not open source, but isn't something better than nothing?
Since the OS booted to play DVDs and MP3s should be very light weight and minimal, will power consumption be noticably lower in this mode compared to watching DVDs in windows? I believe the media is decoded with hardware too, further optimizing the power usage. This would be great for watching movies on a plane, with wi-fi off of course!
Sounds like a great idea. NOT.
Sure, *your* idea sounds bad. But your idea lacks vision. I'm talking about decentralizing the classic OS, and decentralizing Microsoft's monopoly. Linus has been doing it for years, but by more or less following the classic design of an OS. I'm suggesting a shift into a more dynamic model. What's wrong with that?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Windows Media Player does not include a DVD player; it can play DVDs, but you need to install a codec. WinDVD installs the codec for it to use.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Good point. As much as I like linux and use it daily, Microsoft is a huge multibillion corporation. I don't see how linux is going to knock it off it's mountain any time soon. At most, it's marketshare will increase to that of Apple. That would still be a huge accomplishment, but it's unrealistic to hope it's going to topple microsoft. And even if it did, Microsoft could just focus all of it's efforts on Office to compete with open office and still make money. I've read that Office is microsoft's bread and butter anyway so it wouldn't make much of a difference.
If some day the operating system becomes completely transparent and people can run any software on any machine, then the money will be made in the applications.
Linux still needs it's desktop standards "enforced" better I think. The handful of distros are still competing against each other too much. RPMs should be killed. We need standards like connecting a printer will automatically set it up. Sharing over home networks works out of the box. When you plug a USB drive in, it's contents pops up on the screen. Same thing with digital cameras and mp3 players. Mass broadband adoption helps things because manufacturers can centralize their driver databases, or even just the distros can do this.
The devil is in the details and linux still requires too much knowledge that geeks take for granted. I like how KDE is starting to take over on some of this and in a sense making operations standard across distros, but this needs to happen more often.
It's been my experience that distros differ little for the end user. Window managers differ in their features between basic WMs to desktop environments like KDE and GNOME.
Flame and bitch me out all you want and call me stupid for thinking operating linux requires knowledge and experience, but I bet someone can setup and share a printer and a directory faster on windows than linux if they had no background experience to begin with. We don't need to dumb everything down to a wizard, but making initial configuration easier is where standards have to be initiated.
Oh, and before anyone thinks they should list a dozen apps that will do what I said above, if they're not turned on by default or at least given the obvious option when I install linux, then they're too difficult for the average user. And I'm sure I've either heard or currently use any package you want to inform me about, but that meant I already had to search them out, something most people aren't going to do.
Sorry to point this out, but Windows will never be made irrelevant. Fact is, its been running 90% of the world's desktop PC's for a decade, and brought computers to the home market in a way never seen before. Its already made its place in history, and will never be regarded as "irrelevant".
Perhaps the word you really meant to use was "obsolete", but ... well, the comment I was going to make has been made many, many time before so I'll leave it at that.
I agree with you 100%, but I want to point out recent experiences at my office, where I'm a graphic designer, and I periodically go between windows, KDE/linux and the other 99% of the time Mac OS X.
When I need to print, and if I need to select and configure a printer, OS X wins, hands down. I can find a printer on the network and get it configured in less than a minute. Peachy.
on linux, a little trouble. I had to format an url to give to cups. Took about 5 minutes, but once I did it it worked.
On windows... well... it generally takes me about 10 minutes to figure out how get the god-damned wizard to navigate to a listing where I can pick a printer from. usually takes a few back-n-forths, and sometimes it hangs as it searches the network. Generally, it takes me calling the IT people and getting them to set it up.
My point here is that people assume windows has a better gui, just because people are used to it, and accustomed to it's failures (I'm not talking about blue-screens, those are GONE).
My old room mate was an IT guy for a defense contactor -- a windows-only type of shop. he always snickered at my powerbook and at my thinkpad running linux. I didn't mind him laughing at linux as user-unfriendly, but he'd get on my mac and say "where's the start-menu?" "Where's windows-feature-x?" He's a smart guy, but he only knows windows, and to him, anything that deviates from windows is user-unfriendly.
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If you check out Toms Hardware you can see a small chunk of cube pc's which already feature this.
Not a bad option if you are like me and looking for a portable everything box with an alternate plan of being a PVR in its spare time.
However, after looking over the prices I decided I would rather have a mini-itx solution.
A nice C3 board with tv out and a PCI slot for capture ended up being my pick. Thankfully, I alraady have most of the components to slap into this little beast. The final product should measure about 7 x 2 x 10 (w x h x l).
Yeah, it won't have instant on dvd support, but I'm not going to nit pick when my savings was in the 300+ range.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
You don't really seem to understand how an operating system works. I don't mean the gui/desktop/environment that has become part of the OS, I mean the kernel (which in computer science terms IS the operating system). You can't just have programs just multitask because they're on the same computer. They're competing for resources! There's only one (ok maybe two) proccessor. Only one video card. Only one sound card. Only a single memory address space. Something has to mediate, hand out these resources to the programs that need them, and stop those programs that don't. This, is the operatings system. You don't actually have 5 or 6 programs running on your processor at the same time, you have an operating system that interupts each program when its allocated time slot is up and hands it over. It also divides up memory, protects regions of memory from other programs, allows multiple programs to draw to screen at once, allows multiple programs to send internet traffic, all because these programs make requests of it and it passes the requests on to hardware.
Now considering your previous direction, you're probably going to say each program can just be good and give up control of the processor when it doesn't need it, or just be good enough not to go outside of its bounds in ram. What you would have described, in this case is Windows 3.1 or MacOS Classic. Both of these systems are horribly crash prone, and low performing because they don't keep sloppy programs from doing bad things, hogging proccessor time, straying in memory, accessing the sound card when another is using it. Hell, even if you have well written programs, a cooperative multitask system isn't going to perform as well. The way you split up processor and memory is highly dependant on what is going on in the system as a whole. A single program can't make the proper judgement call on how much processor time to take. Only a program that's monitoring the whole system and who's sole purpose is dividing up resources can make that call. That program again is the operating system.
And you say you don't want to multitask. Well what if some of the other tasks are things being handled by the os? Each program shouldn't contain an entire TCPIP stack. That's a massively complex piece of software. That lives in the operating system. Or it could be in a separate program that you communicate to but that's just describing a microkernel system with a tcpip server. Just another form of operating system.
And lastly, even if you don't need services like tcpip and you don't need to multitask, and you just want a program to have access to hardware, you have to deal with the fact that hardware is different! Doom3 written directly to the radeon X800 wouldn't work on the geforce 6800, or other radeons for that matter. You need something to abstract the hardware, a driver. And guess what, drivers are just a plugin to your operating system. They OS needs to present the hardware as a generic abstract device, with the implementation details handled by the driver.
Consoles get around this by having consistent hardware. Carmack can write directly to the hardware because he knows what it is. And things like tcpip are implemented in the developer kit which is kind of like a very stripped down OS.
God I ramble....someone needs to shut me up.