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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.
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.
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
Do you, or any of the other slashbots get it?
This is what the device does when you turn it on:
- Checks for disc in drive
- If disc is present, and is a DVD or CD Audio Disc, the device boots the "media player" burned into roms on the board
- If not, it boots normally.
This is really dual-booting, except one of the OS's lives in firmware.
In other words, it doesn't "save RAM" when running windows, it doesn't have to do with Windows Update. It doesn't have anything to do with windows at all.
It's as if you booted from a floppy that had a linux-based media player on it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.