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Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps
Anti-Globalism sends along a PCWorld article outlining two technologies from Intel and Dell that do an end run around Windows. "Dell, Intel and their partners announced last week new technologies that represent major leaps forward for mobility. The companies seem to have discovered the secret to making such bold leaps: Cut Microsoft out of the deal. One technology involves enabling users to gain instant access to a laptop's e-mail, browser and other basic functionality — without booting Windows at all. The second technology enables an Internet-based message to wake a Windows PC from sleep mode. These new technologies are perfect metaphors for what's happening in the industry... Windows is asleep while Microsoft's own partners give users what they really want."
It takes way too many resources. Maybe 3 years down the line, but Microsoft really dropped the ball by ignoring the reality of the fastest growing segment in computer sales.
Because of this, Apple is having great sales on the high/upper-mid-end with it's very nice line notebooks and Linux is getting a start on the lower end.
Without Vista, I don't think it would have been possible for Linux to get a foothold.
The year of Linux on the Desktop is distant, but thanks to Microsoft, the Year of Linux on the notebook looks like it's becoming reality sooner rather than later.
And the way a distro like Ubuntu evolves so quickly from year to year, I think it's a mistake that MS can't afford to do again.
In a few years, we'll see that MS was the one who dropped the ball to allow the competition the elbow room to come in.
It's also making things worse by having so many different versions and while it's debatable that Vista should have been wholly 64bit (definitely by Windows 7), MS doesn't even have the decency to provide 32/64bit on the same disc but is trying to grab every nickel it can from it's customers who chose one or the other (many discs don't qualify from alternative media).
Now it's "I just need web and email.".
Next month it'll be "Sound would be nice.".
Then you'll be bitching "Damn we need support for youtube and flickr up in this bitch.".
Then you'll say "Can we get a fucking IM client and some printer support? It's 2010!".
Ultra mobile / webtop / nettop / netbook / whatever is retarded.
There's a bit more to it than that, from the article:
"The Intel-JaJah combination will enable you to dump your landline phone and use a PC-based VoIP phone without leaving your PC on all the time"
You both must be new here.
It doesn't matter if it's in the BIOS, or uses a second processor.
What matters is that it allows your laptop to "just work" rather than having to wait for the bloated monstrosity that is Windows to become usable (or as usable as it gets).
I was delighted to find that my old Compaq laptop allowed you to run on the CD player to listen to music without booting up the machine at all. This looks like an extension of that philosophy. I can imagine having a laptop that would never be fully booted except to run some "legacy" program. It only took us what, 20+ years to get here!
It's not news, it's fark^H^H^H^Hslashdot.com? Oh, and I know, please tell me about all the things RedHat comes with...except:
1)those extras aren't forced, they're easy to remove (unless they're gnome...), and they're all OSS
2)you're missing the point. The point is that the OS shouldn't be expected to provide EVERYTHING. It's not a problem when IBM modifies RedHat to work with their LPARs, and it's not news when someone makes a Windows appliance without Windows. That's supposed to happen, on a regular basis.
I have an ancient machine that plays CD/DVD in 5 seconds without booting - it's called a DVD player.
Seriously, HP had PCs that can do that 2-3 years ago. Oracle worked on a DB server that can run without booting into Windows OS more than 5 years ago. On new mobile phones you can open up your email within 5 seconds. Stop giving free press to Intel and Dell until they have the real guts to get away from Windows entirely.
If you want all of that in your long-life Windows laptop, then get yourself a $22 SDHC card and install Ubuntu on it with all the extras. I've tried it. Boots in 3 seconds. No moving parts. Snappy fast and low power if you set it up to turn off your HDD - or better yet, pull that out - you won't need it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I realize that I am probably just beating a dead horse here but most modern OSes simply boot too many services and other infrastructure (drivers, programs, libraries, or whatever else, etc) which most users simply are not going to use in an average desktop login session. It would be nice if the boot sequences in various OSes could be more configurable (Linux is better on this count than Windows) as to what needs to be loaded during boot and what can wait to be loaded as needed on demand. There is also the issue of what does and does not belong in the kernel (aka the Mach vs Monolithic kernel debate), but that is a separate (albeit related) problem. The other technology that would go a long way towards rendering the boot issues moot is the solid state hard drive, but that too still has a ways to go before it can match the number of write/rewrites before failure of the good old mechanical magnetic drives that most of us are still using right now. One solution, which could be interesting, would to have a solid state memory for the core OS so that the boot times are fast, but then load programs from the larger (and slower but cheaper and reliable) magnetic disk until solid state discs are roughly equal or superior to mechanical magnetic drives in expected service lifetime.
Linux is known to be more power-hungry than Windows; I noticed the same on my computers.
Windows XP works about 40min longer than openSuse11 on the same machine, using default settings.
Here is some reading material:
- http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/
- there was a white paper written by folk from Intel, I don't remember where I found it, but it could be somewhere here: http://oss.intel.com/en-us/casestudies/
You need to switch to a tickless kernel, and tinker with powertop - that should improve things.
Note that in my case, none of the powertop tricks had any impact - I was surprised to see that no matter what I did, the estimated time would always be 1h45min. This is still an experiment in progress, so don't count this feedback as 100% certain.
The saddest poem