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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."
You could at least read the summary, it's a BIOS that runs Linux without booting windows.
OMG, 1996 called, it wants its story back.
Put microsoft's hand in warm water while they're at it. We'll get the next version of Windows a year early!
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
Wake on LAN is ancient.
Dual booting is ancient.
One strategy for Microsoft in order to counter this trend is to modify its Windows OS license in a way that specifically prohibits this kind of set-up.
This way, a laptop will have to run a non Windows OS in order to be participant in DELL's "DELL Latitude On" or INTEL's "Intel Remote Wake."
I know this is not illegal.
This is retarded and sensational.
In other words, perfect front-page material. You must be new here.
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).
Having the computer work just like a TV, toaster, or microwave is very appealing to many. I don't know MS can't come up with refinements to make the computer "just work", but most of the time email and web are all I need. If someone can make that work at the push of a button, I'll probably use it a lot and so will my parents and grandparents.
Apple is having decent sales in the overpriced, zealot segment.
Anything that's not implemented correctly is a major security issue...
Even when implemented correctly it can still be a major security issue, it just becomes an even bigger one when not done correctly. Some ideas (ActiveX?) should just not ever be implemented and implementing them poorly is just asking for trouble.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Windows won't wake, because the buggy chipset drivers mean it's now frozen in standby.
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
Yeah, because it runs of entirely separate hardware, i.e. not the same processor/RAM and doesn't use the hard drive. And the great thing is because it runs off a lower power ARM SoC and doesn't have to power any hard drive the thing can stay on for more than a day instead of a mere few hours. It's really two computers inside of one.
You just got troll'd!
...the mighty jungle
The Ballmer sleeps tonight...
Somebody continue...
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Perhaps there is a group that would like Microsoft to enter and control the motherboard and hardware markets. Or perhaps someone is just regurgitating anti-MS propaganda in order to feel smart without actually thinking for themselves. I guess that as long as they stay out of political discussions, I can live with it.
PC World has a decent summary of Intel Remote Wake Technology.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/149863/2008/08/.html
Then there's also the actual Intel site
http://www.intel.com/technology/chipset/remotewake.htm
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.
Uh, no. They said "instant on". They didn't say power on the machine, wait a while for the JVM to load, and then work.
Bender: black jack... and hookers. In fact - forget the black jack!
And don't get me started on the phrase "do an end run around Windows" when it clearly should be "reach around" - at least that's the only way *I* can enjoy my Microsoft products. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The concept that a vendor could sidestep the restrictions imposed by Windows by using another OS is hardly new.
The idea of running a second OS on a laptop is hardly new. It's two computers in one box - that's not a new technology, that's space efficiency ;-)
Obviously it's far from the first time that I notice this behaviour ;)
You just got troll'd!
No, only I'm New Here
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.
we can wake Windows remotely. This seems like a major security issue if not implemented correctly.
No kidding. Waking Windows locally is already a big enough security issue as it is!
On my old Alienware laptop there was a button you could press that loaded a minimal Linux distro to play DVDs and CDs without loading Windows.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
> 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.
Helloooo, Mcfly!
This Dell thing is kinda retarded but netbooks aren't. An ASUS EEEPC has sound, it ships with a version of mplayer that looks nice and has pretty broad codec support. Firefox has the flash plugin preloaded so youtube isn't an issue. IM? It's in there. Printing? Browse your Windows or CUPS printers out of the box. Browse SMB or NFS file shares while you are at it if the included SSD is getting a little full.
Of course the "can't add apps" thing Dell if throwing around is just crazy talk. Even if they try to close it down it won't work. If it has a penguin inside somebody will open it up and get Debian on it inside the first month. The drama will be whether one of the BSDs release first.
Democrat delenda est
This posting is amazingly odd. It's claiming that these gigantic hardware companies are somehow magically avoiding Microsoft. But last time I checked... Microsoft was a software company.
MS doesn't put out hardware specs, they don't design laptops (or desktops), they aren't giving these companies dictates from on high, etc. Also... neither OSX nor Teh Lunix are driving this innovation... so how is this "Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps"? Windows is software. So what does that have to do with somebody making hardware with extra features?
Stupidity like that is exactly why computers are still using the archaic BIOS-based system, rather than making an intelligent and modern hardware platform. HARDWARE platform... meaning it's absurd to think Microsoft needs to hold their weiner while these hardware companies use the bathroom.
This is just symptomatic of the degree to which MS-haters need to stretch to find criticisms. MS hate at any cost, even when the cost is looking and sounding like a complete and total irrational idiot. MS is not daddy. Hardware companies actually CAN figure out how to do hardware stuff, all by themselves!
I don't believe Microsoft is sleeping - they were woken up by the development of the OLPC project. But their problem was that Windows needs so much memory to run. A Linux system could run under 1 Gigabyte of memory, Microsoft wanted at least 2 Gigabytes.
That has woken up the PC manufacturers who now have to compete against PDA's, Blackberry's , smart mobile phones and Eee-PC's. For most people, managing E-mail and surfing the web for You-tube videos is all they want from a PC. All that requires is some multi-language support and audio/video codecs. Hard drives and graphics chips are small enough already - the only problem seems to be the memory usage of Windows and the desktop.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Yea, that's what I thought at first. "Hmm, sounds like that MediaDirect nonsense." But then I read TFA. And it's nothing like MediaDirect. Although the article is sketchy on details, what it sounds like is this:
Standard mode: Core 2 Duo processor booting Windows from hard drive.
Latitude ON mode: Atom processor booting from flash drive running Linux.
The system will have two separate processors, and the main selling point to this new mode is the battery life (est. at 19hours if you are running off the Atom and Linux SSD).
No, this is just another example of how a monopoly impedes progress.
The fact that industry is having to work around Microsoft's stranglehold instead of simply shifting to another vendor is a sad indictment of governments' handling of an abusive monopolist.
Microsoft should have been split at the original DoJ antitrust case. It still should.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Put microsoft's hand in warm water while they're at it. We'll get the next version of Windows a year early!
I think you might be confusing output ports #1 and #2.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
My new Asus P5Q Pro has a feature called ExpressGate that lets you boot a thin BIOS OS (Linux?) with Firefox, Email, etc. The installer runs from Windows, and it may or may not use data from the hard disk, but you enable/disable the feature in the BIOS.
If Microsoft were adding features to Windows, like when they added an internet browser and media player, would you be happier?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Similar technology is already used on mobile phones, they can be remotely reprogrammed to pretend that they're switched off while they're recording and transmitting your conversation.
We don't live in a 1984 world yet, but the usual greedy Megacorps are trying to patent the required technology already...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I'm left asking, "What's the windows processor for, once I have a low power, light Linux system which boots in a flash?" I know I'm not currently the norm, but I think I'm more and more the norm. You don't have to add much to the system they're describing to make it everything I want in a laptop. (Not a desktop replacement laptop, but an ultra-portable take-with-me device.)
Sideshow is designed for small screens, however there is nothing which would prevent you from using a full screen except for increased power consumption for the backlight.
I'm just saying that it's not like Microsoft is ignoring the "Instant On Sub Computer" concept. It's just that Dell is deciding to make their own implementation.
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.
Yep, provided they were:
Those constraints would allow fair competition. If Microsoft were then able to produce better browsers and media players than the competition, they'd deserve my money.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
This article failed to mention Asus, and their embedded chips... that allow you to use applications like Skype and Firefox.. without a hard drive or having to use MS as your OS.
Uh, my laptop already uses technology that allows this, and it allows more than "basic functionality". This stunning new technology is called "Linux".
The last couple of decades have been a bit of a blur to you, haven't they?
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
More popular does not equal better
More popular does not equal easier
More popular does not equal simpler
More popular does not equal more advanced
A monopoly helps no-one except the company who is the monopoly
People use windows because most people use windows and no other reason!
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Where the have you been all these years? Nothing stopping hardware OEMs from selling hardware with non-Windows OSes my ass. Jean-Louis Gassée found that one out when he first began to try pitching BeOS to hardware OEMs. He wrote an article on why PC manufacturers won't sell non-MS products (more info on this here and here). The Windows monopoly is reinforced by anti-competitive agreements that Microsoft has with all of the major hardware OEMs. If one of these OEMs violates the agreement, they lose the OEM discount on all the other Windows PCs they sell, and consequently their Windows-based computers wind up costing much more than those vendors that decided to abide by the agreement. You can guess what that would mean to a major OEM.
In a way, this move by Dell is interesting since it shows to what lengths they've gone to avoid violating the contract. They could have used the same CPU to run the Linux firmware here, but no, they had to include a full ARM SoC to do the same instead. Granted, that has some advantages (given that the x86 CPU is much too overpowered and would eat the battery alive), but perhaps the agreements they have with Microsoft may also have something to do with it.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Before Latitude ON, there was Dell MediaDirect, a Windows XP Embedded partition that booted in about 10 seconds.
The only user focused difference between the 2 that I see, is that MediaDirect is/was positioned as a way to access your files - and Latitude ON is positioned as a way to access the Internet.
Technically, the whole "embed an ARM PC into an x86 PC" may be a better idea than the convoluted MBR and partitioning schemes MediaDirect employed - but it's certainly more expensive as well.
Then, as mentioned, there's Windows Sideshow, which even Dell is prototyping. SideShow is more ambitious than Latitude ON, encompassing everything from sinlge line text displays to show system stats, to ARM based Windows Mobile devices to check email, play media files, etc. So far, it's failed to gain much traction in the marketplace - but, I think that it's still too early to call it dead.
If you take a look at some of the prototype developments in the SideShow remote computer spaces, I think you'll agree that all the functionality of Latitude ON is there - it's just a seperate device instead of being housed in the same case as a laptop.
So - it's not like Microsoft isn't aware or working on this market, Dell and Co. just decided to go their own way. Big deal - happens all the time. While MediaDirect used XP Embedded, other manafacturers were using Linux based OS's. Wake me up in 2 or 3+ years when the market has settled down, and we can declare a winner.
Windows... It can be put to sleep though.
Is this like putting it down?
I drank what? -- Socrates