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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."
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!
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).
Fuck it, I'll reply to myself.
"Microsoft has been pushing Remote Desktop and its communications software for years. But apparently it never occurred to anyone in Redmond that people might want to leave their PCs in sleep mode, then have them turn on for remote access or VoIP calls."
Remote Desktop supports wake on LAN.
When you try to connect, it tries to wake the machine up. If the machine has wake on lan enabled, and you don't have any NAT issues, it'll work.
Apple is having decent sales in the overpriced, zealot segment.
You could at least read the article, it's an ARM SoC that serves as a separate UMPC inside the laptop. Kind of like having a N810 inside your laptop if you will.
You just got troll'd!
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"
Well yeah, but I'm sure Dell wouldn't just open wide and swallow that. And a licensing clause like that sounds like a good target for more anti-trust lawsuits, which the EU seems to relish.
The government can't save you.
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!
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!
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.
It doesn't matter if it's in the BIOS, or uses a second processor.
It does matter that it uses a 2nd processor that is very power efficient. I haven't used a windows laptop in a while, but if you just wake your computer from sleep how long does it really take?
I think the real advantage of this is battery savings from running on an ARM processor.
From the article:
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765
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.
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 know this is not illegal.
This is the exact type of behavior MS was convicted of a decade ago.
You could at least read the article, it's an ARM SoC that serves as a separate UMPC inside the laptop. Kind of like having a N810 inside your laptop if you will.
Didn't you get the memo? We don't RTFA. We simply skim TFS for keywords, and then post with an authoritative tone, as though we had not only read TFA, but had actually authored it AND examined the subject in a PhD thesis.
You must be new here...
A long time ago, and by internet standards, I mean in pre-historic times, there was a computer called the Lisp Machine, designed and built at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. We're talking mid-1980s here. That's more than TWO DECADES AGO. Your cell phone would run circles around a LispM.
One of the amazing things about LispMs is that they came up really, really quickly, despite having very large and slow disk drives. They did this by essentially performing a full boot and then saving that precise memory image (including all peripheral state) to a special part of the disk called a band. This is not unlike the modern laptops' suspend-to-disk feature, except that bands were pretty static. The intent was that you set up your machine just so, and then wrote what you felt was the canonical startup state to the band. Then, every time the machine started, the band loaded in from disk, and POOF! was ready to go.
It was a radical departure, and one that, unfortunately, was not learned by the industry. I would *love* to have my laptop use bands. Save-to-disk is nice and all, but since laptop hardware (and Linux support for it) is so f-ing flaky, it's far better to have a feature to boot quickly to a known-good state.
What's the relevance here? LispMs were as fast to boot as you'd expect for a computational appliance. OMFG if I have to boot my current Linux desktop or Windows laptop it takes eons to come up, and that's with hardware that's probably three orders of magnitude faster. Our modern machines should be in a known, operable state in under a second, and the only reason they aren't is poor engineering / pressure from Microsoft.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Dell is the only one who puts an extra CPU in there to run the Linux BIOS image so all that hardware you mentioned, except the hard drive, is fully used by the Linux image on the other systems.
It seems strange that Dell would put in a 2nd CPU but it does make it drop dead easy to design this way. There are tons of ARM based SoCs to pick from and pretty much all of them have Linux BSPs.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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."
No, New Here already posted...
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=649601&cid=24653097
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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)
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."
Basically it's an instant-boot into something and instant-on can give a laptop some credibility where it didn't before, i.e In A Hurry. (Stop gloating you non-Windows users, this isn't about you!) Drag that work laptop to the airport and check your mail via the web before it's time to show the security guy the holes in your socks. Sometimes the web is all you need, or Skype, and some companies issue laptops for their consultants but not Blackberries or other decent PDA.
This gives you a chance to do something with a company-approved laptop SOE that doesn't involve waking the slow, cranky and belligerant dragon that is Vista or XP Pro. This Is A Good Thing. Oh, and you can push a button on the screen that boots Windows if you need to read the boss' Powerpoint. If you have the time, that is. Takes a while to wake the dragon.
The reason why they can do this is they are a specific hardware company (ASUS the example I know) who don't have to cater to all forms of hardware -- just their own. Full-cut OS' can't be that inflexible. So it's a quick little trip from the BIOS to a v.fast PDA screentop. Most of what I need is on that little thing, for the rest you press your OS button and load your standard desktop.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The last couple of decades have been a bit of a blur to you, haven't they?
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.