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Dell Considering ARM-Based Smartbooks
wonkavader sends us this quote from an article in PCWorld:
"In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday. The company is researching the possibility of offering new Linux-based mobile devices called smartbooks, said Todd Finch, senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, at the OpenSourceWorld conference in San Francisco. The company will also upgrade its Ubuntu Linux OS for netbooks to the latest version in the next few weeks ... Smartbooks with Arm chips have inherent advantages over x86 chips like Atom, such as lower power consumption and longer battery life, according to Finch. The chips are also becoming more powerful, as indicated by the growing number of applications on smartphones, he said. 'I think it's natural and reasonable for us to begin looking at them as they begin scaling their processors up.'"
And what reason do we have to believe this isn't a just negotiating tactic against Microsoft?
Lower power consumption leads to longer battery life.
In all seriousness though, I once had someone tell me as I was looking into programming in assembly that I should learn an ARM-Based syntax. It still hasn't paid off completely yet, but this is a step in the right direction.
MS might not be selling any ARM-compatible systems at the moment (embedded OSs aside), but I would bet they have experimental ARM builds of everything they've produced in the past 5 years.
At least now Microsoft can't object to Linux sales on the claim people are wiping them to install bootleg Windows - not on an ARM.
ARM has an advantage such as lower power consumption, but it also has a huge disadvantage - it does not run x86 programs.
It will be the same situation like with PDAs ~10 years ago.
I want some program, it's available for PC, but not available for Psion.
With this ARM "smartbook", I'll still have to lug around a big laptop to be able to run those programs that the smartbook doesn't. I think that in this regard, I'd rather buy a Fujitsu U810 or equivalent.(17cm x15.5cm x 2.7cm but has Atom and is fully compatible with x86 programs; battery holds for >6 hours).
No.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Or does x86 inherently consume more power at the same performance level?
Difficult: ARM has traditionally had a very clean instruction set which eliminates a lot of the junk that an x86 requires in order to function, and it's much easier to take a chip designed for low power and increase the performance than to take a 100+W monster like an x86 and scale it down for low-power use. The modern 'x86', at least from Intel, is basically an x86 emulator wrapped around a RISC core.... the ARM effectively eliminates the emulator and just runs the RISC core.
If I remember correctly, the dual-core ARM chips I was working on a couple of years ago used about 1W of power to play 720p HD... an Atom has trouble doing that even with several times that power usage.
I predict that these things are going to take off. Once people realize that they don't need a heavy OS like Windows in order to enjoy a portable platform that provides email & web browsing, any prejudice against will evaporate. Besides, most people won't even notice that Windows is missing.
One reason PDA's never took off is the man-machine interface. The keyboard is pretty much a must-have for an email & messaging platform. These things are going to be everywhere, especially with carriers eager to sell data plans subsidizing them.
Basically a big Up Yours to Intel and Microsoft.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Actual netbooks will come. All current netbooks are small laptops, this is something else which is better.
Do not know if it is due to the reporter or the strategy itself.
In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday.
It ends with
The company is also researching Google's Chrome for use in netbooks.
Makes netbooks-are-atom-and-smartbooks-are-ARM distinction.
However
Dell couldn't say whether it would ultimately offer a smartbook.
Maybe just floating of test baloons.
Like it or loath it, Apple has seriously shaken up the mobile phone industry, and got away with something nobody else ever managed: taking a big slice of the carrier's cake on top.
If Appe brings out a sensible iTablet that actually works and is smart enough to work with the laser keyboard (the Bluetooth version does proper HID support) I cannot see that fail, and it will probably nuke the market Dell is looking at.
The tablet in itself goes into markets at present taken by ebook stuff like the Kindle, and with a proper remote keyboard it hits the portable market - why take a whole system if it's that portable.
So I'd wait a bit - let's see what Apple is up to. I hope I'm right - it's about time for such a device.
Insert
Firstly, debian already ported most of Linux software to ARM, software availability is not an issue anyway.
Secondly, x86_64 is an extension on x86. Linux32 is just a set of 32-bit libraries compiled against a 64-bit kernel, that allows you to run 32-bit apps, using features of the processor specifically designed to do this. ARM is a completely different architecture and such an approach is simply impossible. The only way to run other x86 applications on ARM are via virtualization, which frankly would be unusably slow on a netbook.
ARM is a different instruction set entirely. x86_64 vs. x86_32 differ only in some memory layout, but the binary instructions are 99% the same. So it's easy to write a wrapper. linux32 would not work. You also need an instruction set emulator (e.g. bochs), which would be quite slow.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
better than that stupid term 'netbook".
Windows?
Of course not - and who would want to except the brain-dead slack-jawed fools that still believe that "Windows came free with my computer". MS still haven't realised that Windows was superceded about 10 years ago. They can continue to make their interface ever shinier, but it's still the same old broken NT kernel underneath (and don't let the marketing hype about "completely new kernels" fool you!)
Game Over, Microsoft!
Remember that Asus achieved a large success in the netbook market by releasing the eee before everyone else got their act together. If Dell could do the same, they could gain another reasonably large untapped market
The 32-bit wrapper works because chips like the athlon64 and core can both run 32-bit apps natively in 64-bit mode since they can execute x86. I really don't know who modded this one insightful.
zosxavius photography
Their has been an ARM-build of Flash for years, just look at Nokia N810 for example. But you have to remember these devices are meant for surfing the web, maybe some e-mail, some light office work, etc. So Flash is the only proprietary you'll probably need. Which is already available.
New things are always on the horizon
It's interesting how some people are quick to declare portable ARM computers a failure because it won't run their favorite (proprietary) x86 programs.
That's the Stockholm Syndrome, only with software instead of human kidnappers.
Could be, could also be because Ubuntu's next release will have an ARM-release and they already ship Ubuntu.
New things are always on the horizon
Or maybe because Ubuntu's next release will have an ARM-release and they already ship Ubuntu.
New things are always on the horizon
...does it run RISC OS?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
ARM systems usually use co-processors for things like decoding video. A heavy use of co-processors lets the already low-power CPU be idle even more often.
It is not the "x86 emulator", as it takes a tiny percent of the die, and 90-95% of instructions are decoded to one underlying RISC equivalent. Most power consumption is because of OoOE, huge pipelines, and huge caches. In my opinion OoOE processors are an aberration inteded to maximize serial code, by wasting 4 to 8x resources, as it is like having many processors executing future code paths "just in case" (misusage of instruction cache just to feed the OoOE jump prediction execution paths) while making a misuse of the system bus by loading data for instructions that will be discarded 1 of every 10 times (data cache misusage by fetching data for instructions that will be discarded in a major part). So in "advanced OoOE CPU" you're saturating the bus for computing worthless instructions. As example, in the area of a P4 CPU, you may had 8 to 16 MIPS or ARM in-order CPU cores, making much better usage of the shared cache, and with 4 to 8x more executed instructions/transistor, with efficient system bus usage.
Well, some embeddded version of Windows which has no applications available. But pretty much all Open Source applications that run on x86 Linux are available on ARM. Just take a look at the Debian repository. Even Ubuntu will have an ARM-port for their next release.
New things are always on the horizon
Uhhh...I thought that was the whole point of the Nvidia Ion? The GPU does the heavy lifting on video, and the CPU does the basic tasks. While I have no doubt that these little ARMs will find a niche, the question is how big of a niche. Folks have their iPhones for just basic web browsing kind of stuff, and the problem I've found whenever you're are talking about Netbooks is that geeks well...they think like geeks.
You know what my customers call Netbooks, which is important as that is how Joe and Jane average see them? They call them 'baby laptops" which is important. You see they think these baby laptops should run everything their big laptops do, only much slower of course, because they are babies. You say ARM and they are gonna have no fricking clue as to what you are talking about. They will go "oooh cute!" and pick one up and then get pissy when their printer won't print. After all, it is USB and there is a USB port right there!
So while I am sure that some geeks that know what ARM and x86 and Windows and Linux are might buy some of these, how many of those are out there? And can they buy enough to make this a niche worth pursuing? Who knows, I guess we will know when these things come out. Of course they have to watch the timing because Win7 is gonna be released soon, and the MSFT advertising is gonna be everywhere. And as anybody who has run Win7 can tell you, it is actually quite nice. So they either need these things out yesterday, or to wait until the Win7 hype dies down. That is unless they plan to keep this as strictly a geek toy you have to hunt for on their website. Because Joe and Jane won't have a clue what ARM is, they'll just see the Win7 commercials and want to know why they can't run that "new thing" on their baby laptop. And believe me, working retail? Customers don't like hearing the word no for ANY reason.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What? So no viruses?
If that's the case, then it would seem to that there's even less hope for the average Linux user to attract the notice of malware developers.
Where most people will be scared of trying linux, they'll trust it when it has the Google brand. Where many people might be confused by an OS that looks mostly like Windows but where everything is just different enough to be confusing, they'll probably understand the concept of "Chrome OS is just a browser & nothing else". The remaining question is if ARM + Chrome OS will drive prices down low enough that people will be willing to forego the flexibility & familiarity of a regular Windows laptop.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
"lower power consumption AND longer battery life"!
Wow! Two advantages for the price of one. Amazing.
Whenever I see someone criticizing someone else for being a nerd here, I just want to yell, ''THIS. IS. SLASHDOT!!'' and boot them off a cliff.
Half-crazed anti-microsoft rhetoric. It's how we (t)roll.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The ARM design is also licensed out and companies embed the ARM cores with all kinds of other hardware, so what you were using to play 720p HD may well have been an ARM core with a hardware video decoder integrated.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I'm afraid it will be something weaker and smaller than current netbooks. A toy computer, compared to the real computers that run Windows on x86, like God intended.
The point is, why can't we have a regularly sized laptop with a sensible processor like ARM?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Microsoft is planning to build "Microsoft PC" products that are Microsoft Software+Hardware.
Interesting. Do you have a link for that?
I don't think most of the PC manufacturers would be able to complain any more than the mouse manufacturers did about the MS mouse. It might make sense. Microsoft needs the revenue and the whole Netbook thing really scared them. I'd guess that the PC manufacturers could easily be the next partner for them to crush.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Yet another marketing term? Someone really needs to restrain the marketing guys.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You mean emulation [of the x86 instruction set]. This need not be necesarrily slow. Look how Apple's Rosetta performs. Apart from it not supporting any and all software, the stuff it does support it supports pretty well. I've played a few recent (for the time, when the Intels came out) PPC games, and I did not detect any slowness or bugs.
Well, so does ( did ) MIPS. And SPARC. and Power. Each has its advantages over the old x86, but x86 has one advantage that trumps most : 20 years of a code base as the mainstream.
( myself i still prefer MIPS, but good luck finding something that runs it, or something to run ON it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How long before WinCE gets 'improved' with the inclusion of Windows Genuine Advantage?
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Indeed. You know, with x86 processors batteries tend to get depressive and commit suicide, which shortens their life, of course. With ARM they are much happier, and therefore battery suicides are rare.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
Always Innovating Touch Book.
ARM based tablet/netbook with (supposedly) 15h of battery life. The keyboard is detachable, and the tablet itself can run for 5h. The second battery is in the keyboard compartment. This is something that I've had my eye on for a while. And their already working with Ubuntu for a compatible release.
in a laptop or netbook if it means longer battery life, I dont use laptops netbooks for CPU/GPU intensive things, mostly web surfing & email, IM, and occasional typing of documents in OpenOffice on Linux and since Linux already supports arm the switch to that architecture would be seamless...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The only way to run other x86 applications on ARM are via virtualization, which frankly would be unusably slow on a netbook.
You mean emulation, not virtualisation. It doesn't have to be slow. How much software these days is CPU-bound? And how much CPU time does it spend in the application binary, and how much in libraries? If you have the headers for a library, you can quite easily automatically generate a stub version that calls the real version outside an emulator. This is quite an old technique, and is one that Apple uses for running PowerPC binaries on x86. If you call any standard library function from PowerPC code, you call a stub which creates an x86 call frame from the emulated registers and calls it. This means that time spent in the graphics libraries, for example, is time running native, not emulated, code. Windows, for example, would run all of the DirectX and GDI libraries as native code and the application as emulated code.
Even without this level of integration, something like QEMU does quite well. It can run emulated Linux programs just trapping the system calls and substituting real ones. Every Linux GUI program communicates with the X server via sockets and shared memory, with an ABI-neutral layout. This means that an emulated program will still be using the native, accelerated, X11 implementation, including OpenGL.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You are wrong. A device like that, would cost like 900$, the ARM netbooks are going for 200$ or maybe less, these are completely different markets.
Also take in consideration the total failure the iPhone is in Japan, the leader in mobile technology.
Kindle is, frankly, junk. But have you seen other brands, such as chinese Hanlin? The point in ebooks is not just their small size, they also use a display that doesn't use backlight and doesn't draw power unless you change the content. It looks very much like a printed page on a fax machine.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
I can't wait to get my hands on a Netbook based on Intels latest Itanium2 cores. Then I could do many cool things on it.
The Itanium architecture is an architecture developed for 64-bit computing without the burden of backwards compatibility with the older I386 instruction set.
I see Dell's OEM prices going up, or HP (those loyal chaps), Acer and Lenovo going down.
Yesterday they criticized Microsoft's FUD about Linux netbook returns, today they get noisy about Windows-proof computers... They can't say they didn't see it coming.
But, hey, Michael, I will buy three Windows-proof ARM-based netbooks provided they:
- run a more or less standard Linux (I am fine with Ubuntu)
- have a hard-disk
- are expandable to at least 2 gigabytes of RAM
- have an optional 768x1366 pixel screen (plus an analog VGA port for a second screen)
I bet a lot of people here will be happy getting rid of their x86s.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
...in the US at least where the constitution says people have a right to bare ARMs..
*ducks*
There seems to be a lot of comments about how the average joe is going to be pissy when he discovers that he can't run his windows applications on his arm netbook, or print well for that matter. That is obvious, and therefore redundant to talk about. This is a website dedicated to (hopefully intelligent) nerds, right? I'm more interested in running Linux anyway, or possibly an up-and-coming Mac OS X for ARM.
I would like to say to DELL - excellent idea!!! ARM for netbooks / smartbooks only makes perfect sense! The battery will last longer, they're fully capable of doing everything that a netbook should (including all multimedia applications), they're SILENT / FANLESS. All of that makes me (a green geek / engineer) very happy! If you could pull off an aluminium unibody, then you would have Apple beat if they ever got around to making a Mac smartbook.
My advice though, is to choose your components wisely. People won't want to wait for application contexts to be reactivated from swap, so make sure that you have enough RAM to keep everything going. Also, make sure that you prelink all binaries so that loading times are much faster! Last but not least, I would highly recommend that you choose a dual-core ARM SoC like the TI OMAP-4, which is based on the Cortex-A9 ARM family. With dual-cores, there would be many more pipelines available for concurrent threads, which means very little noticeable lag times.
Specifically for the OMAP, I really hope that the integrated PowerVR 3D graphics core and integrated video codec will get full Linux support at some point soon. TI seems pretty dedicated to supporting Linux on their devices, so I don't think that full support is unrealistic. The enhanced DSP ARM instructions will accelerate any multimedia applications in the mean time, and those are fully supported by GCC, with optimizations in the works for mplayer, ffmpeg, etc, until a decent architecture-agnostic kernel drm layer is in place, with PowerVR / IVA support.
For Windows enthusiasts, I'm sure that Windows 7 will be available at some point for ARM, as we have seen some of the demonstrations already at Computex (although Android seemed to be much easier to port). Will Microsoft even bother making a compatibility layer for ARM? I have to hand it to Apple, that they are in a better position than MS to make a fully featured ARM netbook, given their universal binary format in Mac OS X.
You will be glad to learn that last arm cpu (cortex A9) do OoOE. Also newer arm got mixed 16/32 bits instruction with thumb2. And yes newer arm CPU eat lot's of more power that older generation (armv5), but there are more powerfull.
Yes, they do OoOE, but not with the insane amount of register renaming of the OoOE-x86/OoOE-PowerPC ones, nor with the same alternate execution depth. The ARM Cortex OoOE is a very power-wised balanced OoOE, however, and is just my opinion, completely unnecesary (you could put 3 in-order-execution cores instead of the 2 out-of-order-execution ones).
I think, looking forward, MS will make the CE kernel a lightweight bootstrap for a .NET JIT. It only benefits them to reduce the attack surface, memory footprint, and number of interfaces they'll have to maintain for backwards compatibility and delegate it to the CLR. Then you've got a sand box that can leak memory (and reclaim it!) all day, that has a single interface to the kernel that needs to be maintained, and as a bonus you don't alienate any developers in the process. The last thing they want is another v[bc]-6 or J# incident.
IIRC, you work on an open source project that deals with operating system internals (was it something to do with emulation?); in your educated opinion, do you think this is likely?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
No it won't. Because as usual with Apple products, they will cost twice a fortune, and still be rather low-end.
While... well... do you know what those ARM systems actually cost! :)
They start with $200. That is their "very high newcomer" price!
After 3 months, they will have fallen to $100!
And still get complete HD video acceleration, Flash support, 10 hours of lifetime, and practically no heat production.
For that price I wonder if I could simply buy ten of them and link them into a Beowulf cluster. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Oh, and still be cheaper than that iTablet. :P
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Only that their printer *will* actually print. With CUPS I found it to be less hassle to make a printer work on Linux than on Windows.
Tell me one thing that they would want to do, that is not limited because of performance.
Hardware on Linux: Works.
Browsing, music, movies, e-mail, chatting, instant messaging, etc: All works nicely, and out of the box.
If you think otherwise, that you haven't used any recent Ubuntu or similar distribution.
Additionally, the distribution will of course be adapted to the laptop, by Dell.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
...Windows?
Yes. Probably. Almost certainly.
Wine will port very nicely to Linux on ARM architecture. Wine already provides Platinum (i.e., runs straight out of the box) support for MS Office and most other business and productivity Windows software. Its support for games is good and continuing to improve.
I suspect that a lot of Linux based VMs will also port easily to ARM architecture.
Next year it may well become accepted that the best way to use Windows on portable devices is to do it under Linux. Or it might take a couple of years to get there.
Will
FWIW, my first laptop is one of the new 13" MacBook Pro's and battery life was a big selling point. Another reason is that MacOS X is much more Unix friendly (well, duh) than Windows.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Yes, most software running on current 2.5-3 GHz dual-core and quad-core CPUs with a lot of SIMD and FPU power isn't CPU-bound. That probably won't be the case on a ~1 GHz single or dual-core ARM CPU. Anybody using a Web browser on a smartphone or PDA to browse typical websites today can tell you the little 400-800 MHz ARM CPU gets hammered pretty heavily.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
I was serious that is not a troll, nice one mods.
Four words buddy: Lexmark all in one. The most popular printer here by a country mile. Hell I can walk down the hall of my apartment building and find a good half dozen or more of those suckers, and I had nothing whatsoever to do with their purchasing decisions. Then there is those USB Wifi and TV tuners (which good luck getting THOSE things to work in x86 Linux with all the chip changes they do with those things, much less ARM), those USB based cards you get from the phone companies now to let you hook up through their network, hell I could go on forever. And I have tried selling Ubuntu, the last one 9.04 I think? (I suck at version numbers) and found that around 20% of items sold in my local supercenter have support. The rest were paperweights. Not good from a sales standpoint.
You see, the problem is those things can be worked around if one researches and makes an informed decision. problem is, and from building, selling, and servicing PCs since the days of Win3.xx I can tell you this is the case with a good 85%+ of the computer buying public, they can't tell you jack shit about WHAT they got, much less anything like what Arch it runs on. Hell I still get "Windows something" when I ask a customer what kind of computer they have. Not the year, not Intel or AMD (because frankly they don't even have a clue there either) but just "Windows something". So the question is how bad is the return rates on these things gonna be, and will it be worth it to keep around.
Now I can see these things carving out a niche, especially in education where you don't want them actually running anything you don't want them to, hell these will probably be great there. Unless of course all the textbook manufacturers refuse to release in anything but some proprietary DRM laden format, which of course will be X86 Windows only. But your average Joe and Jane? Honestly can't tell the difference between Intel and AMD, much less have a clue that ARM is a niche arch that will only run a subset of Linux software compiled for it. Geeks just don't understand how totally clueless the average consumer is. When I ask a customer what kind of PC they want do you know what I get? "Big and fast, with a nice flatscreen!" that's it. So good luck trying to explain the ARM VS X86 to them. Me? If these things get cheap enough I might pick up a few and try to sell them to the local college kids. For a simple portable notepad with Internet it would work great. But I wouldn't try to sell them to Joe Public on a bet. Too many returns when their stuff don't work.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
For any architecture, there is a point at which a CPU designer gets diminishing returns for added transistors and power. A simple 32-bit RISC or GPU seems to be a lot closer to the peak of useful performance per transistor and per microwatt than are the current laptop implementations of the x86 ISA.
At this point the issue left is whether the application speed required fit the performance near that peak, or will the application be better off with one CPU far from the peak that's maybe 4X faster at a cost of 16X more power and transistors, or with the alternative of 16X more tiny CPUs (the direction OpenCL-style computation is going).
I'm not going to cite every thing in my posts.
You make an assertion, you back it up.
If you don't want to, you don't want to debate or inform.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
but most users stopped caring about speed ten years ago.
I don't know if you were paying attention, but Apple switched to Intels from PowerPC because Freescale and IBM could not provide Apple with CPUs as fast as Intel's that did not get hot enough to fry an egg on. Apple released G5 desktops and towers but they were not able make a laptop because of heat. Even today years after the switch programmers push the envelop on CPU power. Heck, even netbooks and the new smartbooks have more power than computers from just a few years ago.
A lot of the non-geeks I know stopped complaining that their computer was too slow around then.
Yet how many replaced their PCs, vs how many are using only a 5 year old PC?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
the music industry convinced the Canadian government to put a tax on all CD-Rs (DVDs too?)
The US also has taxes on black media. It started with cassette and video tapes, moved to CDs, and now there's a tax on blank DVDs.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
...Windows?
I don't care if it runs Windows, I'm sick and tired of MS Bullshit.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
They can continue to make their interface ever shinier, but it's still the same old broken NT kernel underneath
NT 4 was the only version of Windows I liked and did not have a problem with. I haven't used Vista but even XP froze the first tyme I used it. I know it was supposed to be based on the NT kernel but if so MS screwed it up.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
With x86-64 you can run 32-bit apps seamlessly.
I've been researching about installing Ubuntu Studio on my computer and one of the things I came across is that there are not 64 bit versions of some software and there are problems running 32 bit versions on 64 bit Ubuntu. I found this article on how to How to Run 32-bit Apps in 64-bit Linux.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Flash is becoming more and more obsolete anyway.
Maybe after html5 is released. Say, 10 or 20 years later. Some people still aren't using html4 well.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Netscape was a problem on alphas, on both Windows and Linux
I didn't try Netscape in Linux on my Alpha but I didn't get it to run in Windows. It was the same with almost all of the commercial, proprietary, software I bought. Shareware was another matter, almost all of the shareware programs did install and run. What I found weird was that the only proprietary software I was able to use on my Alpha was Borland C++ Powerbuilder.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You seem to forget what those things are...
OK, there might be some some printer that doesn't work but...USB WiFi dongles? TV-tuners? You're talking here about 7 inch ultraportable ffs, that fits in a pocket (check form factor on Qualcomm site promoting the term "Smartbook"). They will have WiFi built-in. Heck, most will have 3G. The only USB TV tuner worth considering when they come out is DVB-H (or some other mobile TV standard, depending on the area). Though if you really want "big" TV, tuners for DVB-T seem quite standard...
People don't have a problem with realizing the purpose of such devices. More or less appliances. They understand X360. Or Dell Linux laptops, which have identical return rates with Windows ones (news straight from Dell; everything else you've heard is MS FUD)
Though at the end you go in the right direction - yes, those ARM smartbooks will carve a niche. They will do the same for netbooks what netbooks done to laptops.
One that hath name thou can not otter
For Linux, Windows NT, or both? I tried to install Netscape on my Alpha in NT4 but couldn't get it to install. So I called Netscape support and they said it would not run on Alphas. And they didn't say anything about a download version that would work. Luckily I had a laptop I installed it on, otherwise I would have wasted money buying it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
While I don't want one I can see 2 appeals for them, cost and battery life. On the other hand if Apple came out with a 21" MacBook Pro, I'd want to get one.
For the majority of consumers, that means they want to run exactly the same e-mail program, the same browser, the same IM program(s)...
I do. When I used Windows I used Firefox, Eudora, and OpenOffice. When I switched to Linux and OS X, I used the same apps. Well for email I started using Penelope which was based on Eudora before switching to Thunderbird.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
there are already Linux alternatives to every major Windows application out there.
Not for every major Windows app. There certainly isn't one for pro print photographers. Gimp is fine for web work but it's not so good for print. After more than 10 years of promises Gimp 2.6 finally has some 32 bit support. It also doesn't support CYMK separation natively but uses a plug-in for it.
Oh, hold on. I see there's finally a Mac OS X port for Gimp, so now I'll try it out again. I tried it on Windows but preferred Paint Shop Pro.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Also take in consideration the total failure the iPhone is in Japan, the leader in mobile technology.
Japan may be the leader in mobile tech now but China is the largest market and Apple is working on a deal with China Unicom to market iPhones.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
No it won't. Because as usual with Apple products, they will cost twice a fortune, and still be rather low-end.
1989 wants it mime back. Similarly configured Macs and PCs are similarly priced. And Macs last longer than Windows OEM PCs.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Uhh....did you actually read that article closely? Dell said "after figuring the returns on those that wanted Windows" and screwed up that the returns were similar. And the Dell situation is a whole different can of worms than retail. You don't just go to dell.com and trip over Linux ANYTHING- you have to go looking for it. And it is designed that way for a REASON, because average Joe doesn't know "Windows VS Linux" from a toaster oven.
And as for "what folks will actually use this for" I take it you haven't actually worked retail. Just because it would seem stupid or make no sense to YOU doesn't mean the customer won't want to do it. Hell I had a doctor that was still using a Win95 laptop LAST YEAR as his main machine!
Now imagine those kinds of folks running into these things at the Walmart. Now they are gonna see USB port on this thing, and they have been trained that "USB is good. USB always works" because since Win2K (and Win98 if you install the USB generic driver) that all you have to do is plug in anything USB and it works. Kinda like magic. if worse comes to worse you put in the CD (which I have had a few Netbook customers grace my door because they couldn't figure out how to put something on without a CD. never crossed their minds to use a USB stick) and "clicky clicky, next next next" and everything just magically works. Do you honestly think it will EVER cross their minds that this is an ARM CPU and it doesn't work the same as what they are used to? Nope.
It has a screen, and a keyboard, and most importantly LOOKS like a "baby laptop" so it should behave like one. That is why the Atom has been a hit, as it plays into that mindset. Everything works like a big laptop, only much slower which they understand is because it is a "baby" and babies are little. I have a feeling unless they are VERY specific in which niche markets they try to sell these things that the returns will kill them. It is like I have argued in the whole "Linux VS Windows" thing, that the problem is this: Geeks think like geeks and NOT like home users. Geeks know they will have to research hardware, geeks know that Linux is not Windows, geeks aren't afraid of CLI. None of that actually applies to home users. They think if it looks like a laptop, smells like a laptop, and feels like a laptop, well then it is a laptop and should act like one. Which to them means just like Windows they can pick anything up at the Wally World ( because many won't even shop online) and plug it in and it goes. Sorry, I don't make the customers, I just sell to them.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It seems you should read up on what Wine and also virtual machines are and how they work...
One that hath name thou can not otter
If all you want is to shoot out text or postscript, then yeah, CUPS will work. There's more to printing than that.
Where I work, there are a lot of very fancy Xerox printers. You can access them through Solaris LPR (not CUPS, but the same kind of old-fashioned spooling) or you can access them directly via the Windows-only Xerox driver. With LPR, you get a printout. If you really know what you're doing, you can make the printout double-sided.
With the Xerox print driver, you can print out multiple copies, collated and stapled. You can send and receive faxes, and scan in documents. There are other features (like n-up printing) that you could do on LPR, but only if you're really good with Postscript filters; on Windows, you just have to find the right GUI screen.
Mind you, I'm not happy that Xerox doesn't provide a Linux version of this driver. But the fact remains that it's the only way to use this fancy, expensive piece of hardware to its full potential.
I meant ubuntu, though I haven't really tried running a great deal on the 64-bit port. It sucks that it isn't seamless.
OK. I'd rather run 64bit Ubuntu but like I said before I read there were problems. I'd rather just install 32 bit Ubuntu Studio and get it setup that possibly spending weeks getting the 64 bit version running, or finding out it won't. As it is now it may take me a few hours, if there are no problems.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
X86_64 is entirely different from x86. It might as well be SPARC. The only thing is, that it is usually built in CPUs that also support x86 at native speed.Thing is, it has to run in another thread. That's why you can't run 32-bit drives in 64 bit Windows.
PS: You fucked up the math in your sig, 1 = -1 <==> 2 = 0
XD
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Virtualization != Emulation.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
There is metric butt-ton of 8+ y.o. ThinkPads that want to talk to you, bub. Also, people don't (usually) buy computers to make a supercomputer, host a high load server. They just want to do basic computing stuff with excellent/good responsiveness + some gaming. When you (the average user) go Mac, you get crap graphics relative to the rest of the machine, and if you go low end, you might as well get a netbook, at least you'll get a battery and screen for a similar price. If you go high end, then you are doing the equivalent of burning natural diamonds to boil the water for your tea. Either way, it sucks. I'm not saying Macs don't have a place in the marketplace, but they are given way too much credit.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
HP still sells Alphas. Actually though I think DEC damaged Alphas with poor marketing, and a shitty interpretor, FX!32.
Mickeysoft is just giving them some headroom, you think, they ain't on a leash?
No, I don't think HP is on MS's leash. MS got away with playing hardball during the Bush years, the Clinton Department of Justice had them on the ropes, but they can't count on being able to continue. MS also still has the EU hanging over them.
Not that I don't wish they wouldn't try to play hardball aqain, I supported the original judge's verdict and believe MS should have been broken up into 2 if not 3 different businesses. If MS did maybe they would broken up.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Um, yeah, you are right of course.
The Windows apps will need to use an i86 emulator as well as Wine. That won't be a big obstacle for FOSS packages, since recompiling for an i86 emulator isn't that difficult. Somebody will do it, others will find the bugs and develop the workarounds and all will be good in a few months.
But I've become so FOSS oriented that I tend to forget that proprietary Windows packages are not going to convert so easily. The pools of developers and testers are just too damn small and expensive for effective adaptation to a new environment. They won't be able to make the jump.
So probably ARM adopters will switch from MS Office and PhotoShop to native versions of OOo and The GIMP, and Wine and VM won't matter so much.
Not every dinosaur evolved into a bird. Most of them just bit the dust.
Will
I don't think that a hard drive upgrade would be hard. PATA-SATA converters are dirt cheap.
Well I've replaced and added disks before but I don't know what interface the Alpha uses. That and once when I replaced a disk I had to run a utility that came on a disk with it. I'm also concerned about compatibility. Next to the Alpha is a PC with Linux installed. When I bought it I bought a Maxtor second disk to use as the user partition. No matter what I did I couldn't get Linux to recognize the disk. It ended up Linux had a problem with Maxtor drives so I returned it and got a Seagate. After installing it I didn't know how to get Linux to mount it so I had someone at the Geek Squad do it. He had to research it himself but then told me what to look for next tyme so I could research and do it myself, I know the fstab file has to be edited now.
BTW, what sort of errors did you encounter?
Installing software with FX!32? It gave me messages it could not install the software. Now they may not really be errors but they were to me. Here I was, I'd spent a lot of money on hardware but I couldn't install most of the software I also bought. About the only saving grace was that I also bought a laptop I was able to install the software on.
There I was with all the hardware and software, wishing I had bought Macs instead. Well after ten years of buying and using Windows PCs I finally switched. First to the Linux PC above, then I got a MacBook Pro for my laptop.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
et a Thinkpad, do some research for Linux compat, throw Ubuntu with Etoile on it, and you'll get something at least equal to a Macbook.
Before I got my MacBook I did research and I plan on installing Ubuntu Studio on it. And I doubt a Thinkpad with or without Ubuntu installed is better than a MacBook Pro. The Thinkpad X200 Tablet may come close if Leveno offered a 17" model, all they have is a 12.1 inch LCD. However that wouldn't hold true if Apple were to also to offer a 17" tablet.
One reason is because though I can install Ubuntu on my Mac, I can't install Photoshop CS4 in Ubuntu. And no, GIMP is not a drop-in replacement for professional print photographers. It's fine for amateur or web work but not for print photography.
Linux is mature enough to make them a non-issue for general usage.
General use yes, but not pro print photography. I am hoping to start my own photography business and I don't want or need to buy 2 laptops.
BTW, did you consider trying QEMU instead?
QEMU? I don't er didn't know what it was. Apparently it's a hardware emulator. While it can host Windows NT4 for Alpha, as well as Mips and PPC, as a guess I didn't find anything saying it can run on an Alpha to emulate an Intel. So it does me no good.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?