Anything remotely resembling a character you want to care about.
I think one of the basic problems is that most of the characters didn't have any major development happening. For instance, original Star Wars:
Han Solo: Rogue, trying to save his good skin after getting in major trouble with a crime boss. By the end of the first film he's demonstrated that he is willing to put his life on the line with no explicit promise of reward. Luke Skywalker: Whiny bitch who wants to have an adventure. Learns about the mysterious Jedi and hears a few stories about his father and the man who killed him... Endures loss and manages to save the day. Leia: Royalty turned spy and guerilla fighter. Her character in the first film exists to turn the "damsel in distress" cliche on its head.
Now, the Phantom Menace:
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Jedi apprentice, he's studying to become a Jedi Knight and then someday, maybe, a Jedi Master. He fights, I guess, to serve a society he believes in. Anakin Skywalker: Hard-working, earnest young slave. Qui-Gon learns he's some kind of mystery and thinks he could be the key to some vaguely-defined prophecy, so tells him he should learn to be a Jedi. Anakin thinks that's maybe an OK thing to do with the rest of his life. Of course, we all know he'll someday become the most evilest villain ever! But we don't know exactly how and the first movie gives us no indication as to this (except a deleted scene where he beats up Greedo) Amidala: Royalty, later a fighter as well... She doesn't do too much in the first film except drive the plot around with her concern for her planet's welfare and complain about Qui-Gon's plans...
The thing that strikes me about the prequels is that having most of the main characters be Jedi is actually not as exciting or interesting as it might have sounded to me ten years ago... I think you need the "regular" characters around to make the Jedi characters look impressive by comparison... I think they were sort of trying for that with Amidala, but she wasn't quite enough of a balancing influence to do the trick... <shrug> I don't know...
I think Return of the Jedi was a more disappointing movie. The change in tone in this from Empire was more drastic than the change between this and the prequels.
I don't know, I rather like the part at Jabba's palace. The rest I don't think was as good as Empire but still good stuff. Speeder bikes, cooler Death Star battle, Jedi showdown... Maybe a bit unimaginative (another Death Star... Really?) but good times.
Actually, in comparison to the prequel trilogy (at least I & II), the Clone Wars cartoons are actually... surprisingly decent.
Are you talking about the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars cartoons or the CGI-animated Clone Wars movie and TV show?
I thought MightyMartian was referring to the latter. Everybody knows Tartakovsky's Clone Wars cartoons kicked ass. And he made Shaak Ti so goddamn cute!
It's funny, though, that the author mentions not seeing #2 and #3 as I shared that reaction, but it seems like pretty much every one else was like "Oh, this is shit.... Let's go pay $11 to watch the next one!"
Heh... Yeah, I didn't escape that trap. It went something like this...
"Hey, let's go watch "Episode 1"! Those Special Editions really got me all excited and now there's gonna be an all-new Star Wars movie for the first time in 16 years! Isn't that cool?"
(George Lucas personally enters the theater, kicks each audience member squarely and firmly in the crotch, and leaves)
"Aw, damn, that hurt... Three years later and it still hurts. Well, I guess we should give episode 2 a chance, right? They say it's a lot better, and Jar-Jar barely talks in it at all... It's got to be better, right?"
(George Lucas again kicks each audience member in the crotch)
"Damn it, no more! Oh, come on, you say this time it's gonna be different? Yeah, I heard that one before... I mean, "Clone Wars" was fun but there's no way "Revenge of the Sith" is gonna be a better movie than the other prequels... What? You promise this time? It really is gonna be as good as the old Star Wars movies? You don't mean "Jedi", do you? Oh, you mean "Empire"! And you're going to tell us the exciting story of Darth Vader's origin, and explain how he became evil, and how the Jedi died, and it's going to be ABSOLUTELY THE LAST STAR WARS MOVIE EVER so we'd better not miss it? Well, that's different, let's go then"
(BAM, another nut shot...)
I did avoid Transformers 2, at least... I should have known to avoid Transformers 1 and "Star Trek" as well... But if you don't go see the movie how do you really know you don't like it? Right?
I still haven't seen the Holiday Special, but I've heard from a very reliable source that it is so terrible that there are no words in any language on Earth that sufficiently describe it.
You are forgetting those of us who were kids then. It was a time when "special effects" in science fiction consisted of cheap plastic models with fireworks and sparklers stuffed in them
Cheap? Plastic? Huff-huff and guffaw, good sir! You speak as if you know nothing of the special effects models of that era.
Most of them would have been wooden, most likely... "Cheap" certainly varied depending on the production... But I wouldn't say the original Starship Enterprise models were "cheap" by any means. The main one was huge - 11 feet long. And while it's true there was a lot of crap and even the good stuff wasn't always that great, they did some impressive work...
And just how do you think those two lost their ability to speak?
They visited the Haunted Mansion, where an eerie supernatural presence mystically stole their voices, converted them to crude racial stereotypes, and trapped them in a pair of animatronic birds in the Tiki Room!
A lot of these characters are STUPID, but I don't think that's a good enough description for a redeeming movie.
That was actually the point of the movie. It's all about the downfall of the Republic, characterized by Queen Amidala's ineffectual term as Senator, and the decadence of the Jedi Order, demonstrated by how even "renegade" Qui Gon Jinn tells Obi Wan to let The Force guide him. When Qui Gon said "There's always a bigger fish" he didnt mean "It sure was lucky that a bigger fish came by", he actually means it.
Nevertheless, the.NET platform relies upon certain libraries and interfaces.
Which ones?
All of them! I guess you could look here and see which ones Mono still lacks...
Though I would say, since.NET is a bit of a fresh start, the problem of replicating its libraries probably isn't as complicated as replicating all the stuff WINE needed to replicate... (It seems that way. I only say "probably" because I don't know.)
The ECMA standards cover the C# language and the CLR runtime - and, from what I understand, precious little else. The interfaces are known but things like Windows Forms and Silverlight have to be re-implemented for other platforms (i.e. Mono) if people want support for it outside Windows. If you think I'm wrong on this point, please feel free to elaborate. Provide some information if you've got it.
But in any case, I don't see what this has to do with my point - which was that.NET serves as Microsoft's exit strategy from IA-32 dependence. I believe that Microsoft is letting enough of.NET loose to encourage wider adoption, while keeping enough of it to themselves that they can act as gatekeepers for the platform. But even if they really are completely open with the platform: that doesn't change the fact that its existence provides Microsoft with a way to move their developers, and eventually their users, off of IA-32 code. I don't even understand why that would be a contentious idea.
Binary compatibility is a non-issue if you're free of Windows.
I am, and it isn't...
I mean, in theory, binary compatibility isn't an issue for me. In practice, when I've tried it, there was always some nice bit of software that was partially coded in IA-32 assembly, or that had platform-specific optimizations - or, like I said before, non-libre software like drivers or whatever for a piece of hardware in my system... Or maybe someone has a nice, closed-source app for Linux and they only build for Intel. Apart from things like critical drivers (video, audio, network) or bits of software like Flash, there's not a lot tying me to the Intel architecture - but I swear, there's always something.
Yeah but there is a middle ground between Atom and the fastest Core2 you can put into a 'laptop'. You can get low power fast processors and get 4-5 hours of battery easily.
Look at the X200S by lenovo.
With a 6-cell battery (which, I'm guessing, is what you need for actual 5 hours use as opposed to spec'd), it weighs about 50% more than my 901... Of course, that may be a result of other components' weight, such as the hard drive, rather than just the battery... (judging by the weight difference between the 6-cell and 9-cell versions of the X200, that's probably the case...)
I guess I'd probably be inclined to agree that the Atom may not be the best point on the power consumption/processing capabilities curve. What I haven't seen, however, is the combination of small form factor, light weight, decent price, and good battery life in a non-Atom machine... Any machine's a compromise, I suppose - in my case I think compromising the power of the CPU and GPU was a better deal than any of the other factors... Though, who knows? In a future purchase I might want to move to something more similar (from a hardware/form factor standpoint) to my old 12" powerbook or the X200... bigger and heavier than the 901 but more powerful, too.
The big bang is still hitting us with EMR. The sun. Power lines. Satellite television hits us at every square inch of this planet. Radio waves, analog and digital are everywhere. And so you know, the powerlines don't stop outside your house, they go in your house and all around your rooms, and when you've got something on, the power going to that thing is making an EMR field.
The difference is proximity and intensity. A cell phone has to emit a signal strong enough to hit the nearest tower - and when the phone's in use, it does this on a constant basis, and (the way most people use their phone) the transmitter also happens to be right next to your head. The inverse square pattern of signal intensity means there's a huge difference between environmental sources of EMR and local ones.
That said, I think it's stupid to require warnings on cell phones when it hasn't been clearly established that the danger is real.
Because they probably get a discount for some of the stickers.
Well, sure, but go up three posts in this thread and it looks more like AC is arguing that the stickers make it go faster...:) The stickers, by themselves, do not make the machine better. I think there's a fair case that they make the machine worse, at least until they are removed.
I agree 100%. Atom processors are a combination of stuff that I don't want. Too slow to do anything. So who cares about battery life.
A fast processor is useless if you haven't got power to run it... The really nice thing about my EEE is I can take it places - it's light enough to comfortably carry it around, and it's got enough power that I can get several hours of use out of it... Like 4-5 hours of actual usage, compared to the three or so I could get with my Powerbook - doesn't sound like much but in practice it's a big difference.
It is too slow to do a fair number of things - for instance, Youtube and Hulu (i.e. Flash video) playback is poor, and combined with the weak-ass GPU it's not much good for games or real-time 3-D animation. But it's good for web browsing, and it's powerful enough for most of what I want to do with it - playing video, running Blender, running gEDA PCB, writing code and so on.
Buy a beagle board or a gumstix, attach it to an lcd, mini keyboard and battery, now install one of the handful of linux operating systems available for it and you have an arm netbook.
Right... that'll go over big with the general public, so I'm sure to see that kit available at newegg and bestbuy any day now.
Wait, that's your complaint? Not that building and setting up your own machine would be a pain in the ass, but just that the kit wouldn't be popular with the general population, and wouldn't be available on Newegg?
Point is, there was headline after headline proclaiming that 2009 was going to be the year of the ARM netbook, and by 2012 that 20 or 30% of the entire netbook market would be ARM based. That simply isn't going to happen if the answer is "buy your own components, get yourself a CNC milling machine and design a case for them, and fashion your own netbook".
People are always quick to blame MS and Intel, but the problem is more that their competitors keep dropping the ball.
Well, really, building your own ARM netbook isn't the answer to ARM netbooks being "the next big thing". It does sound like a fun project, actually (I think I'd start with an old EEE case or something) but, yeah, I really don't think a build-your-own-ARM-netbook would make for a successful popular platform...
But that's the other big problem with ARM netbooks: binary compatibility. People generally want IA-32 compatibility (whether they immediately realize it or not) - and a lot of people want to run Windows or Mac OS X and their usual collection of applications. This is the basic pattern we saw with the second round of EEEs and such - there were the Linux versions that could do a bunch of stuff, had a good web browser and Open Office and so on, but to a lot of people these machines were worth more if they were running Windows. I think when people saw that netbooks could be used as ordinary laptops, that's what they wanted. From a Windows user's perspective, a Windows netbook is more useful than a Linux netbook because the Windows netbook can do everything the Linux netbook can, plus it can run Windows software. Now, going back to the ARM netbook thing - going to an ARM processor, one burns that bridge. Such a machine would presently be doomed to be forever surrounded with warnings and caveats. "This is a nice machine, but you can never ever run Windows on it, it won't work." If this machine is on a shelf next to a machine with an IA-32 processor, the IA-32 machine has a distinct advantage. From most people's perspective, there's something that IA-32 machine can do that the ARM can't: It can run all their IA-32 software. Even running Linux, there are a few pieces of software I use that are specifically IA-32... Hardware drivers and WINE are the main examples. This is why my lovely G4 powerbook is gathering dust instead of running Linux - it would have been a pretty feeble Linux environment, not having decent drivers for the video chipset or the wireless card...
I don't have a good reason, personally, for my decision to run 64-bit versions of any software I use, if it's available. I made the switch to the AMD64 platform rather late (last 2008) - by which time a lot of the problems had already been solved. I've never had to run the 32-bit Flash plugin on my 64-bit processor, for instance.
I don't know if there's any practical benefit to running a 64-bit build of the Browser... Running a 32-bit build on a 64-bit kernel would get me 4GiB of virtual memory space for the process - do I actually need more than that? I couldn't tell you. And is the cost of a 64-bit build (64-bit integers and pointers everywhere, larger instructions as well I suppose) significant? Again, couldn't say. I run a 64-bit build because I want to run a pure 64-bit system, that's all, really.
Because unlike pretentious Apple fanboys, most people care more about a computer being cost effective and able to do what is needed. Its the reason why PCs and not Macs own most of the market.
Why does cost-effective, capable hardware imply a need for a billion stickers on the casing?
Emulating the software platform (the Windows APIs) is entirely another.
Uh-huh..NET doesn't rely on the Windows APIs (i.e. Win32). Go do some reading.
Nevertheless, the.NET platform relies upon certain libraries and interfaces. The difference between emulating the Common Language Runtime and emulating the entire.NET platform is equivalent to the difference between writing a PC emulator and re-implementing Windows.
The reason they can't readily shuffle the Windows platform to another architecture is because people have a bunch of applications they still want to run which are IA32-native.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with.NET.
It does..NET is how Microsoft is getting themselves out of that situation.
Uh... that's not what.NET is for..NET has a Common Language Specification (CLS) that is published by the ECMA, so technically anyone can use this to write a compiler. And they have - search google for the Mono project.
WHOA, HOLY SHIT I READ SLASHDOT AND I NEVER HEARD OF MONO BEFORE.
Anyone can write a compiler or a runtime engine - just as anyone could write a C++ compiler, a Pentium emulator, and re-implement WINE. But that's the thing: emulating the architecture (the processor - or, in the case of.NET, the virtual machine) is one thing... Emulating the software platform (the Windows APIs) is entirely another.
The reason they can't readily shuffle the Windows platform to another architecture is because people have a bunch of applications they still want to run which are IA32-native. This hasn't changed with the introduction of.NET, and Microsoft would suffer greatly if they tried to force such a platform change at this point. If most new applications were built upon.NET, it would still take several years before an architecture transition could be made without seriously impacting Microsoft's position. But this is exactly what Microsoft has done: they've introduced.NET and encouraged people to use it. They've reached a point where a large number of people do use it. Windows hasn't yet reached the point at which it could simply pack up and move to another architecture, but it's moving in that direction... Gradually - which makes the transition much less jarring than, for instance, Apple's move from PowerPC to Intel...
And, in fact, they did this for Windows NT back in the day for the DEC Alpha, and in the initial prereleases of Windows 2000.
I did mention this in my own post, actually. But without any level of binary compatibility, the usefulness of those releases was rather limited. Processor architecture was a problem for Windows CE as well - just about everybody who runs a mobile platform these days is looking to virtual machines as a way to keep dependence upon a single processor architecture from biting them a few years down the road...
when d00d drives past 88 mph the intense electromagnetic radiation produces > 1.2 jiggawatts necessary to power his flux capacitor, which streams tachyon particles around his car, through a graviton assisted phasers which reverses the tachyon particles' polarity and allows him to travel into the past.
Oh, it doesn't just let him travel into the past - it allows him, having traveled into the past, to then return back to... back to...
...back to the point in the timeline from which he originated...
Slashdot Mirror
and take away:
Anything remotely resembling a character you want to care about.
I think one of the basic problems is that most of the characters didn't have any major development happening. For instance, original Star Wars:
Han Solo: Rogue, trying to save his good skin after getting in major trouble with a crime boss. By the end of the first film he's demonstrated that he is willing to put his life on the line with no explicit promise of reward.
Luke Skywalker: Whiny bitch who wants to have an adventure. Learns about the mysterious Jedi and hears a few stories about his father and the man who killed him... Endures loss and manages to save the day.
Leia: Royalty turned spy and guerilla fighter. Her character in the first film exists to turn the "damsel in distress" cliche on its head.
Now, the Phantom Menace:
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Jedi apprentice, he's studying to become a Jedi Knight and then someday, maybe, a Jedi Master. He fights, I guess, to serve a society he believes in.
Anakin Skywalker: Hard-working, earnest young slave. Qui-Gon learns he's some kind of mystery and thinks he could be the key to some vaguely-defined prophecy, so tells him he should learn to be a Jedi. Anakin thinks that's maybe an OK thing to do with the rest of his life. Of course, we all know he'll someday become the most evilest villain ever! But we don't know exactly how and the first movie gives us no indication as to this (except a deleted scene where he beats up Greedo)
Amidala: Royalty, later a fighter as well... She doesn't do too much in the first film except drive the plot around with her concern for her planet's welfare and complain about Qui-Gon's plans...
The thing that strikes me about the prequels is that having most of the main characters be Jedi is actually not as exciting or interesting as it might have sounded to me ten years ago... I think you need the "regular" characters around to make the Jedi characters look impressive by comparison... I think they were sort of trying for that with Amidala, but she wasn't quite enough of a balancing influence to do the trick... <shrug> I don't know...
I think Return of the Jedi was a more disappointing movie. The change in tone in this from Empire was more drastic than the change between this and the prequels.
I don't know, I rather like the part at Jabba's palace. The rest I don't think was as good as Empire but still good stuff. Speeder bikes, cooler Death Star battle, Jedi showdown... Maybe a bit unimaginative (another Death Star... Really?) but good times.
Actually, in comparison to the prequel trilogy (at least I & II), the Clone Wars cartoons are actually... surprisingly decent.
Are you talking about the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars cartoons or the CGI-animated Clone Wars movie and TV show?
I thought MightyMartian was referring to the latter. Everybody knows Tartakovsky's Clone Wars cartoons kicked ass. And he made Shaak Ti so goddamn cute!
It's funny, though, that the author mentions not seeing #2 and #3 as I shared that reaction, but it seems like pretty much every one else was like "Oh, this is shit.... Let's go pay $11 to watch the next one!"
Heh... Yeah, I didn't escape that trap. It went something like this...
"Hey, let's go watch "Episode 1"! Those Special Editions really got me all excited and now there's gonna be an all-new Star Wars movie for the first time in 16 years! Isn't that cool?"
(George Lucas personally enters the theater, kicks each audience member squarely and firmly in the crotch, and leaves)
"Aw, damn, that hurt... Three years later and it still hurts. Well, I guess we should give episode 2 a chance, right? They say it's a lot better, and Jar-Jar barely talks in it at all... It's got to be better, right?"
(George Lucas again kicks each audience member in the crotch)
"Damn it, no more! Oh, come on, you say this time it's gonna be different? Yeah, I heard that one before... I mean, "Clone Wars" was fun but there's no way "Revenge of the Sith" is gonna be a better movie than the other prequels... What? You promise this time? It really is gonna be as good as the old Star Wars movies? You don't mean "Jedi", do you? Oh, you mean "Empire"! And you're going to tell us the exciting story of Darth Vader's origin, and explain how he became evil, and how the Jedi died, and it's going to be ABSOLUTELY THE LAST STAR WARS MOVIE EVER so we'd better not miss it? Well, that's different, let's go then"
(BAM, another nut shot...)
I did avoid Transformers 2, at least... I should have known to avoid Transformers 1 and "Star Trek" as well... But if you don't go see the movie how do you really know you don't like it? Right?
"Echuta!!"
Poodoo!
Oh, what a sob story. [tiny violin]
You are forgetting those of us who were kids then. It was a time when "special effects" in science fiction consisted of cheap plastic models with fireworks and sparklers stuffed in them
Cheap? Plastic? Huff-huff and guffaw, good sir! You speak as if you know nothing of the special effects models of that era.
Most of them would have been wooden, most likely... "Cheap" certainly varied depending on the production... But I wouldn't say the original Starship Enterprise models were "cheap" by any means. The main one was huge - 11 feet long. And while it's true there was a lot of crap and even the good stuff wasn't always that great, they did some impressive work...
And just how do you think those two lost their ability to speak?
They visited the Haunted Mansion, where an eerie supernatural presence mystically stole their voices, converted them to crude racial stereotypes, and trapped them in a pair of animatronic birds in the Tiki Room!
That was actually the point of the movie. It's all about the downfall of the Republic, characterized by Queen Amidala's ineffectual term as Senator, and the decadence of the Jedi Order, demonstrated by how even "renegade" Qui Gon Jinn tells Obi Wan to let The Force guide him. When Qui Gon said "There's always a bigger fish" he didnt mean "It sure was lucky that a bigger fish came by", he actually means it.
I cast "summon bigger fish"!
And don't dis Muppets!
I believe any hopes for a Spaceballs sequel died with John Candy, unfortunately.
They could do a prequel! Or give us the long-awaited "Jews In Space!"
Which ones?
All of them! I guess you could look here and see which ones Mono still lacks...
Though I would say, since .NET is a bit of a fresh start, the problem of replicating its libraries probably isn't as complicated as replicating all the stuff WINE needed to replicate... (It seems that way. I only say "probably" because I don't know.)
The ECMA standards cover the C# language and the CLR runtime - and, from what I understand, precious little else. The interfaces are known but things like Windows Forms and Silverlight have to be re-implemented for other platforms (i.e. Mono) if people want support for it outside Windows. If you think I'm wrong on this point, please feel free to elaborate. Provide some information if you've got it.
But in any case, I don't see what this has to do with my point - which was that .NET serves as Microsoft's exit strategy from IA-32 dependence. I believe that Microsoft is letting enough of .NET loose to encourage wider adoption, while keeping enough of it to themselves that they can act as gatekeepers for the platform. But even if they really are completely open with the platform: that doesn't change the fact that its existence provides Microsoft with a way to move their developers, and eventually their users, off of IA-32 code. I don't even understand why that would be a contentious idea.
Binary compatibility is a non-issue if you're free of Windows.
I am, and it isn't...
I mean, in theory, binary compatibility isn't an issue for me. In practice, when I've tried it, there was always some nice bit of software that was partially coded in IA-32 assembly, or that had platform-specific optimizations - or, like I said before, non-libre software like drivers or whatever for a piece of hardware in my system... Or maybe someone has a nice, closed-source app for Linux and they only build for Intel. Apart from things like critical drivers (video, audio, network) or bits of software like Flash, there's not a lot tying me to the Intel architecture - but I swear, there's always something.
Yeah but there is a middle ground between Atom and the fastest Core2 you can put into a 'laptop'. You can get low power fast processors and get 4-5 hours of battery easily.
Look at the X200S by lenovo.
With a 6-cell battery (which, I'm guessing, is what you need for actual 5 hours use as opposed to spec'd), it weighs about 50% more than my 901... Of course, that may be a result of other components' weight, such as the hard drive, rather than just the battery... (judging by the weight difference between the 6-cell and 9-cell versions of the X200, that's probably the case...)
I guess I'd probably be inclined to agree that the Atom may not be the best point on the power consumption/processing capabilities curve. What I haven't seen, however, is the combination of small form factor, light weight, decent price, and good battery life in a non-Atom machine... Any machine's a compromise, I suppose - in my case I think compromising the power of the CPU and GPU was a better deal than any of the other factors... Though, who knows? In a future purchase I might want to move to something more similar (from a hardware/form factor standpoint) to my old 12" powerbook or the X200... bigger and heavier than the 901 but more powerful, too.
"Be careful with that phone lieutenant! ...Over time, you could develop a tumor!"
The big bang is still hitting us with EMR. The sun. Power lines. Satellite television hits us at every square inch of this planet. Radio waves, analog and digital are everywhere. And so you know, the powerlines don't stop outside your house, they go in your house and all around your rooms, and when you've got something on, the power going to that thing is making an EMR field.
The difference is proximity and intensity. A cell phone has to emit a signal strong enough to hit the nearest tower - and when the phone's in use, it does this on a constant basis, and (the way most people use their phone) the transmitter also happens to be right next to your head. The inverse square pattern of signal intensity means there's a huge difference between environmental sources of EMR and local ones.
That said, I think it's stupid to require warnings on cell phones when it hasn't been clearly established that the danger is real.
Because they probably get a discount for some of the stickers.
Well, sure, but go up three posts in this thread and it looks more like AC is arguing that the stickers make it go faster... :) The stickers, by themselves, do not make the machine better. I think there's a fair case that they make the machine worse, at least until they are removed.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/video-introducing-bing-the-better-way-to-google/
Yeah, I knew somebody would provide that link... :) That was a good one...
I agree 100%. Atom processors are a combination of stuff that I don't want. Too slow to do anything. So who cares about battery life.
A fast processor is useless if you haven't got power to run it... The really nice thing about my EEE is I can take it places - it's light enough to comfortably carry it around, and it's got enough power that I can get several hours of use out of it... Like 4-5 hours of actual usage, compared to the three or so I could get with my Powerbook - doesn't sound like much but in practice it's a big difference.
It is too slow to do a fair number of things - for instance, Youtube and Hulu (i.e. Flash video) playback is poor, and combined with the weak-ass GPU it's not much good for games or real-time 3-D animation. But it's good for web browsing, and it's powerful enough for most of what I want to do with it - playing video, running Blender, running gEDA PCB, writing code and so on.
Buy a beagle board or a gumstix, attach it to an lcd, mini keyboard and battery, now install one of the handful of linux operating systems available for it and you have an arm netbook.
Right... that'll go over big with the general public, so I'm sure to see that kit available at newegg and bestbuy any day now.
Wait, that's your complaint? Not that building and setting up your own machine would be a pain in the ass, but just that the kit wouldn't be popular with the general population, and wouldn't be available on Newegg?
Point is, there was headline after headline proclaiming that 2009 was going to be the year of the ARM netbook, and by 2012 that 20 or 30% of the entire netbook market would be ARM based. That simply isn't going to happen if the answer is "buy your own components, get yourself a CNC milling machine and design a case for them, and fashion your own netbook".
People are always quick to blame MS and Intel, but the problem is more that their competitors keep dropping the ball.
Well, really, building your own ARM netbook isn't the answer to ARM netbooks being "the next big thing". It does sound like a fun project, actually (I think I'd start with an old EEE case or something) but, yeah, I really don't think a build-your-own-ARM-netbook would make for a successful popular platform...
But that's the other big problem with ARM netbooks: binary compatibility. People generally want IA-32 compatibility (whether they immediately realize it or not) - and a lot of people want to run Windows or Mac OS X and their usual collection of applications. This is the basic pattern we saw with the second round of EEEs and such - there were the Linux versions that could do a bunch of stuff, had a good web browser and Open Office and so on, but to a lot of people these machines were worth more if they were running Windows. I think when people saw that netbooks could be used as ordinary laptops, that's what they wanted. From a Windows user's perspective, a Windows netbook is more useful than a Linux netbook because the Windows netbook can do everything the Linux netbook can, plus it can run Windows software. Now, going back to the ARM netbook thing - going to an ARM processor, one burns that bridge. Such a machine would presently be doomed to be forever surrounded with warnings and caveats. "This is a nice machine, but you can never ever run Windows on it, it won't work." If this machine is on a shelf next to a machine with an IA-32 processor, the IA-32 machine has a distinct advantage. From most people's perspective, there's something that IA-32 machine can do that the ARM can't: It can run all their IA-32 software. Even running Linux, there are a few pieces of software I use that are specifically IA-32... Hardware drivers and WINE are the main examples. This is why my lovely G4 powerbook is gathering dust instead of running Linux - it would have been a pretty feeble Linux environment, not having decent drivers for the video chipset or the wireless card...
Why would anyone run a browser in 64bit mode?
Why not?
I don't have a good reason, personally, for my decision to run 64-bit versions of any software I use, if it's available. I made the switch to the AMD64 platform rather late (last 2008) - by which time a lot of the problems had already been solved. I've never had to run the 32-bit Flash plugin on my 64-bit processor, for instance.
I don't know if there's any practical benefit to running a 64-bit build of the Browser... Running a 32-bit build on a 64-bit kernel would get me 4GiB of virtual memory space for the process - do I actually need more than that? I couldn't tell you. And is the cost of a 64-bit build (64-bit integers and pointers everywhere, larger instructions as well I suppose) significant? Again, couldn't say. I run a 64-bit build because I want to run a pure 64-bit system, that's all, really.
Because unlike pretentious Apple fanboys, most people care more about a computer being cost effective and able to do what is needed. Its the reason why PCs and not Macs own most of the market.
Why does cost-effective, capable hardware imply a need for a billion stickers on the casing?
I was hoping a meme would catch on, to call it "binge," but that never happened.
I just call it "google"...
Uh-huh. .NET doesn't rely on the Windows APIs (i.e. Win32). Go do some reading.
Nevertheless, the .NET platform relies upon certain libraries and interfaces. The difference between emulating the Common Language Runtime and emulating the entire .NET platform is equivalent to the difference between writing a PC emulator and re-implementing Windows.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with .NET.
It does. .NET is how Microsoft is getting themselves out of that situation.
Uh... that's not what .NET is for. .NET has a Common Language Specification (CLS) that is published by the ECMA, so technically anyone can use this to write a compiler. And they have - search google for the Mono project.
WHOA, HOLY SHIT I READ SLASHDOT AND I NEVER HEARD OF MONO BEFORE.
Anyone can write a compiler or a runtime engine - just as anyone could write a C++ compiler, a Pentium emulator, and re-implement WINE. But that's the thing: emulating the architecture (the processor - or, in the case of .NET, the virtual machine) is one thing... Emulating the software platform (the Windows APIs) is entirely another.
The reason they can't readily shuffle the Windows platform to another architecture is because people have a bunch of applications they still want to run which are IA32-native. This hasn't changed with the introduction of .NET, and Microsoft would suffer greatly if they tried to force such a platform change at this point. If most new applications were built upon .NET, it would still take several years before an architecture transition could be made without seriously impacting Microsoft's position. But this is exactly what Microsoft has done: they've introduced .NET and encouraged people to use it. They've reached a point where a large number of people do use it. Windows hasn't yet reached the point at which it could simply pack up and move to another architecture, but it's moving in that direction... Gradually - which makes the transition much less jarring than, for instance, Apple's move from PowerPC to Intel...
And, in fact, they did this for Windows NT back in the day for the DEC Alpha, and in the initial prereleases of Windows 2000.
I did mention this in my own post, actually. But without any level of binary compatibility, the usefulness of those releases was rather limited. Processor architecture was a problem for Windows CE as well - just about everybody who runs a mobile platform these days is looking to virtual machines as a way to keep dependence upon a single processor architecture from biting them a few years down the road...
when d00d drives past 88 mph the intense electromagnetic radiation produces > 1.2 jiggawatts necessary to power his flux capacitor, which streams tachyon particles around his car, through a graviton assisted phasers which reverses the tachyon particles' polarity and allows him to travel into the past.
Oh, it doesn't just let him travel into the past - it allows him, having traveled into the past, to then return back to... back to...
...back to the point in the timeline from which he originated...
Looks like you have managed to Slashdot it rather quickly ... ;-)
It's not hard, it's hosted over an AX.25 connection.