How the hell is that supposed to work without a "Phone distro" to start with?
Ubuntu runs on many Android devices just fine... you just need to write the phone stack and front-end yourself - nobody's stopping you.
In other words: You CAN put pretty much anything you want on there... there just isn't anything usable *to* put on a phone yet. How is that Android's/Google's fault?
And maybe even more interesting: Will this offer me any benefit over Windows 7?
Currently running 7 Pro 64bit on a Thinkpad X200, but it's getting on my nerves a little. Intel's display drivers are buggy and do strange things like consume 2W more power after standby than before, requiring a complete restart of the driver... Standby takes too long (5-10 seconds - far too long to just close the laptop and put it in a bag, because if I do that, the hard drive will still be spinning when I [rather roughly, if I'm in a hurry] throw the laptop in the bag) and the window management requires a lot of third-party tools to be usable (Ultramon, Dexpot, Winsplit Revolution, Allsnap, 7-Taskbar-Tweaker, Autohotkey... they're all running in the background, explaining why I need 8GB of RAM for a smooth running system:P).
I've actually been trying to run Mint in VMWare Player with no success (no time to figure it all out), just to try it out... I'm hesitant to take a day to repartition my hard drive and take my chances with GRUB for a Mint boot partition without knowing if it'll be worth the trouble. So here my questions to the Mint users on Slashdot:
1. Any trouble with my system config and peripherals? Will anything not run out of the box? -Core2Duo P8400 -8 gigs of DDR3 -Intel G45 chipset w/ Intel 4500MHD graphics -Intel 5100 WiFi -EMU 0202USB audio interface (important!) -HP scanner/printer (HP2050, I think it was)
2. Power consumption - similar to Windows? Will I be looking at the same battery life? Been getting about 7W on average when surfing the web with little interactivity (reading forums or Slashdot), 6-6.5W when just displaying PDFs - at least when the display driver isn't acting up. Works out to about 12 hours with the 9-Cell battery, and I'd hate to lose runtime (taking off for the weekend without needing a charger is great)... does Mint usually have decent power consumption out of the box, or does it require tweaking to get long battery life?
3. How should I go about setting up the multi-boot? Currently I have: C:= Win7, D:= Data partition, E:= XP, set up in that order on the actual disk. I have little to no experience with GRUB or other Linuxy bootloaders (I've managed to run Ubuntu in VMWare Player quite well until now - takes care of my Android compilation needs), so a guided install that gives me a bootloader entry for all three OSs (XP, 7 and Mint) would be great...
4. And most importantly: Will switching to Mint rid me of my Win7 annoyances without adding new ones? Does the desktop environment provide the things that I need all these third-party utilities for on Windows? Window-snapping, window tiling via hotkeys, hotkey scripting a la AutoHotKey, virtual desktops (IIRC this is pretty much a Linux feature anyway?), multi-monitor taskbar extension... are there any particularly annoying bugs I should be aware of?
Agreed 100% on the cinema crap. Even worse: My girlfriend loves going to the cinema, but doesn't understand a word of English... so I end up being dragged into German-dubbed crap.
The only good thing: They sell pretty decent beer at the snack bars...
Can you get the $30 movie experience at home for free? The big screen, 400 gazillion channel surround sound, that same popcorn, the same atmosphere, the same idiots yelling at the screen during horror movies... some people seem to like the experience and are willing to pay for it.
How about the $60 meal? Can you sit at home for free and wait for a meal to magically appear without paying for it?
Games, on the other hand, are played at home in exactly the same way whether you pay for them or pirate them. That's what makes it easy to say "Geee, I'm not paying $20 for a DRM-laden piece of crap!"
Not saying it's right, just that it's different from the movie theater experience or going out to eat.
Actually, my parents are there (bought a house in outer Bangkok a few years ago for retirement) - the water made it right up to the garden fence before starting to recede, and according to them, it's brown and smells pretty bad.
I'm just glad I bought my 1TB laptop drive (Spinpoint M8) right before the floods (lucky coincidence) - ~600 gigs free on that, about 4TB free on the NAS and a bunch of 3.5" drives between 400GB and 1TB laying around for my Quickports (those SATA docks for internal drives - they're awesome!)... so I'm fine just playing the waiting game:)
Hasn't the need for hard drive space more or less plateaued outside of video editing afficionados and HD pirates? With people slapping 80-200GB SSDs in their laptops instead of big hard drives, you'd think that they don't require all too much space... or is it all the Steam games?
Aren't the stripped down versions still something like $200? Same thing in the music industry: Cubase costs something like $200-$300 in the EDU version... *facepalm*.
I don't know anyone (who doesn't use the program for work - those people have the software paid for by their employer) who's paid for either program, but tons of people who use them. Bring the price down to, say, $50 for a "Home Edition" and you'll see a ton more sales.
If, on the other hand, Photoshop now costs $50 for a not-too-stripped-down version, I'd like a link so I can buy it please...
Region locked pricing is a good thing though. I have a copy of HL2 that I bought back when I was living in Thailand (right when it came out), and it cost me about 20€ for the full English version. Retail prices in the USA and Europe were, IIRC, closer to 70-100€/$... There was a Thai-Only version selling for about half that... if this hadn't been the case, no regular Thai would've been able to afford the game.
The same thing applies in, well, pretty much all other third-world regions.
Yes, piracy is widespread in these regions (and easy), but the advent of games with a strong online component makes originals more appealing, and there's no point in selling them at a price nobody can afford.
In the EU, paying the same price in € that Americans pay in US$ is annoying, but people are willing to pay it.
A bigger problem IMO is the fact that it's difficult to get the same content over here in Europe. When I go online looking for an eBook, I don't want a stupid translation, I want the original. I have the Kindle app on my phone, and every time I try to buy a freakin ebook, Amazon redirects to the German Amazon site, which then often doesn't have the book I was looking at, because there's no translated German version - and they don't sell the English one either. All the while, the ePub torrent (perfectly formatted and DRM-free!) is two clicks away... Why am I trying to give these people my money again?
*Modern* cards are pretty much all the same. I haven't seen an ATi card in the last few years that couldn't output a clean 1080p signal. The cable and the monitor are far more important for a decent image...
Standard batteries in use today (say in laptops or smartphones) typically don't last longer than 300-500, and that's with greater capacity loss than 20%... then again, people really beat their batteries into submission - charging a smartphone during GPS navigation while the sun shines on the damn thing, constantly charging to 100% and keeping it charged all day while the phone's on the desk, running it down to 0% regularly (usually other people than the constantly charged ones - the memory effect still lives in the minds of those old enough to remember batteries before Lithium Ion)...
Hell, the laptop battery I'm currently using has only got 104 cycles and is already down to 22.08/28.80Wh - ~76%. Recalibration might pull that back up to 24Wh or so, but still... This is my beater-battery, so it's constantly being charged and discharged in tiny increments, but it's still pretty gruesome.
Hmmm, I'm not so sure I'd describe an X120e as durable...no structure frame, no spill tray, chiclet keyboard... they're decent little netbook-upgrades, but not exactly throw-em-down-the-stairs Thinkpads.
I was thinking more along the lines of the X220 with the IPS screen, or a T420...
These are all consumer and prosumer products - why would you expect to get anything other than anecdotal evidence?
As for Lenovo's reliability: I said Thinkpad, not Lenovo. You wouldn't lump in Alienware with Dell, would you? Yes, Lenovo has been making some unfortunate additions to the Thinkpad line (Edge, X1xxe, SL series...), but the workhorse T series, workstation W series and X220 are still pretty much unequalled.
Not a cracked case, but creaky palmrests, keyboard keys becoming unresponsive, the touchpad buttons becoming loose... hell, I only had two regular laptops before switching to Thinkpdas, and both of them exhibited all those symptoms. I see it every day at university, where people are schlepping around creaky half-broken laptops with glossy screens, overpowered graphics and mediocre battery life instead of geting something that gets the job done.
Not only durability is a factor here - ergonomics play a huge role as well. A decent trackpoint like those on Thinkpads, or the touchpads on MacBooks, are worth at least a few hundred dollars on a device you use for hours every day.
And however much you want to fight it: Apple tools do get the job done, and last longer while doing it.
Interesting... the Thinkpads I've been looking at lately are all pretty much just as expensive as a MBP. Are they so much cheaper than Apple stuff in the States?
Oh well, don't think my X200 will be dying any time soon... maybe I'll just wait until I get a chance to visit the States again:)
On a 17" monitor? Unless the AD/DA converters on your video card and the monitor are totally shoddy, I highly doubt it. Running 1680x1050 out of an Intel onboard card via VGA into a Samsung 223BW right now, and there is absolutely no difference between that and DVI or HDMI.
Sure, if the monitor you're using has crappy VGA inputs or you're using a crappy cable, yes, you'll have problems - problems which are nonexistent with a digital connection (there you'll just have no signal at all)... but it's not correct to say that VGA is inherently fuzzy and washed out.
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How the hell is that supposed to work without a "Phone distro" to start with?
Ubuntu runs on many Android devices just fine... you just need to write the phone stack and front-end yourself - nobody's stopping you.
In other words: You CAN put pretty much anything you want on there... there just isn't anything usable *to* put on a phone yet. How is that Android's/Google's fault?
And maybe even more interesting: Will this offer me any benefit over Windows 7?
Currently running 7 Pro 64bit on a Thinkpad X200, but it's getting on my nerves a little. Intel's display drivers are buggy and do strange things like consume 2W more power after standby than before, requiring a complete restart of the driver... Standby takes too long (5-10 seconds - far too long to just close the laptop and put it in a bag, because if I do that, the hard drive will still be spinning when I [rather roughly, if I'm in a hurry] throw the laptop in the bag) and the window management requires a lot of third-party tools to be usable (Ultramon, Dexpot, Winsplit Revolution, Allsnap, 7-Taskbar-Tweaker, Autohotkey... they're all running in the background, explaining why I need 8GB of RAM for a smooth running system :P).
I've actually been trying to run Mint in VMWare Player with no success (no time to figure it all out), just to try it out... I'm hesitant to take a day to repartition my hard drive and take my chances with GRUB for a Mint boot partition without knowing if it'll be worth the trouble. So here my questions to the Mint users on Slashdot:
1. Any trouble with my system config and peripherals? Will anything not run out of the box?
-Core2Duo P8400
-8 gigs of DDR3
-Intel G45 chipset w/ Intel 4500MHD graphics
-Intel 5100 WiFi
-EMU 0202USB audio interface (important!)
-HP scanner/printer (HP2050, I think it was)
2. Power consumption - similar to Windows? Will I be looking at the same battery life? Been getting about 7W on average when surfing the web with little interactivity (reading forums or Slashdot), 6-6.5W when just displaying PDFs - at least when the display driver isn't acting up. Works out to about 12 hours with the 9-Cell battery, and I'd hate to lose runtime (taking off for the weekend without needing a charger is great)... does Mint usually have decent power consumption out of the box, or does it require tweaking to get long battery life?
3. How should I go about setting up the multi-boot? Currently I have: C:= Win7, D:= Data partition, E:= XP, set up in that order on the actual disk. I have little to no experience with GRUB or other Linuxy bootloaders (I've managed to run Ubuntu in VMWare Player quite well until now - takes care of my Android compilation needs), so a guided install that gives me a bootloader entry for all three OSs (XP, 7 and Mint) would be great...
4. And most importantly: Will switching to Mint rid me of my Win7 annoyances without adding new ones? Does the desktop environment provide the things that I need all these third-party utilities for on Windows? Window-snapping, window tiling via hotkeys, hotkey scripting a la AutoHotKey, virtual desktops (IIRC this is pretty much a Linux feature anyway?), multi-monitor taskbar extension... are there any particularly annoying bugs I should be aware of?
Thanks in advance! :)
And why did you do that? EDGE is terrible compared to 3G... especially in terms of latency. Couldn't you have ported your number to T-Mobile?
You could just upgrade to the Galaxy Nexus, of course... pentaband, meaning it supports both AT&T and T-Mobile 3G bands. :)
Agreed 100% on the cinema crap. Even worse: My girlfriend loves going to the cinema, but doesn't understand a word of English... so I end up being dragged into German-dubbed crap.
The only good thing: They sell pretty decent beer at the snack bars...
Good to know, I thought it was just an issue of abuse... deep cycling and such.
Can you get the $30 movie experience at home for free? The big screen, 400 gazillion channel surround sound, that same popcorn, the same atmosphere, the same idiots yelling at the screen during horror movies... some people seem to like the experience and are willing to pay for it.
How about the $60 meal? Can you sit at home for free and wait for a meal to magically appear without paying for it?
Games, on the other hand, are played at home in exactly the same way whether you pay for them or pirate them. That's what makes it easy to say "Geee, I'm not paying $20 for a DRM-laden piece of crap!"
Not saying it's right, just that it's different from the movie theater experience or going out to eat.
Actually, my parents are there (bought a house in outer Bangkok a few years ago for retirement) - the water made it right up to the garden fence before starting to recede, and according to them, it's brown and smells pretty bad.
I'm just glad I bought my 1TB laptop drive (Spinpoint M8) right before the floods (lucky coincidence) - ~600 gigs free on that, about 4TB free on the NAS and a bunch of 3.5" drives between 400GB and 1TB laying around for my Quickports (those SATA docks for internal drives - they're awesome!)... so I'm fine just playing the waiting game :)
Hasn't the need for hard drive space more or less plateaued outside of video editing afficionados and HD pirates? With people slapping 80-200GB SSDs in their laptops instead of big hard drives, you'd think that they don't require all too much space... or is it all the Steam games?
Aren't the stripped down versions still something like $200? Same thing in the music industry: Cubase costs something like $200-$300 in the EDU version... *facepalm*.
I don't know anyone (who doesn't use the program for work - those people have the software paid for by their employer) who's paid for either program, but tons of people who use them. Bring the price down to, say, $50 for a "Home Edition" and you'll see a ton more sales.
If, on the other hand, Photoshop now costs $50 for a not-too-stripped-down version, I'd like a link so I can buy it please...
How do I move it? Just copy and then symlink/hardlink?
Gah, "Half that" meaning half the price of the full English version, not half of the EU/US prices. Was roughly 500 Baht (10€) at that time, IIRC...
Region locked pricing is a good thing though. I have a copy of HL2 that I bought back when I was living in Thailand (right when it came out), and it cost me about 20€ for the full English version. Retail prices in the USA and Europe were, IIRC, closer to 70-100€/$... There was a Thai-Only version selling for about half that... if this hadn't been the case, no regular Thai would've been able to afford the game.
The same thing applies in, well, pretty much all other third-world regions.
Yes, piracy is widespread in these regions (and easy), but the advent of games with a strong online component makes originals more appealing, and there's no point in selling them at a price nobody can afford.
In the EU, paying the same price in € that Americans pay in US$ is annoying, but people are willing to pay it.
A bigger problem IMO is the fact that it's difficult to get the same content over here in Europe. When I go online looking for an eBook, I don't want a stupid translation, I want the original. I have the Kindle app on my phone, and every time I try to buy a freakin ebook, Amazon redirects to the German Amazon site, which then often doesn't have the book I was looking at, because there's no translated German version - and they don't sell the English one either. All the while, the ePub torrent (perfectly formatted and DRM-free!) is two clicks away... Why am I trying to give these people my money again?
*Modern* cards are pretty much all the same. I haven't seen an ATi card in the last few years that couldn't output a clean 1080p signal. The cable and the monitor are far more important for a decent image...
Standard batteries in use today (say in laptops or smartphones) typically don't last longer than 300-500, and that's with greater capacity loss than 20%... then again, people really beat their batteries into submission - charging a smartphone during GPS navigation while the sun shines on the damn thing, constantly charging to 100% and keeping it charged all day while the phone's on the desk, running it down to 0% regularly (usually other people than the constantly charged ones - the memory effect still lives in the minds of those old enough to remember batteries before Lithium Ion)...
Hell, the laptop battery I'm currently using has only got 104 cycles and is already down to 22.08/28.80Wh - ~76%. Recalibration might pull that back up to 24Wh or so, but still... This is my beater-battery, so it's constantly being charged and discharged in tiny increments, but it's still pretty gruesome.
Hmmm, I'm not so sure I'd describe an X120e as durable...no structure frame, no spill tray, chiclet keyboard... they're decent little netbook-upgrades, but not exactly throw-em-down-the-stairs Thinkpads.
I was thinking more along the lines of the X220 with the IPS screen, or a T420...
These are all consumer and prosumer products - why would you expect to get anything other than anecdotal evidence?
As for Lenovo's reliability: I said Thinkpad, not Lenovo. You wouldn't lump in Alienware with Dell, would you? Yes, Lenovo has been making some unfortunate additions to the Thinkpad line (Edge, X1xxe, SL series...), but the workhorse T series, workstation W series and X220 are still pretty much unequalled.
Not a cracked case, but creaky palmrests, keyboard keys becoming unresponsive, the touchpad buttons becoming loose... hell, I only had two regular laptops before switching to Thinkpdas, and both of them exhibited all those symptoms. I see it every day at university, where people are schlepping around creaky half-broken laptops with glossy screens, overpowered graphics and mediocre battery life instead of geting something that gets the job done.
Not only durability is a factor here - ergonomics play a huge role as well. A decent trackpoint like those on Thinkpads, or the touchpads on MacBooks, are worth at least a few hundred dollars on a device you use for hours every day.
And however much you want to fight it: Apple tools do get the job done, and last longer while doing it.
Interesting... the Thinkpads I've been looking at lately are all pretty much just as expensive as a MBP. Are they so much cheaper than Apple stuff in the States?
Oh well, don't think my X200 will be dying any time soon... maybe I'll just wait until I get a chance to visit the States again :)
Longer than a run-of-the-mill Toshiba/Acer/ASUS/Dell? Yes, of course.
Longer than a Dell Precision or a Thinkpad T/X/W or HP Elitebook? Maybe not, but then again, those often actually cost more than Apple hardware...
On a 17" monitor? Unless the AD/DA converters on your video card and the monitor are totally shoddy, I highly doubt it. Running 1680x1050 out of an Intel onboard card via VGA into a Samsung 223BW right now, and there is absolutely no difference between that and DVI or HDMI.
Sure, if the monitor you're using has crappy VGA inputs or you're using a crappy cable, yes, you'll have problems - problems which are nonexistent with a digital connection (there you'll just have no signal at all)... but it's not correct to say that VGA is inherently fuzzy and washed out.
Good to know, I'll remember that next time I'm in a Meth lab... :P
Might have something to do with those exploding meth labs we see on TV? ;)
They released a bootloader-locking update for the original Galaxy Tab a while back, IIRC... maybe he's referring to that.
Agreed. The only problem with Security Essentials is that you have to download it manually...
I thought the old computer had an optical drive... why would you throw away your OS install media?