Compiled code also assumes you have tons of shared libraries. If you are running an OS that has good package management, you generally don't care what language something is in or what dependencies it has if you are getting it out of the repos because that is handled for you. If you need to run some random perl script that is not in the repos, here is a tip for Debian based machines: Much of CPAN is mirrored in the repos and the perl module called Foo::Bar is very likely to be package libfoo-bar-perl.
If Aero is anything like compiz, it probably doesn't put any load on the CPU while it's running because it's instead putting the load on the GPU. If you specifically tell it to put the load on the CPU, I suspect Bad Things(tm) will happen to your CPU usage when doing things like, I dunno, scrolling in a web browser.
Interesting. I hadn't thought of that but, if you hibernate linux and then reboot into Windows, you'd probably be able to reboot into the hibernated linux afterwards if you didn't have the Windows NTFS partition(s) mounted from there. Hibernation blows your cache which is annoying but, it's not a horrible solution.
Just because you aren't multitasking doesn't mean you don't have multiple tasks open. It's not uncommon for me to have 20-30 windows open (spread across multiple desktops) and so rebooting is a particularly painful process for me. My hardware is powerful enough to keep all those tasks open and play a game at the same time. If the only choices I had were "reboot" or "don't play games", I would pick "don't play games".
For this crowd, it might be better to explain it in terms of Amdahl's Law. A 24% increase in life expectancy is insignificant if your diet consists of Mountain Dew, Taco Bell and Cheetos.
What makes you think that a different OS will inherently give better battery life? Battery life is a function of the OS providing the needed interfaces to tell the hardware to use less power at the expense of speed. For most laptops (at least Intel based ones), Linux is the champion of battery life because the kernel can quickly be taught how to talk to the hardware and put it into power savings mode. The problem is that no mainstream Linux distro comes with all the power savings features enabled by default. Have a look at www.lesswatts.org to see just how amazing Linux can be for power savings (and that only scratches the surface...)
People say this, but Apple would have to take on a lot of expense to support generic hardware. They'd have to massively upgrade their test procedures, spend huge amounts of development time on drivers, hire reams of new tech support...
This is correct and, even more so, Apple users generally acknowledge that they are running a "different" hardware/OS and so either buy from an Apple store or research a product before buying it. If you install Ubuntu for someone on a stock machine that was previously running Windows, they don't quite understand that they have fundamentally changed the way their machine works and will inevitably go out and buy incompatible hardware and then blame Ubuntu when it doesn't work. That is exactly the position Apple doesn't want to be in. Both for loss of proprietary hardware sales and for the support nightmare that will ensue.
This is common in "performance benchmarks". Not just because code is hand tuned for a specific CPU/platform. but because it takes the compiler time to catch up and emit better code. I worked for Sun doing benchmarking related things for a number of years and when the software guys would see the features/specs on new chips it made us enthusiastic. At release time, I wouldn't have wanted to be a Sales Engineer because if you told a customer that the new chips were faster, you were full of shit. It took time for the compilers to get better, the hardcore benchmarking engineers who ate SPARC assembly for breakfast to wrap their head around how the chip reacts, Solaris updates, etc...
If you take a machine, run some benchmarks on it, swap out the motherboard/cpu with the new architecture and get better results (without changing the software at all), I suspect one of the following is probably true:
1) Your compilers have always been shit. 2) Your OS is shit. 3) Your benchmarks are shit. 4) Your new architecture is the same shit but designed to slightly compensate for said shit in 1-3.
(Whoa... Started to work myself into a frenzy there.. And, I actually *like* Intel).
Being a pompous ass isn't the only reason to not own a TV. I don't own a TV but I do own a laptop and a small USB TV tuner card. I don't have a fundamental problem with actual televisions but, I enjoy moving around a lot (different countries, not neighborhoods) and it's difficult to fit a TV in my backpack.
Watching TV is good. Owning a television is a pain in the ass.
No, they don't sign up for the full versions but they also don't know how to remove the 10 icons in their system tray that popup and say, "I see your subscription has expired" every time they restart. I've used laptops owned by non-geeks and was absolutely blown away by the amount of shit they have to deal with every time they reboot their computer. It's not "restart machine, wait a second for the wireless to connect, start FireFox and go", it's an endless spam of popups (that sometimes can't even be closed manually) and insanity.
The reason this works is because people don't know they have other options or how to fix it. Most people in their 40's or 50's probably think this is normal behavior and so when machine after machine does this to them, they just accept it. I've actually installed linux on a number of friends machines and, just the fact that they aren't incessantly nagged by shit they don't want is enough to make them switch.
I think their goal is to eventually make money but, at the moment, Shuttlesworth can afford to bankroll the whole thing until they actually start doing so. In essence, I would say that they are a great company because they can "do the right thing" for as long as needed until "doing the right thing" eventually starts to make them money.
I think the "how" is the most scary. I frequently travel to and from the U.S. and I can just imagine them opening my Ubuntu laptop and saying, "Where's the Start button?" and then hauling me into a back room for some Rubber Glove Lovin' when they accidentally hit a screen corner that causes compiz Scale to throw 50+ windows onto a single desktop.
I was surprised to read that as well. If anything I'd think that the linux version would have better support for printers/TV tuners (I'm not even sure what they mean by USB disc drives because it doesn't even make sense), assuming the kernel comes with a diverse set of modules, normally you just plug in a USB device on linux, wait a second and the device is configured and working. There is no surfing the net for drivers or looking for lost install disks that will then install some poorly thought out proprietary interface to use the hardware which is inevitably bound to look like shit on such a small screen.
Admittedly, with linux it either works with no effort at all or you are fucked but, any non-nerd is likely to have technology that lags behind the cutting edge enough that "just plugging it in" is likely to be a much smoother experience on linux.
Actually, I found TFA inspiring. I think we should all galvanize and form some sort of foundation to help protect the electronic frontier. Now if we could only come up with a catchy acronym for it...
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Compiled code also assumes you have tons of shared libraries. If you are running an OS that has good package management, you generally don't care what language something is in or what dependencies it has if you are getting it out of the repos because that is handled for you. If you need to run some random perl script that is not in the repos, here is a tip for Debian based machines: Much of CPAN is mirrored in the repos and the perl module called Foo::Bar is very likely to be package libfoo-bar-perl.
There. I did it in one line of code.
That doesn't look like perl to me...
If Aero is anything like compiz, it probably doesn't put any load on the CPU while it's running because it's instead putting the load on the GPU. If you specifically tell it to put the load on the CPU, I suspect Bad Things(tm) will happen to your CPU usage when doing things like, I dunno, scrolling in a web browser.
And hibernation isn't an option why?
Interesting. I hadn't thought of that but, if you hibernate linux and then reboot into Windows, you'd probably be able to reboot into the hibernated linux afterwards if you didn't have the Windows NTFS partition(s) mounted from there. Hibernation blows your cache which is annoying but, it's not a horrible solution.
Just because you aren't multitasking doesn't mean you don't have multiple tasks open. It's not uncommon for me to have 20-30 windows open (spread across multiple desktops) and so rebooting is a particularly painful process for me. My hardware is powerful enough to keep all those tasks open and play a game at the same time. If the only choices I had were "reboot" or "don't play games", I would pick "don't play games".
For this crowd, it might be better to explain it in terms of Amdahl's Law. A 24% increase in life expectancy is insignificant if your diet consists of Mountain Dew, Taco Bell and Cheetos.
What makes you think that a different OS will inherently give better battery life? Battery life is a function of the OS providing the needed interfaces to tell the hardware to use less power at the expense of speed. For most laptops (at least Intel based ones), Linux is the champion of battery life because the kernel can quickly be taught how to talk to the hardware and put it into power savings mode. The problem is that no mainstream Linux distro comes with all the power savings features enabled by default. Have a look at www.lesswatts.org to see just how amazing Linux can be for power savings (and that only scratches the surface...)
People say this, but Apple would have to take on a lot of expense to support generic hardware. They'd have to massively upgrade their test procedures, spend huge amounts of development time on drivers, hire reams of new tech support...
This is correct and, even more so, Apple users generally acknowledge that they are running a "different" hardware/OS and so either buy from an Apple store or research a product before buying it. If you install Ubuntu for someone on a stock machine that was previously running Windows, they don't quite understand that they have fundamentally changed the way their machine works and will inevitably go out and buy incompatible hardware and then blame Ubuntu when it doesn't work. That is exactly the position Apple doesn't want to be in. Both for loss of proprietary hardware sales and for the support nightmare that will ensue.
This is common in "performance benchmarks". Not just because code is hand tuned for a specific CPU/platform. but because it takes the compiler time to catch up and emit better code. I worked for Sun doing benchmarking related things for a number of years and when the software guys would see the features/specs on new chips it made us enthusiastic. At release time, I wouldn't have wanted to be a Sales Engineer because if you told a customer that the new chips were faster, you were full of shit. It took time for the compilers to get better, the hardcore benchmarking engineers who ate SPARC assembly for breakfast to wrap their head around how the chip reacts, Solaris updates, etc...
If you take a machine, run some benchmarks on it, swap out the motherboard/cpu with the new architecture and get better results (without changing the software at all), I suspect one of the following is probably true:
1) Your compilers have always been shit.
2) Your OS is shit.
3) Your benchmarks are shit.
4) Your new architecture is the same shit but designed to slightly compensate for said shit in 1-3.
(Whoa... Started to work myself into a frenzy there.. And, I actually *like* Intel).
Being a pompous ass isn't the only reason to not own a TV. I don't own a TV but I do own a laptop and a small USB TV tuner card. I don't have a fundamental problem with actual televisions but, I enjoy moving around a lot (different countries, not neighborhoods) and it's difficult to fit a TV in my backpack.
Watching TV is good. Owning a television is a pain in the ass.
No, they don't sign up for the full versions but they also don't know how to remove the 10 icons in their system tray that popup and say, "I see your subscription has expired" every time they restart. I've used laptops owned by non-geeks and was absolutely blown away by the amount of shit they have to deal with every time they reboot their computer. It's not "restart machine, wait a second for the wireless to connect, start FireFox and go", it's an endless spam of popups (that sometimes can't even be closed manually) and insanity.
The reason this works is because people don't know they have other options or how to fix it. Most people in their 40's or 50's probably think this is normal behavior and so when machine after machine does this to them, they just accept it. I've actually installed linux on a number of friends machines and, just the fact that they aren't incessantly nagged by shit they don't want is enough to make them switch.
I think their goal is to eventually make money but, at the moment, Shuttlesworth can afford to bankroll the whole thing until they actually start doing so. In essence, I would say that they are a great company because they can "do the right thing" for as long as needed until "doing the right thing" eventually starts to make them money.
I think the "how" is the most scary. I frequently travel to and from the U.S. and I can just imagine them opening my Ubuntu laptop and saying, "Where's the Start button?" and then hauling me into a back room for some Rubber Glove Lovin' when they accidentally hit a screen corner that causes compiz Scale to throw 50+ windows onto a single desktop.
Admittedly, with linux it either works with no effort at all or you are fucked but, any non-nerd is likely to have technology that lags behind the cutting edge enough that "just plugging it in" is likely to be a much smoother experience on linux.
Actually, I found TFA inspiring. I think we should all galvanize and form some sort of foundation to help protect the electronic frontier. Now if we could only come up with a catchy acronym for it...