Yet, some people buy Vespas instead of Harleys, some buy low-cost Chinese MP3 players instead of iPods, and some people will buy this laptop instead of more expensive computers. A successful product doesn't have to be everything for everyone like Windows tries to (and arguably fails). It only has to find just enough customers.
As a geek / techie you might think it's pointless, but then consider that low cost Chinese non-x86 machines flooding the low end market are a dire threat to Microsoft, since all their software and, more importantly, third party device drivers are intimately tied to the x86 architecture. Does it look that bad now?
I mean yeah the computer took 2 hours of bullshit just to install a functional USB mouse drive and it froze up twice but I hear you get that exact same crap with Linux too so you can't complain too much.
I say troll! As long as your USB mouse doesn't have 15 additional buttons or 7 scroll wheels it works out of the box.
If by "USB mouse drive" you meant an USB flash memory then it's even more absurd as these things always work perfectly.
I had a hard time trying to get my setup on a tablet with a Wacom digitizer, stub AT keyboard, tablet-activated buttons, 2 USB keyboards which may or may not be attached at any given time and one of them has an integrated trackpoint, and an USB mouse with horizontal scroll to work reliably but that's a bit of an overkill. However, I never used the horizontal scroll functionality in Windows because it required a several MB crapware process in the background to use it, while Xorg has it built in, so overall it has been an improvement.
What about reliability and failure rates? What you describe sounds like a mission-critical application, and I don't expect those Chinese laptops to be particularly robust or long lasting.
There's no way this thing could ever emulate the PSP, the PSP has dedicated 3D hardware.
Emulation = you run something you don't have the hardware for Compatibility layer = you run something on matching hardware but without the OS / required software
So while a compatibility layer may be impossible (we don't know what's the GPU), an emulator is not out of the question, especially since it could run most of the code natively, and would only need to emulate firmware calls and GPU instructions.
There are reasons why it's so cheap: 1. Small LCD. 2. No HDD. 3. The CPU is MIPS rather than x86, it may be a version of the Loongson chip designed in China. 4. The entire notebook was probably designed and built in China so licensing costs are minimal. 5. It's possible that it has no mechanical parts at all except the screen hinge and lock, since judging from the specs the CPU doesn't require cooling.
Minor points: - Chinese companies don't usually have an Internet presence, because it's not how they do business in China. Much of it is still done face-to-face. (This is not personal experience though.) - If I understand correctly it comes preloaded with Chinese crapware, so it may have additional entertainment value!
Overall the offer doesn't rise any red flags to me, but I would be cautious as with any company in a remote country. I have seen many similar offers for other Chinese goods and they are usually real but the quality varies.
You have exactly zero chance of running Flash on this laptop, since it's a MIPS machine. Gnash FTW.
By the way, it could be a very useful portability testing machine. You don't have to fumble with cross-compilers and other assorted crap, you just check out your svn and test it on this laptop. If your code runs both on x86 and MIPS you can be pretty sure that it's reasonably portable.
This is a 400 MHz MIPS + 128MB of memory. The PSP is a 333 MHz MIPS + 64MB of memory (Slim variant) + GPU. If the laptop's GPU can handle it, someone needs to reverse-engineer PSP games to run on this (preferably via a Wine-style compatibility layer) and those laptops are an instant sell. It wouldn't be legal, but this would immensely boost value nonetheless, and the Chinese are not exactly known for always abiding with the copyright law.
Another question is the battery life. The PSP has similar specs and it sustains about 4 h of intensive use on a rather wimpy 1200 mAh battery, so it should be very good provided that they supplied a decent battery. Does anyone have battery life specs for this thing? There's nothing about this in TFA or the ordering page...
Those %!@#ing ink cartridges cost an arm and a leg.
Unfortunately, either the ink cartridges are expensive, or there are cheap ink refills that are just some ink and a sponge in a plastic case which people are OK with, and a printing head that lasts quite long, until it clogs because you haven't printed anything for a few weeks, and then it costs A %!@#ING LOT.
Canon 865i is an example of this type of printer. The print quality is stunning, the inks are cheap and it can print on very thick paper, but when the head clogs you either have to use a 3rd party cleaning liquid (=DIRTY), pay for a new head (costs a lot, tough to come by) or buy a new printer.
For a more MAFIAA-compliant solution, legislate that every camcorder sold in the US must have a remote kill switch that is triggered in the cinema. The problem is that this system can either be hard to circumvent or hard to abuse, but not both.
If the CamKiller® system works one-way, then anyone can capture the kill signal and broadcast it elsewhere.
If it works both ways, i.e. the camera has a transmitter and requests a digitally signed confirmation after the first kill signal, and turns off only when a correct reply is received, then you can circumvent the system by wrapping the camera in tinfoil.
If the camera also turns off when it doesn't receive a reply at all (= something is blocking the communication), then we're back to the first case, as someone can still capture the first signal and fail to send any confirmations, and the cameras will still turn off.
However, the most plausible outcome is that abuse potential will not be taken into account at all, or the blocking devices will even be sold commercially to everyone - e.g. tourist attractions (so you have to buy their overpriced postcards instead of making photos / videos), privacy-hungry celebrities, government sites, bars retransmitting sports events, etc.
So axxo-style groups who put ripped DVDs on BT trackers are morally supreme to them, even though their content is high quality and eliminates any incentive a person might have to actually go to a cinema / buy a DVD of a movie they watched as a bootleg camcorder copy?
The end result of what they're doing is largely the same, the only difference is that the DVD rippers usually at least obtain the content in a legal way (DVD purchase).
1. Compiz doesn't degrade gracefully, it either goes full hardware or doesn't work at all. Still, it works even on rather old hardware, including integrated Intel GPUs. 2. The features required by Aero were already present in old cards (vide point 1.), the decision to only support DX10 compliant cards and leave users of existing HW in the cold was predominantly a marketing one (to encourage purchases of new systems).
The fact it doesn't is indicative that it requires hardware features that weren't present in 2003-era video cards
All effects in Aero can be implemented using features present on cards several years old (vide Compiz). It just artificially requires DX10 compliance to boost sales of new GPUs and new systems, because you won't get all the bling when you install Vista on your old system. This was a wise move, because it boosts the OEM market where they are the strongest, but screws the users, because they are forced to upgrade.
Your argument seems good at the surface, but it's not true!
The truth is that the Moon librates a bit (a few degrees), so there actually ARE earthrises when you are near the edge of the Earth-observable Moon surface. The Earth just doesn't do a full circle around the sky, it travels along a Lissajous figure.
Even Wikipedia is incorrect on this, at least when you look up "Earthrise".
To be precise, the European Commission is pushing for software patents, but to date all their attempts have been struck down by the European Parliament.
based on various proof texts where the Bible equates God, Jesus, and the holy spirit
Who the hell was Jesus praying to then? And he sometimes prayed in solitude, so it wasn't to "give an example". There are more examples of this kind of total stupidity arising from the Trinity.
Check out the bug comments for this issue in Launchpad. Complex problems can't be solved by flinging personal accusations, and it is a complex problem.
That's about all you need to know. I didn't get some of the restricted goodies, and had to link the firmware directory from the stock kernel to/lib/firmware/`uname -r`, but it works. That being said, adding debug statements to the kernel is not something human beings usually do.
I was going to mock Windows for not being able to run on Cell based machines like the PS3, but it looks like somebody has managed it
Actually, it runs inside QEMU on Fedora... So technically speaking it doesn't run on the PS3. It's like saying that GameBoy Color games can run on x86 processors because there are GBC emulators.
In my country people prefer to pay by bank wire before the shipment. As such, there's no payment section in the stores. Another popular option is COD payment. The upside: web stores are straightforward. Downside: the e-commerce software written in the US is completely out of whack, because it assumes people will pay using credit cards or money transfer services. I whipped up my own web store, because removing things from Drupal or Magento or Zencart would take more time than writing it from scratch, and would probably be less stable. On top of that, localized versions of those systems universally use the shitty ISO-8859-2 encoding, which is supported neither by Windows (it uses cp1250) nor Linux (it uses UTF-8)...
This is more likely a hardcore radical communist cell (after all, they departed quite far away from the Marxist and Maoist ideology) than a democratic resistance movement.
How many misformed or bad bricks have you run into?
I once hit a malformed (smashed?) 1x4 gray plate in the Adventurers zeppelin set. This was the only occurence though. This was probably because the smashed plate weighed exactly the same as a normal plate (their main QC devices are precision scales).
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Yet, some people buy Vespas instead of Harleys, some buy low-cost Chinese MP3 players instead of iPods, and some people will buy this laptop instead of more expensive computers. A successful product doesn't have to be everything for everyone like Windows tries to (and arguably fails). It only has to find just enough customers.
As a geek / techie you might think it's pointless, but then consider that low cost Chinese non-x86 machines flooding the low end market are a dire threat to Microsoft, since all their software and, more importantly, third party device drivers are intimately tied to the x86 architecture. Does it look that bad now?
I mean yeah the computer took 2 hours of bullshit just to install a functional USB mouse drive and it froze up twice but I hear you get that exact same crap with Linux too so you can't complain too much.
I say troll! As long as your USB mouse doesn't have 15 additional buttons or 7 scroll wheels it works out of the box.
If by "USB mouse drive" you meant an USB flash memory then it's even more absurd as these things always work perfectly.
I had a hard time trying to get my setup on a tablet with a Wacom digitizer, stub AT keyboard, tablet-activated buttons, 2 USB keyboards which may or may not be attached at any given time and one of them has an integrated trackpoint, and an USB mouse with horizontal scroll to work reliably but that's a bit of an overkill. However, I never used the horizontal scroll functionality in Windows because it required a several MB crapware process in the background to use it, while Xorg has it built in, so overall it has been an improvement.
What about reliability and failure rates? What you describe sounds like a mission-critical application, and I don't expect those Chinese laptops to be particularly robust or long lasting.
There's no way this thing could ever emulate the PSP, the PSP has dedicated 3D hardware.
Emulation = you run something you don't have the hardware for
Compatibility layer = you run something on matching hardware but without the OS / required software
So while a compatibility layer may be impossible (we don't know what's the GPU), an emulator is not out of the question, especially since it could run most of the code natively, and would only need to emulate firmware calls and GPU instructions.
They don't have a MIPS version, so no. It would still run Debian, Slackware, Mandriva, or Gentoo.
However, it most probably runs some version of Red Flag Linux by default.
There are reasons why it's so cheap:
1. Small LCD.
2. No HDD.
3. The CPU is MIPS rather than x86, it may be a version of the Loongson chip designed in China.
4. The entire notebook was probably designed and built in China so licensing costs are minimal.
5. It's possible that it has no mechanical parts at all except the screen hinge and lock, since judging from the specs the CPU doesn't require cooling.
Minor points:
- Chinese companies don't usually have an Internet presence, because it's not how they do business in China. Much of it is still done face-to-face. (This is not personal experience though.)
- If I understand correctly it comes preloaded with Chinese crapware, so it may have additional entertainment value!
Overall the offer doesn't rise any red flags to me, but I would be cautious as with any company in a remote country. I have seen many similar offers for other Chinese goods and they are usually real but the quality varies.
You have exactly zero chance of running Flash on this laptop, since it's a MIPS machine. Gnash FTW.
By the way, it could be a very useful portability testing machine. You don't have to fumble with cross-compilers and other assorted crap, you just check out your svn and test it on this laptop. If your code runs both on x86 and MIPS you can be pretty sure that it's reasonably portable.
This is a MIPS machine, not a cheap x86 machine. It can't run Windows in the strictest sense possible.
This is a 400 MHz MIPS + 128MB of memory. The PSP is a 333 MHz MIPS + 64MB of memory (Slim variant) + GPU. If the laptop's GPU can handle it, someone needs to reverse-engineer PSP games to run on this (preferably via a Wine-style compatibility layer) and those laptops are an instant sell. It wouldn't be legal, but this would immensely boost value nonetheless, and the Chinese are not exactly known for always abiding with the copyright law.
Another question is the battery life. The PSP has similar specs and it sustains about 4 h of intensive use on a rather wimpy 1200 mAh battery, so it should be very good provided that they supplied a decent battery. Does anyone have battery life specs for this thing? There's nothing about this in TFA or the ordering page...
I will when I find the book when I read about that, to avoid the citation needed problem.
Those %!@#ing ink cartridges cost an arm and a leg.
Unfortunately, either the ink cartridges are expensive, or there are cheap ink refills that are just some ink and a sponge in a plastic case which people are OK with, and a printing head that lasts quite long, until it clogs because you haven't printed anything for a few weeks, and then it costs A %!@#ING LOT.
Canon 865i is an example of this type of printer. The print quality is stunning, the inks are cheap and it can print on very thick paper, but when the head clogs you either have to use a 3rd party cleaning liquid (=DIRTY), pay for a new head (costs a lot, tough to come by) or buy a new printer.
For a more MAFIAA-compliant solution, legislate that every camcorder sold in the US must have a remote kill switch that is triggered in the cinema. The problem is that this system can either be hard to circumvent or hard to abuse, but not both.
If the CamKiller® system works one-way, then anyone can capture the kill signal and broadcast it elsewhere.
If it works both ways, i.e. the camera has a transmitter and requests a digitally signed confirmation after the first kill signal, and turns off only when a correct reply is received, then you can circumvent the system by wrapping the camera in tinfoil.
If the camera also turns off when it doesn't receive a reply at all (= something is blocking the communication), then we're back to the first case, as someone can still capture the first signal and fail to send any confirmations, and the cameras will still turn off.
However, the most plausible outcome is that abuse potential will not be taken into account at all, or the blocking devices will even be sold commercially to everyone - e.g. tourist attractions (so you have to buy their overpriced postcards instead of making photos / videos), privacy-hungry celebrities, government sites, bars retransmitting sports events, etc.
So axxo-style groups who put ripped DVDs on BT trackers are morally supreme to them, even though their content is high quality and eliminates any incentive a person might have to actually go to a cinema / buy a DVD of a movie they watched as a bootleg camcorder copy?
The end result of what they're doing is largely the same, the only difference is that the DVD rippers usually at least obtain the content in a legal way (DVD purchase).
1. Compiz doesn't degrade gracefully, it either goes full hardware or doesn't work at all. Still, it works even on rather old hardware, including integrated Intel GPUs.
2. The features required by Aero were already present in old cards (vide point 1.), the decision to only support DX10 compliant cards and leave users of existing HW in the cold was predominantly a marketing one (to encourage purchases of new systems).
The fact it doesn't is indicative that it requires hardware features that weren't present in 2003-era video cards
All effects in Aero can be implemented using features present on cards several years old (vide Compiz). It just artificially requires DX10 compliance to boost sales of new GPUs and new systems, because you won't get all the bling when you install Vista on your old system. This was a wise move, because it boosts the OEM market where they are the strongest, but screws the users, because they are forced to upgrade.
Before anyone questions this: The angular span of the Moon's libration is a few times larger than the angular diameter of the Earth as seen from Moon.
Your argument seems good at the surface, but it's not true!
The truth is that the Moon librates a bit (a few degrees), so there actually ARE earthrises when you are near the edge of the Earth-observable Moon surface. The Earth just doesn't do a full circle around the sky, it travels along a Lissajous figure.
Even Wikipedia is incorrect on this, at least when you look up "Earthrise".
To be precise, the European Commission is pushing for software patents, but to date all their attempts have been struck down by the European Parliament.
based on various proof texts where the Bible equates God, Jesus, and the holy spirit
Who the hell was Jesus praying to then?
And he sometimes prayed in solitude, so it wasn't to "give an example".
There are more examples of this kind of total stupidity arising from the Trinity.
Check out the bug comments for this issue in Launchpad. Complex problems can't be solved by flinging personal accusations, and it is a complex problem.
I just used the linux-kernel-source package, which is probably a clone of the Debian kernel, and kernel-package to build it:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libncurses5 linux-kernel-source kernel-package fakeroot
fakeroot make-kpkg clean
fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-custom kernel_image kernel_headers
That's about all you need to know. I didn't get some of the restricted goodies, and had to link the firmware directory from the stock kernel to /lib/firmware/`uname -r`, but it works. That being said, adding debug statements to the kernel is not something human beings usually do.
I was going to mock Windows for not being able to run on Cell based machines like the PS3, but it looks like somebody has managed it
Actually, it runs inside QEMU on Fedora... So technically speaking it doesn't run on the PS3. It's like saying that GameBoy Color games can run on x86 processors because there are GBC emulators.
In my country people prefer to pay by bank wire before the shipment. As such, there's no payment section in the stores. Another popular option is COD payment. The upside: web stores are straightforward. Downside: the e-commerce software written in the US is completely out of whack, because it assumes people will pay using credit cards or money transfer services. I whipped up my own web store, because removing things from Drupal or Magento or Zencart would take more time than writing it from scratch, and would probably be less stable. On top of that, localized versions of those systems universally use the shitty ISO-8859-2 encoding, which is supported neither by Windows (it uses cp1250) nor Linux (it uses UTF-8)...
This is more likely a hardcore radical communist cell (after all, they departed quite far away from the Marxist and Maoist ideology) than a democratic resistance movement.
How many misformed or bad bricks have you run into?
I once hit a malformed (smashed?) 1x4 gray plate in the Adventurers zeppelin set. This was the only occurence though. This was probably because the smashed plate weighed exactly the same as a normal plate (their main QC devices are precision scales).