> Skype so far does not support anything but 32 bit Intel based linux distributions.
Skype already supports the Nokia Maemo platform. Maemo is Linux with a mutant Gtk/GNOME stack. So if there is a major OEM wanting Skype on a Linux/ARM based netbook it will be there.
> Adobe flash have the same problem - I cannot run neither Skype or Adobe flash on my ppc based mac
Adobe doesn't care about PPC anymore but they care about ARM. They have a full Flash solution for Linux/ARM, again probably because Nokia needed it for their tablets. Adobe, despite being banned from the iPhone, doesn't plan on being left out of the smartphone marketplace. They just don't make it a free download, they charge money for the ARM port. If lots of netbooks show up and folks start running generic Linux distros on them it will be interesting to see if Adobe adds free ARM binaries to their repositories, especially with Gnash nipping at their heels.
> Could one just slap Debian ARM on this instead? Android is being hyped because Linux is for icky nerds while Android is full of Google VC Attractibg Goodness! Seriously, go look at Skytone's webpage and you will find a model 680 with Android and a model 600 with Linux with little other difference. Both models even have the swivel display.
Again, these are still vaporware at the moment and one or both versions could get axed before actual delivery begins. With luck though, by the end of the year all of us who are feeling a throbing in the loins for long and strong penguin ARM action will finally get satisfaction from at least one of the promised netbooks. I don't really want a super cheap machine, I want small, light and all day battery. My ideal machine would have the 8.9 display from an eeePC 900 in a smaller, lighter ARM powered body. Give it at least 256MB RAM (512MB would be perfect) and at least 8GB of flash.
But while I might not want to carry around the super cheap machine I would be looking to gift a few to the grandkids so I do want to see how low they can go and still be usable
Joel is wrong. A few years ago he was right but he obviously hasn't looked at Microsoft's latest balance sheet. They blew through the cash horde paying us stockholders dividends to keep us from going after em with pitchforks. Used to be they carried zero debt on their books, not anymore.
Go look it up, it is shocking how fast they went from more money than the Pope in Rome to a normal profitable company. And now the recession is upon them, netbooks are encroaching on their fat margins and there isn't much excitement in corporate America to engage in a mass hardware refresh to get Windows 7.
The computing landscape is about to change, the old guard who built the industry is retiring/dying off and things are about to make the shift from high flying growth to stable basic industry.
> I'm not sure there's a single industry in which the average business > puts out a product without at least starting to plan the next one.
I'm sure you are correct. However I'm pretty sure this is the first time Microsoft has hinted about V+2 before V+1 shipped. Up to now the cycle has been:
1. Release. This is THE product you must have. It fixed everything you hated about V-1 and is just packed full of awesome.
2. As customers actually buy V and find it creates as many problems as it fixed, even after the first service release announce the upcoming V+1 in development. Release some internal builds and screenshots to the tame tech media to begin working the hype up. Yup, V+1 is going to be the bomb, every feature you could possibly want is going to be in this puppy, it will finally be secure and you will even have whiter teeth!
3. As release date passes without a release start removing features. Make sure all the pirates and tech media have a recent build. Ensure all reviews are between the upcoming release and competing shipping products to suck out their oxygen. Nah, who needs NDS when Active directory is coming any day now and will rule!
4. PROFIT! ; Goto 1
This time Windows 7 isn't even being hyped as more than a corrective for the stuff people hated in Vista, no real new features. The new features are now being hyped for V+2. Which is only more evidence that 7 is just Mojave/Vista SE.
> most advances over the last decade are related to extra cores, and improvements in performance per clock.
Oh really. Remember that in the 1990s we went from counting cycles per instruction to multiple instructions per cycle. Recent CPUs have seen some improvement in that quarter but a lot of it has been recovering from the mistake that was the Netburst/Pentium4. Most improvement lately seems to be in multiple cores and more recently in improving work per watt. Which was something long overdue. The 486 was the first Intel cpu to even need a heatsink and now 100W parts are mainstream.... even before they get overclocked.
But to more generally clarify my original observation, some measurements have improved a lot faster than others and it is causing some serious strains in system design. For example our hard drives today hold a hundred times more than a decade ago but seek times are only a few percent improved and transfer rates haven't improved even tenfold. CPU speeds are another one of the lagging factors. While a decade ago the GPU had only recently become standard equipment and has improved a lot.. yet unless one is a hardcore gamer so long as you can run Aero/Compiz additional GPU performance doesn't matter much.
> There is very little benefit for them to have lots of RAM sitting idle.
Wrongo. Do you use a swap/pagefile? Then you could benefit from more RAM. Even the shift to SSD doesn't change that, in fact it makes it worse since swapping to flash shortens the life dramatically.
The trick is to avoid confirming your mailbox is active. Opting out means you saw the spam so they will of course send you more. The second thing is to make sure your mail client doesn't disclose your presence. Ensure it asks before sending a reception confirmation and finally under no circumstances allow your mail client to pull ANYTHING from the network without your permission. Otherwise those cute/porn pictures in all that spam are confirming your presence by the unique urls embedded in each spam.
To me the takeaway is just how little progress chipmakers are making.
Compare to the 1990s. x86 processors started the decade with the 80486 @ 33MHz and ended with the Athlon @ 1GHz mark and was doing more per clock for even more improvement than pure clock ratings would indicate.. Now in the decade we are about to close out we have managed to push that to around 3.5GHz and by the end of '10 we might hit 4GHz and eight cores (for those willing to spend serious coin) but work per clock doesn't seem to have improved at all and if anything have even slid back a bit.
RAM improvement have slowed down as well, probably because of Windows inability to get large deployment of 64bit editions limiting demand. The 1990s saw average ram go from 1-4MB to 64-128MB. It has only been recently that 2GB sticks went from exotic server stuff to mainstream.
Speed also isn't getting faster as fast as capacity is growing. Compare how many seconds it would take a 1990 vintage 486 to write to every memory location vs a modern machine. Same goes for disk access. Hibernation on a modern laptop is pretty much a dead issue since the time to write the whole memory load to disc is unworkable.
>..sales of Windows based netbooks seem to be much higher than for Linux.
True... now. But look at the factors Microsoft had to deal with to make that happen.
1. They had to 'encourage' the vendors to go upscale and forget about the low end. Of course most didn't need much encouraging anyway since this whole $200 and falling netbook idea scared the willies out of most of em. But while computer companies fear the low margins pricing that low will entail the consumer electronics people see an opportunity.
2. They had to lower the OEM price and keep lowering it. Reports now indicate they are selling XP Home licenses for $15 each. Windows 7 Starter won't be nearly as attractive to customers as XP Home currently is so Microsoft is soon going to have to make a decision as to which choice hurts least. a) keep XP home available, b) price Windows 7 Home cheap enough to compete in the netbook space or c) watch Linux share start rising again as customers reject 7 Starter Edition. So even if they 'win' they could lose if they cut their earnings bad enough the shareholders come at em with pitchforks. Remember, MSFT has been a bad stock to own since the.bomb went off but at least up to now they have had cash flow.
And then there is ARM. It is like the Terminator. It is out there, it is coming and it won't stop. Windows doesn't run on ARM. WinCE isn't going to compete, anything that isn't Windows is at the same disadvantage as Linux and WinCE isn't Windows. It also isn't a complete enough solution to compete with Linux with a real browser and office suite.
Porting Windows to ARM would be as pointless as their previous ports to PPC, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium, etc. If the ISV community doesn't port the whole effort is wasted and they can only be stirred into halfhearted support for x86_64. Ask yourself this: If Intuit hasn't bothered porting Quickbooks to Linux with people begging them for over a decade how long will it take them to port to Windows/ARM? Especially since I don't think the Windows toolchain is setup to cross compile and there aren't exactly a lot of ARM (native) developer workstations available to buy even if an ISV were so inclined.
> We didn't need fast computers for everyday use and then we wanted to be able to...
Most of the things you mention are more of a case of trying to find uses for the glut of cycles at hand. They are nice to have if the power is there anyway but give people a choice between much cheaper or better longer battery lufe and they will decide they can live without it. Except for h264 video but the sane way to handle that is to get it off the main core. Puny ARM chips can play h264 by way of a dedicated DSP coproccessor and have total system power consumption levels Intel wishes they could get their idle draw down to.
Nope, if Intel wants to keep the treadmill going it needs to be funding something that eats cycles like crazy yet once people see they just HAVE to have it. Natural speech recognition might do it, but odds are that would also become a candidate for offloading to specialized hardware. Nothing video related will do it since that would quickly get sucked over to the video chipset.
I'd bet good money that isn't how it is accounted. The rest is an upfront prepaid wireless contract. They will book zero profit on the device, great for tax purposes. The money comes from the fact it is for all intents and purposes locked[1] to Amazon content which has nice phat margins.
Remember that the intended use is to buy all of the content over the wireless. To make that more desirable they even toss in some free wireless goodies. If the Kindle were just a typical e-book reader that loaded it's content via the USB port the battery life and weight specs would be much better. And it wouldn't need to waste so much space on the keyboard.
[1] I know some twit will pipe up and say you CAN load other content onto a Kindle but Amazon went out of their way to discourage it and made buying their content oh so easy.
> Buying laptops with XP Pro rather than Home got difficult enough...
Buy professional grade laptops instead of home stuff and it isn't at all hard to find. HP and Lenovo will fix ya up with an XP Pro preload. Of course you have to pay for Vista Business to get the upgrade rights for XP Pro. But Vista Business is the roughly similar product to XP Pro so it isn't totally unfair.
> Linux returns of netbooks have been far higher than Windows, from what I've seen.
Quit spreading this debunked FUD. See LWN's link to one of the debunkings.
> Assuming of course that the netbook market doesn't go the way of the PDA market.
Too true. My prediction? The current netbook market will be dead in two years, replaced by subsidized crap from the 3G carriers in teh same way pretty much every PDA morphed into a cell phone with a contract. But perhaps the really cheap ARM netbooks will survive since they will be too cheap to subsidize at the current 3G rates.
> Also, BTW, if you were to virtualize the operating system in Virtual Box...
Have you seen the hardware limits to qualify for the cut rate licenses? 1GB max RAM means you won't enjoy running a virtual machine on Windows 7 Starter. And then there would be the expense of a unlimited Windows license to run in the virtual machine. Which by the book can't be an OEM license so just pay the upcharge and get the unrestricted Windows 7 preload which every vendor will be offering. Plus unless they remove the feature, starting with Vista you can upgrade any time over the net with a credit card. And if you were planning to run a pirate edition in the VM just save a step and blow away Windows 7 Starter with Windows XP Pirate Edition and have something that would actually work.
This is nothing more than taking the "Free Trial of Office' every PC seems to include these days and making teh OS itself a free trial offer. All to keep the sticker price difference between Windows and Linux low enough that nobody will bother stocking the Linux version. After the customer gets home and realizes they got screwed it will be too late, the sheep will go "Baaah!" and whip out their credit card and but the upgrade to Windows 7 usable edition while they are buying the full version of the trial edition of the anti-malware program that came preloaded.
And reviews will NEVER mention the requirement to pay those upcharges when they compare to the linux versions and deem them not worth the small price difference. And of course Linux can NEVER actually be better, as is better even if they price advantage didn't exist.
> Most of the medical profession believes that adult stem cells are more likely to offer cures than embryonic stem cells
Because this article is just a troll for more funding and to give Obama's recent stem cell ruling credibility. Sorry guys, truth time. Who in their right mind is going to want to take drugs the rest of their life to stop the body from rejecting the implant? Those drugs can be wicked. That is why this procedure isn't going anywhere until they find a way to do it with the patient's own cells as source material.
I know some on the left get erect at the thought of embryonic stem cells, probably because it involves dead babies[1], but it's a dead end. A small amount of good might come from it in cases like this were early research can go ahead while other teams work out the rest of the details on adult stem cells but that is the extent of it.
[1] From observing that most on the 'left' favor extreme environmentalism including wiping out a good 90% of the human population, get off on abortion, infanticide and euthanasia (volunteer and forced) it's pretty obvious they hate themselves and by extension their entire species.
And yes kids, THIS is how one does a troll. Pure Truth, yet presented in the most inflamatory way possible, is the surest way to drive folks into a blind rage.
Except Dr. Sagan was an almost canonical example of a politicized scientist toward the end of his life. His greatest work, Cosmos (which I have a DVD set of on my shelf) was greatly flawed by his growing political leanings (which were garden variety peacenik/green of the most naive uneducated sort) instead of focusing on the science which he was an actual authority on.
> In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,'
That has probably never happened. The other guy having really good (and repeatable) RESULTS can change opponents into supporters in science. Hell, scientists would probably still be debating relativity and quantum theory had not the Trinity Test not settled the matter in such dramatic fashion.
But that not the same as the the problems when scientists get into political affairs, they expect the decisions to be made on purely rational arguments that can be solved as a math problem. But they often can't. Political decisions aremore often cases of competing interests or weighing risk/rewards. Then we get to AGW and the usefuless of the scientific method is really called into question. AGW has almost zero actual numbers, it's all computer models and measurements close to the error bars where both sides can make good arguments, thus both sides now field Nobel Prize Winners in attempts to win by appeal to authority. But one side has Al Gore and James Hansen and that settles it as far as this non-scientist is concerned. Gore isn't a scientist but is treated as one and Hansen might have been a scientist once but has been nothing but a fraud since his antics with the hockey stick chart were debunked and he escaped all consequences.
> Don't worry, they are still going to implement the carbon tax.
Of course. Because it has never been about global warming or CO2. Otherwise CO2 emitted by India and China would have been as bad as emissions in the 1st world. But Kyoto exempted them. It is about a once in a lifetime opportunity for the 'enlightened good progressives' to get almost total control over all aspects of life in the West and thus finally stamp out everything they don't like by taxing it out of practicality. And the things they don't like include pretty much all of western civilization.
> Not sure if it will be in Jaunty or not, but Ubuntu is working on a fix for that.
Oh! So Ubuntu will finally catch up to where Fedora has been for a couple of years. Fedora has had repos installable as packages for a long time. CLick here to add the Adobe Flash repo, etc.
Maybe in a few more years it will backport to Debian?
Kinda like the Debian based distributions only recently got GPG signed packages while RPM has had PGP signing since before GPG was available.
Maybe someday the Debian based systems will get bi-arch and make 64bit a seamless experience instead of basically stuffing a whole seperate 32 bit system into a chroot. Oh, but dpkg/apt doesn't support that either.
Yet in any distro comparison thread we hear the zealots proclaim Apt-get the ultimate and whinge that if RPM would just go away we would have much better world with only one package format.
So Moz is only going to support the current shipping service pack for XP and Vista. Why? Is Firefox doing anything (better question SHOULD it be) low level enough for the current version to matter?
The situation with FF on Linux it is bad enough, in that they don't do security fixes for older versions, and new versions generally won't run on old Linux distributions but we understand that Moz Corp doesn't really give a crap about Linux, they make their coin on Windows. But now they are slashing Windows support. Only supporting XP SP3 isn't terrible, but if it is a prelude to dropping XP when 7 ships it will be a terrible thing.
> Is this the same scam like "Free" Credit Report.com
Yes, it is a major effort to newspeak the word "Free". Engrain into people that any time you hear someone say something is "Free" to go "And just how much is this 'Free' product?" and we will haev a much harder time giving away our stuff. It is insidious and it just has to be a Microsoft conspiracy against us.:)
> It has a note on the inside saying that it was last repaired in 1909.
And the last time that clock was reset to correct drift? That is another feature of this clock, it is supposed to be able to not only run for 10,000 years it is supposed to keep correct time for 10,000 without human intervention. That is an interesting goal.
> People that are the heavy users (over 50 GB/month, say) have seen their access available > at a certain price point for a long time will feel ripped off..
As someone who once worked in the ISP game I can say with confidence they don't care how you leeches feel, they wish they could run you off. The idea of 'unlimited' Internet at anything like current prices is what is stupid. The ISPs did it to themselves though since each was afraid to be the first to state a limit. Until now all that are left are government regulated monopolies who have decided they don't have to care what their customers like. They OWN the state regulators and will almost certainly end up owning the FCC with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats running Congress.
TWC disarmed all rational arguments with the $150 total unlimited package. To date the cheapest full unlimited in the US was buying your own T1 line, Compare the prices. But don't expect the bargains to last, once they get people to accept the notion of bandwidth caps the will squeeze. I'm not saying they aren't going to be evil, it is the nature of such government monsters. The solution is competition, not yet more regulation of some of the most regulated industries in the country.
Break the phone/cable monopoly up, only don't do it stupid like the AT&T breakup. Break it along the natural monopoly line, the local loop. The government regulated monopoly runs the local loop (fiber to the door, cabel pipe, etc.) and leases out access to it on totally neutral terms.
Oh come on, if the subject is silly uses for a nuke can anyone beat A Realistic Plan for World Peace a.k.a. Nuke The Moon. And it would be just crazy enough to work if we still had Bush. Nobody would believe Obama had the balls for the kind of crazy the plan requires though.
> I hope that means $250 retail and not $250 manufacturer's cost.
No, that's $250 out the loading dock of a contract manufacturer, $450-$500 retail. That this clown thinks you could sell them for $300 shows he has zero business knowledge. That he built a dedicated web browser around an Intel processor instead of ARM shows his technical skills are about average for a tech journalist. i.e. shockingly close to zero.
I like the idea but everything I have read about the product says it is a lousy phone. And if it can't do that basic function well it doesn't matter what other neat things it can do, whether it is open software, open hardware, whatever. A phone that sucks is no sale.
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> Skype so far does not support anything but 32 bit Intel based linux distributions.
Skype already supports the Nokia Maemo platform. Maemo is Linux with a mutant Gtk/GNOME stack. So if there is a major OEM wanting Skype on a Linux/ARM based netbook it will be there.
> Adobe flash have the same problem - I cannot run neither Skype or Adobe flash on my ppc based mac
Adobe doesn't care about PPC anymore but they care about ARM. They have a full Flash solution for Linux/ARM, again probably because Nokia needed it for their tablets. Adobe, despite being banned from the iPhone, doesn't plan on being left out of the smartphone marketplace. They just don't make it a free download, they charge money for the ARM port. If lots of netbooks show up and folks start running generic Linux distros on them it will be interesting to see if Adobe adds free ARM binaries to their repositories, especially with Gnash nipping at their heels.
> Could one just slap Debian ARM on this instead?
Android is being hyped because Linux is for icky nerds while Android is full of Google VC Attractibg Goodness! Seriously, go look at Skytone's webpage and you will find a model 680 with Android and a model 600 with Linux with little other difference. Both models even have the swivel display.
Again, these are still vaporware at the moment and one or both versions could get axed before actual delivery begins. With luck though, by the end of the year all of us who are feeling a throbing in the loins for long and strong penguin ARM action will finally get satisfaction from at least one of the promised netbooks. I don't really want a super cheap machine, I want small, light and all day battery. My ideal machine would have the 8.9 display from an eeePC 900 in a smaller, lighter ARM powered body. Give it at least 256MB RAM (512MB would be perfect) and at least 8GB of flash.
But while I might not want to carry around the super cheap machine I would be looking to gift a few to the grandkids so I do want to see how low they can go and still be usable
> More seriously, as Joel points out:
Joel is wrong. A few years ago he was right but he obviously hasn't looked at Microsoft's latest balance sheet. They blew through the cash horde paying us stockholders dividends to keep us from going after em with pitchforks. Used to be they carried zero debt on their books, not anymore.
Go look it up, it is shocking how fast they went from more money than the Pope in Rome to a normal profitable company. And now the recession is upon them, netbooks are encroaching on their fat margins and there isn't much excitement in corporate America to engage in a mass hardware refresh to get Windows 7.
The computing landscape is about to change, the old guard who built the industry is retiring/dying off and things are about to make the shift from high flying growth to stable basic industry.
> I'm not sure there's a single industry in which the average business
> puts out a product without at least starting to plan the next one.
I'm sure you are correct. However I'm pretty sure this is the first time Microsoft has hinted about V+2 before V+1 shipped. Up to now the cycle has been:
1. Release. This is THE product you must have. It fixed everything you hated about V-1 and is just packed full of awesome.
2. As customers actually buy V and find it creates as many problems as it fixed, even after the first service release announce the upcoming V+1 in development. Release some internal builds and screenshots to the tame tech media to begin working the hype up. Yup, V+1 is going to be the bomb, every feature you could possibly want is going to be in this puppy, it will finally be secure and you will even have whiter teeth!
3. As release date passes without a release start removing features. Make sure all the pirates and tech media have a recent build. Ensure all reviews are between the upcoming release and competing shipping products to suck out their oxygen. Nah, who needs NDS when Active directory is coming any day now and will rule!
4. PROFIT! ; Goto 1
This time Windows 7 isn't even being hyped as more than a corrective for the stuff people hated in Vista, no real new features. The new features are now being hyped for V+2. Which is only more evidence that 7 is just Mojave/Vista SE.
> most advances over the last decade are related to extra cores, and improvements in performance per clock.
Oh really. Remember that in the 1990s we went from counting cycles per instruction to multiple instructions per cycle. Recent CPUs have seen some improvement in that quarter but a lot of it has been recovering from the mistake that was the Netburst/Pentium4. Most improvement lately seems to be in multiple cores and more recently in improving work per watt. Which was something long overdue. The 486 was the first Intel cpu to even need a heatsink and now 100W parts are mainstream.... even before they get overclocked.
But to more generally clarify my original observation, some measurements have improved a lot faster than others and it is causing some serious strains in system design. For example our hard drives today hold a hundred times more than a decade ago but seek times are only a few percent improved and transfer rates haven't improved even tenfold. CPU speeds are another one of the lagging factors. While a decade ago the GPU had only recently become standard equipment and has improved a lot.. yet unless one is a hardcore gamer so long as you can run Aero/Compiz additional GPU performance doesn't matter much.
> There is very little benefit for them to have lots of RAM sitting idle.
Wrongo. Do you use a swap/pagefile? Then you could benefit from more RAM. Even the shift to SSD doesn't change that, in fact it makes it worse since swapping to flash shortens the life dramatically.
The trick is to avoid confirming your mailbox is active. Opting out means you saw the spam so they will of course send you more. The second thing is to make sure your mail client doesn't disclose your presence. Ensure it asks before sending a reception confirmation and finally under no circumstances allow your mail client to pull ANYTHING from the network without your permission. Otherwise those cute/porn pictures in all that spam are confirming your presence by the unique urls embedded in each spam.
To me the takeaway is just how little progress chipmakers are making.
Compare to the 1990s. x86 processors started the decade with the 80486 @ 33MHz and ended with the Athlon @ 1GHz mark and was doing more per clock for even more improvement than pure clock ratings would indicate.. Now in the decade we are about to close out we have managed to push that to around 3.5GHz and by the end of '10 we might hit 4GHz and eight cores (for those willing to spend serious coin) but work per clock doesn't seem to have improved at all and if anything have even slid back a bit.
RAM improvement have slowed down as well, probably because of Windows inability to get large deployment of 64bit editions limiting demand. The 1990s saw average ram go from 1-4MB to 64-128MB. It has only been recently that 2GB sticks went from exotic server stuff to mainstream.
Speed also isn't getting faster as fast as capacity is growing. Compare how many seconds it would take a 1990 vintage 486 to write to every memory location vs a modern machine. Same goes for disk access. Hibernation on a modern laptop is pretty much a dead issue since the time to write the whole memory load to disc is unworkable.
> ..sales of Windows based netbooks seem to be much higher than for Linux.
True... now. But look at the factors Microsoft had to deal with to make that happen.
1. They had to 'encourage' the vendors to go upscale and forget about the low end. Of course most didn't need much encouraging anyway since this whole $200 and falling netbook idea scared the willies out of most of em. But while computer companies fear the low margins pricing that low will entail the consumer electronics people see an opportunity.
2. They had to lower the OEM price and keep lowering it. Reports now indicate they are selling XP Home licenses for $15 each. Windows 7 Starter won't be nearly as attractive to customers as XP Home currently is so Microsoft is soon going to have to make a decision as to which choice hurts least. a) keep XP home available, b) price Windows 7 Home cheap enough to compete in the netbook space or c) watch Linux share start rising again as customers reject 7 Starter Edition. So even if they 'win' they could lose if they cut their earnings bad enough the shareholders come at em with pitchforks. Remember, MSFT has been a bad stock to own since the .bomb went off but at least up to now they have had cash flow.
And then there is ARM. It is like the Terminator. It is out there, it is coming and it won't stop. Windows doesn't run on ARM. WinCE isn't going to compete, anything that isn't Windows is at the same disadvantage as Linux and WinCE isn't Windows. It also isn't a complete enough solution to compete with Linux with a real browser and office suite.
Porting Windows to ARM would be as pointless as their previous ports to PPC, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium, etc. If the ISV community doesn't port the whole effort is wasted and they can only be stirred into halfhearted support for x86_64. Ask yourself this: If Intuit hasn't bothered porting Quickbooks to Linux with people begging them for over a decade how long will it take them to port to Windows/ARM? Especially since I don't think the Windows toolchain is setup to cross compile and there aren't exactly a lot of ARM (native) developer workstations available to buy even if an ISV were so inclined.
> We didn't need fast computers for everyday use and then we wanted to be able to...
Most of the things you mention are more of a case of trying to find uses for the glut of cycles at hand. They are nice to have if the power is there anyway but give people a choice between much cheaper or better longer battery lufe and they will decide they can live without it. Except for h264 video but the sane way to handle that is to get it off the main core. Puny ARM chips can play h264 by way of a dedicated DSP coproccessor and have total system power consumption levels Intel wishes they could get their idle draw down to.
Nope, if Intel wants to keep the treadmill going it needs to be funding something that eats cycles like crazy yet once people see they just HAVE to have it. Natural speech recognition might do it, but odds are that would also become a candidate for offloading to specialized hardware. Nothing video related will do it since that would quickly get sucked over to the video chipset.
> Is R&D, marketing, distribution, and profit.
I'd bet good money that isn't how it is accounted. The rest is an upfront prepaid wireless contract. They will book zero profit on the device, great for tax purposes. The money comes from the fact it is for all intents and purposes locked[1] to Amazon content which has nice phat margins.
Remember that the intended use is to buy all of the content over the wireless. To make that more desirable they even toss in some free wireless goodies. If the Kindle were just a typical e-book reader that loaded it's content via the USB port the battery life and weight specs would be much better. And it wouldn't need to waste so much space on the keyboard.
[1] I know some twit will pipe up and say you CAN load other content onto a Kindle but Amazon went out of their way to discourage it and made buying their content oh so easy.
> Buying laptops with XP Pro rather than Home got difficult enough...
Buy professional grade laptops instead of home stuff and it isn't at all hard to find. HP and Lenovo will fix ya up with an XP Pro preload. Of course you have to pay for Vista Business to get the upgrade rights for XP Pro. But Vista Business is the roughly similar product to XP Pro so it isn't totally unfair.
> Linux returns of netbooks have been far higher than Windows, from what I've seen.
Quit spreading this debunked FUD. See LWN's link to one of the debunkings.
> Assuming of course that the netbook market doesn't go the way of the PDA market.
Too true. My prediction? The current netbook market will be dead in two years, replaced by subsidized crap from the 3G carriers in teh same way pretty much every PDA morphed into a cell phone with a contract. But perhaps the really cheap ARM netbooks will survive since they will be too cheap to subsidize at the current 3G rates.
> Also, BTW, if you were to virtualize the operating system in Virtual Box...
Have you seen the hardware limits to qualify for the cut rate licenses? 1GB max RAM means you won't enjoy running a virtual machine on Windows 7 Starter. And then there would be the expense of a unlimited Windows license to run in the virtual machine. Which by the book can't be an OEM license so just pay the upcharge and get the unrestricted Windows 7 preload which every vendor will be offering. Plus unless they remove the feature, starting with Vista you can upgrade any time over the net with a credit card. And if you were planning to run a pirate edition in the VM just save a step and blow away Windows 7 Starter with Windows XP Pirate Edition and have something that would actually work.
This is nothing more than taking the "Free Trial of Office' every PC seems to include these days and making teh OS itself a free trial offer. All to keep the sticker price difference between Windows and Linux low enough that nobody will bother stocking the Linux version. After the customer gets home and realizes they got screwed it will be too late, the sheep will go "Baaah!" and whip out their credit card and but the upgrade to Windows 7 usable edition while they are buying the full version of the trial edition of the anti-malware program that came preloaded.
And reviews will NEVER mention the requirement to pay those upcharges when they compare to the linux versions and deem them not worth the small price difference. And of course Linux can NEVER actually be better, as is better even if they price advantage didn't exist.
> Most of the medical profession believes that adult stem cells are more likely to offer cures than embryonic stem cells
Because this article is just a troll for more funding and to give Obama's recent stem cell ruling credibility. Sorry guys, truth time. Who in their right mind is going to want to take drugs the rest of their life to stop the body from rejecting the implant? Those drugs can be wicked. That is why this procedure isn't going anywhere until they find a way to do it with the patient's own cells as source material.
I know some on the left get erect at the thought of embryonic stem cells, probably because it involves dead babies[1], but it's a dead end. A small amount of good might come from it in cases like this were early research can go ahead while other teams work out the rest of the details on adult stem cells but that is the extent of it.
[1] From observing that most on the 'left' favor extreme environmentalism including wiping out a good 90% of the human population, get off on abortion, infanticide and euthanasia (volunteer and forced) it's pretty obvious they hate themselves and by extension their entire species.
And yes kids, THIS is how one does a troll. Pure Truth, yet presented in the most inflamatory way possible, is the surest way to drive folks into a blind rage.
> I think Carl Sagan neatly addressed that:
Except Dr. Sagan was an almost canonical example of a politicized scientist toward the end of his life. His greatest work, Cosmos (which I have a DVD set of on my shelf) was greatly flawed by his growing political leanings (which were garden variety peacenik/green of the most naive uneducated sort) instead of focusing on the science which he was an actual authority on.
> In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,'
That has probably never happened. The other guy having really good (and repeatable) RESULTS can change opponents into supporters in science. Hell, scientists would probably still be debating relativity and quantum theory had not the Trinity Test not settled the matter in such dramatic fashion.
But that not the same as the the problems when scientists get into political affairs, they expect the decisions to be made on purely rational arguments that can be solved as a math problem. But they often can't. Political decisions aremore often cases of competing interests or weighing risk/rewards. Then we get to AGW and the usefuless of the scientific method is really called into question. AGW has almost zero actual numbers, it's all computer models and measurements close to the error bars where both sides can make good arguments, thus both sides now field Nobel Prize Winners in attempts to win by appeal to authority. But one side has Al Gore and James Hansen and that settles it as far as this non-scientist is concerned. Gore isn't a scientist but is treated as one and Hansen might have been a scientist once but has been nothing but a fraud since his antics with the hockey stick chart were debunked and he escaped all consequences.
> he general public apparently has no idea how incredibly dogmatic, religious,
> and un-scientific much of modern science has become.
and
> I think the real issue here is that scientists have become another authority.
Or put more simply:
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die."
- Max Planck
And he said that before the politics and money factors entered into science.
> Don't worry, they are still going to implement the carbon tax.
Of course. Because it has never been about global warming or CO2. Otherwise CO2 emitted by India and China would have been as bad as emissions in the 1st world. But Kyoto exempted them. It is about a once in a lifetime opportunity for the 'enlightened good progressives' to get almost total control over all aspects of life in the West and thus finally stamp out everything they don't like by taxing it out of practicality. And the things they don't like include pretty much all of western civilization.
> Not sure if it will be in Jaunty or not, but Ubuntu is working on a fix for that.
Oh! So Ubuntu will finally catch up to where Fedora has been for a couple of years. Fedora has had repos installable as packages for a long time. CLick here to add the Adobe Flash repo, etc.
Maybe in a few more years it will backport to Debian?
Kinda like the Debian based distributions only recently got GPG signed packages while RPM has had PGP signing since before GPG was available.
Maybe someday the Debian based systems will get bi-arch and make 64bit a seamless experience instead of basically stuffing a whole seperate 32 bit system into a chroot. Oh, but dpkg/apt doesn't support that either.
Yet in any distro comparison thread we hear the zealots proclaim Apt-get the ultimate and whinge that if RPM would just go away we would have much better world with only one package format.
So Moz is only going to support the current shipping service pack for XP and Vista. Why? Is Firefox doing anything (better question SHOULD it be) low level enough for the current version to matter?
The situation with FF on Linux it is bad enough, in that they don't do security fixes for older versions, and new versions generally won't run on old Linux distributions but we understand that Moz Corp doesn't really give a crap about Linux, they make their coin on Windows. But now they are slashing Windows support. Only supporting XP SP3 isn't terrible, but if it is a prelude to dropping XP when 7 ships it will be a terrible thing.
> Is this the same scam like "Free" Credit Report.com
Yes, it is a major effort to newspeak the word "Free". Engrain into people that any time you hear someone say something is "Free" to go "And just how much is this 'Free' product?" and we will haev a much harder time giving away our stuff. It is insidious and it just has to be a Microsoft conspiracy against us. :)
> It has a note on the inside saying that it was last repaired in 1909.
And the last time that clock was reset to correct drift? That is another feature of this clock, it is supposed to be able to not only run for 10,000 years it is supposed to keep correct time for 10,000 without human intervention. That is an interesting goal.
> People that are the heavy users (over 50 GB/month, say) have seen their access available
> at a certain price point for a long time will feel ripped off..
As someone who once worked in the ISP game I can say with confidence they don't care how you leeches feel, they wish they could run you off. The idea of 'unlimited' Internet at anything like current prices is what is stupid. The ISPs did it to themselves though since each was afraid to be the first to state a limit. Until now all that are left are government regulated monopolies who have decided they don't have to care what their customers like. They OWN the state regulators and will almost certainly end up owning the FCC with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats running Congress.
TWC disarmed all rational arguments with the $150 total unlimited package. To date the cheapest full unlimited in the US was buying your own T1 line, Compare the prices. But don't expect the bargains to last, once they get people to accept the notion of bandwidth caps the will squeeze. I'm not saying they aren't going to be evil, it is the nature of such government monsters. The solution is competition, not yet more regulation of some of the most regulated industries in the country.
Break the phone/cable monopoly up, only don't do it stupid like the AT&T breakup. Break it along the natural monopoly line, the local loop. The government regulated monopoly runs the local loop (fiber to the door, cabel pipe, etc.) and leases out access to it on totally neutral terms.
Oh come on, if the subject is silly uses for a nuke can anyone beat A Realistic Plan for World Peace a.k.a. Nuke The Moon. And it would be just crazy enough to work if we still had Bush. Nobody would believe Obama had the balls for the kind of crazy the plan requires though.
> I hope that means $250 retail and not $250 manufacturer's cost.
No, that's $250 out the loading dock of a contract manufacturer, $450-$500 retail. That this clown thinks you could sell them for $300 shows he has zero business knowledge. That he built a dedicated web browser around an Intel processor instead of ARM shows his technical skills are about average for a tech journalist. i.e. shockingly close to zero.
I like the idea but everything I have read about the product says it is a lousy phone. And if it can't do that basic function well it doesn't matter what other neat things it can do, whether it is open software, open hardware, whatever. A phone that sucks is no sale.