Or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
This counts the number of people that cancelled cable subscriptions. What about those that never signed up?
A lot of people my age when they move out on their own, get internet only. Download what shows they want, or make do with the potpourri of channels that aren't filtered out. In addition to not paying for cable-tv service, they also don't pay for home phone service, prefering to just pay a cellphone bill.
My only experience with Wyse terminals was my local public library. In the early 90's they migrated from a manual card catalog / checkout system to a computer based one. Wyse terminals were located through the library, and at the checkout. It was revolutionary! You could modem (and eventually telnet) into the system to look up or renew books! They also had a couple Wyse terminals in the back connected to the local Freenet for public internet access.
They built a new branch 10 years ago that had brand new Wyse dumb terminals. Eventually they migrated to a web based system.
Meanwhile at my current job we use VT220 terminals and DECwriters connected to 1980's PDP-11's.
Before we replace those we have to get rid of the 1970's computers.
I agree. Of the Gawker empire it seems to have the least childish commentors, and least ranting/swearing articles.
I also agree though that the quality of the posts have gone down. With the likes of Gina, there was a lot more original content. Now it seems more about keeping post count up, and there's more and more reposts from other sites. Not only that but reports that are wrong, or weren't tested. There was also a while where they were obsessed with really cheesy DIY's. Cinderblock speakerstands, lamp speaker stands, and endless laptop/iphone stands made out of all sorts of garbage.
Commentorship really went down. After the site redesign comments on open thread have dropped by half.
But the other sites are really bad. Gizmodo swears a lot, and Jason, Jesus, and co love to swear, and love to love the iPhone, love to steal iPhones, and love to banhammer people over nothing.
-- Ever notice how people remember posters by their sigs and not their names?
I had to laugh at this. Only because I can think of two sigs I see here often "I changed my web server to port 6502, long live CPU wars" and "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway" but I couldn't tell you their names.
An interesting tidbit of history that some people get wrong (I'm not accusing you) is that Win2000 was actually released before WinME. Win2000: Feb-17-2000, WinME: Sept-14-2000 so in truth ME was obsolete before it came out. Windows 2000 also saw far longer shelf life: Both in 3rd party support, and Microsoft support. Microsoft discontinued extended support of Win2000 in July 2010 and WinME in July 2006.
Windows 2000 didn't get much public acceptance because it was never marketed as an end user / home operating system. The non-server edition was "Windows 2000 PROFESSIONAL" which cost more and had higher system requirements. Seldom would it be included with machines at Bestbuy, etc. I remember buying a $500 emachine July 2000 that only came with 32MB RAM and 98SE. Windows2000 is really desperate with that little RAM (Not that 98 is much better) Incidentally the machine had the RAM upgraded, it still works, and it ran Win2000 for the longest time. People were also still clinging to their DOS support. ME didn't run anything in the Autoexec.bat and config.sys so people couldn't run their crappy real mode drivers which they complained a lot about! All NT's (including 2k) never even pretended to parse those files given they weren't DOS based.
Windows 2000 truly was a huge leap forward. It introduced a lot of features NT4 lacked (PnP, USB, latest NTFS version) and XP/2003 were always just a small increment above it.
What you say about "95/98/ME was creaking horribly" is so true. You would get blue screens all the time. Heck you get a blue screen if you take out a floppy or CD and try to access it! The system would show the BSOD, stop, but let you hit a key to continue. Remember "System resources"? The mystical figure that decreased as the system ran, not all of it would be freed up as programs closed, causing you to reboot? It's true, you had to reboot at least once a day, though most people at the time shut down every night. I remember on only two occasions coaxing Windows 95 last long enough to crash at the 49.7 day bug mark. I got an analog photo of one occurrence!
Transitioning home/end users over to the rock solid NT architecture made all that go away. BSODs are a lot less rare, and usually traceable to crappy hardware or crappy drivers. I typically only reboot my home machines once a month at update time.
But yes, I agree with you, Linux had it's opportunity when Windows 9x was mainstream and such a steamy pile. That moment passed more than 10 years ago.
I have an iPod Touch but not an iPad. Although overall I'm satisfied with the device,I have some of the same experiences.
-Word processing and spreadsheet apps are poor, especially at the free pricepoint. I'm not looking for MS Office 2010 capability. I'd be satisfied with '97 -I haven't had a web browser crash this much in the past 10 years. -Skype is bad. It's bad on Windows, it's bad on iOS. Frequent crashes, poor performance. -More and more I'm suffering random unexplained bog-downs. Though the UI isn't giving feedback, it is registering my keypresses, so it will after stalling for a while catch up to what I'm typing.
Just stop using paper! Just as soon as a simple 8.5x11 epaper-pads is available at the right price that has wifi and nfc I'm going to either get fired or get those deployed. Paper is a horrible waste as is maintaining printers and storing the crap and all of that. We use paper for trivial bullshit that then gets thrown away. Paper and printing are costing us 12 million over the last 10 years though costs have decreased some it's leveled off and my prediction is it will cost 9 million for the next ten. I want us weened off paper for the trivial bullshit NOW. Hell I could by sixty thousand of the damn things for 150 each with 9 million. Several 'paper is god' dinosaurs will by gone soon so I may have a shot. Dunno.
I truly believe 2012 will be the year of the paperless office. That and the Linux Desktop.
In other news at some point we DID get the year of the Linux(ish) Mobile.
I've seen a video where a toddler stands in FRONT of a parked car and the front of the car is taller than the toddler so the driver couldn't see the toddler and ran over the toddler. The toddler's parents/guardians are mostly to be blamed in that incident. It was a moderately busy street not suitable for unsupervised toddlers.
I have a pretty big SUV. There was an interesting segment I saw once were they had not one, but an entire kindergarten class stand in front of that model. From inside the car, you couldn't see any of them. For that reason, I always walk around my car if there are small children known to be in the vicinity. Sometimes I do it anyway just out of habit. 10 seconds of inconvenience to spare me a lifetime of guilt if I run over someone's kid? Yeah, I'm willing to take the time.
I'm also amazed parallel parking, a car behind me can practically disappear in the blind spot, making it very difficult to judge distances. I retrofitted a reverse camera. $75 or so from Amazon.
What I find criminal is that school busses aren't equipped with reverse cameras. Due to dead-end streets many routes require a backup-turnaround, and busses have a much larger rear blindspot than a car. The safest approach in this scenario is to backup AFTER picking up students, and BEFORE dropping off students. However you never know when a late child might be running for the bus. In many districts if a bus has to backup on school property there must be a spotter. There's cameras recording the students actions inside, but a simple $100 system can look behind the bus.
For all bystanders: "Volume licences" from Microsoft are upgrade only. You cannot buy bare metal with no license, and put a VL image on it. They are, for example, to upgrade a Windows XP Professional OEM license (or retail I believe) to a Windows 7 Professional license.
You are also entitled to: -Reimaging rights. If you bought computers that came with Windows 7 Pro OEM licences, you are allowed, at no charge, to install your Windows 7 Pro VL image on it.
-Downgrade rights. If you bought computers that came with Windows 7 Pro OEM licences, you are allowed, at no charge, to install your Windows XP Pro VL on it.
While I dislike some of Microsoft's licencing policies, I don't advocate piracy, particularly in a school or business.
Generally the laptops would work with a bit more memory,
It depends on what you mean by "Work". In our school district, we found out the hard way, that the VLM KMS Server (microsoft DRM) doesn't work with commodity hardware, PERIOD. There is an extra setting in BIOS that is a MS Key on Enterprise level hardware that is required for the KMS to activate our Win 7 Professional/Server 2k8R2. (Office KMS works fine however).
If you don't have hardware with SLP bits in it, you can get all your enterprise stuff to activate by changing the registry setting: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE\MediaBootInstall” to 0
REG ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE/v MediaBootInstall/t reg_dword/f/d 0 and slmgr/rearm
aught to do it.
MS volume licences are "upgrade only", so it either needs to recognize MS SLP bits in the BIOS, or installed by an "upgrade", or tricked to think it was installed as an upgrade.
Recruiters want it editable so they can take out your contact info and add garbage, but I've never seen an employer prefer a.doc
Many companies use Taleo for their resume submission. Taleo will readily accept PDF resumes.
My current job thankfully I submitted a PDF (to Taleo), because I had used Office 2010 formatting and fonts. The employer only had Office 2002 at the time so it would have rendered poorly if I submitted it as a DOC.
I've also seen strawmen argument of businesses being confused and not knowing how to open PDFs. Seriously, in 2012 pretty much EVERYONE knows how to make, open, and print PDFs. Even the little 50 year old ladies that you're surprised can log into the computer. Corporate computer images always include a PDF reader.
The next few years are going to be really fun to watch as companies fight over this new market. I think it's inevitable that phones and tablets will become the primary computing devices for most users in a matter of years, because they let people do the things that they use PCs for--Facebook, YouTube, email--without the hassle of PC maintenance. Tablets are already outselling the desktop PC market. Some people don't like "appliance computing", but having grown up with handheld consoles, I see appliance computing as a natural evolution and something to look forward to. PCs will still be around for those who need them.
Back in the day home users had home computers (simple appliances), while "real" computers were expensive complicated contraptions used at businesses (mini-computers, workstations). Early IBM-PCs (for all the crappy specs) were positioned above home computers in price. Eventually the home computer market got absorbed into the PC/Mac market, which also absorbed in a lot of the higher end market (server, supercomputer). People are using complex computers for their simple home user needs!
Home users would typically be best served by home computers, while workstation-esq PCs will still be a mainstay in businesses, and also in homes (but you might have 1 PC in a house of 5 people.) As it is the refresh cycle is longer in PCs than it used to be (mine is currently 4.5 years old with no plans to replace).
I can see the attraction to tablet/smart phone form factors. Years ago I got a palm pilot. It can crudly play music, and you can keep notes on it, but that's about it. Plus you get to look dorky using it.
After years of not getting a smartphone I finally got an iPod Touch. A lot of the benefit of a smart phone without the contract. It's almost what I'd hope the palm pilot would be.
- Playing Vimeo videos... I have no clue how they made their player so damned inefficient, but I get about 2 frames per second in a tiny box in the browser. Meanwhile, mplayer will happilly play 1080p H.264 content just fine on the same hardware.
This is all Flash. For years Youtube would struggle on a PIII, and if you went full screen you'd get 0.5fps (and see it scanning!) The CPU would be pegged.
Meanwhile you can take the.flv file and play it in VLC (or whatever), full screen and get smooth graphics and 30% CPU usage.
They claim newer versions have hardware acceleration, but I think that's only for GPUs with native H.264 decoding. For everything else it keeps scribbling in the 2D frame buffer with a crayon.
You also get useless Flash menus (or ads if you don't have ad block plus) in background browser tabs chewing up excess CPU cycles.
Combined with the highly inefficient P4 Netburst arcitecture, I wonder how much global warming / how many polar bear deaths can be attributed to Flash and Pentium4.
Aside from intense programs like games, and ridiculously inefficient browser technologies like Flash and abused Javascript (like Slashdot) a PIII still has enough power for a lot of tasks. Which is where you see many mobile platforms have a similar level of computing power (though usually with more native codecs)
As an example, many cybercafes and print shops still run p4 based desktops, they simply dont need more power
The public library near me still runs desktops with AthlonXP (or something), 256MB RAM, and Windows 2000. My own computer is 4.5 years old, and I'll keep using it till it gives out. As compared to years past, it really isn't that far out of date.
We all know LaTeX allows you to focus on the content and magically comes up with beautiful layouts. I mean the single best page layouts are always in the looks-the-same LaTeX format! And it's so intuitive to use!
Medfield uses PowerVR licensed graphic cores. The same as Apple and many other ARM SoCs.
Intel's Z series Atom uses GMA500 graphics. GMA500 is a PowerVR licensed graphic core. Impressive hardware specs but horrendous driver support in Linux AND Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
More fragmentation in the Linux space. Yippee!!
Maybe GNU will move to GNU/HURD, or as I've taken to calling it, GNU plus HURD.
Now this coupler is really cool:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE
Let me guess, you're a GNU/Linux kind of person?
Or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.
Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
This counts the number of people that cancelled cable subscriptions. What about those that never signed up?
A lot of people my age when they move out on their own, get internet only. Download what shows they want, or make do with the potpourri of channels that aren't filtered out. In addition to not paying for cable-tv service, they also don't pay for home phone service, prefering to just pay a cellphone bill.
My only experience with Wyse terminals was my local public library. In the early 90's they migrated from a manual card catalog / checkout system to a computer based one. Wyse terminals were located through the library, and at the checkout. It was revolutionary! You could modem (and eventually telnet) into the system to look up or renew books! They also had a couple Wyse terminals in the back connected to the local Freenet for public internet access.
They built a new branch 10 years ago that had brand new Wyse dumb terminals. Eventually they migrated to a web based system.
Meanwhile at my current job we use VT220 terminals and DECwriters connected to 1980's PDP-11's.
Before we replace those we have to get rid of the 1970's computers.
No, Flutter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeLZCy-_m3s
I agree. Of the Gawker empire it seems to have the least childish commentors, and least ranting/swearing articles.
I also agree though that the quality of the posts have gone down. With the likes of Gina, there was a lot more original content. Now it seems more about keeping post count up, and there's more and more reposts from other sites. Not only that but reports that are wrong, or weren't tested. There was also a while where they were obsessed with really cheesy DIY's. Cinderblock speakerstands, lamp speaker stands, and endless laptop/iphone stands made out of all sorts of garbage.
Commentorship really went down. After the site redesign comments on open thread have dropped by half.
But the other sites are really bad. Gizmodo swears a lot, and Jason, Jesus, and co love to swear, and love to love the iPhone, love to steal iPhones, and love to banhammer people over nothing.
--
Ever notice how people remember posters by their sigs and not their names?
I had to laugh at this. Only because I can think of two sigs I see here often "I changed my web server to port 6502, long live CPU wars" and "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway" but I couldn't tell you their names.
An interesting tidbit of history that some people get wrong (I'm not accusing you) is that Win2000 was actually released before WinME. Win2000: Feb-17-2000, WinME: Sept-14-2000 so in truth ME was obsolete before it came out. Windows 2000 also saw far longer shelf life: Both in 3rd party support, and Microsoft support. Microsoft discontinued extended support of Win2000 in July 2010 and WinME in July 2006.
Windows 2000 didn't get much public acceptance because it was never marketed as an end user / home operating system. The non-server edition was "Windows 2000 PROFESSIONAL" which cost more and had higher system requirements. Seldom would it be included with machines at Bestbuy, etc. I remember buying a $500 emachine July 2000 that only came with 32MB RAM and 98SE. Windows2000 is really desperate with that little RAM (Not that 98 is much better) Incidentally the machine had the RAM upgraded, it still works, and it ran Win2000 for the longest time. People were also still clinging to their DOS support. ME didn't run anything in the Autoexec.bat and config.sys so people couldn't run their crappy real mode drivers which they complained a lot about! All NT's (including 2k) never even pretended to parse those files given they weren't DOS based.
Windows 2000 truly was a huge leap forward. It introduced a lot of features NT4 lacked (PnP, USB, latest NTFS version) and XP/2003 were always just a small increment above it.
What you say about "95/98/ME was creaking horribly" is so true. You would get blue screens all the time. Heck you get a blue screen if you take out a floppy or CD and try to access it! The system would show the BSOD, stop, but let you hit a key to continue. Remember "System resources"? The mystical figure that decreased as the system ran, not all of it would be freed up as programs closed, causing you to reboot? It's true, you had to reboot at least once a day, though most people at the time shut down every night. I remember on only two occasions coaxing Windows 95 last long enough to crash at the 49.7 day bug mark. I got an analog photo of one occurrence!
Transitioning home/end users over to the rock solid NT architecture made all that go away. BSODs are a lot less rare, and usually traceable to crappy hardware or crappy drivers. I typically only reboot my home machines once a month at update time.
But yes, I agree with you, Linux had it's opportunity when Windows 9x was mainstream and such a steamy pile. That moment passed more than 10 years ago.
Look -- they are pieces of equipment they are not people or even animals for that matter. This is taking anthropomorphism way too far.
Yes, the shuttles hate that.
Did they at least put the eyes in the right place?
http://jalopnik.com/5870976/how-pixar-screwed-up-cartoon-cars-for-a-generation-of-kids
I have an iPod Touch but not an iPad. Although overall I'm satisfied with the device,I have some of the same experiences.
-Word processing and spreadsheet apps are poor, especially at the free pricepoint. I'm not looking for MS Office 2010 capability. I'd be satisfied with '97
-I haven't had a web browser crash this much in the past 10 years.
-Skype is bad. It's bad on Windows, it's bad on iOS. Frequent crashes, poor performance.
-More and more I'm suffering random unexplained bog-downs. Though the UI isn't giving feedback, it is registering my keypresses, so it will after stalling for a while catch up to what I'm typing.
Slashdot's bloated Javascript runs over dial-up?
Just stop using paper! Just as soon as a simple 8.5x11 epaper-pads is available at the right price that has wifi and nfc I'm going to either get fired or get those deployed. Paper is a horrible waste as is maintaining printers and storing the crap and all of that. We use paper for trivial bullshit that then gets thrown away. Paper and printing are costing us 12 million over the last 10 years though costs have decreased some it's leveled off and my prediction is it will cost 9 million for the next ten. I want us weened off paper for the trivial bullshit NOW. Hell I could by sixty thousand of the damn things for 150 each with 9 million. Several 'paper is god' dinosaurs will by gone soon so I may have a shot. Dunno.
I truly believe 2012 will be the year of the paperless office. That and the Linux Desktop.
In other news at some point we DID get the year of the Linux(ish) Mobile.
What's strange is how well a company (particularly a tech company) is doing is judged by the rate of growth.
I have a pretty big SUV. There was an interesting segment I saw once were they had not one, but an entire kindergarten class stand in front of that model. From inside the car, you couldn't see any of them. For that reason, I always walk around my car if there are small children known to be in the vicinity. Sometimes I do it anyway just out of habit. 10 seconds of inconvenience to spare me a lifetime of guilt if I run over someone's kid? Yeah, I'm willing to take the time.
I was surprised that my midsize sedan has as poor rearward visibility as a large SUV:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/car-safety/car-safety-reviews/mind-that-blind-spot-1005/best-and-worst/0304bli0_best-and-worst-rear-blind-zones.htm
I'm also amazed parallel parking, a car behind me can practically disappear in the blind spot, making it very difficult to judge distances. I retrofitted a reverse camera. $75 or so from Amazon.
What I find criminal is that school busses aren't equipped with reverse cameras. Due to dead-end streets many routes require a backup-turnaround, and busses have a much larger rear blindspot than a car. The safest approach in this scenario is to backup AFTER picking up students, and BEFORE dropping off students. However you never know when a late child might be running for the bus. In many districts if a bus has to backup on school property there must be a spotter. There's cameras recording the students actions inside, but a simple $100 system can look behind the bus.
For more information check: http://bit.ly/aXS77Q
For all bystanders: "Volume licences" from Microsoft are upgrade only. You cannot buy bare metal with no license, and put a VL image on it. They are, for example, to upgrade a Windows XP Professional OEM license (or retail I believe) to a Windows 7 Professional license.
You are also entitled to:
-Reimaging rights. If you bought computers that came with Windows 7 Pro OEM licences, you are allowed, at no charge, to install your Windows 7 Pro VL image on it.
-Downgrade rights. If you bought computers that came with Windows 7 Pro OEM licences, you are allowed, at no charge, to install your Windows XP Pro VL on it.
While I dislike some of Microsoft's licencing policies, I don't advocate piracy, particularly in a school or business.
It depends on what you mean by "Work". In our school district, we found out the hard way, that the VLM KMS Server (microsoft DRM) doesn't work with commodity hardware, PERIOD. There is an extra setting in BIOS that is a MS Key on Enterprise level hardware that is required for the KMS to activate our Win 7 Professional/Server 2k8R2. (Office KMS works fine however).
If you don't have hardware with SLP bits in it, you can get all your enterprise stuff to activate by changing the registry setting:
“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE\MediaBootInstall” to 0
REG ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE /v MediaBootInstall /t reg_dword /f /d 0 /rearm
and slmgr
aught to do it.
MS volume licences are "upgrade only", so it either needs to recognize MS SLP bits in the BIOS, or installed by an "upgrade", or tricked to think it was installed as an upgrade.
Recruiters want it editable so they can take out your contact info and add garbage, but I've never seen an employer prefer a .doc
Many companies use Taleo for their resume submission. Taleo will readily accept PDF resumes.
My current job thankfully I submitted a PDF (to Taleo), because I had used Office 2010 formatting and fonts. The employer only had Office 2002 at the time so it would have rendered poorly if I submitted it as a DOC.
I've also seen strawmen argument of businesses being confused and not knowing how to open PDFs. Seriously, in 2012 pretty much EVERYONE knows how to make, open, and print PDFs. Even the little 50 year old ladies that you're surprised can log into the computer. Corporate computer images always include a PDF reader.
On three year cycles they're not buying, they're leasing. Places I know that buy stretch out to 5 years, and machines usually have second lives.
The next few years are going to be really fun to watch as companies fight over this new market. I think it's inevitable that phones and tablets will become the primary computing devices for most users in a matter of years, because they let people do the things that they use PCs for--Facebook, YouTube, email--without the hassle of PC maintenance. Tablets are already outselling the desktop PC market. Some people don't like "appliance computing", but having grown up with handheld consoles, I see appliance computing as a natural evolution and something to look forward to. PCs will still be around for those who need them.
Back in the day home users had home computers (simple appliances), while "real" computers were expensive complicated contraptions used at businesses (mini-computers, workstations). Early IBM-PCs (for all the crappy specs) were positioned above home computers in price. Eventually the home computer market got absorbed into the PC/Mac market, which also absorbed in a lot of the higher end market (server, supercomputer). People are using complex computers for their simple home user needs!
Home users would typically be best served by home computers, while workstation-esq PCs will still be a mainstay in businesses, and also in homes (but you might have 1 PC in a house of 5 people.) As it is the refresh cycle is longer in PCs than it used to be (mine is currently 4.5 years old with no plans to replace).
I can see the attraction to tablet/smart phone form factors. Years ago I got a palm pilot. It can crudly play music, and you can keep notes on it, but that's about it. Plus you get to look dorky using it.
After years of not getting a smartphone I finally got an iPod Touch. A lot of the benefit of a smart phone without the contract. It's almost what I'd hope the palm pilot would be.
- Playing Vimeo videos... I have no clue how they made their player so damned inefficient, but I get about 2 frames per second in a tiny box in the browser. Meanwhile, mplayer will happilly play 1080p H.264 content just fine on the same hardware.
This is all Flash. For years Youtube would struggle on a PIII, and if you went full screen you'd get 0.5fps (and see it scanning!) The CPU would be pegged.
Meanwhile you can take the .flv file and play it in VLC (or whatever), full screen and get smooth graphics and 30% CPU usage.
They claim newer versions have hardware acceleration, but I think that's only for GPUs with native H.264 decoding. For everything else it keeps scribbling in the 2D frame buffer with a crayon.
You also get useless Flash menus (or ads if you don't have ad block plus) in background browser tabs chewing up excess CPU cycles.
Combined with the highly inefficient P4 Netburst arcitecture, I wonder how much global warming / how many polar bear deaths can be attributed to Flash and Pentium4.
Aside from intense programs like games, and ridiculously inefficient browser technologies like Flash and abused Javascript (like Slashdot) a PIII still has enough power for a lot of tasks. Which is where you see many mobile platforms have a similar level of computing power (though usually with more native codecs)
As an example, many cybercafes and print shops still run p4 based desktops, they simply dont need more power
The public library near me still runs desktops with AthlonXP (or something), 256MB RAM, and Windows 2000. My own computer is 4.5 years old, and I'll keep using it till it gives out. As compared to years past, it really isn't that far out of date.
We all know LaTeX allows you to focus on the content and magically comes up with beautiful layouts. I mean the single best page layouts are always in the looks-the-same LaTeX format! And it's so intuitive to use!
Because intel graphics suck.
Medfield uses PowerVR licensed graphic cores. The same as Apple and many other ARM SoCs.
Intel's Z series Atom uses GMA500 graphics. GMA500 is a PowerVR licensed graphic core. Impressive hardware specs but horrendous driver support in Linux AND Windows.
They're going to wait more than 10 years to promote it?