It is more of a So What. The BioFuel Truck can travel at 155MPH so what.
The thing that gets me is that 155MPH is easy. Almost any passenger car with over ~200HP will do 155MPH, or would if you took off the electronic limiter. I imagine you could beat it if you took a standard Audi A4 TDI 3.0 an put biodiesel in it. Or a VW Touareg TDI. And if not it would only be a result of the low redline and being gear limited by the transmission, so all you would have to do is replace the transmission with one that has a higher top gear.
Top speed is way too easy in general. All you do is put more horsepower in something with good aerodynamics, which is trivial when you have no fuel consumption constraints. It's not even interesting. Come back when you have a pickup that will do 80MPG at 80MPH.
You lose data because the differences between the lossy version after decompression and the lossless version are compounded by recompression. If you have a sufficiently high quality original, even if it technically is not lossless, the differences are minimal. To the point that you won't really be able to see the difference after recompressing it.
By contrast, YouTube is particularly bad because most people start with a low quality video and then YouTube recompresses it at a low bitrate.
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained and its by products are toxic for thousands of years, but that is better then toxic gasses floating in the air you breath.
The "thousands of years" thing is FUD too. It comes from the half life of certain Plutonium isotopes (~24,000 years), but ignores that said Plutonium is not substantially more radioactive than the Uranium they mined out of the ground to make it in the first place. It also ignores that newer reactors can use it as fuel, which gets rid of it permanently.
The most difficult components of nuclear waste are the medium half life isotopes that last for a few years, because they're radioactive enough to be problematic but long lived enough that you need to wait a few decades before they're "safe." But characterizing having to store them for e.g. 50 years as an insurmountable problem just doesn't pass the laugh test.
The problem is the fear cycle. Plants in operation are old and less safe than newer plants. We can't build newer plants because plants in operation are "unsafe." Plants in operation thereby continue to be "unsafe" rather than being replaced with newer, safer plants.
(Naturally the existing plants are not really "unsafe" because safety is a numbers game. The number of deaths per TWh is still lower for nuclear than it is for any of the alternatives by a wide margin. But when something happens it makes the news, and people are more about what the television says than the reality.)
Keynes is widely misunderstood. He once said that it would be better to build totally useless pyramids than to have high unemployment, but he wasn't actually suggesting that we should do that. It's obvious when you think about it, because there are a million and one productive things that could be done with the same labor. The actual idea is that it's better to pay someone to work in a soup kitchen than it is to watch crime skyrocket if you leave them to starve and they resort to theft.
If (as would seem obvious from this case) the DEA is not engaged in anything productive, you don't have to make them unemployed. You just have to eliminate their current positions and instead set them to work patrolling the streets in gang neighborhoods at night to suppress actual crime.
I don't imagine anybody bought the box, but you could get a new computer without it, a Mac being the obvious alternative for typical users.
But a Mac doesn't run that ancient call center software that corporate uses, and you've already integrated Dell's purchasing system with your accounting system so that it's easy to buy from them, plus you've got a support contract and if you buy new systems you can put them under the same contract instead of having to deal with multiple vendors, etc.
I think the point is that once you're on Linux, you aren't tied to any particular architecture. Which causes you to choose not-Itanium as your architecture.
I hate to start any conspiracy theories, but look at it from Intel's perspective. Intel likes a good skunkworks project. Try something new, if it pans out you make a mint, if not, well, cost of doing business. Take the tax deduction. (Incidentally, that is where the Core architecture came from. Israeli design team making improvements to the old P6, never expecting to need it outside of maybe laptops.)
So they come up with this crazy VLIW idea and realize it will cost a ton of money. At the same time, they can convince HP to transition away from their existing RISC architectures (PA-RISC and Alpha) and in so doing get them to pay a big chunk of the R&D costs. Then, if it works out, great! Intel is now the sole supplier of Itanium chips for HP's high end servers. And if it fails, great! Two more non-Intel RISC architectures dead and out of competition with x86, and Intel gets HP to pay half the cost of their own execution.
And at that point, once Intel is in the position where success or failure doesn't matter to them because they sell the same number of chips whether they're Itanium or x86, success becomes the more expensive option. Why keep developing new models of Itanic when you've already got a Xeon that is better in every significant way?
Well Android does (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-15/tech/30400455_1_ios-iphone-smartphone-market), but then you have to correlate that to market growth as well. Can you do that?
The share of Android phones as a percentage of the market has been growing. The market itself has been growing. By what strange application of mathematics could it be the case that the number of Android phones is not consequently also growing?
No i think you'll find the iphone is the most common smartphone.
Ah yes, the literal argument. And if the Apple has the most popular laptop model it clearly must mean that more people buy laptops with MacOS than with Windows. (Or not, in either case.)
The birth of the consumer smartphone market, look at how it's different from what it was 6 years ago. Same as with the birth of the PC market decades ago.
There were smartphones before the iPhone, like the Blackberry. Or that stuff Microsoft was selling back then. There has to be some reason why people chose early iOS and Android over their contemporaries. You're trying to define "smartphone" as "iPhone", which is just begging the question.
Your baseline is zero, you don't use a completely different product to base it on. If you wanted to measure a change in the ipad market share you don't use the newton as a baseline, you don't use the ipod as a baseline for the iphone, you don't use windows gaming pcs as a baseline for the xbox.
Those things are not replacements for one another. There was no one still using a Newton when the iPad came out. You can't run Excel on an XBOX; it isn't intended as a replacement for a Windows PC. They didn't stop making Windows when they started making XBOX, which means there was nobody whose Windows PC was too old who wanted a newer one but found them unavailable and looked to the XBOX as the nearest living relative. That is not the case with Windows Mobile, which disappeared just as WP7 came onto the scene and which Microsoft was more than happy to direct its former customers to if they came looking for "WM7" to replace their WM6. I mean look, they continued the version numbering. It isn't "Windows Phone 1.0."
No because it is obviously completely different, you might as well say that a gamer who has a windows PC is pre-disposed to buying an xbox instead of a PS3 or Wii, obviously stupid.
See above. Windows PCs are not fungible with consoles. You don't buy a console and throw away your PC. By contrast, nobody buys a WP7 phone to supplement a WM6 phone. They (the mythical they who actually buys one) would do it to replace a WM6 phone.
Given your lack of numbers or comparison to other platforms in their first year your whole argument is absolutely baseless.
The comparison to iOS and Android would be meaningless exactly because of what I'm talking about. Before iOS and Android, neither Apple nor Google made mobile operating systems. When WP7 was released, Microsoft already had a distribution chain. They had relationships with manufacturers and carriers. They had existing customers to convert to the new product. Their failure to make hay from that speaks much louder than would any delay (necessary to, you know, build relationships with manufacturers and carriers and find new customers) between initial release and substantial market share for iOS and Android.
Where? Those figures look pretty made up.
IIRC the specific estimates above are for the higher education market, but I'll give you the numbers for the whole US market. The trend of increasing Mac market share holds in either case. Here is one from 2007-2009, and another consistent with the first bringing us from 2009 to the present. We see Mac market share go from ~7% in 2007 to ~10% in 2009 and is now ~15%. (Naturally that comes at the expense of Windows because, well, what else?)
And that's just as applicable to the iPhone and Android these days too, particularly with mobile application lock-in.
Which fails to explain how both have more market share than they did a year ago. If there are more users now than before, not all of them can be those forced to keep the previous platform because critical legacy applications are not available on alternatives.
Often people just buy the most common product, on desktop OS that's Windows and in the smartphone land that's the iPhone.
Actually in smartphone land that's Android. But that's just proving the point: There is no default purchase in the smartphone market. Five years ago neither of them were anything. If there was a strong propensity for smart phone customers to just buy the most popular product then how did both of them become popular in the first place?
WM and WP7 are completely different and not even remotely compatible, putting them together makes as much sense as putting the ipad and newton together.
WP7 wasn't on sale until recently. You can't measure a change in market share unless you have a baseline. Even if you want to claim that it's a completely new product with no relation to previous Windows mobile devices (which is clearly wrong, since the people who had WM devices had to replace them with something and their familiarity with the Windows brand for phones predisposes them to WP7), comparing to a baseline "zero" still doesn't bode well for it, since their sales volume remains "near zero." And since it's pretty difficult to make fewer than zero sales, having little to no change in volume since a point prior to the product existing is probably not a good sign.
As for marketshare change worldwide Windows and OSX have remained pretty flat for many years, things haven't changed there much.
Not really. The change has been slow, but it's clearly there. It wasn't long ago that Windows had ~90% share and MacOS 10%. Now it's more like 80%/20%.
I find that resource limits tend to be more trouble than they're worth. Like right now Firefox is using 1.2GB of RAM because I have a million tabs open. But that's why I have 8GB of RAM. I don't care and I don't want to hear about it, and I certainly don't want to have it stopping me from opening new tabs because it can't allocate any more memory.
The way to handle resources isn't arbitrary limits, it's scheduling priorities. Firefox can use 20GB of RAM if it wants, but that "ram" is really going to be "swap" if anything else needs actual RAM. Angry Birds can use all the cores unless something else needs them for something, in which case it can't. This is really a solved problem.
You do understand that CyanogenMod was a recommendation rather than a requirement. You can perfectly well use your own mail server with stock Android.
(Incidentally, by "troubles" I can only assume you're referring to added features and more regular updates and improvements than you can get from a carrier for any device. And what warranty? You mean the text in the EULA for every piece of software on Earth that disclaims all warranties?)
I'll grant you that 50W for the total is an overestimate, which is clear when you do the math for hours of battery given battery capacity. (I took the number from the post I was replying to.)
But the point about TDP not being typical consumption is still valid. Look at the link I posted for the HP laptop with the AMD A series processor. If you take the most similar battery to the one in the MacBook Air (the 55Wh one), the battery life for the AMD laptop is 7 hours 15 minutes. Which is less than a watt from the calculated power consumption of the Air using your method, ~7.6W vs. ~7.1W. And there is undoubtedly that much margin of error in the numbers.
So then you want to talk about the benchmark results and say that the motherboard matters. Of course it does! When you're talking about ~7-8W total power consumption for the entire system, everything matters. But I think the larger point here is that AMD CPUs are competitive with Intel on power consumption. There is no great discrepancy one way or the other. Which means that attempting to disqualify the AMD chip for using too much is wrongheaded.
It's modded troll because there is no mod for "-1 Astroturf." Or did no one else find is suspicious that the GP is five paragraphs long and yet was posted with the same timestamp to the minute as the story itself?
I doubt there are that many people who would put Windows and the iPhone in one quality-bucket and OSX and WP7 in another.
I think the problem is that you have to look at market share changes. You can sell millions of copies of a turd sandwich like Vista, even if there are better options available, because many people buy based on inertia.
But if you compare market share changes over time, you get a much different picture. In particular, it puts OSX and iPhone back in the same bucket as one another, and puts Windows and WM/WP7 together in the other one.
By this logic mafia protection money is not "your dime" either, if they arrange to take their cut before you can put the cash your pocket and the protection racket has been going on as long as you've had your store.
Apps should be installed in a sandbox and only allowed outside of the box when a user grants them access.
This is doing it the wrong way. You don't want a sandbox, you want capabilities. Then the package manager can give you good defaults based on the application like "yes, Firefox can access the Internet" and "no, Angry Birds can't read from the file system" etc.
The user can then have the option of changing what capabilities an application gets, but you make it like 'about:config' in Firefox. It's there, but grandma doesn't know it's there. And for the most part you don't have to mess with the defaults.
So how do you make a file compression program that uses a Sandbox?
Imagine gzip without the ability to read or write to the filesystem. It's still just as useful: you just type 'gzip -c file.gz' and your file gets compressed, and if gzip is broken it can't do anything other than compress the file wrong. And there is no reason why a GUI application can't be designed to work in an analogous way.
It does mean that the world of Windows software development would look a lot different. A zip program doesn't need its own UI. All it needs is to provide an algorithm to the OS and a hook that tells the US it can put it in the 'things you can do to a file' menu. Then the zip program never gets access to the file system, the OS just feeds it data to compress on stdin and takes the compressed data from stdout.
One amendment would simply state that Congress shall protect the right to freedom of religion, making no law that includes distinctions on the basis of religion, and protects the rights to freedom of the press and of speech by making no law that infringes on them without due process. Another amendment would simply state that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, homes, papers and effects is the right to privacy. Might as well go the next step in stating that the right to keep and bear arms necessary to supplying a militia that defends a free state is protected from infringement by law. All these clarifications make the Constitution direct the government to actually protect our freedoms, rather than allow weasel words (and weasel lawyers) to get the government to abuse our freedoms.
That is pretty much what it already says. Your changes are nothing that a bunch of lawyers couldn't still weasel out of.
The problem with all of this is that the constitution uses absolute language ("Congress shall make no law") when the literal interpretation is unreasonable. Certainly Congress can punish soldiers who commit treason by telling the enemy about troop movements, even though that is just as clearly a restriction on "speech." And once we accept that there are some unspecified exceptions to the rule, the courts keep hammering at it until (like the commerce clause or the 9th and 10th amendments) there is really nothing left.
What we are all dancing around is this: If we want a clear, simple constitution then we have to trust the courts to do the right thing. If we don't trust the courts then the constitution has got to look like the tax code.
You can get a subset of voting groups to oppose a candidate (or support a candidate) but as the number of groups increases, the voting power of each group decreases.
I don't dispute that, but how does it change anything? It only increases the number of groups available to be selectively informed, which if anything only makes the problem worse because someone with money can still afford to do it and someone with less money is less able to afford to undo it.
In addition to that, most elections are close. If the vote would have been 55% to 45%, you don't have to change the votes of every voting block, only of the 5% in the opposite camp who are most easily swayed.
I think you're confusing actual power draw with TDP. So for example, an A8-3500M has a 35W TDP, that's the most it will draw for a sustained period of time. The actual power draw at idle will be more in the neighborhood of maybe 10-20W, something like that. So you take that, you add the screen, the hard drive, memory, wireless, etc. and you get your 50W. The CPU is not the dominant factor. In most cases the screen uses more.
Slashdot Mirror
It is more of a So What. The BioFuel Truck can travel at 155MPH so what.
The thing that gets me is that 155MPH is easy. Almost any passenger car with over ~200HP will do 155MPH, or would if you took off the electronic limiter. I imagine you could beat it if you took a standard Audi A4 TDI 3.0 an put biodiesel in it. Or a VW Touareg TDI. And if not it would only be a result of the low redline and being gear limited by the transmission, so all you would have to do is replace the transmission with one that has a higher top gear.
Top speed is way too easy in general. All you do is put more horsepower in something with good aerodynamics, which is trivial when you have no fuel consumption constraints. It's not even interesting. Come back when you have a pickup that will do 80MPG at 80MPH.
You lose data because the differences between the lossy version after decompression and the lossless version are compounded by recompression. If you have a sufficiently high quality original, even if it technically is not lossless, the differences are minimal. To the point that you won't really be able to see the difference after recompressing it.
By contrast, YouTube is particularly bad because most people start with a low quality video and then YouTube recompresses it at a low bitrate.
Pray tell where do we find nearby waterfalls sufficient to replace the two dozen plus nuclear reactors that power the northeastern United States?
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained and its by products are toxic for thousands of years, but that is better then toxic gasses floating in the air you breath.
The "thousands of years" thing is FUD too. It comes from the half life of certain Plutonium isotopes (~24,000 years), but ignores that said Plutonium is not substantially more radioactive than the Uranium they mined out of the ground to make it in the first place. It also ignores that newer reactors can use it as fuel, which gets rid of it permanently.
The most difficult components of nuclear waste are the medium half life isotopes that last for a few years, because they're radioactive enough to be problematic but long lived enough that you need to wait a few decades before they're "safe." But characterizing having to store them for e.g. 50 years as an insurmountable problem just doesn't pass the laugh test.
Compare deaths per terawatt produced between coal and nuclear.
OK, Deaths per TWh:
Coal – world average: 161
Coal – China: 278
Coal – USA: 15
Nuclear: 0.04
The problem is the fear cycle. Plants in operation are old and less safe than newer plants. We can't build newer plants because plants in operation are "unsafe." Plants in operation thereby continue to be "unsafe" rather than being replaced with newer, safer plants.
(Naturally the existing plants are not really "unsafe" because safety is a numbers game. The number of deaths per TWh is still lower for nuclear than it is for any of the alternatives by a wide margin. But when something happens it makes the news, and people are more about what the television says than the reality.)
Keynes is widely misunderstood. He once said that it would be better to build totally useless pyramids than to have high unemployment, but he wasn't actually suggesting that we should do that. It's obvious when you think about it, because there are a million and one productive things that could be done with the same labor. The actual idea is that it's better to pay someone to work in a soup kitchen than it is to watch crime skyrocket if you leave them to starve and they resort to theft.
If (as would seem obvious from this case) the DEA is not engaged in anything productive, you don't have to make them unemployed. You just have to eliminate their current positions and instead set them to work patrolling the streets in gang neighborhoods at night to suppress actual crime.
I don't imagine anybody bought the box, but you could get a new computer without it, a Mac being the obvious alternative for typical users.
But a Mac doesn't run that ancient call center software that corporate uses, and you've already integrated Dell's purchasing system with your accounting system so that it's easy to buy from them, plus you've got a support contract and if you buy new systems you can put them under the same contract instead of having to deal with multiple vendors, etc.
I think the point is that once you're on Linux, you aren't tied to any particular architecture. Which causes you to choose not-Itanium as your architecture.
I hate to start any conspiracy theories, but look at it from Intel's perspective. Intel likes a good skunkworks project. Try something new, if it pans out you make a mint, if not, well, cost of doing business. Take the tax deduction. (Incidentally, that is where the Core architecture came from. Israeli design team making improvements to the old P6, never expecting to need it outside of maybe laptops.)
So they come up with this crazy VLIW idea and realize it will cost a ton of money. At the same time, they can convince HP to transition away from their existing RISC architectures (PA-RISC and Alpha) and in so doing get them to pay a big chunk of the R&D costs. Then, if it works out, great! Intel is now the sole supplier of Itanium chips for HP's high end servers. And if it fails, great! Two more non-Intel RISC architectures dead and out of competition with x86, and Intel gets HP to pay half the cost of their own execution.
And at that point, once Intel is in the position where success or failure doesn't matter to them because they sell the same number of chips whether they're Itanium or x86, success becomes the more expensive option. Why keep developing new models of Itanic when you've already got a Xeon that is better in every significant way?
Well Android does (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-15/tech/30400455_1_ios-iphone-smartphone-market), but then you have to correlate that to market growth as well. Can you do that?
The share of Android phones as a percentage of the market has been growing. The market itself has been growing. By what strange application of mathematics could it be the case that the number of Android phones is not consequently also growing?
No i think you'll find the iphone is the most common smartphone.
Ah yes, the literal argument. And if the Apple has the most popular laptop model it clearly must mean that more people buy laptops with MacOS than with Windows. (Or not, in either case.)
The birth of the consumer smartphone market, look at how it's different from what it was 6 years ago. Same as with the birth of the PC market decades ago.
There were smartphones before the iPhone, like the Blackberry. Or that stuff Microsoft was selling back then. There has to be some reason why people chose early iOS and Android over their contemporaries. You're trying to define "smartphone" as "iPhone", which is just begging the question.
Your baseline is zero, you don't use a completely different product to base it on. If you wanted to measure a change in the ipad market share you don't use the newton as a baseline, you don't use the ipod as a baseline for the iphone, you don't use windows gaming pcs as a baseline for the xbox.
Those things are not replacements for one another. There was no one still using a Newton when the iPad came out. You can't run Excel on an XBOX; it isn't intended as a replacement for a Windows PC. They didn't stop making Windows when they started making XBOX, which means there was nobody whose Windows PC was too old who wanted a newer one but found them unavailable and looked to the XBOX as the nearest living relative. That is not the case with Windows Mobile, which disappeared just as WP7 came onto the scene and which Microsoft was more than happy to direct its former customers to if they came looking for "WM7" to replace their WM6. I mean look, they continued the version numbering. It isn't "Windows Phone 1.0."
No because it is obviously completely different, you might as well say that a gamer who has a windows PC is pre-disposed to buying an xbox instead of a PS3 or Wii, obviously stupid.
See above. Windows PCs are not fungible with consoles. You don't buy a console and throw away your PC. By contrast, nobody buys a WP7 phone to supplement a WM6 phone. They (the mythical they who actually buys one) would do it to replace a WM6 phone.
Given your lack of numbers or comparison to other platforms in their first year your whole argument is absolutely baseless.
The comparison to iOS and Android would be meaningless exactly because of what I'm talking about. Before iOS and Android, neither Apple nor Google made mobile operating systems. When WP7 was released, Microsoft already had a distribution chain. They had relationships with manufacturers and carriers. They had existing customers to convert to the new product. Their failure to make hay from that speaks much louder than would any delay (necessary to, you know, build relationships with manufacturers and carriers and find new customers) between initial release and substantial market share for iOS and Android.
Where? Those figures look pretty made up.
IIRC the specific estimates above are for the higher education market, but I'll give you the numbers for the whole US market. The trend of increasing Mac market share holds in either case. Here is one from 2007-2009, and another consistent with the first bringing us from 2009 to the present. We see Mac market share go from ~7% in 2007 to ~10% in 2009 and is now ~15%. (Naturally that comes at the expense of Windows because, well, what else?)
And that's just as applicable to the iPhone and Android these days too, particularly with mobile application lock-in.
Which fails to explain how both have more market share than they did a year ago. If there are more users now than before, not all of them can be those forced to keep the previous platform because critical legacy applications are not available on alternatives.
Often people just buy the most common product, on desktop OS that's Windows and in the smartphone land that's the iPhone.
Actually in smartphone land that's Android. But that's just proving the point: There is no default purchase in the smartphone market. Five years ago neither of them were anything. If there was a strong propensity for smart phone customers to just buy the most popular product then how did both of them become popular in the first place?
WM and WP7 are completely different and not even remotely compatible, putting them together makes as much sense as putting the ipad and newton together.
WP7 wasn't on sale until recently. You can't measure a change in market share unless you have a baseline. Even if you want to claim that it's a completely new product with no relation to previous Windows mobile devices (which is clearly wrong, since the people who had WM devices had to replace them with something and their familiarity with the Windows brand for phones predisposes them to WP7), comparing to a baseline "zero" still doesn't bode well for it, since their sales volume remains "near zero." And since it's pretty difficult to make fewer than zero sales, having little to no change in volume since a point prior to the product existing is probably not a good sign.
As for marketshare change worldwide Windows and OSX have remained pretty flat for many years, things haven't changed there much.
Not really. The change has been slow, but it's clearly there. It wasn't long ago that Windows had ~90% share and MacOS 10%. Now it's more like 80%/20%.
I find that resource limits tend to be more trouble than they're worth. Like right now Firefox is using 1.2GB of RAM because I have a million tabs open. But that's why I have 8GB of RAM. I don't care and I don't want to hear about it, and I certainly don't want to have it stopping me from opening new tabs because it can't allocate any more memory.
The way to handle resources isn't arbitrary limits, it's scheduling priorities. Firefox can use 20GB of RAM if it wants, but that "ram" is really going to be "swap" if anything else needs actual RAM. Angry Birds can use all the cores unless something else needs them for something, in which case it can't. This is really a solved problem.
You do understand that CyanogenMod was a recommendation rather than a requirement. You can perfectly well use your own mail server with stock Android.
(Incidentally, by "troubles" I can only assume you're referring to added features and more regular updates and improvements than you can get from a carrier for any device. And what warranty? You mean the text in the EULA for every piece of software on Earth that disclaims all warranties?)
I'll grant you that 50W for the total is an overestimate, which is clear when you do the math for hours of battery given battery capacity. (I took the number from the post I was replying to.)
But the point about TDP not being typical consumption is still valid. Look at the link I posted for the HP laptop with the AMD A series processor. If you take the most similar battery to the one in the MacBook Air (the 55Wh one), the battery life for the AMD laptop is 7 hours 15 minutes. Which is less than a watt from the calculated power consumption of the Air using your method, ~7.6W vs. ~7.1W. And there is undoubtedly that much margin of error in the numbers.
So then you want to talk about the benchmark results and say that the motherboard matters. Of course it does! When you're talking about ~7-8W total power consumption for the entire system, everything matters. But I think the larger point here is that AMD CPUs are competitive with Intel on power consumption. There is no great discrepancy one way or the other. Which means that attempting to disqualify the AMD chip for using too much is wrongheaded.
It's modded troll because there is no mod for "-1 Astroturf." Or did no one else find is suspicious that the GP is five paragraphs long and yet was posted with the same timestamp to the minute as the story itself?
But what does that have anything to do with which kind of phone to get? You can perfectly well use your own mail server with CyanogenMod.
I doubt there are that many people who would put Windows and the iPhone in one quality-bucket and OSX and WP7 in another.
I think the problem is that you have to look at market share changes. You can sell millions of copies of a turd sandwich like Vista, even if there are better options available, because many people buy based on inertia.
But if you compare market share changes over time, you get a much different picture. In particular, it puts OSX and iPhone back in the same bucket as one another, and puts Windows and WM/WP7 together in the other one.
By this logic mafia protection money is not "your dime" either, if they arrange to take their cut before you can put the cash your pocket and the protection racket has been going on as long as you've had your store.
Apps should be installed in a sandbox and only allowed outside of the box when a user grants them access.
This is doing it the wrong way. You don't want a sandbox, you want capabilities. Then the package manager can give you good defaults based on the application like "yes, Firefox can access the Internet" and "no, Angry Birds can't read from the file system" etc.
The user can then have the option of changing what capabilities an application gets, but you make it like 'about:config' in Firefox. It's there, but grandma doesn't know it's there. And for the most part you don't have to mess with the defaults.
So how do you make a file compression program that uses a Sandbox?
Imagine gzip without the ability to read or write to the filesystem. It's still just as useful: you just type 'gzip -c file.gz' and your file gets compressed, and if gzip is broken it can't do anything other than compress the file wrong. And there is no reason why a GUI application can't be designed to work in an analogous way.
It does mean that the world of Windows software development would look a lot different. A zip program doesn't need its own UI. All it needs is to provide an algorithm to the OS and a hook that tells the US it can put it in the 'things you can do to a file' menu. Then the zip program never gets access to the file system, the OS just feeds it data to compress on stdin and takes the compressed data from stdout.
Not if the constitutional amendment we pass specifically prohibits that.
One amendment would simply state that Congress shall protect the right to freedom of religion, making no law that includes distinctions on the basis of religion, and protects the rights to freedom of the press and of speech by making no law that infringes on them without due process. Another amendment would simply state that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, homes, papers and effects is the right to privacy. Might as well go the next step in stating that the right to keep and bear arms necessary to supplying a militia that defends a free state is protected from infringement by law. All these clarifications make the Constitution direct the government to actually protect our freedoms, rather than allow weasel words (and weasel lawyers) to get the government to abuse our freedoms.
That is pretty much what it already says. Your changes are nothing that a bunch of lawyers couldn't still weasel out of.
The problem with all of this is that the constitution uses absolute language ("Congress shall make no law") when the literal interpretation is unreasonable. Certainly Congress can punish soldiers who commit treason by telling the enemy about troop movements, even though that is just as clearly a restriction on "speech." And once we accept that there are some unspecified exceptions to the rule, the courts keep hammering at it until (like the commerce clause or the 9th and 10th amendments) there is really nothing left.
What we are all dancing around is this: If we want a clear, simple constitution then we have to trust the courts to do the right thing. If we don't trust the courts then the constitution has got to look like the tax code.
You can get a subset of voting groups to oppose a candidate (or support a candidate) but as the number of groups increases, the voting power of each group decreases.
I don't dispute that, but how does it change anything? It only increases the number of groups available to be selectively informed, which if anything only makes the problem worse because someone with money can still afford to do it and someone with less money is less able to afford to undo it.
In addition to that, most elections are close. If the vote would have been 55% to 45%, you don't have to change the votes of every voting block, only of the 5% in the opposite camp who are most easily swayed.
I think you're confusing actual power draw with TDP. So for example, an A8-3500M has a 35W TDP, that's the most it will draw for a sustained period of time. The actual power draw at idle will be more in the neighborhood of maybe 10-20W, something like that. So you take that, you add the screen, the hard drive, memory, wireless, etc. and you get your 50W. The CPU is not the dominant factor. In most cases the screen uses more.
Incidentally, Llano has lower idle power consumption than Core i3.
So as for this:
I'm not sure I've seen a single AMD laptop (that isn't based on the E-350) with battery life over 4 hours.
Here you go. AMD A6, "9-cell (100 WHr): Up to 12 hours and 30 minutes."