Sounds good to me. But what happens when you tell the average user (who pays Best Buy to snap in DIMMs) that they need to pop the cover off of their PC to upgrade the drive firmware? 99% of them will freak and at least one of those people will sue the company because they pried the cover off of their PC with a tire iron. Not only that, IT departments would be livid if they had to upgrade firmware in 500 PCs and had to pop the cover on each one to do it.
Jesus Fucking Christ! The ignorance some Linux users have about firmware is amazing. You can't flash CD-ROM firmware by copying a file the device with the dd command.
I'm an embedded systems engineer. There is no standard "Upgrade firmware" command built into the ATAPI or IDE spec, is there? Each manufacturer picks a method and random probing will trigger some of these methods.
Yeah, but this is a completely diffenet type of damage. It has nothing to do with firmware.
I looked on the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) Mandrake web site and they referred to the drives being "physically dead" or some such, but I have no faith that it's not indicative of a firmware corruption problem. Most software people say that the motherboard is "fried" when they flash in the wrong BIOS, so I don't put much faith in non-technical explanations. Do you know what the particular problem is?
Digital cryptographic signatures work pretty well. If the hardware will only function with a signed firmware, then it's unlikely you will do much besides temporarily disable the drive, requiring a reflash.
If the device has the CPU to deal with that, then, yes, it would work. That's the idea behind a lot of the DRM hardware we've heard about. No flashing of unauthorized firmware.
You, my friend, are forgetting one simple thing... Mandrake was not attempting to upgrade firmware in the el-cheapo LG CD-ROM drives, it was simply TRYING TO READ FROM IT.
What they were attempting to do and what they did are obviously two very different things. If memory serves, the way that you used to put some Dallas Semiconductor flash parts into programming mode was with reads from specific locations with a specific timing and order.
And on that note, I know on at least some mobo's there exists a jumper to disable BIOS flashing
And sometimes it doesn't do what it claims. Some years back, I had an Asus motherboard with such a jumper and it did nothing. I wired it to the "turbo" button on the case figuring that I could manually protect against a flash. Nope. Turned out that Asus swapped in a EEPROM for a Flash part (not exactly the same) and the jumper no longer worked.
(some of em even have dual BIOS's, ain't that neat?)
Gigabyte, I believe.
but I'm not exactly sure if the other hardware devices have a simliar "feature"... My better judgement is telling me this is a definate no, can anyone else comment?
You're right on that. But all of them should. It's only a matter of time until some worm author creates something that targets the flashable firmware on motherboards and peripherals.
If you consider scrambling firmware to be physical damage (I don't),
I never said that it was "physical damage." I said that it could render it unusable.
a "RESTORE FACTORY DEFAULTS" switch solves that problem.
Does your motherboard have a "restore factory defaults" switch? Does your CD burner? Such a switch would require a completely separate, non-flashable copy of the firmware and a CPU capable of flashing that copy back into the flash memory.
Microsoft releases service packs regularly for Windows that are at least 350mb in size... usually bigger.
Two problems with that argument:
1. Mandrake 9.2 has only been out since October 14. Microsoft does not release 350MB of updates within two weeks of releasing the OS.
2. Windows service packs are not "at least 350MB in size... usually bigger":
Windows 2000 Service Pack 4: About 132MB
Windows 2000 Service Pack 3: About 127MB
Windows XP Service Pack 1a: About 128MB
Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 6a: About 35MB
There is clearly something wrong with the LG drives if they are able to be destroyed by software.
Can flashing the wrong BIOS on your motherboard render it unusable? If I can prove to you that it can, will you be demanding a new motherboard from the manufacturer?
How on earth you implied linux destroys hardware, I will never know.
Because this distro did do just that and Mandrake admits it.
It could have easily been a flaw in Windows that did this.
So the next time that a worm hits Windows, will you be saying "a flaw in Linux could allow the same thing, so let's not criticize Microsoft"?
Dude, software should never be able to damage hardware. Not in 2003. Part of this is just common sense -- how could anyone design hardware that bad?
Tell me the make and model of your motherboard, CD-ROM drive, DVD drive, CD-R/W drive, modem, and anything else in your system with a flashable BIOS. I'll send you a CD-ROM to boot up. Let me know how it goes for you.
P.S. Make sure that you have an alternate PC to e-mail me from.
If you're a hardware manufacturer...and software is capable of destroying your products, you're fucking fired.
So how do you propose putting firmware updates into CD-ROM drives, DVD drives, modems, etc.? Just about any peripheral which has flashable firmware can be rendered unusable by software.
Tablet PC hardware gives us a glimpse of where laptops should have headed. They typically have a much lower power consumption and, hence, could run a lot longer on a given battery size. That's what most people need. They don't need a 2.8ghz P4 to do word processing or compose e-mail. They don't need 17" screens either. But rather than embrace a real need (battery life and light weight), laptop manufacturers have concentrated on turning out machines with more horsepower than a blown Ferrari with nitrous oxide. When people happily use desktop machines running at under a gigahertz, it really makes you wonder why the slowest HP laptops now have either an Athlon XP-M 2200+ or a 2.4ghz Celeron CPU.
Want to sell Tablet PCs? Get rid of the swivel feature on the display, put a full-sized battery in them, load them up with Windows XP Pro, and sell them as long battery life, lightweight, practical laptops.
It's my viewpoint, not a "bias." Do you consider yourself biased or do you consider yourself conservative? Answer me!
But you must realize that a majority of americans feel differently,
Then why did Gore get about half a million more votes than Bush?
Well, there is a long, proud tradition of murder in the USA also
We, as a people, are "proud" of murder? I don't think so. We are, however, proud of those who stood up to unjust laws.
The second was a clear violation of the law, and probably set the cause of civil rights back more than anything, by associating black activists with willful violations of the law.
You need to go back to your history books (assuming that you ever opened one in the first place). Historians generally view her act of civil disobedience as pivotal in advancing the cause of civil rights for blacks.
As for banning subversive activities, there is a well-established constitutional authority to override certain privileges when the national interest is at stake; considering the tradition of treason within the liberal movement, I don't think my suggestions are at all in conflict with this principle.
That sounds just like the rationale for Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in June 1989. Yep, just another case of self-righteous conservatives looking out for what they viewed as the national interest.
In short, I am for the use of state power to protect freedom,
How does protecting the interests of a corrupt, unethical corporation qualify as protecting freedom? How does the state protect freedom when it uses laws to hide documents that expose corporate corruption?
and you are for the use of state power to suppress freedom.
How? Please, tell me what I asked the state to do in this matter. Or was that just another in a long series of lies?
You should stop trying to redefine conservatism as anything that pampered Western liberal intellectuals don't like, and vice versa. It's dishonest and despicable.
What's despicable and dishonest is your attempts to portray a society which subjugates women, resists change at all costs, and highly values conformity as anything other than conservative.
Just another example of how America's colleges promote liberalism
Okay. That's a good thing.
and anti-americanism
How is it anti-American to expose flaws in voting machines which could threaten the very heart of our society; the fair democratic election of our leaders?
and promote the acceptance of lawbreaking
We should accept lawbreaking when the laws being broken. Did you ever learn about the Boston Tea Party? Ever hear of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a bus? Civil disobedience has a long, proud history in America.
If you like conservatism and patriotism, and you dislike civil disobedience, then move to Communist China. They are very conservative, very patriotic, and don't tolerate civil disobedience. Your kind of people...
The aptly-named "liberal arts college" should be banned if you ask me.
No one did, but you'd have really appreciated Mao's Cultural Revolution where intellectuals were rounded up and sent to brutal labor camps.
Name a product on which Iomega hasn't screwed the pooch.
I (and the stockholders) would love to, but there isn't one.
I've never understood why they had to change the Zip drive hardware design, case, and power supply every couple of months. You'd buy one in April and it would have a switching supply. The one you bought in May would have a double-the-size conventional wall-wart. The one you bought in July would have a completely different case style. It was infuriating and a total waste of time. I'd have much preferred that they quit wasting money on case designs and just lowered the cost of the units or the media. But that wouldn't have been the Iomega way of doing things.
The problem with Zip wasn't so much the cost of the drive, it was the way they kept control on the media.
It was really both. The cost of the drives was high enough that they weren't an impulse buy. They cost too much for Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc. to include them in pre-built PCs. That limited demand for media and the drives.
Because the demand for the media was limited, the economies of scale did not materialize the way that they should. And because the quantity sold was low, Iomega kept the price artificially high to keep the income stream up.
It's really a chicken and egg thing. The drives weren't in demand because the media was too expensive and the media wasn't in demand because the drives didn't have enough market penetration -- due to their high cost.
According to the chart at the end of the article, Zip drives are a dying technology. I've got news for those guys: Zip drives died, rigor mortis set in, the were embalmed, buried, and have mostly decomposed.
I've got a few of them at home, including two internal IDE Zip drives, an external USB Zip drive, and an external SCSI Zip drive. I also have about 50 Zip disks but I can't even remember the last time I spun one of them up.
Iomega pissed away that entire market with their greed. Had they been smarter, they would have given the drives away in every Dell, Compaq, and Gateway system sold and made money off of the media (ala the Gillette shaver business model). Instead, they continued to charge too much for the drives, limiting their adoption. As CD-R and CD-RW media plummeted in price, Iomega continued to charge an arm and a leg for their Zip media rather than dropping prices to retain customers. They introduced the Zip 250, Zip Click!, and Zip 750, all of which failed due to the high drive costs, exorbitant media costs, and marketplace confusion with customers not knowing which model to buy in order to exchange data with colleagues and friends. They never effectively tried to broaden the appeal of their media with MP3 recorders, players, or in-dash car units.
After effectively killing the Zip product line, they introduced external CD-R/W drives. Unfortunately, they were just rebadged units stuck in gaudy blue cases -- for which they charged double what everyone else did. They're toast.
2. Institute a block all email except where you have whitelisted the sender...
That's just absurd. Put up a for-sale ad and you have to know who will respond in advance? You circulate your resume and then refuse e-mail from people offering you a job?
This approach is very similar to the approach employed by various firewalls. Ignore all except where otherwise told to.
No, it is not at all like that. For a firewall to be analogous, you would have to whitelist every IP that was to access your web server, FTP server, etc. Firewalls normally block by destination (port, IP, etc.) rather than source (exceptions being when you have identified a malicious source).
Apple tried it with the very first Mac Portable in 1989, and it was a valiant but flawed effort. Sure, it had an 8 hour battery life, but it also weighed 17lbs thanks to a huge lead-acid battery and had a monochrome non-backlit screen.
You're missing the point. If people were to look at their actual processor horsepower, RAM, and hard drive needs, laptop manufacturers could make sub-ghz machines with low-power CPUs (like VIA C3s, Transmetas, etc.), slower 2.5" hard drives, no cooling fans, and use other technologies to reduce power requirements. Then they could use the same batteries used today and probably get 8 hour run times -- and probably with a lighter, smaller laptop.
I bought an HP laptop. It has a 1.6ghz mobile Celeraon. Unlike the "old" laptops, there is no way to slow the CPU to extend the battery life. I don't need 1.6ghz to edit a document on a plane. I don't need 1.6ghz to surf the web or check my e-mail. So now I have to carry two batteries so that I can rotate them out while the laptop runs a fan and tries to scorch the flesh off of my lap.
What about digital audio? I've don't plenty of work, both hobbyist and pro gigs, using less than 512MB of RAM. Get some perspective: Most CDs don't even have 512MB of music on them -- and it's not like you need to be able to get an entire CD into memory at once anyway.
I remember when Windows 98 recommended 128mb, now XP wants 256MB
Where do you get those numbers and is there toilet paper stuck to them?
According to Microsoft, Windows 98 required a 486DX 66 megahertz (MHz) or faster processor (Pentium central processing unit recommended), 16 megabytes (MB) of memory (24 MB recommended), and about 175MB of free hard disk space. Yeah, put 256MB into that Pentium 100 system and you're ready to rock and roll with Windows XP!
Face it: By the time that the next version of Windows rolls out, the 900mhz CPU in that laptop will be wheezing. Besides, you don't have to buy a new OS just because Microsoft releases one.
Face it, you're not going to be rendering in Maya, encoding DVDs to XviD/OGM or editing 60,000x20,000 pixel images in Photoshop on a 900 MHz CPU; Unreal Tournament 2003 isn't going to suck up all that memory running at 12 FPS on the integrated Intel graphics. And given the screen size, your ability to multitask is limited, since only so much will fit at once, so unless you feel like leaving open 70 minimized windows for some reason, that won't be an issue either.
Thank you!
I have an HP laptop that I just upgraded from 128MB to 384MB and, for a laptop, that's a stout quantity of RAM. It never ceases to amaze me how much crap people think needs to be in a laptop. It's a friggin' laptop. You surf the web, check your e-mail, edit some text files, and maybe do some word processing or spreadsheet work on it. If you get bored, you might play solitaire or minesweeper. A 12" screen, 900mhz laptop doesn't have the screen, CPU horsepower, or hard drive speed to make apps that take 512MB of RAM practical.
If it wasn't for that kind of penis-substitute-mindset, we would have practical laptops with eight-plus hour battery life rather than ones with 2.8ghz P4s that can't make it to three hours.
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How about a write protect jumper?
Sounds good to me. But what happens when you tell the average user (who pays Best Buy to snap in DIMMs) that they need to pop the cover off of their PC to upgrade the drive firmware? 99% of them will freak and at least one of those people will sue the company because they pried the cover off of their PC with a tire iron. Not only that, IT departments would be livid if they had to upgrade firmware in 500 PCs and had to pop the cover on each one to do it.
dd if=badfirmware of=cdrom; ; dd if=goodfirmware of=cdrom; cdrom = works again (=unusable)
dd if=badcode of=cdrom; dd if=goodcode of=cdrom; cdrom = still broken (destroyed)
Jesus Fucking Christ! The ignorance some Linux users have about firmware is amazing. You can't flash CD-ROM firmware by copying a file the device with the dd command.
Simple, you use the "Upgrade firmware" command
I'm an embedded systems engineer. There is no standard "Upgrade firmware" command built into the ATAPI or IDE spec, is there? Each manufacturer picks a method and random probing will trigger some of these methods.
Well what you said wasn't particularly insightful and just sidetracks the discussion.
Actually it was insightful. That's why it was modded up. Come back when you have an ID to post under.
Yeah, but this is a completely diffenet type of damage. It has nothing to do with firmware.
I looked on the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) Mandrake web site and they referred to the drives being "physically dead" or some such, but I have no faith that it's not indicative of a firmware corruption problem. Most software people say that the motherboard is "fried" when they flash in the wrong BIOS, so I don't put much faith in non-technical explanations. Do you know what the particular problem is?
Digital cryptographic signatures work pretty well. If the hardware will only function with a signed firmware, then it's unlikely you will do much besides temporarily disable the drive, requiring a reflash.
If the device has the CPU to deal with that, then, yes, it would work. That's the idea behind a lot of the DRM hardware we've heard about. No flashing of unauthorized firmware.
Everyone Look At Me! Look At Me! I'm Special!
That's why you rode the short bus.
You, my friend, are forgetting one simple thing... Mandrake was not attempting to upgrade firmware in the el-cheapo LG CD-ROM drives, it was simply TRYING TO READ FROM IT.
What they were attempting to do and what they did are obviously two very different things. If memory serves, the way that you used to put some Dallas Semiconductor flash parts into programming mode was with reads from specific locations with a specific timing and order.
And on that note, I know on at least some mobo's there exists a jumper to disable BIOS flashing
And sometimes it doesn't do what it claims. Some years back, I had an Asus motherboard with such a jumper and it did nothing. I wired it to the "turbo" button on the case figuring that I could manually protect against a flash. Nope. Turned out that Asus swapped in a EEPROM for a Flash part (not exactly the same) and the jumper no longer worked.
(some of em even have dual BIOS's, ain't that neat?)
Gigabyte, I believe.
but I'm not exactly sure if the other hardware devices have a simliar "feature"... My better judgement is telling me this is a definate no, can anyone else comment?
You're right on that. But all of them should. It's only a matter of time until some worm author creates something that targets the flashable firmware on motherboards and peripherals.
Wow, that's some kind of record in karma-whoring. :-)
I maxed out on karma long ago. I just wanted everyone to see what I had to say.
If you consider scrambling firmware to be physical damage (I don't),
I never said that it was "physical damage." I said that it could render it unusable.
a "RESTORE FACTORY DEFAULTS" switch solves that problem.
Does your motherboard have a "restore factory defaults" switch? Does your CD burner? Such a switch would require a completely separate, non-flashable copy of the firmware and a CPU capable of flashing that copy back into the flash memory.
Microsoft releases service packs regularly for Windows that are at least 350mb in size... usually bigger.
Two problems with that argument:
1. Mandrake 9.2 has only been out since October 14. Microsoft does not release 350MB of updates within two weeks of releasing the OS.
2. Windows service packs are not "at least 350MB in size... usually bigger":
Windows 2000 Service Pack 4: About 132MB
Windows 2000 Service Pack 3: About 127MB
Windows XP Service Pack 1a: About 128MB
Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 6a: About 35MB
There is clearly something wrong with the LG drives if they are able to be destroyed by software.
Can flashing the wrong BIOS on your motherboard render it unusable? If I can prove to you that it can, will you be demanding a new motherboard from the manufacturer?
How on earth you implied linux destroys hardware, I will never know.
Because this distro did do just that and Mandrake admits it.
It could have easily been a flaw in Windows that did this.
So the next time that a worm hits Windows, will you be saying "a flaw in Linux could allow the same thing, so let's not criticize Microsoft"?
Dude, software should never be able to damage hardware. Not in 2003. Part of this is just common sense -- how could anyone design hardware that bad?
Tell me the make and model of your motherboard, CD-ROM drive, DVD drive, CD-R/W drive, modem, and anything else in your system with a flashable BIOS. I'll send you a CD-ROM to boot up. Let me know how it goes for you.
P.S. Make sure that you have an alternate PC to e-mail me from.
If you're a hardware manufacturer...and software is capable of destroying your products, you're fucking fired.
So how do you propose putting firmware updates into CD-ROM drives, DVD drives, modems, etc.? Just about any peripheral which has flashable firmware can be rendered unusable by software.
Tablet PC hardware gives us a glimpse of where laptops should have headed. They typically have a much lower power consumption and, hence, could run a lot longer on a given battery size. That's what most people need. They don't need a 2.8ghz P4 to do word processing or compose e-mail. They don't need 17" screens either. But rather than embrace a real need (battery life and light weight), laptop manufacturers have concentrated on turning out machines with more horsepower than a blown Ferrari with nitrous oxide. When people happily use desktop machines running at under a gigahertz, it really makes you wonder why the slowest HP laptops now have either an Athlon XP-M 2200+ or a 2.4ghz Celeron CPU.
Want to sell Tablet PCs? Get rid of the swivel feature on the display, put a full-sized battery in them, load them up with Windows XP Pro, and sell them as long battery life, lightweight, practical laptops.
So you admit your bias.
It's my viewpoint, not a "bias." Do you consider yourself biased or do you consider yourself conservative? Answer me!
But you must realize that a majority of americans feel differently,
Then why did Gore get about half a million more votes than Bush?
Well, there is a long, proud tradition of murder in the USA also
We, as a people, are "proud" of murder? I don't think so. We are, however, proud of those who stood up to unjust laws.
The second was a clear violation of the law, and probably set the cause of civil rights back more than anything, by associating black activists with willful violations of the law.
You need to go back to your history books (assuming that you ever opened one in the first place). Historians generally view her act of civil disobedience as pivotal in advancing the cause of civil rights for blacks.
As for banning subversive activities, there is a well-established constitutional authority to override certain privileges when the national interest is at stake; considering the tradition of treason within the liberal movement, I don't think my suggestions are at all in conflict with this principle.
That sounds just like the rationale for Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in June 1989. Yep, just another case of self-righteous conservatives looking out for what they viewed as the national interest.
In short, I am for the use of state power to protect freedom,
How does protecting the interests of a corrupt, unethical corporation qualify as protecting freedom? How does the state protect freedom when it uses laws to hide documents that expose corporate corruption?
and you are for the use of state power to suppress freedom.
How? Please, tell me what I asked the state to do in this matter. Or was that just another in a long series of lies?
You should stop trying to redefine conservatism as anything that pampered Western liberal intellectuals don't like, and vice versa. It's dishonest and despicable.
What's despicable and dishonest is your attempts to portray a society which subjugates women, resists change at all costs, and highly values conformity as anything other than conservative.
Just another example of how America's colleges promote liberalism
Okay. That's a good thing.
and anti-americanism
How is it anti-American to expose flaws in voting machines which could threaten the very heart of our society; the fair democratic election of our leaders?
and promote the acceptance of lawbreaking
We should accept lawbreaking when the laws being broken. Did you ever learn about the Boston Tea Party? Ever hear of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a bus? Civil disobedience has a long, proud history in America.
If you like conservatism and patriotism, and you dislike civil disobedience, then move to Communist China. They are very conservative, very patriotic, and don't tolerate civil disobedience. Your kind of people...
The aptly-named "liberal arts college" should be banned if you ask me.
No one did, but you'd have really appreciated Mao's Cultural Revolution where intellectuals were rounded up and sent to brutal labor camps.
Name a product on which Iomega hasn't screwed the pooch.
I (and the stockholders) would love to, but there isn't one.
I've never understood why they had to change the Zip drive hardware design, case, and power supply every couple of months. You'd buy one in April and it would have a switching supply. The one you bought in May would have a double-the-size conventional wall-wart. The one you bought in July would have a completely different case style. It was infuriating and a total waste of time. I'd have much preferred that they quit wasting money on case designs and just lowered the cost of the units or the media. But that wouldn't have been the Iomega way of doing things.
The problem with Zip wasn't so much the cost of the drive, it was the way they kept control on the media.
It was really both. The cost of the drives was high enough that they weren't an impulse buy. They cost too much for Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc. to include them in pre-built PCs. That limited demand for media and the drives.
Because the demand for the media was limited, the economies of scale did not materialize the way that they should. And because the quantity sold was low, Iomega kept the price artificially high to keep the income stream up.
It's really a chicken and egg thing. The drives weren't in demand because the media was too expensive and the media wasn't in demand because the drives didn't have enough market penetration -- due to their high cost.
According to the chart at the end of the article, Zip drives are a dying technology. I've got news for those guys: Zip drives died, rigor mortis set in, the were embalmed, buried, and have mostly decomposed.
I've got a few of them at home, including two internal IDE Zip drives, an external USB Zip drive, and an external SCSI Zip drive. I also have about 50 Zip disks but I can't even remember the last time I spun one of them up.
Iomega pissed away that entire market with their greed. Had they been smarter, they would have given the drives away in every Dell, Compaq, and Gateway system sold and made money off of the media (ala the Gillette shaver business model). Instead, they continued to charge too much for the drives, limiting their adoption. As CD-R and CD-RW media plummeted in price, Iomega continued to charge an arm and a leg for their Zip media rather than dropping prices to retain customers. They introduced the Zip 250, Zip Click!, and Zip 750, all of which failed due to the high drive costs, exorbitant media costs, and marketplace confusion with customers not knowing which model to buy in order to exchange data with colleagues and friends. They never effectively tried to broaden the appeal of their media with MP3 recorders, players, or in-dash car units.
After effectively killing the Zip product line, they introduced external CD-R/W drives. Unfortunately, they were just rebadged units stuck in gaudy blue cases -- for which they charged double what everyone else did. They're toast.
2. Institute a block all email except where you have whitelisted the sender...
That's just absurd. Put up a for-sale ad and you have to know who will respond in advance? You circulate your resume and then refuse e-mail from people offering you a job?
This approach is very similar to the approach employed by various firewalls. Ignore all except where otherwise told to.
No, it is not at all like that. For a firewall to be analogous, you would have to whitelist every IP that was to access your web server, FTP server, etc. Firewalls normally block by destination (port, IP, etc.) rather than source (exceptions being when you have identified a malicious source).
Apple tried it with the very first Mac Portable in 1989, and it was a valiant but flawed effort. Sure, it had an 8 hour battery life, but it also weighed 17lbs thanks to a huge lead-acid battery and had a monochrome non-backlit screen.
You're missing the point. If people were to look at their actual processor horsepower, RAM, and hard drive needs, laptop manufacturers could make sub-ghz machines with low-power CPUs (like VIA C3s, Transmetas, etc.), slower 2.5" hard drives, no cooling fans, and use other technologies to reduce power requirements. Then they could use the same batteries used today and probably get 8 hour run times -- and probably with a lighter, smaller laptop.
I bought an HP laptop. It has a 1.6ghz mobile Celeraon. Unlike the "old" laptops, there is no way to slow the CPU to extend the battery life. I don't need 1.6ghz to edit a document on a plane. I don't need 1.6ghz to surf the web or check my e-mail. So now I have to carry two batteries so that I can rotate them out while the laptop runs a fan and tries to scorch the flesh off of my lap.
What about digital audio?
What about digital audio? I've don't plenty of work, both hobbyist and pro gigs, using less than 512MB of RAM. Get some perspective: Most CDs don't even have 512MB of music on them -- and it's not like you need to be able to get an entire CD into memory at once anyway.
I remember when Windows 98 recommended 128mb, now XP wants 256MB
Where do you get those numbers and is there toilet paper stuck to them?
According to Microsoft, Windows 98 required a 486DX 66 megahertz (MHz) or faster processor (Pentium central processing unit recommended), 16 megabytes (MB) of memory (24 MB recommended), and about 175MB of free hard disk space. Yeah, put 256MB into that Pentium 100 system and you're ready to rock and roll with Windows XP!
Face it: By the time that the next version of Windows rolls out, the 900mhz CPU in that laptop will be wheezing. Besides, you don't have to buy a new OS just because Microsoft releases one.
Face it, you're not going to be rendering in Maya, encoding DVDs to XviD/OGM or editing 60,000x20,000 pixel images in Photoshop on a 900 MHz CPU; Unreal Tournament 2003 isn't going to suck up all that memory running at 12 FPS on the integrated Intel graphics. And given the screen size, your ability to multitask is limited, since only so much will fit at once, so unless you feel like leaving open 70 minimized windows for some reason, that won't be an issue either.
Thank you!
I have an HP laptop that I just upgraded from 128MB to 384MB and, for a laptop, that's a stout quantity of RAM. It never ceases to amaze me how much crap people think needs to be in a laptop. It's a friggin' laptop. You surf the web, check your e-mail, edit some text files, and maybe do some word processing or spreadsheet work on it. If you get bored, you might play solitaire or minesweeper. A 12" screen, 900mhz laptop doesn't have the screen, CPU horsepower, or hard drive speed to make apps that take 512MB of RAM practical.
If it wasn't for that kind of penis-substitute-mindset, we would have practical laptops with eight-plus hour battery life rather than ones with 2.8ghz P4s that can't make it to three hours.