This kind of thing should never exist in the first place. Why should anyone be given a government-created monopoly on "present a list of what you want and hand over money to get it?" I understand if you invent a tangible contraption, but for a basic function of any website that sells products? No way!
This comes with Windows. Most Windows desktop applications are developed in a 75 dpi environment and massively bumping the dpi on Windows makes this become painfully obvious. Most users of this machine will use Windows. Imagine 3200x1800 at 75 dpi. That's why I'm pointing it out as ridiculous.
For what it's worth, I spend the vast majority of my time on Phenom II desktops with 12-16 GB of memory and big RAID-5 arrays, so most laptops are likely to be disappointing. I suppose Moore's Law works actively against me.
1.1 GHz is pretty severely low clocking, don't you think? Compared to an i5-2430M (2.4 GHz) it also has 1/3 smaller L3 cache with less associativity and no hyperthreading capability. I have serious doubts about it being faster than a high-end LGA775 desktop P4. I have also built C847 systems with 4GB of RAM and an SSD; those things don't change the problems stemming from slowness of the CPU. All it does is change where the speed bottleneck lies.
I didn't mention when I bought the laptops; they're not new as in within the past 12 months, but I have gotten my hands on bleeding edge hardware to test and don't find it to be much better. You should see the CPU overhead that USB 3.0 transfers alone tend to suck up. CPU performance is a massive factor in the perceived speed of a system, especially in an era where seriously minimizing both price and power consumption are the biggest driving factors in CPU design and fabrication decisions. Using an SSD instead of a hard drive is definitely another game-changing option, but I have seen precious few retail laptops under $1000 offered with an SSD and absolutely zero in the sub-$500 ranges. The average person won't be buying and installing an SSD in their new laptop, so SSDs aren't really relevant to the discussion, and as I've said, the CPU being a cheapie can negate other theoretically speed-boosting goodies. RAM also doesn't change the size of the cache and core configurations of a CPU.
IIRC up until a year or so ago, Apple was still selling Macbooks and even higher-end Macbook Pros with Core 2 Duo chips even though Sandy Bridge i{3,5,7} chips were spreading en masse. Apple said they did this because the C2D wasn't as quick to drain the battery. I think that saying Apple doesn't sell "just enough" hardware is highly subjective, especially since the Macbook Air has precious few ports, a tiny screen, and isn't much more powerful than a "just enough" cheap PC laptop. $1000 for a 1.3 GHz ULV i5 and no HDMI? I'd say that's wearing the "just enough" uniform quite snugly. (Then again, the Air is exactly that: a "just enough" Mac that sacrifices a lot so it can be thin and easily damaged...)
I have managed a computer repair shop for many years. Guess what comes in the front door the most often and ISN'T over 3 years old? Hint: laptops. People largely buy laptops. If PC sales go down, that's where the biggest losses will be found.
Use a laptop with an AMD E2 or Celeron 847 for a while and you'll change your mind. The CPU is what they cut the hardest for cheap laptops and those laptops range from dog slow to downright excruciating.
I got it. I used it for a few months because I support "normal people" and had to learn it. I moved to Windows 7 and never put that scourge back on the laptop ever again. Windows 8 definitely contributed to driving down PC hardware sales.
My Galaxy S2 obsoleted my tablet before I bought it. I got the tablet and after a week I stopped using it because my phone effectively IS a tablet and runs all of the same apps, plus it's insanely convenient. I sold the tablet to someone else.
Everyone will say "no sense replacing what works" and I agree. Let's look at what one would be able to buy now, though, and why people wouldn't buy it.
On the low end of the price spectrum, you have Chromebooks (yuck, puke, no one sane buys these unless they put Linux on it instead), Celerons, and AMD E2 and A4 processors; none of those are even remotely fast. Moving up in price, you see a lot of AMD APUs and Intel Core i3-M systems. I've owned two fairly new laptops recently, one with an AMD A8-4500M ($400) and one with an Intel Core i7-2630QM ($830). The i7 was disappointing (it's a freaking i7, it should absolutely blaze) and only more so because for tasks that are not heavy in the data processing side of things (i.e. data/video compression, software compilation) the A8 seemed to move much faster than the i7 with identical Windows 7 images. Unfortunately, someone at AMD had the stupid idea of making the L1 instruction caches a pitiful 16KB in size and that makes data-heavy tasks run like dog poo.
On the higher side of things, you find ridiculous and exotic offerings like the Yoga 2 Pro with a 13.3" LCD that has a 3200x1800 resolution (hint: you can't read anything at all unless you squint) and it comes with a low-performance ULV version of a mobile (read: already low-performance without being ULV) Core i5 and a nice low-performance Intel GPU, and all versions of this insane hardware combination are around the $1000 mark. I also firmly believe that while there is a market for "ultrabooks," the majority of people out there are wasting their money on "convertible laptops" and having touchscreens for Windows 8. It's a neat shiny new feature that ends up only being useful in niche situations and otherwise was no different than wrapping $400 up and chucking it in the rubbish bin.
Why would anyone buy a new laptop when they are so ridiculous? If you're penny-pinching, you get a machine with tons of RAM, hard drive space, and maybe even USB 3.0, but the CPU is slow beyond belief and the whole system suffers. Dropping a few hundred more bucks might get you into i7 territory but even the i7 up to Sandy Bridge is, in my experience, not much better than equivalent higher-end chips in laptops made four years ago. Why blow $1000 on a really nice new laptop when they're either not much better than what you already own or they're an expensive high-resolution joke of a machine? No thanks; I'll wait until they sweeten the pot some more. (And until the convertibles fad goes to hell.)
It's part of a product I am developing, but I'll consider making it available at no cost. It seems that there is some interest in it here. If you'd like to know when/if it comes out, follow nctritech.wordpress.com and if I do decide to make it available, it'll pop up in a post there.
No, it's part of a larger computer diagnostic and repair product I am developing. However, it's trivial to take a large pile of drivers and write a Bash script that locates INF files that match the PCI or USB IDs for hardware. (The hard part for me was getting the logic to handle specific versions of Windows; the INF format section decoration rules are really annoying.) It wouldn't be useful without a massive driver collection to draw on either.
I wasn't. It's probably a manufacturer-specific option; it's also possible that a newer driver might have added the option. My point is that this behavior shouldn't happen by default in the first place; it's a touchpad, not a touchscreen, and this particular motion is supposed to be a touchscreen-specific gesture. There is no usefulness to having it on a touchpad, especially since the Win+C combination pops it out.
Oh? Interesting that I never saw that option in the relevant control panel and manufacturer-specific options, then. Windows 8 is still a usability mess even if that's fixed.
The plethora of Linux servers don't tend to get counted in stats because while they do host websites, they tend to not access other websites very much.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation needed. No, really: if you're going to say "the latest study shows" then cite the study.
For reference: http://www.yro.slashdot.org/story/02/05/13/1914221/under-attack-by-panips-patent-lawyers
This kind of thing should never exist in the first place. Why should anyone be given a government-created monopoly on "present a list of what you want and hand over money to get it?" I understand if you invent a tangible contraption, but for a basic function of any website that sells products? No way!
So now we shouldn't have to back up contentious statements?
No sources and ad hominem. /thread
This comes with Windows. Most Windows desktop applications are developed in a 75 dpi environment and massively bumping the dpi on Windows makes this become painfully obvious. Most users of this machine will use Windows. Imagine 3200x1800 at 75 dpi. That's why I'm pointing it out as ridiculous.
For what it's worth, I spend the vast majority of my time on Phenom II desktops with 12-16 GB of memory and big RAID-5 arrays, so most laptops are likely to be disappointing. I suppose Moore's Law works actively against me.
My i7 was a high TDP quad-core with hyperthreading.
I'm seeing that now. Interesting. It certainly proves how terrible the P4 microarchitecture really is...thanks.
1.1 GHz is pretty severely low clocking, don't you think? Compared to an i5-2430M (2.4 GHz) it also has 1/3 smaller L3 cache with less associativity and no hyperthreading capability. I have serious doubts about it being faster than a high-end LGA775 desktop P4. I have also built C847 systems with 4GB of RAM and an SSD; those things don't change the problems stemming from slowness of the CPU. All it does is change where the speed bottleneck lies.
I didn't mention when I bought the laptops; they're not new as in within the past 12 months, but I have gotten my hands on bleeding edge hardware to test and don't find it to be much better. You should see the CPU overhead that USB 3.0 transfers alone tend to suck up. CPU performance is a massive factor in the perceived speed of a system, especially in an era where seriously minimizing both price and power consumption are the biggest driving factors in CPU design and fabrication decisions. Using an SSD instead of a hard drive is definitely another game-changing option, but I have seen precious few retail laptops under $1000 offered with an SSD and absolutely zero in the sub-$500 ranges. The average person won't be buying and installing an SSD in their new laptop, so SSDs aren't really relevant to the discussion, and as I've said, the CPU being a cheapie can negate other theoretically speed-boosting goodies. RAM also doesn't change the size of the cache and core configurations of a CPU.
IIRC up until a year or so ago, Apple was still selling Macbooks and even higher-end Macbook Pros with Core 2 Duo chips even though Sandy Bridge i{3,5,7} chips were spreading en masse. Apple said they did this because the C2D wasn't as quick to drain the battery. I think that saying Apple doesn't sell "just enough" hardware is highly subjective, especially since the Macbook Air has precious few ports, a tiny screen, and isn't much more powerful than a "just enough" cheap PC laptop. $1000 for a 1.3 GHz ULV i5 and no HDMI? I'd say that's wearing the "just enough" uniform quite snugly. (Then again, the Air is exactly that: a "just enough" Mac that sacrifices a lot so it can be thin and easily damaged...)
You make the statement and it's everyone else's job to find the references that back it?
Your argument is invalid.
I have managed a computer repair shop for many years. Guess what comes in the front door the most often and ISN'T over 3 years old? Hint: laptops. People largely buy laptops. If PC sales go down, that's where the biggest losses will be found.
Back your statements up with links to said research.
Use a laptop with an AMD E2 or Celeron 847 for a while and you'll change your mind. The CPU is what they cut the hardest for cheap laptops and those laptops range from dog slow to downright excruciating.
I got it. I used it for a few months because I support "normal people" and had to learn it. I moved to Windows 7 and never put that scourge back on the laptop ever again. Windows 8 definitely contributed to driving down PC hardware sales.
My Galaxy S2 obsoleted my tablet before I bought it. I got the tablet and after a week I stopped using it because my phone effectively IS a tablet and runs all of the same apps, plus it's insanely convenient. I sold the tablet to someone else.
Everyone will say "no sense replacing what works" and I agree. Let's look at what one would be able to buy now, though, and why people wouldn't buy it.
On the low end of the price spectrum, you have Chromebooks (yuck, puke, no one sane buys these unless they put Linux on it instead), Celerons, and AMD E2 and A4 processors; none of those are even remotely fast. Moving up in price, you see a lot of AMD APUs and Intel Core i3-M systems. I've owned two fairly new laptops recently, one with an AMD A8-4500M ($400) and one with an Intel Core i7-2630QM ($830). The i7 was disappointing (it's a freaking i7, it should absolutely blaze) and only more so because for tasks that are not heavy in the data processing side of things (i.e. data/video compression, software compilation) the A8 seemed to move much faster than the i7 with identical Windows 7 images. Unfortunately, someone at AMD had the stupid idea of making the L1 instruction caches a pitiful 16KB in size and that makes data-heavy tasks run like dog poo.
On the higher side of things, you find ridiculous and exotic offerings like the Yoga 2 Pro with a 13.3" LCD that has a 3200x1800 resolution (hint: you can't read anything at all unless you squint) and it comes with a low-performance ULV version of a mobile (read: already low-performance without being ULV) Core i5 and a nice low-performance Intel GPU, and all versions of this insane hardware combination are around the $1000 mark. I also firmly believe that while there is a market for "ultrabooks," the majority of people out there are wasting their money on "convertible laptops" and having touchscreens for Windows 8. It's a neat shiny new feature that ends up only being useful in niche situations and otherwise was no different than wrapping $400 up and chucking it in the rubbish bin.
Why would anyone buy a new laptop when they are so ridiculous? If you're penny-pinching, you get a machine with tons of RAM, hard drive space, and maybe even USB 3.0, but the CPU is slow beyond belief and the whole system suffers. Dropping a few hundred more bucks might get you into i7 territory but even the i7 up to Sandy Bridge is, in my experience, not much better than equivalent higher-end chips in laptops made four years ago. Why blow $1000 on a really nice new laptop when they're either not much better than what you already own or they're an expensive high-resolution joke of a machine? No thanks; I'll wait until they sweeten the pot some more. (And until the convertibles fad goes to hell.)
It's part of a product I am developing, but I'll consider making it available at no cost. It seems that there is some interest in it here. If you'd like to know when/if it comes out, follow nctritech.wordpress.com and if I do decide to make it available, it'll pop up in a post there.
No, it's part of a larger computer diagnostic and repair product I am developing. However, it's trivial to take a large pile of drivers and write a Bash script that locates INF files that match the PCI or USB IDs for hardware. (The hard part for me was getting the logic to handle specific versions of Windows; the INF format section decoration rules are really annoying.) It wouldn't be useful without a massive driver collection to draw on either.
I wasn't. It's probably a manufacturer-specific option; it's also possible that a newer driver might have added the option. My point is that this behavior shouldn't happen by default in the first place; it's a touchpad, not a touchscreen, and this particular motion is supposed to be a touchscreen-specific gesture. There is no usefulness to having it on a touchpad, especially since the Win+C combination pops it out.
Oh? Interesting that I never saw that option in the relevant control panel and manufacturer-specific options, then. Windows 8 is still a usability mess even if that's fixed.
The plethora of Linux servers don't tend to get counted in stats because while they do host websites, they tend to not access other websites very much.
The DVD player was left out so MS wouldn't have to buy a DVD playback license for every copy of Win8 sold.